On the Nature of Ecological Paradox

By Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison

This work is a large, powerfully illustrated interdisciplinary natural sciences volume, the first of its kind to examine the critically important nature of ecological paradox, through an abundance of lenses: the biological sciences, taxonomy, archaeology, geopolitical history, comparative ethics, literature, philosophy, the history of science, human geography, population ecology, epistemology, anthropology, demographics, and futurism. 

 

The ecological paradox suggests that the human biological–and from an insular perspective, successful–struggle to exist has come at the price of isolating H. sapiens from life-sustaining ecosystem services, and far too much of the biodiversity with which we find ourselves at crisis-level odds. It is a paradox dating back thousands of years, implicating millennia of human machinations that have been utterly ruinous to biological baselines. Those metrics are examined from numerous multidisciplinary approaches in this thoroughly original work, which aids readers, particularly natural history students, who aspire to grasp the far-reaching dimensions of the Anthropocene, as it affects every facet of human experience, past, present and future, and the rest of planetary sentience.

With a Preface by Dr. Gerald Wayne Clough, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and President Emeritus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Foreword by Robert Gillespie, President of the non-profit, Population Communication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030645267

Book preview

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. C. Tobias, J. G. MorrisonOn the Nature of Ecological Paradoxhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_1

1. Introduction

Michael Charles Tobias¹   and Jane Gray Morrison¹

(1)

Dancing Star Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Keywords/Phrases

TroubadoursCrueltyEcological paradoxGilbert RyleCogitoKrill

1.1 Ecological Interpolations

We call this treatise, or Tractatus —in homage to both Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza (1632–1677) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)—On The Nature of Ecological Paradox, knowing full well that its causes and consequences are the real clue to an Anthropocene that has, to date, been analyzed for its inflictions on the natural world, which are unprecedented in their cruelty .

SARS-CoV-2 (or Covid-19), climate change, extinctions, global pollution, human progress for some but not for most, vast inequities between species: These are only some of the most recent ecological pandemics that are, at heart, a prime lesson in paradox and pain. Ultimately, a healthy, well-balanced individual should, theoretically, make for a healthy planet. However, even in health, as in sickness, humanity has shown so many hostile predilections with respect to other life forms, that today we have no baseline for assuring reasonable correlations between human behavior and the options for successful furtherance and interactive vitality among other species.

Such escalating facets of the human experience question the very substance and verity of our notions of evolution and natural selection against a pressing context of ethics. Ethics that are phronetic (born of practical wisdom), dispositional as the vicissitudes of life dictate, silent, pragmatic, consequential, teleological, eudaemonist, self-effacing and rationalizing, absolutist, situationist, overtly volitional, and the like. These are just some of the philosophical traditions key to any thorough examination of the history of the natural sciences within a contemplative and unstinting context of analysis. And its many tentacles of speculation are fraught with paradox.

Paradoxical in that a hominid that for so long has prided itself on species success has done so only at an extreme cost to the rest of the biological planet. One most recent example involves the so-called wet markets throughout much of the world, where shoppers demand that their food be animals, and that those sentient beings be slaughtered right there before them (in the most violent, inhumane, and unsanitary of circumstances). Cruel because that is cruel—emblematic of our species’ insensate grip upon the majority of life forms; and, ironically, the cruelty, at the stage of gene commingling into mutant virus bats, pangolins, mink, possibly other species; a resulting global pandemic that infects humans, thus totally backfiring, at least for our kind. But it is not the first time—nor will it be the last (the ultimate backfire is yet to occur)—that a paradox of the most heinous and vile dimensions has suddenly (seemingly) dominated the biosphere (Fig. 1.1).

../images/491739_1_En_1_Chapter/491739_1_En_1_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Fig. 1.1

A Troubadour: Nature instructing the Poet, from a M.S. in the King’s Library in Paris. (Reproduced from Costello and Pickering,³ Private Collection, Frontispiece, Photo © M.C.Tobias)

1.2 Troubadours

It is by that amalgamation into a mere word, cruelty, Old French, indifference to, or pleasure taken in, the distress or suffering of any sentient being,¹ stemming etymologically from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that we perforce from the very beginning grapple with its psychological implications, collapse of virtue, this singular indictment of the human species. A word, cruelty, that most prominently corresponded to take one salient, if seldom discussed, example to the Spanish Inquisitional flames that claimed so many lives of a culture of southwestern France, the Vaudois, which had given birth to the ascetic, pure, and sensuous musical traditions of the nomadic lyrical gypsies of Provençal. We single them out, that time and place in Western history, because it was a fashion of music subtly delivered in order to please, to quiet the heart, and it was nearly obliterated by forces who refused to be pacified by poets. Dante was greatly influenced by their fancies, the Utopian songs and lyricism that are their legacy, and the Inferno to which many were subjected.

