An Unprecedented Attempt to Delegate Extinction to the Chapters of History: A Review of Joe Roman's Listed and a small discussion on Endangered Species

I’m drawn to them. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to figure it out but haven’t come up with a good enough answer yet. Endangered species and threatened non-traditionally marketable habitats facing destruction (wetlands, deserts, and the arctic as opposed to logging forests, prairies for agriculture, etc) got me into the environmental world originally. I used to call them the ‘Expendables’ but then a shitty movie was made that had nothing to with ecological concerns. But both the endangered species and special habitats are frankly expendable and have been historically of limited concern to us. Both share the dubious distinction of 1) being exploited directly or indirectly and 2) a difficult argument of why to protect or save them.

Working in southern California wetlands, I have focused on the exploitation and argument for that habitat and have touched barely on the work of a few other habitats as well as some endangered species. There have been many guiding intellectuals whose work has propelled my efforts in wetlands, specifically Joy Zedler and Schoenherr. Dr. Zedler did the incredible work of putting dollar amounts to wetlands globally and Schoenherr does work on understanding California habitats. But what made the issue crystal clear for me was EO Wilson’s Future of Life. He conceptualized and contextualized many things but two that are relevant here: the dozen Biodiversity Hotspots and HIPPO. The Hotspots are referenced on my Eco page but they show the 12 most important places that contain the most biodiversity with high levels of endemism. Basically, if we lose or damage irretrievably one of the places on that list, we lose what’s found at that place forever – it will not be found anywhere else now or in the future.  HIPPO is an acronym for the 5 most important threats to biodiversity on the planet: Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Population, and Overharvesting. These five are not just destroying habitat that contains plants and animals but the plant and animal species that have evolved since prokaryotes over 3.6 billion years ago and have been shucking and jiving, bobbing and weaving through 5 great extinction events.

EO Wilson's HIPPO with Heinrich Kley's hippo

That leads us into the current state of our planet, what is being called the anthropocene due to the 6th great extinction event: human impact (the other 5 being ‘natural’ ones: end of Cretaceous and non-avian dinosaurs, end of the Triassic, end of the Permian and 96% of everything, end of the Devonian, and the end of the Ordovician-Silurian). And that leads me into the big question: Why Save Endangered Species? If a small marsupial dies on a remote island in the south Pacific, am I affected? If a dusty brown sparrow living in a salt marsh in Orange County, California ceases to exist as a species, does that matter to an Ethiopian family struggling to gather water, let alone food? Why would we as a species allocate resources into saving other species when we’ve got existential concerns of our own? I don’t know how to answer that well enough to convince an industrialist or someone living below the poverty line that we should.

Timeline spiral of the planet's history

Douglas Adams spent his entire Last Chance to See convincing us that Endangered Species (and by extension, all species) are there to be enjoyed and seen and championed. It is a gift, and we need to protect that gift.

EO Wilson has many arguments but they all revolve around a similar concept that he calls Biophilia: as humans we have an inherent and innate love of all things life.

David Quammen proposed another parallel argument in his Monsters of God. We lose a major part of our psyche when we lose the real world components that helped to create our psyche –the plants and animals that we evolved around (in his book he was specifically talking about the animals that struck the fear of god/s in us).

These are all great and they all basically return to a moral argument. But I can’t put weight behind a morality; I can’t walk into a meeting to negotiate land-use with a conflict of values (as all environmental workers, I have, and it can be… de-moralizing). Morality is fantastic to steer the larger memetic discussion and to inspire humanity toward achieving a greater universal self and surmounting previously unattainable concepts (civil rights, space travel, removing religion from civic policy, etc) but it doesn’t offer nuts and bolts very well.

So, in addition to the above thinkers, I picked up Jane Goodall, The 6th Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, The Great Ape Project by Cavalieri and Singer, Jeff Corwin’s 100 Heartbeats, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and reviewed the USFWS and NMFS websites to answer Why Save Endangered Species. I like them all and appreciate them but I found much in Listed by Joe Roman. Listed takes the reader through the in’s and out’s, the history, the implications good and bad, and the efficacy of the United State’s Endangered Species Act.

Roman sold me on his book 48 pages in when he exclaimed so elegantly  what I’ve been toying around with and trying to understand: the Endangered Species Act is “an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. [It] is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing – the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but it’s available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary—and as American—as the Declaration of Independence” (emphasis added).The legislation is revolutionary and when he says ‘unprecedented’, he means not only unprecedented in environmental work but unprecedented as a species. It is an unprecedented, revolutionary piece of cultural expression for our species (any species) to care significantly about species not our own. 

So, Why? Why care and Why save endangered species? His absolute best argument caught me off-guard because it is so confusingly simple: “Extinction doesn’t fuel evolution; it chips away at the raw material…it creates a depauperate Earth… and leaves little opportunity for speciation.”(44) It not only kills life but the potential for life. I hadn’t thought of it in these terms before but I guess I had just assumed that with more species dying off, more niches for more new life would fill those niches. But, oh so obviously, evolution is slower than opportunistic generalists (rats, pigeons, starlings and people).  

Beyond that terrific argument it comes down to money and that logic is unsatisfying to an environmentalist but fantastic to any other sensible person. But you have to take the not so big leap of faith that Endangered Species and the Endangered Species Act is the “edge behind the axe of habitat protection” and habitat protection is important. Endangered Species “have become the flagship for their ecosystem” – basically a tool to work on saving larger habitats. There are three economic factors at work:  

1. EcoTourism 
   
2. Habitat protection for saving us money (shoreline stabilization, reducing zoonotic disease, cleaner air and water reduces medical expenses, etc)
   
3. Habitat protection for allowing continual harvesting (for food, shelter, medicine, etc).
   

Those are good but what would satisfy the ‘Why?’ for me? What would give me more than the value-argument? Anything that provides or assists with human basic needs development (health; safety; access to food, water, shelter; and the opportunity for individual betterment) would help me out. Economics and a criticalness to a habitat (especially one that is marketable) would do that. Satisfying those criteria are necessary for an environmental worker when communicating to people who haven’t drank the kool-aid of ecological importance yet and are focused myopically on bottom-lines.

9 global dangers to human health

Kevin Kelly tells us in his What Technology Wants that “choice without value is stultifying but value without choice is equally dry.” For me, then, what is at the heart of this difficulty, I think, is the inability to quantify empathy for a non-human species, let alone a non-human system, because we have never had to. All of our previous fights as humans have been with other humans over other resources or home for other humans.  With all of this in consideration, maybe taking a step back and realizing how unprecedented this actually is becomes the novel challenge of Endangered Species conservation. Endangered Species work no longer becomes a question of whether we should or should not save them but could then be seen as an opportunity for us as a species to exhibit true altruism, to exhibit empathy as never before, to push the bounds of our species’ capabilities. We could choose to see the Endangered Species work as an experiment of how humans will value non-marketable aspects of a world we are creating anew. The work on endangered species could be what we need to express our capacities, to teach us social emotional intelligence, to teach us the quantifiable measures of systems-thinking, to show us how we approach the very real challenge of losing the capacity for life on this planet while simultaneously pursuing economic motivations for technological innovation that will help us meet our global basic needs. The lessons learned facing and succeeding at this challenge will prove beneficial when we try as a species to conquer other ‘expendable’ non-market concepts for our own betterment and survival; to start with: the right of universal access to sustainable energy and the internet, a full global defense against impact from outer-space bombardment, and the absolute banishment of genetic and epigenetic diseases worldwide. Endangered Species work will teach us the lessons of how to create the world we want to live on; a world full of life and full of the capacity to express even more life.