Ethics For a Full World E-Book

Tormod Burkey

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The global emergencies facing the inhabitants of our planet – climate change, biodiversity meltdown, ocean acidification, overfishing, land degradation and more – are symptoms of a common problem: the world is full. Humanity has already exceeded several planetary boundaries. The situation is without precedent and its manifestations are numerous. Ethics for a Full World argues that our dominant culture's anthropocentrism – our human-focused thinking – is an underlying cause of the world's problems, threatening life as we know it. The blights that endanger our planet are experienced by many today, particularly those who care about other species, as deeply personal tragedies. So why are we not acting to save the world? Some say that humans won't do anything until we feel the repercussions ourselves – but by then it would be too late. This book takes an uncompromising view on our culture, our democracy and us as human beings, and examines why it is so difficult to save the world from ourselves. In a globalized world, the most urgent issues are the ones that exhibit tipping points, as they are the ones that it may become too late to fix. Burkey argues that non-anthropocentric ethics and the people who hold them, could be key to turning the tide. In a cry for meaningful and effective engagement, he proposes a concrete first step to connect concerned individuals. This is a book for people who want to be part of the solution, and who aren't fooled by the feeble attempts for change that have been made so far.

Leseprobe

Praise for Ethics For A Full World

Tormod Burkey would like to save the world because he cares deeply about it, and from the perspective of ecology and evolutionary biology, saving the world seems the right thing to do. Much like Daniel Kozlovsky’s 1974 book, An Ecological and Evolutionary Ethic, Burkey makes a strong case that modern science provides a foundation for deciding how we should treat non-human species and the earth as a whole, even if we can’t derive ‘ought’ directly from ‘is.’

— Reed F. Noss, Provost’s Distinguished Research Professor, University of Central Florida, author of Forgotten Grasslands of the South.

Tormod Burkey’s Ethics For A Full World is one of the shortest, sharpest, clearest and most compelling descriptions of the causes and cures of our environmental bankruptcy that I have ever read.

— Lloyd Timberlake, author on environment and development issues.

Dr Burkey’s extraordinary book touches on psychology and neuroscience, evolutionary biology, ecology, dynamic systems theory, statistics, economics, philosophy, ethics, conservation biology, history, law, religion and political science. A cure for narrow-mindedness, this provocative book should be required reading for politicians — and those who vote for them.

— Brian Czech, President, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, author of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train and Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution.

People charge that I have abandoned science to become an ‘activist.’ What nonsense! Tormod Burkey’s brilliant concise synthesis of the sciences helps us understand why, for the sake of young people and all life on our planet, we must appreciate wisdom emanating from a broad perspective of all scientific disciplines, including philosophy and ethics.

— James Hansen, Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, author of Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

Tormod Burkey has produced a fine, concise book which should enlarge the discussion on what in my view is the most important need of humanity, an ‘ETHICS FOR A FULL WORLD.’

— Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies Emeritus and President of the Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University.

Your writing on this is the best I’ve seen, even going back a while. I think something might have been possible if we had tackled the problem in the 1980s but we have reached a tipping point now. Careerist have ruined our movement. And this is a tough time to be seeking the truth.

— Mike Roselle, Founder, EarthFirst!

‘… Those of us who still see other species as our brothers and sisters, trapped in time and space on the same planet, desperately trying to survive the reckless behavior of our one ignorant species, are ready for the kind of ethics Burkey calls for, and that he recognizes are key to our survival.’

— Rod Coronado, indigenous biocentrist and former saboteur for Sea Shepherd, Animal Liberation Front, Earth First! and founder of Wolf Patrol.

Clairview Books Ltd.,

Russet, Sandy Lane,

West Hoathly,

W. Sussex RH19 4QQ

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Clairview Books

© Tormod V. Burkey 2017

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

The right of Tormod V. Burkey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Print book ISBN 978 1 905570 85 0

Ebook ISBN 978 1 905570 86 7

Cover by Morgan Creative featuring photograph © nialat

Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, Essex

To Edward Abbey — old Cactus Ed.

