Nature Underfoot: Living With Beetles, Crabgrass, Fruit Flies, and Other Tiny Life Around Us by John Hainze

Author:John Hainze [Hainze, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, animals, Insects & Spiders, science, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Environmental Conservation & Protection
ISBN: 9780300252682
Google: JLHNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-02-18T00:24:36.475523+00:00

Several hundred years ago, most people, including scientists, did not think extinctions were possible. Our ability to conceive of extinction was limited by a static understanding of creation—the plants and animals present on earth had been there since the beginning. It seemed even less likely that human beings could directly cause the extinction of another species. Yet it was a little more than three hundred years ago that sailors hunted the dodo to extinction on the island of Mauritius. And, finally, it has been a little over two hundred years since the concept of extinction was accepted by science. Now, many scientists believe we are entering an Anthropocene extinction event generated by human activity.

Our understanding of biology changed significantly with the development of the theory of evolution. We now recognize that species come and go with regularity in nature—a possibility faced even by our own species. Nature is “red in tooth and claw,” according to Tennyson, and we accept that species must constantly adapt to changes in their environment to survive.5 Entomologists speak of an evolutionary arms race, in which plants develop new chemical defenses against the insects that feed on them, and insects evolve metabolic countermeasures that allow them to detoxify those chemicals. But human-caused extinctions somehow seem different. The Endangered Species Act in the United States refers to the “esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people” of endangered species. The Endangered Species Act suggests that we should take action when we can prevent extinctions resulting from “economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.”6

Decisions to conserve species, and their habitats, become more difficult the more that a species is inconvenient to us. Are we willing to slow down in certain stretches of roadway to save the Hine’s emerald dragonfly? Or does that idea seem rather comical? Are we willing to support more expensive oil and gas or real estate development to preserve populations of the American burying beetle? Moving further along the scale of inconvenience, should we try to eliminate the mosquito species that transmit malaria? We can agree that there might be a difference in organisms that are a danger to humans, such as the bubonic plague bacteria, as opposed to organisms that are an economic inconvenience. But there is also an ethical aspect to these questions. We will discuss this further in the final chapter, but here consider that the lives of other organisms may have value just as we believe human lives have value—and not just in their instrumental value to humans. The Endangered Species Act refers to the value of endangered organisms to the nation and its people. But does an organism that has survived for several hundred million years not have a value of its own that is independent of humans? Don’t we have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of our actions on other species irrespective of whether they are useful to us?

Beyond remediation, and survival of a species, can we conceive of

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