​Why Save Endangered Species?
For the last few years, I’ve been playing with the question: why should I care -here, in the United States-if a sparrow goes extinct in Sri Lanka (I just randomly choose a country distant to me but I also like the way a “sparrow in Sri Lanka” sounds- I don’t even know if they have sparrows)? I thought of this when working on building habitat for an endangered sparrow species in southern California. I was very dissatisfied with the answers I could think of: because all nature is connected and the loss of any species will tear apart the connections, that we don’t have the right to let species go extinct from our actions, and that humans will be directly affected by the loss of species. These answers are either subjective or far more nuanced, if not false universally. Biodiversity conservation and rare species conservation specifically is more challenging than other environmental efforts, like clean air and clean water efforts. However, there are great answers for biodiversity conservation and I’ve been collecting them over the years. While I don’t feel I have found or developed a solid, utilitarian (to humans), and universal answer, my notes below have put me closer.
 
I’ve been collecting these answers in my readings and have even inserted them in several presentations but I am inspired to collect them like this now because of the recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Dr. Pyron. In We Don’t Need to Save Endangered Species. Extinction is Part of Evolution., Dr. Pyron brings up great arguments about why endangered species do not need to be saved. I disagree with his conclusions and even his rationale but he does bring up great conservation issues in general. Without going into it too much, the one paradox inherent in conservation is that it is trying to save species that are by definition 4-dimensional genetic expressions (occurring both in space but also in the billions-of-years lineage that they are). Dr. Eisenberg speaks to this when she says we are working save the trajectories of species and habitats, not how we perceive them at some arbitrary place and time of our choosing. Instead of responding to Dr. Pyron’s argument directly right now (I might do so soon), I figured I would share all the reasons why I should care about a sparrow in Sri Lanka.
 
To start with I looked up all the reasons that the IUCN, the ESA, and the WWF give. They are all lame. One of the more succinct answers comes from the US Fish and Wildlife Service but it is still lame:

“Congress answered this question in the preamble to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, recognizing that endangered and threatened species of wildlife and plants "are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people."

• Benefits of natural diversity
• Contributions to medicine
• Biodiversity and agriculture
• Environmental monitors
• Ecosystem services
• Other economic values
• Intangible values “

 
Ok, so here is my list. It is a list-in-process though and I will continue adding and editing it. In all this, I haven’t incorporated Kellert’s typology of attitudes or Gorke’s entire book The Death of Our Planet’s Species, which deals with both the biological and philosophical issues of biodiversity conservation. I will try to address these in the next iteration of this post.
 
Why does saving an endangered species matter?
​

1. Point of no return
   1. Extinction is irreversible
2. Natural sciences
   1. Ecological
      1. Island Biogeography- at some point there is a non-linear tipping point and this is exemplified by islands but from a global perspective, every habitat is it’s own island to some degree
      2. Ehlrich’s Rivet theory – there is a tipping point where too many rivets out of the airplane is too much
         1. amendment: some rivets are big and more important, some small, and others are nodes what are more dependent on others
      3. Ecosystem strength – we just don’t know the full impact of lost species because the results are skewed by the buffer of other species, lost in the complexity, or not recognizable for other reasons
      4. An extension of Taleb’s Antifragile idea
   2. Geology
      
      1. Our ecosystem is only spaceship earth for the period of the Holocene and that is a very short time, we don’t know our home outside of the narrow parameters of our time-frame
   3. Genetic
      1. Unique nonreplicable material
   4. Evolutionary:
      1. “Today’s ecologically trivial species could be tomorrow’s keystone species” Kareiva and Levin
3. Human psychology
   1. EO Wilson’s biophilia
   2. David Quammen – monsters of god: we lose a major part of our psyche when we lose the real world components that helped to create our psyche.
   3. Not fair to future humans, to next generations to lose them
4. Utilitarianism
   1. Money
      1. Habitat protection for saving us money (shoreline stabilization, reducing zoonotic disease, cleaner air and water reduces medical expenses, etc)
      2. Habitat protection for allowing continual harvesting (for food, shelter, medicine, etc).
   2. EcoTourism
   3. Human Safety
      1. Impact on Intensity and Spread of Zoonotic Disease - Quammen
   4. Removing utility from future humans, to next generations to lose them
5. Deontological (obligation, duty)
   1. Every species has an inherent worth and a right to existence
   2. Exceeded the planetary boundary (1 of 9)
   3. Kant’s categorical imperative
      1. As the most powerful and successful species, it is our duty to save non-human species
   4. Stealing from future humans, from next generations that will not have them
6. Morality
   1. A human value of them: we choose to allow them to flourish
   2. Hume’s Naturalistic Fallacy: there is no ought from is, so it is our responsibility to create good “oughts”
7. Aesthetics
   1. Truth in beauty
   2. Subjective beauty
8. Poetic Naturalism
   1. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking
   2. Biodiversity and species preservation are important enough to warrant talking
9. Speciesist/Object Oriented Ontology
   1. A species has an innate right to exist and it is not within another species’ right to make it extinct
10. Information Theory
    1. Harari: dataism – how are species relevant to data and information – similar to how modern westerners treat those they’ve displaced -how we treat animals now is how superhumans and the next evolution will treat us
    2. Justice: Species are genetic information, information to defy evil (Roman (I think) – but then using Deutsch’s maxim: all evil is insufficient knowledge)
11. Other:
    1. Ashley Dawson: species preservation is the only way to empower third world countries through their agency
    2. Altruism: choosing to save non-human species demonstrates the best capacities of humanity (this might be me but with influences from Frans de Waal or others)