And Hayduke, Doc Sarvis, Bonnie Abbzug, and Ol’e Seldom Seen.

Contents

Preface

Ethics For A Full World

Why Are We Not Acting To Save The World?

We Need A New Ethic

A Different Ethic

On The Tragic

Afterword: Can We Save The World?

Notes

Index

Preface

‘The social tree is diseased because of the decrepitude of its philosophical roots; it will do little good to treat the withering branches.’

— Daniel Kozlovsky (1974)1

Before addressing a complex issue, we as citizens sometimes need to take a broad overview of the situation and make sure we know what the overarching and underlying problems really are. Large and important problems, the kind that can occur in a full world, are such issues. The issues that most urgently need our attention are the ones that (potentially or actually) exhibit tipping points — critical points in their underlying dynamics where the system switches into an entirely new regime, one from which it may be impossible to emerge. Such nonlinear dynamics and discontinuities are common in natural systems. ‘Interesting’ issues also have transboundary, international, dimensions, because internal issues are more easily addressed — those are more likely to be solved, indeed they may be well under way to be already. Problems with tipping points and international dimensions are the important challenges, precisely because they are difficult and because it may suddenly be too late. All other problems will be solved some day, simply because it will never be too late to solve them. Of course, the solutions may come too late for individuals to enjoy them, but the most important thing is to ensure that there will still be individuals to enjoy things in the future. In that sense it is never too late, where those other, ‘simple,’ kinds of problems are concerned. Unfortunately, those seem to be the kinds of issues that get the most attention in the public awareness and our daily lives, even with the world in the state that it is.

In a full world we encounter problems of a materially different nature from the kinds of problems humanity has had to deal with in the past. When the world is full, individual actions and problems that have previously been local have repercussions on the global scale. Recycling abilities have been overwhelmed and spill over onto a grander scale. There are no safe havens for exploited populations. Species go globally extinct, and ever more species are lost in cascading chain reactions of ecological dependence. Overharvested systems do not recover, and harvesting shifts elsewhere with similar effect. In a full world there is nowhere else to go for a fresh start when you have exhausted opportunities where you are. A full world is truly globalized. (Even though some resources have substitutes, truly limiting resources (like water, key elements in biological and agricultural systems, and the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon) do not. And even if humans are able to switch to another resource, other species may not. When you are butting up against such critical limits we can say that the world is ‘full’ even though not all limits are exceeded or all potential resources are fully exploited.) Global problems such as climate change, biodiversity meltdown, fisheries collapse, ocean acidification, interference with key nutrient cycles, like the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and so on, are of a scale and complexity hitherto unknown to mankind, and solving such problems may be encapsulated under the notion of ‘Saving The World.’ ‘Saving The World’ is, of course, just a shorthand for the implementation of real-world real solutions to large, complicated, ‘world-threatening’ problems that involve tipping points and international dimensions.

Parts of this book were originally an essay submitted for the Zapffe Prize, a prize announced in the name of Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe. Zapffe was an exponent of biosophy. He articulated severe pessimism with regard to human existence on Earth, and felt that human consciousness was a tragic evolutionary mistake. The Prize is for ‘philosophical and ethical musings on human population growth, including analyses of the causes and effects of such growth in relation to other species and nature in general.’ While this essay does not dwell on human population issues explicitly, my favorite Zapffe quote is reproduced in the opening pages.