This far-off and elusive aesthetic, two centuries of Arcadia-enraptured Occitan-singing musicians who had sought a safe haven in Spain, across the Pyrenees, only to be viciously turned upon (again) and many burned at the stake over their musical and poetic faith, represents one of the most emphatic dialectics in Western tradition; an iconic example of our species-wide psychoses of which much will be written; not unlike the many martyred saints throughout Christian tradition. In this case, the tragic victims of an ill-turning human nature in the Late Middle Ages were Troubadours.

Their melancholic soliloquies, sonnets, and cansos (love songs to one’s beloved) would centuries later inform Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, and Handel, and even Goethe’s first and most despairing of creations, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). We feel the fragile presence of the Troubadours in equal measure across the span of literature and natural history reflections, from Petrarch to Cervantes, from Shakespeare to Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and ultimately Buffon, Beethoven, and Darwin; so star-crossed were the heavens and hells to which their melodies and dreams fell prey.

Theirs is an unwritten history emblematic of The Birth of Innocence; the Fall of Man. Within its diverging paths are two distinct philosophical and moral poles: sagas writ painfully in so many leys d’amors, the pastorela, descort, and alba, this latter a shepherd’s song of woeful countenance, as dawn broke ranks with darkness; and a natural history of Europe and, by sharp implication, all of human time, human contradiction, and ensuing turmoil.²

And at this very moment, a concatenation of global crises is not only bringing out the best in our species but also epitomizing how unprepared the collective really is to effectively deal with individual and community suffering, from Washington, D.C. to Siberia, from Sweden to the Antarctic. The breakdowns are not restricted to, though possibly made more intractable by, democracies. But in every nation, institutional vulnerabilities are now glaringly seen to track with our apparent inability to effectively change large numbers of minds and hearts; to engage in civil and transformational dialogue that can surmount the hurdles inherent to theory; let alone effect widespread parities or distributional justice across diverse constituencies. These gaps in the collective measures of all things—gaps between experience, education, cultural norms, and attitudes—are of greatest concern in a nuclear world, and at the very moment, the fast-waning biodiversity—the underlying, essential pillar of all—is least accounted for. That accountability factor shines the spotlight on human narcissism. As will be explored herewith, that one unconditional, human consciousness, and the one species that all but remains its principal beneficiary, provide vastly insufficient room to negotiate a truce with earth; to mentor the human personage in meaningful, ethical guises other than itself.

Sang Christine De Pise, …Victim of thy cruelty!... May it not an emblem prove/Of untold but tender love?..³

And the twelfth-century Troubadour Jaufre Rudel, I am happy to weep while singing,/it is the only way/to calm this sadness/which engulfs me./I sigh one hundred sighs a day….⁴

It is this forlorn centrality, within the dream of peace, the centered rural life of all those who have been subsumed by the seasons, lulling late-afternoons, mottled lights of the winding orchards of Medieval France; reticent personages pondering their world, simply enjoying the fellowship of their flocks in the solace of shade trees, that so strikingly invokes its tortured aftermath. Any testament to those prior times necessarily invokes the psychological and anthropological reconciliation, from inside ourselves, that contradictory relationship of our kind to nature, however uncomfortable or bathetic its revelations.

The fact so much pain, murder, exile should have correlated with the very birth of Renaissance music and poetics does much to subsume human nature in the perplexity of all those exquisite visions, paradise scenes, celebrations and degrees of confidence, and sheer curiosity at our world that heralded the rise of the ecological sciences.

Except that now, our temptation to escape into the pensive elegiacs of lore, far removed from Black Plagues and Spanish Inquisitions (we would like to think), is an ill-afforded nostalgic luxury for dreamers. Nature has equipped us with only so much tolerance for each other, beyond all the ecstatic love affairs and intimations of some destiny, leading across our neighbor’s fields to the pivotal horizon-teeming questions: What have we done? Who are we?

1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse

Ecological Paradox hopes to shine an even light on some of humanity’s foibles where self-interest easily undermines species and, by implication, the biosphere’s survival, a guaranteed backfire on our kind. We do so throughout the book, with the best of intentions, or from a critical perspective on incremental change. Paradoxical behavior, contradictory assumptions and goals appear fundamental to human evolution. We harbor no illusions that in one generation, or in response to unprecedented catastrophe, our species is going to suddenly change. If it were to embrace some kind of revolutionary collective wake-up call, ready-or-not, a spiritual epiphany spanning a critical, now-or-never mass, history renders clear that it won’t be good for all constituents. Given our habits of domination over most other vertebrates (a few exceptions earlier noted), and our near total vulnerability to our own bodily microbes and viruses, and the invertebrates that vast outnumber us (an estimated 400 trillion individual krill in Antarctica’s waters during spring and summer, for example—500 million tons)⁵ both in quantity and their generally rightful claims to biological tenure, it is a fretful, murky picture for Homo sapiens .

