THE VINE JUNE 30, 2009
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When it comes to saving dwindling species from oblivion, the federal government has actually done a halfway decent job. Since 1973, when the Endangered Species Act passed, more than 1,300 U.S. species have been listed as threatened or endangered, and only nine have totally vanished. Then again, it's also true that only 15 of those listed species have fully recovered—the whole point of the law in the first place. And the species that do recover tend to be cute animals that capture the public imagination: bald eagles, gray wolves, Yellowstone grizzly bears. That hasn't been a coincidence.
David Fahrenthold has a great story in The Washington Post about how, for decades, "charismatic megafauna" got all the love and attention when it came to conservation. Even today, the 50 protected species that get the most funding include eagles, bears, sea turtles—but few plants or insects or crustaceans. And that's a problem, since if you're looking at preserving a broad ecosystem, many of the less-cuddly plants and insects are often underpinning the whole edifice. Recently, however, that bias has started to evaporate—homely organisms like beetles and mussels that are key to a larger habitat are now getting the emphasis they often require.
One ever-nagging question, though, is what happens to all these painstaking conservation efforts if nothing's done to slow the pace of global warming. According to the IPCC, a 3.5C global average temperature rise would likely kill off 40 to 70 percent of the world's species. According to recent MIT projections, we're on pace for a 5.2C, rise by century's end, so expect an even higher carcass count. And a new Science study finds that "mass biodiversity collapse" has historically accompanied the sort of increases in carbon-dioxide that we're currently shoveling into the atmosphere. (In case you're curious, yes, this would be terrible for humanity—see this old TNR piece by Jerry Coyne and Hopi Hoekstra.)
In this grim scenario, focusing on "charismatic megafauna" obviously won't accomplish much at all. We're well beyond gray wolves being hunted to annihilation. In fact, even the twentieth-century strategy of trying to cordon off parks and wildlife reserves could prove futile, if temperature increases start shifting entire habitats around. (As one example, the protected areas in Mexico where monarch butterflies spend their winters may soon be uninhabitable as the climate transforms.) So it's worth asking if there's any conservation strategy to stop what would essentially be the sixth mass extinction in world history—apart from trying to curb emissions and prevent large temperature increases. It doesn't appear so.
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5 comments
While it's obvious that people do focus on the charismatic when they think about species conservation, the position implied by criticism of that - that all species when threatened somehow represent the same threat to the biosphere is just as dumb as the charismatic megafauna fixation. There are threatened snails that live near here, only at the vents of ice caves in the karst topography. In total, there is less than a square mile of habitat suitable for them. There wasn't much more of it 400 years ago. An environmental threat that would wipe them out is orders of magnitude less serious than one that causes the decline and imminent extinction of a widely distributed or capstone species.
By not recognizing this - by giving every little species that inhabits some tiny little habitat and has not been more widespread than that for eons, the same protection it gives indicator, widespread and capstone species, the ESA long ago made itself a laughing stock for people who can otherwise be persuaded to conversation minded. It's sad, really.
- sdemuth
June 30, 2009 at 9:31pm
Yeah, that's a very fair point, and I'm not sure what, exactly, the best criteria for prioritizing is. It's not necessarily "cutest critter," but it's also true that not all species are equally crucial. A few years ago in the Boston Review, MIT ecologist Stephen Meyer made a good case for focusing on ecosystems rather than individual species, although again, this would all come to not if we actually do see a 5.2°C or greater rise in temperatures:
www.zmag.org/.../6487
- Brad Plumer
June 30, 2009 at 11:16pm
It's good to know the Federal government will step in if blackton is ever in danger of going extinct.
- ratnerstar
July 1, 2009 at 10:45am
charismatic indeed:
Pint-sized rabbit relatives, pikas live in high-elevation boulder fields surrounded by mountain meadows throughout the western United States. Specially adapted to cold alpine conditions, they cannot tolerate high temperatures. Rising temperatures and drier conditions in summer can expose the animals to heat stroke, reduce food in mountain meadows, and make conditions too hot for them to find food. In winter, because they remain active rather than hibernate, pikas rely on insulating snowpack and their dense coats to keep them warm – but the loss of winter snowpack due to climate change exposes them to deadly winter cold snaps.
Rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas pollution have already caused drastic losses of lower-elevation pika populations. More than a third of documented pika populations in the Great Basin mountains of Nevada and Oregon have gone extinct in the past century as temperatures warmed. In California, pikas have moved upslope in Yosemite National Park over the past century, and they have largely disappeared from the Bodie Hills in the Sierra Nevada mountains in recent decades. Scientists project that global warming will virtually eliminate suitable habitat for the pika in this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced.
google up a picture
- jemerk
July 1, 2009 at 12:49pm
Brad,
I couldn't agree more on the main point - that global climate change will be an extinction catastophe, if it runs into the 4 - 5C range. There just aren't enough places for stressed populations to run, nor time enough for ecosystems to migrate North, nor space for them to migrate South, in order to preserve even reasonably resilient populations. The specialized, non-resilient ones are just screwed.
What that really means to me is the ESA is not a relevant tool in talking about global climate change. Climate change is just to broad and large a challenge to the ecosystem. Extinctions are just one of a dozen major catastrophes that could result, and no individual extinction is in fact a particularly relevant part of the picture.
- sdemuth
July 1, 2009 at 1:42pm