The final chapter of this short work is entitled ‘On The Tragic,’ as a reference to Zapffe’s magnum opus, and doctoral dissertation, Om det tragiske (On The Tragic2), which sadly has never been translated from the original Norwegian. For those of us who care deeply about the natural world, the global challenges we face can feel like profoundly personal tragedies. Many of us are so engaged with the problems facing the world, and the species we love, that our ability to address them effectively becomes pivotal to our own happiness and quality of life as well. Hopefully, we can find means of turning this emotional engagement into a force for good despite the scale and the urgency of the problems that are threatening to overwhelm us. The title of my submission was Ethics For A Full World. For a different audience, an alternative title might have been Can Animal-Lovers Save The World? Hence the wilfully convoluted and unmodern title of this book, which to my mind harkens back to theses of a past century, when a man like Charles Darwin could publish his revolutionary theory under the full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

The second chapter of this book, ‘Why Are We Not Acting To Save The World?’, was not part of the original essay, and can to a large extent be read in isolation. It motivates the final chapter (‘Afterword: Can We Save the World?’) and the project described therein. It also serves to motivate the need for a new ethic, which is elaborated on in the ensuing chapters. It is also rather long and slightly different in style from the others, focusing more on what others have said before me, and on fields where I have no particular expertise and have to rely more on the insights of others. To some it may therefore seem a distraction from the main theme of the book, particularly if you find yourself getting bogged down. If your main interest is in ethics, our relationship to other species and the natural world, and the need for a different ethic to replace our old anthropocentric one, you could decide to skip this chapter altogether, or return to it later, perhaps before reading the Afterword. You may even find that many parts of this book can be read out of order, or piecemeal.

Chapters One, Three, and Four together make the case against the prevailing anthropocentric ethic. Given everything we have learned over the centuries, you would have thought that one of them was that it is not all about humans. While many of us have, as a society it seems that we have not. Humans are just one of the millions of species on this planet. For some of us it is personal, because we love species that are immediately impacted by the desecration of the Earth; many of which are long gone, many that are on the threshold, and many that are simply suffering needlessly at the hands of man. While sadness and depression are natural reactions to this state of affairs, I hope the combination of feelings, knowledge and true understanding may sustain a burning rage that will help channel our energy into doing something about it. Something real. Something more than just window-dressing and busywork.

A new effort I am trying to initiate, explores the vital question ‘Can We Save The World?’ As a preliminary step to more concerted efforts to come up with the actual, real solutions to the problems facing the world, I should like to get a dedicated group of political scientists and other people with complementary backgrounds and experiences to thoroughly analyze the question of whether we really could save the world (with existing institutions) and what the main structural challenges facing such efforts are. The nature of this more limited project, which I am trying to find partners and supporters for, is outlined in the Afterword, in an effort to reach out and hear from interested readers with a visceral reaction to our plight and a burning need to take effective action.

Not wishing to produce a scholarly treatise for a few academics, this is not a thoroughly referenced work. In the interest of focussing on a few core ideas, and keeping it short and for a more general audience, it does not strive to give an exhaustive history of philosophy or review of intellectual antecedents. Scant attention has been given to the works of others, except where it serves my purposes, nor much attempt given to mapping where one stands on the shoulders of giants. Some are touched on in passing, none given the attention they deserve. Some citations are provided where part of the pedigree was clear to me, or where text appears as a direct quote. Apologies for all sins of omission.

Nor does this book contain an exhaustive description of all the woes facing us, or a litany of facts pertaining to the ecological damages visited upon the world. It is a pet peeve of mine that authors often seem to think all their readers are a tabula rasa that need to be filled up with information about the state of affairs, leaving little or no column space to the question of what we are going to do about it, and how. A similar phenomenon pertains to seminars and conferences as they are typically organized, filled to the brim with one-way communication, leaving no time for progressing beyond what is already known and understood by somebody, or to get work done. I will not insult your intelligence by assuming that most of the problems related to our ecological footprint on Earth are not already known to you, and available in the literature to anyone who cares to find it. Nor will I belabor the text by explaining every little thing in terms of first principles, or providing a lot of associated examples. If you run across a concept with which you are unfamiliar, and my account of it does not meet your needs or desires, Google it. Perhaps, at times, the endnotes may help. Nor do I write for the unquestioning, the incurious, or for the easily offended. Sometimes my writing aims to function at a metalevel, and I hope it works at least some of the time.