This book is divided into three parts meant to, in British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s famed expression, explore category mistakes⁶; to explore through a number of disciplinary provocations, the dualistic chasms of which Ryle was so enamored, in order to fathom and translate a crucial abyss, illogical obsessions without correction that have intellectually attacked the world. Literally attacked it. A situation in which our species has been blind, perverted, propounding a line of reasoning ever dangerously rooted to narcissistic, mechanistic blind-spots. Those intellectual and moral caesuras are profound, at the heart of this counter-intuitive discourse; and first promulgated most demonstrably in French philosopher René Descartes’ (1596–1650) declaration of human mental and emotional superiority to all other life forms. There we were, amid one European war within another war, at the proposed zenith of God’s creation, a central premise of so many philosophical and history of ideas family trees: Je pense, donc je suis; Latin: cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, from Discourse on the Method (1637, Leiden, the Netherlands).

Ryle , and every student of animal rights and conservation, will inevitably collide with the arrogance inside the furnace of Descartes’ unwavering belief in the human mind. Our everyday skepticism, he asserted, must help inform all natural science studies. But with so unvaried a faith in the capacity of the human intellect to surmount any paradox or contradiction as to all but obfuscate the world of nature and, in so doing, engender an implacable division or dualism between people and all other organisms (presumed no more than machine-like in their appearance of intricacy and behavior). That intellectual bifurcation point—and Ryle was most certainly determined to demolish it—was an essential and slow-to-become archaic flash point in the Renaissance obsession with grasping the role of humanity on earth; denuding every mystery, mapping every inch of the world in order to better control it.

Science has long abandoned mechanistic thinking per se. But its distinct opposite orientations, the so-called pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic mythopoetic rituals and artifice galvanizing our species’ self-righteousness, lift up the human spirit in a multitudinous impersonation that misses a fundamental point of departure for this work. Our self-consciousness is deeply distressed by the atavistic, unprecedented suspicion that we are missing, missing everything. That we are lost in ourselves, so sanctimonious when it comes to our actual plight, that our psyches have been usurped by something immutable, agonizing, inflictive, all but impossible to grasp in the species-wide embrace of the willful surrender of crucial memories of the time we were still connected. Perhaps thirty thousand years ago. One-hundred thousand years ago. Just when or how we slipped away cannot be deciphered. But it happened, as sure as continental drift. We lost the rest of the world outside of our little, fast-proliferating species of hominids. Lost our way toward the queasily approaching future. We jettisoned our life rafts. Aggressively chose to subdue and consolidate our power. And that was it.

So it is our intention, however inadequately realized in this book, to explore some varied inroads of this human ontology: aesthetics, ethics, anthropology, metaphysics, history, military debacles, struggling jurisprudence, conflict, that are ecologically kinetic in some form, prone to mismatches, destructive combinations, or strikingly optimistic correlations, delusional though they may be.

The first part of On the Nature of Ecological Paradox—Tractatus Ecologia Paradoxi—examines places, individuals, and certain moments in history that are illustrative of an ecological power over us, or through us. Instances we have selected from personal field research and academic concerns that suggest glimmers and interpreted injunctions of the bifurcation point: that moment when the sheer power of contradiction devolving from humanity’s place in the natural world becomes an overwhelming source of concern, both delight and horror. Other areas of consideration summon philosophical ambiguity, our sheer fascination with those frontiers and rudiments, in mathematics, evolutionary science, biosemiotics, of what is best and most curious about humanity, as it struggles to coexist in and with a biosphere it has only recently begun an acquaintance.

The second part—Ecological Memories and Fractions—is a roving series of deep and peripatetic attenuations of topic: subjective and anecdotal meditations. These are deeply personal divagations but are steeped in aspects of the humanities and sciences, pithy teasers, absent any resolution, that mirror both the perplexity and a brief history of revelations humanity has elicited in itself on behalf of her lost families in nature. Each is a moment out of time that inflects at some level the abiding ecological paradoxes that add up to something poetic and possibly redeeming about humanity’s plight, and her efforts to redress certain fundamentals that have gone wrong. In these pages we find optimism, we believe in hope, we want to believe the prime dualisms driving the world to ecological ruin can yet be sorted out. That the Anthropocene may be our present global crisis, but by faith, common sense, acutely ethical science, and a courageous collective, individuals still have the prowess, possibly the time, to stave off utter, global ruination. These brief glimpses into a huge variety of human experiences are left deliberately unfinished. They are jarring intangibles which in totality are intended to evince and evidence the quintessence of paradox: the perception of great beauty, the acknowledgment of great loss, of violence without surcease, and of the possibility of undying love.

