Biodiversity Threat: Many creatures will simply go to the wall without a concerted program to breed and maintain captive populations of those in peril.
Colin Tudge calls for activist intervention to preserve biodiversity.
PEOPLE who think of themselves as conservationists all agree on one thing: that as great a variety as possible of wild creatures should be able to live unharassed lives in pristine habitats. Most seem to agree, too -- with only a few dissenting voices on what might reasonably be called the lunatic fringe -- that the plight of human beings is at least as important as that of wild creatures, and that the conservation of wilderness must not harm local people and indeed should become a serious component of their economy. But then consensus stops and opinion polarizes into two, often warring camps, which we might call the pragmatists and the romantics.
The pragmatists see that ideals are vital, for without them we do not know what we are trying to achieve and have no spur to action. But the pragmatists accept that wild habitats must be tightly managed and that wild populations must be backed by animals bred intensively in captivity. The whole operation must increasingly be supported by science and the high technologies it generates -- everything from genetics to quantified ecology and a whole panoply of reproductive physiology, including the freezing and transfer of embryos.
The romantics argue that to manage wilderness is to compromise its wildness. It is therefore pointless. They hold that captive breeding can achieve too little to be worthwhile and that if distasteful interventionist high-tech is what is needed, then the price is simply too high.
This dichotomy plays itself out in a hundred contexts. Should elephants in national parks be culled to contain their population, or should `nature' be allowed to take its course? If the animals are culled, should the ivory be sold to finance conservation efforts and compensate local people, or do such sales perpetuate a pernicious trade? Should vets in zoos assist in embryo transfer -- given that strict veterinary ethics proscribes intervention except when an animal is sick? Should zoos exist at all? The plight of the California Condor in the mid-1980s brought all this simmering to the boil, as scientists from the San Diego Zoo and Wildlife Park proposed to rescue the last few condors from the wild to breed them up. The National Audobon Society and others argued that the birds should be allowed to `die with dignity'. Fortunately (I would say) the pragmatists won, and captive-bred birds have now been released back into the wild.
As may already be obvious, I am a pragmatist, and have become more and more of one since I first started taking a serious interest in conservation in the 1950s. To be sure, all conservationists must be romantic to an extent -- driven by emotion and spurred by optimism. But romanticism in this harsh world has to be hard-headed, or it merely becomes effete. Those who eschew the hands-on approach are being irresponsible; or at least have not appreciated the depth and scope of the problems.
The first of these -- an issue that never disappears -- is the rise of the human population. Second, there is the sheer mass of creatures that are faced by imminent extinction. And third -- the point that almost always gets overlooked -- is time scale. Politicians traditionally see the next 30 years as `the long term', but on the biological scale a million years is an appropriate unit of time and the next thousand should be seen to be immediate.
The rise in human numbers is serious but not yet terrifying. If we take it seriously, and act accordingly, we have a reasonable chance of pulling through in a tolerable state, and bringing other animals along with us. Optimistically, we can point out that the percentage-rate of rise is falling and if it continues to fall as it has been doing it could reach zero around 2050. Then the population would be around 10-12 billion. If people average two children per fertile couple then the rate would eventually fall, since some people are infertile and some opt to be childless. For 500 to 1,000 years the decline in babies would be compensated for by an increase in human life span. But after 1,000 years or so population would start to fall and could in principle become as low as our descendants choose.
But as human numbers double the task of conservation will grow steadily more difficult for at least 500, probably 1,000 years. Huge changes in human demography are bound to take place within the lifetimes of millions of infants already on this earth. Even if the population change proves benign (a levelling out, followed later by slow decline) it will still be disruptive. While the world organizes itself to accommodate ten billion people, animals will surely be pushed even further to the sidelines.
This is the background reality. It would of course be best not only to keep animals alive but to do so in the wilderness in which they evolved. The trouble is that, even as things are, for many creatures this is no longer an option. It will become an option for fewer and fewer. The best we can do for wild creatures at present is to provide large well-protected national parks. There are two awesome realities, however, which non-biologists rarely consider.
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