The tasks involved in ‘saving the world,’ are so overwhelming, urgent, and so crucial, that we all need a multitude of partners and allies in this great transformation. If we fail to connect with a critical mass of confederates our personal lot will be a bitter and tragic struggle against the futility of action in isolation — forever impotent, hamstrung, dejected, and tragically frustrated in our desire to make a real difference in the only world that we know and love. For the future of life on Earth, and for our own well-being as well, we need to find triggers that can propel humanity into meaningful action, and mechanisms that can actually solve the problems we face, before it is too late.

Ethics For A Full World

‘The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.’

— Rachel Carson (1962)3

Which book has meant the most to you? No matter who you are, and whether or not you have actually read it, the correct answer is arguably On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.4 Before the concept of Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection, Western civilization could understand nothing about life on Earth. In the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense, save in the light of evolution.’ No other body of thought has had such an impact on our view of the world and our place in it, of life, of how the world works and of the processes that shape our lives. Work on ‘the new synthesis,’ from 1930 onwards, combined Darwin’s insight with genetics, and made it possible to understand a host of mechanisms that make all living things the way they are.

Copernicus relegated Earth to simply one of many planets — not the Center of the Universe, but just another rock in orbit around a rather ordinary star. Darwin did the same with humans; not created in God’s image after all, but shaped by the same processes as all other animals, and not fundamentally different from them. Humans are a part of nature, not put here by God to rule it. For the first time, it was possible to understand life on Earth. Before Darwin we could not even place humans relative to the rest of creation; we had no basis for phylogenies. The term ‘creation’ itself, along with ‘creator’ (in the context of life on Earth) and ‘creature,’ became an unfortunate misnomer.

The new science of ecology demoted humanity further from the position evolutionary biology and astronomy had relegated it to. In a food chain, the species at the bottom support the entire structure and are paramount for the maintenance of the whole. If organisms are mutually inter-dependent, like organs in a body, or the different stages of embryology, which is more important? Darwin himself made a point of reminding himself, repeatedly, not to describe species as ‘higher’ or ‘lower.’ Ecology allows us to understand the interactions in natural communities and how things work on time scales slower than the evolutionary. Ecology made it possible to understand the ebb and flow of population changes and expanded the use of ‘community’ and ‘society’ to other organisms and associations of different species in nature.

When a new worldview becomes dominant it is usually the product of a scientific paradigm shift. Ecology will also force a reality-check on traditional liberalism. There can be no individual welfare, or freedom, removed from the ecological matrix upon which the individual life form depends.5

‘To bear children into this world is like carrying firewood into a burning house.’

— Peter Wessel Zapffe6

We are beginning to see unmistakable signs that our philosophy, and ethics, our institutions, and the ways we have organized ourselves are not up to the challenges we face in a globalized world. In today’s world, a power plant in China and a meat eater in Norway decide the outcome of a polar bear cub’s swim in the Canadian Arctic.

Evolutionary biology, and later ecology, placed humans firmly as a part of nature. Man is an animal like any other, created and molded by the same process as all other species. In that sense it is trivially true that Homo sapiens is a part of nature. But with our opposable thumbs and our technology Man has placed himself outside of nature — different and apart from it, as in the Bible. Not apart from nature in the sense that we do not have an effect upon it — on the contrary — but in the sense that we are not affected by or regulated by nature on the scales of time and space on which we live our lives.

