This article appeared in The Australian October 24, 2007
Biologists should stand up for species’ rights, argues Allan Greer. 
Few scientists work with as much underlying anxiety about the state of the world as do field biologists. This is because botanists, zoologists and ecologists study species and their habitats, and these are being destroyed rapidly by human activity. The universe is fundamentally inhospitable to life.The childhood creek where they roamed like indigenes is now a stormwater channel through a McMansionville; the habitats where they did their PhD research have been cleared or filled, and the ecosystems that they have known all their professional careers continue to be degraded by both accident and design.
Other scientists, such as astronomers, chemists, physicists and even cell biologists are luckier. The things they study are beyond the destructive reach of humans, at least for the present.As a consequence of the inexorable decline of the natural world, many biologists work with a sense of urgency and despair: urgency to understand and record before it all disappears and despair of their work making even the slightest bit of difference. They put on a brave face and try to meet society’s pollyanna-ish expectation to be positive. They write grant proposals promising results that will directly or indirectly contribute to the amelioration, rehabilitation or reconstruction of this or that species, habitat or ecosystem.
Dressed in field gear, standing in an exotic location and holding a specimen of the endangered species they are trying to save, they smile happily out of the pages of popular nature magazines, which describe their heroic work. But they know that their efforts will come to little, and that the childhoods they had searching for the plants and animals in their neighbourhood bush will soon cease to be a part of human experience, and with it the most common basis for a lifelong interest in nature.
When biologists do give a public reason for preserving species, it is usually how this or that species or association of species does or could contribute to a better life for humans. The tiny snail living in only one small spring in the arid zone may be discovered one day to produce a compound that cures cancer; a beachside plant might have a gene that could be put into wheat to help it resist salinity; a rare cockatoo could be managed to produce extra eggs and young for sale to wealthy fanciers by an indigenous community, and corals forming the great reefs must be kept in good health in order to continue attracting millions of tourist dollars.
Biologists are always reminding us that species aggregated into habitats and ecosystems provide essential services such as breeding grounds for commercial fish species (estuaries), carbon sequestration (forests), soil stabilisation (grasslands) and water purification (wetlands), all of which we take for granted because we are never invoiced for them. In other words, biologists today have taken up wholeheartedly the utilitarian argument for preserving nature.
Biologists feel comfortable making the utility argument, because it is both rational and quantifiable, the essence of the way science looks at the world. It is rational, because anything that helps humans is by most people’s definition rational. And it is quantifiable, because its actual or potential value can be measured, or at least estimated, in dollars, a currency everyone understands.
But utility will never save nature, because saving it for its usefulness will change it. As soon as an aspect of nature is valued for its usefulness, it becomes subject to pressure to make it even better or more efficient. If nature contained a species of goose that laid golden eggs, imagine what would happen to that goose when the patent lawyers, genetic engineers, merchant bankers, venture capitalists and agribusiness executives got their hands on it. No doubt more gold, but also over time a much modified natural goose.
In any event, biologists’ public acknowledgement of utility as the reason to value species and hence nature sits oddly with their obvious passion for nature and their distress at what is happening to it. For example, it’s hard to believe that a biologist who has dedicated his or her life to studying a group of marine invertebrates can hardly wait to get to the lab each morning because they believe their work will lead to a better sun screen or even a cure for childhood leukemia, as pleasing as those serendipitous outcomes may be.
There has to be some other motivation. One that is more powerful than dollars. But what could it be?
One obvious reason that biologists value species is that, as a result of their childhood encounters with plants and animals in nature, they continue to find them endlessly fascinating in the myriad details that characterise every species and the subtle differences that separate them. And ever since evolution through natural selection became the unifying theory explaining the similarities and differences among species, biologists have also sought to explain the details of species according to this theory.
Under this view, species have value as a source of endless stimulation for the human mind. And when species become extinct or lose their connection with their natural context, this loss of biological diversity has the same effect as does a loss of cultural diversity: it impoverishes human experience. However, even this value is utilitarian, albeit in the least commercial sense, because it is still based on the premise that species have value for what they can do for humans.
But there may be a deeper value running through the sub-consciences of at least some biologists. That value arises from the remarkable circumstances of the origin and diversification of species. As far as is known, life evolved only once in the history of the universe, and the place where it evolved was Earth. Starting with the first life form more than 3.5 billion years ago, evolution through natural selection has led to the origin of millions of species, each of which has, or did have in its time, some element of uniqueness.
Many of those species have gone extinct naturally, but anywhere between two and 50 million are alive today.
Under this distinctly biological view of the world, all species, including our own, are equal in a number of regards. All species share their ultimate existence to one remarkably improbable event, the origin of life. They all share a kin relationship with every other species through evolution from a single common ancestor. They are all equal in being unique in some way. They all share the experience of having survived for long periods (although no species lasts forever) in a universe that is fundamentally inhospitable to life. And all living species, at least, share an open evolutionary future.