Part three is, admittedly, a sobering conclusion, a meditation on what we perceive to be the only too real cartography of doomsdays our species is courting. We call it A Natural History of Existentialism although everything about it is terribly unnatural, other than the very inclination to have written it. That exercise has been painful, certainly striking of a certain misanthropy, a suspicion at best of our species’ dangers to itself and to all others. From its ashes and ruins we hope—through the data and the arc of fast-looming icebergs before our species’ Titanic—to invite consideration of desperate, last-minute alternatives that may still be within our grasp. We make some recommendations, but few predictions.

Ultimately, this is a work of painfully deferred hesitancies, written under the overarching influence of a global pandemic. After all, we are people, and throughout the book we are alleging that our species is the sole problem. Not an incoming asteroid or Black Plague out of our control. It is us. We can hardly hope to write from an objective perspective outside the self-inflicted disaster for which we are all culpable, perhaps some more than others, but guilty as a species, which verges on the very invalidation of natural history, calling upon metaphysics to somehow exhume fresh air and some novel, tenable, passionate twenty-first century ethical Renaissance. Nothing less can fix it. If it can be rectified at all. We must face up to our own psyches in the unmerciful collaboration that is human history in its war against the planet.

This is not a book of conclusions and omniscient narration, or even a study guide to the perplexed, which presupposes a level of understanding and the fact of having digested so much bad news as a dutiful precursor to a happy ending. The psychoanalytics that have evolved in Act One have not been exorcised from the human psyche. While art has continued to effectively curate our quixotic and teasing landscapes, celebrate the beauty we presume to recognize, and render commentary on all the shortcomings of collective human behavior, there is no true beginning or end, either in paleontology, physics, or so-called futurism, which makes for an exhausting Act Two, and as yet unimaginable Act Three. Dramatic effect is not an issue, to be sure; but any principled promotion of values that may gain traction in coming months and years requires a pronounced collaborative wherewithal to see it through. There is no telling. Humanity is quite capable of deceiving herself with numbers that prove whatever we want to prove. Aesthetics are equally deft in the flight from numbers, just as politicians and economists, philosophers and cosmologists, left to their own minions, can make any scenario or system of cognition work, or founder.

A book holds down any number of temptations that are marginalized for want of time, space, patience, or the actual formulae for working them out, a situation that might suggest an eschewal on principle of happy endings. That does not recognize our disposition in trying to make a certain case. With respect to its inevitable, existentialist-like pronouncements, there is the ever-present risk of putting forth an argument that unavoidably by paragraph two, page one, has readers daunted and dismayed. Nonetheless, somehow, without recourse to a didactic or pedagogical authority it is our hope to actually discover hope in the process of moving beyond the tyranny and orthodoxy of the ambiguous (Fig. 1.2). Timing is inevitably a flirt, and the present era, with its swiftly normalized mantras and jeremiads, will work against any novel introduction of data or interpretive gradations. It has all been said, but not much has changed, over thousands of years of exhausting historical precedent.

../images/491739_1_En_1_Chapter/491739_1_En_1_Fig2_HTML.jpg

Fig. 1.2

Victoria crowned pigeon (Goura victoria), (New Guinea. Photo © M.C.Tobias)

That makes our current condition anything but simple. We can’t just resort to obvious antiphons, dyads, or traditional structures dictating the nature of narrative and ethical dialectics to solve our problems. There is too much at stake to cotton to the comforts of logic and its systematic conclusions upon escalation. We wouldn’t know where to begin, let alone conclude. And while science insists on itself and its forms, we believe that we are now in the midst of great scientific change. Paradigm shifts that go beyond what we can possibly intuit. Hence, we have taken random variables more seriously than we might have a century ago. There is good reason, we believe, to take many things seriously. But we do not second-guess what others are likely to do. As Jacques Maritain wrote of the father of positivism and of modern scientific method, so-called, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), behold a philosopher, declared Maritain, who rightly claimed that science must remain chastely distant from the taint of metaphysics, characterized above all by the elimination of every ontological preoccupation….⁷ We differ, and stray, from that sensibility and approach.