To be regulated in the ecological sense means to exhibit density dependent dynamics, whereby dense populations have lower growth rates, or decline, while small (sparse) populations tend to grow.7 No population grows forever. Regulation is the reason population sizes are kept within certain bounds. A population that exceeds the local environment’s potential to produce the food it needs will be regulated by the availability of food, and go into local decline. Other species’ ranges can be limited by climatic conditions. Humans, on the other hand, have settled every continent, under all sorts of environmental conditions, and are, as a global species, no longer limited by local constraints. Dense populations can continue to grow by drawing on resources from a much greater scale. The time scale that is relevant for regulation of populations of humans has little or no impact on most people’s daily lives. By exploiting the accumulation of biomass over geological time scales we have to a certain extent even freed ourselves from having to live off the steady stream of energy from the sun.

We have also put ourselves outside of nature in the sense that we currently are not subjected to much in the way of selection pressure. Nearly everybody lives a long life, and those who die early do so arbitrarily, due to things that have little or nothing to do with their personal traits or genetics. Practically everyone has a chance to reproduce if they want to. Differential reproduction still occurs, but this variation also tends to be unrelated to physical traits, skills, or inherent abilities. Without systematic differences in mortality and reproduction there will be no further evolution (save in the negative sense, that release from selection causes changes in gene frequencies as formerly unfortunate traits are allowed to increase8). Our fates are determined more by serendipity, modern medicine, technology, and the social structures surrounding us, than by our own prowess.

Clearly our society and our communities exist within nature and are dependent upon it. But we have removed ourselves from nature, elevated ourselves above it, so that we may live as if it didn’t exist. In principle, we too will one day be regulated by the forces of nature, but for the time being we have, by means of our technology, managed to keep nature at arm’s length, extricating ourselves from local resource constraints and dependency on individual species. As global omnivores with impressive technologies we have been able to liberate ourselves from the dictates of natural fluctuations, and need not suffer directly when we have destroyed a prey species, or a mutualist, or experience the long-term consequences of eradicating competitors or natural predators. But in the end, and the end will come, nature will catch up to us and we too will once again become part of nature — victims of our own avarice, and the impoverishment of nature that we ourselves have precipitated. We too will once again feel resource limitations, but only after we have destroyed nearly everything around us will we reap the repercussions of our own actions.

Nature has, temporarily, been unable to regulate the human population. We must therefore voluntarily submit ourselves to regulation by ‘the constraining force of ethics.’9 As long as our ethics are not up to that task we remain a species ‘out of control.’ It is small comfort that some day we will once again be part of nature — a species that also feels the brunt of ecosystems collapsing around us — when in the meantime we will have destroyed most of what makes life worth living.

The way humans are behaving, on the time scale that is relevant to our daily lives, the distinction between concepts like ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ ‘artificial’ and ‘natural,’ between ‘nature,’ ‘the world’ and ‘the universe,’ become meaningless if we still consider humanity, in today’s situation, as a part of ‘nature.’ In the trivial sense, nature is everything. If there is anything special about humanity, it would have to be our ability to wipe out a profusion of other life forms — because we operate on such large scales and are such omnivores that we don’t immediately feel the consequences when we overexploit other species. In the Anthropocene era,10 humans are more an environmental condition that other species are constrained by than a part of the same environment.

‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place…’

— Isaiah 5:811

We will never again experience something ‘natural.’ In an artificial climate, warmer, wetter and wilder than any humanity has ever encountered, we will not recognize the world. Every day we will wonder what it would be like if we had not altered the climate. A warm winter day, without snow, with rain and slush, foggy; every new day will be compared to what we believe it ought to be, wondering how it would have been had we not converted it to something of our own creation. We will be wondering how the animals and plants are coping out there; wet, cold — frost and moisture in rapid succession, with greater variation, unpredictability, new competitors, altered food availability, the signals for migration, germination and reproduction out of tune with the new reality. Not a day will pass without the feeling that it is, in every way, somehow unnatural, and our fault at that.

Of course we must be aware that this state ‘outside of nature’ is a relatively new thing. As a species, we have no experience with such a situation prior to the last 100 years or so. It cannot last. Several limits for human activity have already been overshot;12 it is likely many of us alive today will live to feel some of the consequences, and experience a world entirely different from the one today’s society is built upon.