From these observations, a disinterested observer, and perhaps biologists more so than any others among our own definitely less than disinterested species, might conclude that all living species, sharing as they do a common unique origin, a kin relationship, an improbable heritage, their own special features and their own evolutionary future, have a right to a continued existence in their natural circumstances. This view or value might be called species rights. And importantly, it is a view based on a strictly scientific understanding of the world. It has nothing to do with either a religious or even a spiritual view.
Now most biologists would probably feel affronted to have such a value attributed to them. They would not appreciate being accused of holding an irrational motive ahead of a rational one. And most would sooner die of a slow, painful, disfiguring disease than be associated with a belief that might, at first glance, be confused with what is currently known as animal rights.
However, there should be little that’s controversial about biologists holding an irrational motive for what they do. After all, every scientist, much to the chagrin of managers and politicians everywhere, does it for the sheer, knee-trembling fun of it, no matter how he or she tries to tart it up by paying lip service to whatever higher motive may be currently fashionable, such as utility is today.
The addictive high of the “Ah ha!” moment is, in fact, the force behind all human creativity, and it is only begrudged by those who lack a capacity for it.
But more to the point, a belief that a species has a right to exist is no odder than many other beliefs that are expressed as rights, such as, for example, the curious assertion of one short but influential text that every person has the self-evident right to the pursuit of happiness.
Rights are based initially on such self-evident beliefs and not reason, although a good deal of reason may go subsequently into justifying rights. All that is really needed for a particular right to gain currency in human affairs is for enough people to agree that it is a right. To be sure, potentially conflicting rights have to be arranged in a hierarchy, but this is very different from not admitting to a right at all when in fact it is felt to exist.
The right of a species to continue to exist might be subservient to the right of even one individual human to continue to exist (a person on a deserted island with nothing to eat but an endangered species). But a species’ right to exist might have precedent over the right of an economic development, no matter how urgently it is desired by some people, or the right of a couple to bring more than their replacements into the world. Indeed, the case of the snail darter fish that stopped a dam being built in the US in the 1970s and more recently, a handful of crevice-dwelling invertebrates that were accorded an exclusion zone in a mining area of the Pilbara, show that Western thought, even in its current hyper-commercial phase, is sympathetic with species’ right to exist in nature.
As to the abhorrence most biologists would feel at being bedfellows with animal rightists: given the frequency with which biologists point to the necessity for profound attitudinal change if the destruction of nature is to be arrested, it is salutary to reflect on the fact that the animal rights movement and its less extreme cousin, animal welfare, embodies one of the most successful attitudinal changes towards at least some part of nature in modern times. Once a right gains even partial acceptance, it can have pronounced flow-on effects.
There is, nonetheless, a significant difference between animal rights and species rights. Animal rights generally focuses on the right of individual organisms to live out their lives free of human interference, whereas species rights is concerned with the right of individual species to live out their evolutionary lives free of human interference.
Animal rightists are concerned about those individual koalas that might be shot in a cull, but would not be too concerned about the consequences of spreading urbanisation on the continued existence of a local population of the species. In contrast, species rights would not be too concerned about killing a few individual animals for the purposes of research or management, but it would be concerned about the consequences for a natural local population created by some human activity.
If biologists think that a right of a species to continued existence under natural conditions is not the fundamental underlying reason they themselves value species and hence nature, then they should ask themselves exactly why they do value species. Is their appeal to utility really the deepest value they feel, or is it simply a strategy for our times? Surely biologists’ deepest personal values about species must count for something when people, especially young people who are still forming their views, come to consider their own relationship with nature.
Even if biologists were clearer in their own minds about their deepest feelings about species, would they articulate them? Biologists, like other scientists, strive to keep values out of their professional work, to make their work appear objective, that is, bias free. But scientists, like everyone else, have values, and to imply that they don’t is self-deluding or misleading.
To be sure, scientists should publish their results and offer their professional advice without extraneous attachments, but there is no reason why scientists could not be more candid about their values in other contexts, such as books, articles and public comments. To take an example from another area of biology, human stem cell research, would it not be fascinating, as well as informative, to know what each scientific proponent in the discussion of this topic thinks about the value question of when human life begins? Could any view not be interesting? Could anyone not have a view?
Beliefs are important in thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, because it is unlikely that nature will be saved by the application of ever more science and technology or even by the widespread acceptance of the utilitarian view.
Instead, nature is likely to be saved by the belief that all species have an intrinsic right to continued existence under natural conditions. And if biologists, the people most interested in and impassioned by species, don’t believe that species have such a right, or if they believe they do but are afraid to say so, then, really, one has to ask if we are not just contributors to our own despondency.
Allen Greer is a biologist.
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