Thought processes are fascinating. Inspiration may be learned, or not. There are no proofs for the most important things in life, except to convene in harmony where it seems to benefit the most numbers, and to refrain from human outburst, as decorum, the quality of kindness and common sense should suggest (Fig. 1.3).

../images/491739_1_En_1_Chapter/491739_1_En_1_Fig3_HTML.jpg

Fig. 1.3

Virgin and Child in a Landscape, ca. 1597. (By Aegidius Sadeler II, Netherlandish, after Dürer). (Private Collection). (Photo © M.C.Tobias)

Footnotes

1

https://​www.​etymonline.​com/​word/​cruelty

2

See Protestant Endurance Under Popish Cruelty: A Narrative Of The Reformation In Spain, by J. C. M’Coan, Esq., of the Middle Temple, Binns And Goodwin, London, 1859; See also, The Troubadours -A History Of Provençal Life And Literature In The Middle Ages, by Francis Hueffer, Chatto & Windus, London, 1878, particularly Chapter XIX, Siege Of Autafort -Bertran’s Death, and Chapter XXI, The Vaudois And Albigeois, –The Reformation Of The Thirteenth Century.

3

Specimens of the Early Poetry of France – From The Time Of The Troubadours And Trouveres To The Reign Of Henri Quatre, by Louisa Stuart Costello, William Pickering, London, 1835, p. 103.

4

The Music Of The Troubadours, Provençal Series amo ut intellegam, Volume 1, edited by Peter Whigham, Ross-Erikson, Santa Barbara, CA, 1979, p. 39.

5

See David Attenborough, Antarctica, Seven Worlds One Planet, BBC World, 2019; see also, Virtual World of Krill, Australian Antarctic Division, August 1, 2017 http://​www.​antarctica.​gov.​au/​news/​2017/​virtual-view-krill,Accessed March 3, 2020.

6

See Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.,1949.

7

See Jacques Maritain, Philosophy of Nature , Philosophical Library, New York 1951, p. 51.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. C. Tobias, J. G. MorrisonOn the Nature of Ecological Paradoxhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_2

2. On the Nature of Paradox

Michael Charles Tobias¹   and Jane Gray Morrison¹

(1)

Dancing Star Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Keywords

DarwinMayor BloombergPurchasing power parityExtinctionCountryside

2.1 Fundamental Current Contradictions

When mathematicians with equations for infinity tempt fate, when logicians go half-mad and statisticians start dangerously losing weight, or at the point etymologists and psychoanalysts converge in strikingly similar bouts of frustration, and science races to prove itself mistaken, or an adored pet pig to one by another be perceived as bacon, at that heaving moment, a seismic sigh, the earth, which cannot right herself, if we have cited her properties as having shifted, is left to lawless rules of contradiction and paradox. At least in our minds. And to the extent we will juggle the world’s strange, entrancing, or off-putting meanings, a fundamental problem, a human problem, refuses to be lifted.

All too admittedly, any single stash of papers, a book, a portfolio of sketches, a diary of the subsumed and epigrammatic past, lies dormant among the top-heavy paperweights and ruins. In August of 2010, a Google algorithm declared that 129,864,880 books had been published in the modern world.¹ According to its methodology, divining such a number, a logical series of shortcuts to undermine redundancy, impeding duplication, were adopted, as well as specific steps to eliminate those relics deemed somehow irrelevant. The same Shakespeare in thousands of languages, or would that mean thousands of different Hamlets? Thumb-worn copies of the Bible in its more than 3300 translations, or Pinocchio’s 300+ translations, Alice in Wonderland’s 174, or the more than 140 translations of Don Quixote?² Six editions, during Darwin’s lifetime, of his On the Origin of Species, and then the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of marked up copies of Darwin’s various editions, with often illuminating marginalia, as one would expect to find in any bird, flower, study guide, or textbook. CliffsNotes wherein every kid enamored of Huck Finn has likely left his/her own doodles and interpolations upon the pages.

The point goes to the proliferation and compulsion of human ideas; of frenetic, compulsive expression; its phenomenologies (first-person insights that are the subjective anecdotes that comprise any science and its inevitable thicket of interpretive experience) of translation. All those unending tensions between subjective and objective obsessions with endless layers of meaning, with levels of confidence, or confidence intervals³; of negotiation (Umberto Eco),⁴ of communication (George Steiner),⁵ of individualist escapism (Italo Calvino on James Purdy)⁶; the very rudiments of neurophysiology of the last remaining hominin mind. A brain/mind matrix of inscrutable layering, elusive and unknown to us, by turns enlightening and obfuscating, that somehow may be thought of as its own eco-dynamic flux fraught with the temptation, easily given in to, to act out contradictory behavior, or react to the world cynically.