There is not room here to itemize the damage that seven and a half billion humans wreak on our planet and its inhabitants, or even the damage we managed to do while we were still much fewer. Nor, hopefully, is it necessary. A few examples will serve. If we look at the fate of individuals of other species it is hard to imagine the sheer extent of killing we do every year, and the amount of suffering this entails.

Global total catch of wild fish is said to have peaked in the 1990s at about 90 million tonnes per year.13 Assuming half a kilo per mean-sized fish, that would entail that we kill 180 billion fish every year; 26 times the number of humans on Earth (and that is without counting the discards, which are also largely dead). Since many fisheries are small fish like anchovies, pilchard, etc., the average fish size is actually way below half a kilo.14 One attempt at estimating the extent of suffering from our global fisheries indicates that the total kill may be at least 1–5 trillion individual fish per year. Since this estimate leaves out a diversity of causes for which fish are killed, the total number of fish killed by humans each year may be as great as a thousand times the global human population. While global fish catches supposedly stagnated at 90 million tonnes, we now eat another 70 million tonnes of fish from fish farms, and these fish are in turn fed on a much greater number of wild-caught fish.15

Now a recent attempt to reconstruct historic catches has suggested that global fish catches actually peaked at 130 million tonnes in 1996, and has since been declining even more sharply than hitherto believed. So the seas and oceans of the world used to be even richer than we knew, and our catches have been even more unsustainable than previously thought, declining at a rate of 1.2 million tonnes per year.16 Global statistics are compiled yearly by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO, but they are based on national reporting and hence suffer from highly variable data quality. Because, guess what, nations lie about their catch numbers like they do with logging data and other indicators, and the numbers reported to the FAO have been incomplete, misrepresented and misinterpreted. Catches from small-scale commercial and subsistence fisheries are commonly neglected or unreported. So are fish caught for ‘sport,’ as well as by-catch, illegal fishing, and certain other categories. Where countries have reported ‘no data’ these have commonly been replaced by zeros in FAO records, which clearly need not be the case. So a number of false assumptions have led to annual total global catches, from 1950 through 2010, being underestimated by more than 50% (current best estimates). Needless to say, it is hard to responsibly manage fisheries when you don’t even know how much is really being caught. There are numerous reasons, including political reasons, why quotas and catches are commonly much higher than what is sustainable. Illegal fishing is commonly reviled, but legal catches are the greater problem.

It has been claimed that we kill an estimated 100 million sharks per year (sometimes this number is attributed to the shark fin trade alone); this number is probably on the way down since sharks have been over-harvested all over the world, and so many shark species are now endangered.17 According to some estimates we reduce the biomass of large fishes by 80% in the first 15 years after opening an industrial fishery on them, and have only one tenth left shortly thereafter.18 We are eating our way down food chains and overexploiting fish stocks everywhere while we constantly have to seek them out in deeper waters and with more advanced techniques.19 A recent study concludes that our beloved pet, the domestic cat, kills an estimated 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually.20 Another one hundred million birds die in collision with buildings, just in the United States.21 While the number of animals used in research is about 25 million per year, in the US, the number of mammals and birds killed in food production (still just in the US) each year is approximately ten billion,22 half again the human population on Earth. That number does not include fish or other aquatic animals that we also eat. Globally, three billion mammals and 57 billion birds are killed for food each year according to FAO numbers.23

Where animal rights activists focus on the well-being of individuals, ecologists and conservation biologists concentrate on populations, species, ecosystems and habitats. Conservation biology is applied ecology and population genetics, directed at reducing anthropogenic extinctions and loss of biodiversity. Island biogeography describes what is left of nature as residual habitat islands in a sea of human activity, where previously the reverse was the case: islands of human habitation in a sea of wildlands. Ecologists and conservation biologists study the effects on the diversity of nature and how species and populations die out when the areas remaining to them dwindle and the remnants are further fragmented by humans. The natural background rate of extinction, how often species go extinct in the absence of human influence, can be estimated from fossil records. It is on the order of 0.1–1 species per year per million species. Conservative estimates indicate that the current rate of anthropogenic species loss is greater than the prehistoric background rate by a factor of a thousand or more, and that we can expect it to swell further in years to come.24 There is no reason to think that speciation has sped up from its background rate in a comparable manner.

