Just read a very interesting article linked on the BBC, which posits that in order to save the maximum number of species certain sacrifices must be made. Triage divides cases into three distinct categories - those who’ll live regardless, those who’ll die regardless, and those whose outcome may be determined by immediate care. In other words, ignore the former categories and focus entirely on the latter.
From the linked article:
“The respondents to Rudd’s survey were also asked to consider conservation triage, when, given limited resources, a decision may be made not to intervene to save a highly threatened species. Triage has long been considered controversial among conservation scientists. Yet 50.3% and 9.3% of scientists agree or strongly agree that criteria for triage decisions should be established.” http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-101496.html
Have we got to the point where we must face a brutal pragmatism regarding the futures of certain species on Earth? Should finite resources be used on those species that can be saved, writing those that are in trouble off as doomed regardless of human actions? Which species should we put on the doomed list?
Assuming finite government resources, why wouldn’t we consider triage? That doesn’t preclude private actors from filling in gaps, btw. That will generally take care of the “cute” ones, like pandas.
A good question that has some great answers: (1) Because it is a cultural value; (2) Because we can; (3) Because we want to.
TO the OP: In looking for some more detail on triage, I got the sense that it might mean different things to different people. This article seems to say that triage is sacrificing sub populations to focus maximum resources on those that can be most readily saved.
Limited resources coupled with huge diverse problem means that triage is a strategy that is more likely to be successful. The opposing view in the article brought up the scary idea concerning who makes the decision. There would certainly be errors on the part of decision makers, but as long as politicians take a hands-off approach it will probably be a decision made by the people with the most knowledge.
I’m not really convinced limited gov’t resources are the main problem in saving endangered species. Its sort of like world hunger (and given that some animals are going extinct because hungry people are eating them in some cases its exactly like the would hunger problem).
Food is cheap, at least relative to western gov’t budgets. The problem isn’t really that we couldn’t buy enough food for everyone due to our limited resources, the problem is that the starving people tend to live under dysfunctional gov’ts so that getting the food to them is difficult, and you want to do it in a way that doesn’t make the people receiving the aid forever dependent on it.
My sense is that similar problems plague attempts to preserve species. Most bio-diversity is in the tropics, and many of the gov’ts there are dysfunctional and many of the people that are impoverished. Those problems make it hard to perserve species, and while I’m sure it would help a little, I don’t think tripling or quadrupling the money available to conserve endangered species would make much of a difference in those factors.
Yes, but when you talk about saving the maximum number of species, it sounds like the number of species saved is the only criterion—as though it’s worth letting the panda die out if we can thereby save two or three obscure species of beetle.
So, if we stopped trying to save the panda, how would that help us save other endangered species?
It isn’t like we’ve got a pot of One Million Dollars, and we use that to preserve species all over the world, and once that runs out there’s no more to be had.
Killing off the panda isn’t going to help the Oregon Spotted Frog.
Anyway, let’s talk about what criteria we should use for “triage”. Biologically unique species like the panda should be pretty high on the list. Lower on the list would be rare subspecies of common species. If there are billions of spotted frogs in the world, saving a particular subspecies of spotted frog that lives on the south side of a one mountain might not be as high a priority as saving a distinct species.
And of course, the biggest problem facing most endangered species is habitat destruction. To many people cutting down forests to build farms and houses, too much pollution dumped into the water and air, too many changing enviornmental conditions. Protecting one species from habitat destruction protects dozens or hundreds of other species. It’s not a question of needing to pick and choose.
Pandas probably have a negative cost: Because they’re cute, they serve as a good mascot for rallying the conservationist cause, and so giving up on the panda would probably end up being more expensive than trying to save it.
Meanwhile, does it matter why a species is going extinct? We humans are admittedly pretty good at wiping out other organisms, but species have been going extinct long before we ever arrived on the scene, and would continue to go extinct without us. If we find a species which we can conclude is going extinct for purely natural reasons, do we have any responsibility to try to save it? Heck, do we even have the right?
How the heck do you determine that a species is “going extinct for purely natural reasons”? There are lots of rare species, and any rare species is vulnerable to extinction due to random factors. If a tree falls in a forest and squashes the last female of a rare species, that species is finished. Does that mean it was “natural” for that species to go extinct? If a tsunami hits an island with rare endemic birds, is their extinction “natural”? Was it “natural” for dinosaurs to become extinct? If there was an asteriod headed for Earth, would it be unnatural to try to stop it from smashing into the planet?
And anyway, there is no spot on the globe that is unaffected by human activity. Therefore, it doesn’t even sense to talk about species going extinct “naturally”. You could ask, “If humans had never evolved, would this species have been extinct by 2011 anyway?”, but it’s an impossible question to answer, and not very helpful.
Um, yes. If there is no intervention by humans or (other conscious entities), then whatever happened was natural. That’s the definition of the word in this context.
Would the fact that it’s natural mean we can’t stop it? Of course not. We constantly fight to stop our own natural deaths. But, given the same amount of destruction, why does that mean we can’t prioritize fixing those things we screwed up?
I didn’t see this and although it is probably fairly late to respond, what I learned about it suggests that this triage system is about subpopulations of species. Not the remainder of a species.
Human beings, driving species to extinction is perfectly natural. Inbred mice with human ears growing out of their back and tobacco plants with firefly genes are also perfectly natural. They could not possibly be anything else.
There is no need to differentiate other than it facilitates a false moral claim: its bad if its an “nonnatural” extinction. There is no reason to fix anything we’ve screwed up because we’ve never screwed anything up.
Now if you, as a human, want the world to look and feel a certain way, then that’s a different argument.