The variables of such underlying contradictions (or ambiguities) have been discussed for thousands of years, involving such fundaments as life and death, the soul and matter, senses and reason, change and permanence, being, becoming, yes, no, here, there, not and why not, etc. These contraries, antonyms, oppositional forces, knowns and unknowns are no less intriguing and mysterious than those same combinatorial effusions which highlight poetic function, form, beginnings and ends, throughout the biochemical world we think of as earth, which translates and transliterates every inkling of DNA, every cell, molecule, and atom (Fig. 2.1).

../images/491739_1_En_2_Chapter/491739_1_En_2_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Fig. 2.1

Lycogala epidendrum at night (Groening's slime), Białowieża forest, Poland. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)

So heavily entrenched is our species in copious domestic and international news, information, gigabytes, and fiscal transactions, that the weight of our presence hinders even the possible hint of our ever stepping outside our frameworks, the human context, the mind within. Or, as a website for Bloomberg Philanthropies states, In God We Trust; Everyone Else Bring Data.⁷

When the twelfth richest man in the world according to Forbes,⁸ Mayor Michael Bloomberg, joined his colleagues on the stage of his first democratic debate in Las Vegas (February 19, 2020), amid the scathing flurries of exhausted rhetoric, transparent mantras, desperate efforts at identity differentiation, one candidate, the underdog Bloomberg, referenced (by our accounting) two most telling words otherwise lost in the angry miasmas of dramatic stagecraft: India and methane. While passed over by his immediate peers, these two fleeting mere mentions by Bloomberg were not lost, not by a long shot. His foundation’s multimillion-dollar embrace of global environmental concerns, particularly that of the oceans, and of zero-carbon civilization has resulted in Bloomberg co-founding and chairing the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD ). Its charter declares, Increasing transparency makes markets more efficient, and economies more stable and resilient.⁹ But, when observing such social calls for change (good ones), we are nonetheless only too aware of the distractions. Humanity’s desperate struggles to maintain a functioning human economy all but undermine the economies of nature, no matter how persistent the chorus echoing all things sustainable. Good intentions have not been enough to alter huge tides.

This is a fundamental contradiction. It underscores a powerful and paradoxical issue for individuals and nations: the origins and expenditures of wealth accumulation. Bloomberg took the debate stage the same week as the world’s wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, pledged US$10 billion to help combat climate change. Such newsflashes harken back, in so many guises, to all the words of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Lenin; of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal; of the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program, worth $100 billion in 2018 dollars), and of the 1879 treatise by Henry George (Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy). They are good and useful pledges which strike not only at economic class warfare, of the rampant inequitable divides forever growing among people, communities, and nation states, and of the suffering and silent indifference by most. That silence is recorded in so many realizations, angrily repeated, by proponents of change; change that can exist somewhere between the extremes of increment and revolution.

But in that span of so many appeals for a constructive future, phrases, intentions, and deeds are easily weaponized in the political sphere, turning ultimately to the worst of walkouts on the planet, namely, human distraction with its own woes and inequities. Kin altruism defies interdependency, the heart of biological sustainability. A species that has invested solely in itself, on the pretext of survival, utilizing an entirely arbitrary if cunning mechanism, money, the Geary-Khamis dollar, or that international PPP—purchasing power parity¹⁰—meant to envision fair metrics amid differing values of the same product or system from nation to nation. Countless models of PPP have been extrapolated, including The Economist’s Big Mac Index, a specific metric intended to reveal what the overall costs of said hamburger are, including the entire regional supply chain endogenous sunk (fixed) cost; labor, land, distribution, and the expenditures associated with the sum total of environmentally depreciating footprints (e.g., packaging, fuel and transport, other extractive components, water abstraction, pollution), as well as its foreign exchange rates, from country to country.¹¹

But Bloomberg more than merely mentioned India and methane. He singularly pointed to their respective importance in terms of the general wellbeing and likely mid-term scenarios for the health of the planet. His democratic competitors showed no interest.

Yet, to any ecologist, India—the largest, most polluted democracy in the world, with a dreadful animal rights record, despite its much-touted worship of cows; a local population that will eventually surpass that of China, at around 1.5 billion denizens—represents an environmental tipping point. As does methane, one of the most aggressive of all greenhouse gasses, at least 80 to 100 times that of carbon dioxide. These two categories of human trespass upon the natural world, India and methane, are emblematic of the Anthropocene, a topic central to ecological paradox, to the full psychoanalytic survey of those causes and consequences of human distraction and narcissism, which take from the planet, rather than helping her; and are core to the varied message construct of this book, just one more grappling in real time, between the dust and ash that, at least metaphorically, encinctures all of those 129,864,880+ other book titles.