The greatest threats to life on Earth are, respectively, human land use (agriculture/forestry, settlements, infrastructure), over-exploitation (fishing, forestry, hunting), introduced species, and climate change.25 In the years ahead climate change may catch up with over-exploitation as an extinction driver, but mainly in interaction with the other factors: absolute loss of habitats, and the fragmentation of the remains, as well as over-harvesting, makes for small populations that have greater difficulty moving in response to, and adapting to, changes in climate, while competition from a growing number of alien species is set to explode.

When you wipe out a species you have not only killed the last individual of that species, you have blocked the birth of all potential future individuals of that species, for eternity — an endless stream of beings that could have flowed from the last individuals if we had not destroyed them. Extinction is irreversible; the number zero is an absorption point. This is what Michael Soulé and Bruce Wilcox had in mind when they wrote: ‘Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else.’26

Ecologically, it is not just the continued existence of species that is important, but also their ecologically functional roles that need to be maintained. The US Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 affirmed that one could not allow species to ‘diminish past the point at which they cease to be a significant functioning element in the ecosystem of which they are a part.’ Unfortunately, this and other laws with similar intent have not been enforced to the point where they have become effective in reaching this goal. We lose the thundering herds, the boundless schools, the immense flocks, the overwhelming natural phenomena — and the wealth of emotion they can stir in us — long before we put the species’ continued existence at risk. This impoverishment, and the erosion of the species’ functional role in the ecosystem, occurs long before the species dies out and is gone forever. According to a WWF report, we lost half the wild animal life on Earth between 1970 and 2010.27 And a lot more was lost before that. Vaclav Smil has estimated that even in 1900, the total biomass of wild terrestrial mammals was about as large at the anthropomass of the approximately 1.6 billion humans at the time (about 72 Mt live weight or about 11 Mt Carbon), but 100 years later wild animal biomass had fallen to less than 5 Mt C, with human biomass at least ten times that.28 By now (March 2016), human biomass would have increased to at least 370 Mt live weight and 68 Mt C. By Smil’s calculations, humans and their livestock outweighed wild terrestrial mammals by at least 35 to one by the year 2000. Since livestock have also increased since 2000 and wild animals have continued their decline, while humans have gotten heavier and increased from 6 billion to 7.4 billion in number, this ratio has gotten significantly higher since then. (By the time this book is out total global human population will probably be 7.5 billion so the ratio is outdated almost as soon as it is calculated.) It goes without saying, that in such a skewed relationship one could do untold levels of damage.

As a process with absorption points, extinction is an example of a more general phenomenon: processes with thresholds, or tipping points (break points). Systems with positive (self-enhancing) feedback loops29 are common in nature, in ecology, and in the global climate system.30 A tipping point is the point where self-reinforcing processes gain the upper hand and spin out of control. In dynamic systems theory, which among other things describes the fluctuations of natural populations and changes in ecological communities, one can speak of ‘basins of attraction’: widely disparate states where it can be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the state we were used to once you have crossed into a new domain, or region of state space. As individuals, we live in a world, and on a time scale, where things change gradually and slowly, move in cycles, steadily round and round or back and forth. We are not used to dealing with irreparable damage. We all know that when you bend a branch it flexes evenly and gradually, and when we ease off the pressure it curves effortlessly back and eases back into roughly its original shape. We can repeat this process again and again. But when the branch snaps, there is no way back. Like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Yet we imagine and act as if more complex systems won’t ever break. As a species and as a society we are not good at dealing with such points of no return. Most people are not even aware that these exist, or they refuse to believe it.

