Week 14 Global Conservation

Environmentalism, as we know it today, is a relatively recent social movement and public discourse. For many, environmentalism means protecting nature because the natural world is awe inspiring, beautiful and necessary.  Its roots lie in the older idea of environmental conservation -- the notion that it is important to ensure that resources are not used up completely but are instead well managed so that they can continue to be used by people.  Beginning in the early 19th century, Western ideas of conservation were taken to the colonies resulting in the creation of state resource management institutions and parks.  Now that we as a species have incredible dominance over the nonhuman world, humans feel the need to conserve it. But conservation is very complicated practically, ethically and politically.  By "politically" I mean, as with food politics and water politics, the social relations of power that are part of all human-environment interaction.  Conservation is ethically complicated because of how we choose species (human and nonhuman) to protect (see lecture).  

Listen to this story about saving rhinos.  It's a good example of the practical and philosophical questions that come up in conservation.  I'm using it as a great example of the difficulty of doing conservation.  With that in mind, could you choose one of these paths? It's tricky, isn't it?

Then listen to this debate about letting some species go extinct vs. protecting them.  "With more than half of the world's species threatened with extinction this century, conservation scientists are faced with a very real dilemma:  Is it time to let some species go?  Should we pick winners and losers, and focus our efforts on the species that have the best chance of survival, even if that means giving up on others?   Australian scientist and "triage" advocate Hugh Possingham squares off with Duke University's Stuart Pimm.  We also get the Canadian perspective from York University's Bridget Stutchbury" (the last interview is at the very end).

For those who might like to say that extinction is part of a "natural cycle" keep in mind that extinctions today and in the immediate future are primarily due to capitalist exploitation of environments, consumption levels and climate change with some from livelihood needs and expansion of human settlement into sensitive environments.  In other words, unlike the extinction of the dinosaurs, there's nothing natural about many extinctions now. 

In reference to the podcasts, it's probably clear to you that there are no easy answers.  Do we have a moral obligation to prevent human-caused species extinction? Is it dangerous to think that there are some species that are more important than others? Why is triage not a good metaphor? What parts of whose argument resonated with you and why? Then looking even further ahead, speculate, what species will exist in 200 years and then in 2000 years?  Please address the rhino case and the debate in your answer.