Every generation has sought to document its alarm bells, disasters and lamentations, deferrals, regrets, altercations at all levels, mysteries and rituals, aesthetic reveries, the senses and powers of the imagination, the pure pursuit of information, wealth, immortality, games, sex, and beliefs… to help smother the pains and, on occasion, by generosity, virtue, and sustained excellence to accomplish something better than ourselves. Solutions, in other words, to systemic or altogether new problems facing humanity. Our very solace taken in, and reverence for, Nature would always have seemed the right antidote for our sorrows, a key to our social and conceptual metamorphoses, and our durability as a species. All fine and well but for the fact that never, as far as we know, has humankind been confronted by its own total annihilation. Not even by the Toba Supervolcano of 74,000 years ago, thought until recently to have exerted a nearly fatal genetic/population bottleneck on Homo sapiens ; a catastrophe so severe that there might not have been time for allele frequencies or infrequencies, as the case may be, to experience species-level rebalancing through genetic drift over a short time span of evolution, even a matter of generations. Contrary to the Toba suppositions, however, there is data which shows that African populations were largely unaffected by that mega-eruption in, what is today, Indonesia. If so, we need to look elsewhere for population bottlenecks. The twenty-first century is unambiguous in that respect.¹²

2.2 The Extinction Debates

But now, something has changed exponentially, as we come to view the very tragedy that is ourselves, and perhaps, or not, take heed of both warnings and manifestations. Whether we can actually do anything about it globally remains a mire of theoretical suppositions, data (or as yet unknown data) sets, all those small steps that translate into various positive conservation (by definition) countermeasures, modest progress in hundreds of millions of consumer choices; forward-leaning economic and civic arenas of awareness and action. At the 2020 Davos Economic Forum the key takeaway was climate change, the trending words—positive and impact—as well as the Global Risks Report 2020 in which was highlighted humanity’s interconnect vulnerabilities.¹³

A much more reticent, overwhelmingly depressing and largely private but increasing through-story is that uncomfortable sense of something akin to a blurry Biblical Last Days-like intuition, the worst conceivable Rapture, foundering almost embarrassed, and certainly ashamed, before the vague horizon lines of what could be our own species’ extinction. Whether thinking about any of the relevant verses, from Micah 4:1–3 to 2 Peter 3:10,¹⁴ or simply judging by the collective bad news—glaring headlines devolving into hackneyed everyday life—our frenetic worries track with an ever-increasing human population size, and those desperately plodding conservation gains and even greater losses that have become so many new norms. With them has arisen a philosophical category of deniers, cynics, peer skepticism, and outright protests erupting over everything but biodiversity loss. These costly if morally necessary civic distractions have been highlighted by such rounds of punch and counterpunch as in the case of one esteemed University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, Guy McPherson. He is noted for coining the phrase Near Term Human Extinction, possibly coming as early as 2030, which has had the effect, in some, of inciting philosophical havoc and name-calling (doomist cult hero, fringe characters) with regard to such ultra-realists in the science community; accused of potentially leading society toward a road of apathy and inaction, an alleged infraction deemed by the op-ed world to be as grave as many in the US Republican Party calling climate change a hoax. But at the same time, how dare optimism, as a general category, be challenged? To question hope has been likened to a kind of sick heresy, anti-intellectualism, like mounting an uncomfortable inquiry into carbon offset schemes and their mere alleviation of guilt in sync with the escalation of corporate greenwashing.¹⁵

Just as the individual is hard-pressed to concede his/her own death, so we, the collective, prefer to imagine extinction-level events in museums where dinosaur skeletons are hailed; or Armageddon is tailored for audiences on enormous movie screens, in epic digital smithereens. Many will put themselves to sleep reading charming and somehow comforting British countryside murder mysteries. Is it the murder, murder’s easy surrogacy, the countryside, or some weird combination in the blood? Indeed, countryside—said to occupy 98% of the planet, by human reckoning—has become the very focus of a softened, mellowing ecological interest, the February 20, 2020, premiere of the (short-lived) Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibition on countryside¹⁶ which described it as, the modern conception of leisure, large-scale planning by political forces, climate change, migration, human and nonhuman ecosystems, market-driven preservation, artificial and organic coexistence, and other forms of radical experimentation that are altering landscapes across the world (Fig. 2.2). One can’t help reading into that a distinct, if inevitable, anthropocentric accommodation, which of course is the point of it all. Of course, throughout all of that planning and experimentation, there is also murder, murder in the forests, the air, the water, the soils. Even the final remarkable days of Van Gogh’s life; having just painted one of his greatest (arguably unfinished) works, Tree Roots, at Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, which, he wrote to his brother Theo, the artist hoped would express something of life’s struggle¹⁷; however, he would shoot himself that very night, and die two days later, July 29, 1890.