In ecological systems, a tipping point might be when, for instance, a forest ecosystem is deforested to the point where it becomes dominated by grasses, and the grassland burns yearly, precluding the regeneration of a forest (without extremely intensive, and costly, fire suppression efforts). Or overfishing may lead to an ecosystem becoming dominated by jellyfish, and other invertebrate taxa, which consume fish eggs and larvae so that fish stocks do not recover. Another tipping point may occur when global warming has reached the point where permafrost areas, like those in the vast Siberian tundra, melt sufficiently to release the immense quantities of methane stored there.31 At the opposite end of the spectrum, in the physical world, a ‘snowball earth’ might result if global cooling got to the point where the increased amounts of snow and ice leads to increased albedo, reflecting more energy from the sun back out into space, causing further cooling. An example of negative feedback loops is the hypothetical ‘Daisy World,’ described as an example in the Gaia hypothesis. In it, the world is covered by two kinds of daisies, black and white. The white daisies do well when the climate is warm, black daisies do well when the climate is cool. If the white daisies should start to take over the world, the increased albedo would lead to cooling of the climate, which in turn would lead to the decline of white daisies and more black daisies. And vice versa, as black daisies increase that would lead to warmer conditions which favor the white daisies. This stabilizing effect is the opposite of the positive feedback loops that are involved in tipping points. When global warming causes forests to die, and their carbon stores are released to the atmosphere, that is a positive feedback loop which is inherent to tipping points and may shift conditions into a completely different basin of attraction.

In population dynamics we typically see stabilizing, negative feedback, such that as a population of a given organism increases, individuals face increased competition for resources or greater risk of disease or predation, such that the population will tend to decline again. At low densities, conditions will be more ideal, and the population will once again start to increase. But in some cases populations may exhibit negative dynamic coefficients even at lower densities. In ecology these are known as Allee effects: once a population drops below a certain threshold it may continue to decline. For instance, social animals may have difficulties in finding each other or may fall more easy prey to predators at low densities; those that would otherwise benefit from cooperative behavior may be severely disadvantaged when their numbers are low, individuals in a sparse population may have difficulty finding mates or attaining the conditions to breed successfully. So this also is a positive feedback mechanism: once numbers start falling, they will continue to fall — just like, as at the other end of the spectrum once a quantity has risen above a certain threshold, it will continue to rise. This is the nature of tipping points.

Systems theory and information theory teach us that more complex, more diverse systems often have greater resilience32 — greater ability to recuperate after an external perturbation. They have more pathways through which to dissipate the impact and to absorb it. Yet they can still break, and become something completely other; usually something simpler, something poorer. The enhanced resilience of some complex systems, may lull us into a false confidence, as they remain functional despite the multitude of abuses we hurl at them — up to a point. Nature has many stabilizing mechanisms, but when these are breached all bets are off. In fact, diverse systems like tropical rainforest, cloud forests and coral reefs may be extremely fragile. It may be that the causality is the other way around: that species-rich assemblages like rainforests and coral reefs require a stable environment and freedom from disturbances in order to persist. Furthermore, the tendency to focus our attention on the most diverse biomes has some unfortunate side-effects. It would be most unfair to disregard the plight of individuals and species that carve out a life for themselves in low diversity ecosystems simply because the species count per unit area is lower.

Few sciences have reached a point where they have become truly predictive. Ecology can still not predict the ultimate consequences of losing a species, or the aftermath of an introduced species, or a degree of climate change. What we are doing to nature is like the old Chinese torture method ‘death by a thousand cuts’ — a piece gone here and a piece there until the entire entity has perished. When we atomize the threats to ecosystems we can of course not describe the long-term repercussions of cumulative stresses in a straight-forward manner.

‘An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.’