Newsgroups: ca.environment
Posting-Version: version Notes 2.8.4  1990/05/09; site hpindda.cup.hp.com

Don Johnson writes:

>But if we present ourselves, or let our opponents define us as, people who
>believe that all species are equivalent, we'll be religated to the fringes 
>with other "nutso" groups.
>
>Learning how to manage ecosystems is a tough task. But we WILL have to learn
>how to gauge the relative merits of species within ecosystems. 

The problem with this is that such notions as "relative merits" of species 
have no biological meaning, no matter how much humans are inclined to believe 
that the world has to be ordered in such a way... something that perhaps 
reflects on peculiarities of *our* brain biology (e.g. primate dominance 
hierarchies) and evolutionary past, but not on ecosystem processes or 
evolution itself. 

Our task is to educate people to make them understand that the living world
simply doesn't revolve around human likes and dislikes, any more than the
heavens do. Things that seem to us unimportant may have subtle functions
which we haven't noticed -- *most* of the functioning of the living world
is still unknown to us. Making people grasp what amounts to their own
unimportance in the biological scheme of things and ignorance of its workings
is *NOT* easy -- it's about as easy as getting people to accept the Copernican
Hypothesis was in the 1600's. Such fundamental blows to human pride don't 
historically receive a warm welcome.

But the truth is the truth, no matter how alien or unpleasant it may seem.
We most certainly should *not* fudge it, bend it, or soften it to avoid being
considered "fringe" types.  Do those who compromised with the Church about
the centrality of the Earth deserve greater respect than Galileo or Bruno?
Were they more "successful" in the end?

>Diversity, balance and stability within the system is what is important, 
> not a particular species.

Let's be careful not to have the dogma swing the other way from the old
environmentalist emphasis on protecting species. The importance of diversity
does *not* mean that individual species and subspecies are not worth protecting.
Each species -- each unique local *population* -- represents an irreplacable 
complex of adaptations resulting from an investment of unimaginable amounts of 
time. None is to be discarded unmindfully -- as if we were to burn Rembrandts 
to cook a hamburger. But that is exactly what we are doing in almost all cases 
-- not mindfully seeking to destroy a real threat to us like AIDS, but 
mindlessly destroying things that we scarcely even notice are there. 

The political mistake is to allow mindless destruction of species to be equated
with mindful attempts to eradicate disease. It is *not* a mistake to attempt to
educate people about the importance of diversity, nor the priceless uniqueness
of every species and local population. And ultimately diversity is made up
of unique species and local populations. You can't protect *it* without 
protecting *them*.

Educating people about these things has to be central to environmentalism... 
even at the risk of being called "long-winded" by the short attention-spanned.

Sending checks to Greenpeace is not enough. 

		*	*	*	*	*

Strongly recommended reading: 

Edward O. Wilson, 1992. _The Diversity of Life_, Harvard/ Belknap. 

Outstanding nontechnical (but very nontrivial) treatment of how biological 
diversity is produced, how we are losing it, and what that means, by one
of the most eminent biologists of our time. Available at many bookstores. 
[It will also make an excellent Christmas gift for any environmentalist /
nature lover / intelligent person on your list.] Wilson has won *two* 
Pulitzer prizes for previous nontechnical books, so it's also a first-rate
read.

------------
Alan McGowen