../images/491739_1_En_2_Chapter/491739_1_En_2_Fig2_HTML.jpg

Fig. 2.2

Transitional Countryside, Central Texas. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)

But when it comes to seeing a koala burn to death, and Syrian infants dying in refugee camps, there is no more of that comfort from novels and museum exhibitions. Rather, the very state of near emotional paralysis in which most animal rights/liberation and other nonviolence activists and ecological ethicists have been trapped for centuries.

Footnotes

1

Google: There Are 129,864,880 Books in the Entire World, by Ben Parr, August 5, 2010, https://​mashable.​com/​2010/​08/​05/​number-of-books-in-the-world/​Accessed February 20, 2020.

2

See UNESCO’s Index Translationum, http://​www.​unesco.​org/​xtrans/​bsstatlist.​aspx?​lg=​0, Accessed March 3, 2020.

3

See Wolfram Mathworld, http://​mathworld.​wolfram.​com/​ConfidenceInterv​al.​html.

4

Mouse or Rat? Translation As Negotiation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2003.

5

After Babel Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford University Press, New York and London, 1975.

6

Hermit In Paris – Autobiographical Writings, Translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin, Pantheon Books, New York, p.49.

7

See Bloomberg Philanthropies – Our Approach, https://​www.​bloomberg.​org/​about/​our-approach/​Accessed, February 20, 2020; this quote is allegedly taken from a statement by William Edwards Deming, a U.S. statistician – In God we trust; all others must bring data. See online article by same title, by Adam Breckler, November 18. 2013 –5 min read - https://​medium.​com/​@adambreckler/​in-god-we-trust-all-others-bring-data-96784d01e9be, Accessed February 20, 2020.

8

2020 List, https://​www.​forbes.​com/​real-time-billionaires/​#578cd3173d78, Accessed February 20, 2020.

9

https://​www.​fsb-tcfd.​org, Accessed February 20, 2020.

10

International Dollar Geary-Khamis Define, Examples Explained, Business Case Web Site. 24 February 2016.

11

See What is the Big Mac Index? by Justin Kuepper, The Balance, International Investing, November 26, 2019, https://​www.​thebalance.​com/​what-is-the-big-mac-index-1978992, Accessed February 20, 2020.

12

Ancient Humans Weathered the Toba Supervolcano Just Fine, by Jason Daley, Smithsonianmag.​com, March 13, 2018, https://​www.​smithsonianmag.​com/​smart-news/​ancient-humans-weathered-toba-supervolcano-just-fine-180968479/​Accessed February 20, 2020.

13

See What’s everyone talking about at Davos 2020? by Katie Clift, January 23, 2020, https://​www.​weforum.​org/​agenda/​2020/​01/​what-are-people-talking-about-at-davos/​Accessed February 21, 2020; see also 15th edition of the Forum’s The Global Risks Report 2020, https://​www.​weforum.​org/​global-risks/​reports, Accessed March 3, 2020.

14

See https://​bible.​knowing-jesus.​com/​topics/​Last-Days

15

See Michael E. Mann, Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial, The Washington Post, July 12, 2017.​ For distractions hampering global efforts to accelerate work to save endangered species, see, Coronavirus disrupts global fight to save endangered species," by Christina Larson, June 6, 2020, Associated Press, https://​apnews.​com/​e3cddd53e453a221​58663f0eeb116194​, Accessed June 8, 2020.

16

See https://​www.​guggenheim.​org/​exhibition/​countryside

17

See A Clue to van Gogh’s Final Days Is Found in His Last Painting, by Nina Siegal, The New York Times, July 28, 2020, https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2020/​07/​28/​arts/​design/​vincent-van-gogh-tree-roots.​html?​smid=​em-share

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. C. Tobias, J. G. MorrisonOn the Nature of Ecological Paradoxhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_3

3. Ecological Problems and Paradigmatic Solutions

Michael Charles Tobias¹   and Jane Gray Morrison¹

(1)

Dancing Star Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Keywords

Sixth extinction spasmJack LondonDNAProtected areasIUCN Red ListJohn Stuart Mill

3.1 Science Policy and Human Nature

Ever more taxing, emotionally, to analyze: The numbers, jurisprudence, pragmatic compromises, overall vision for how to fix it are not adding up, because, as a whole species we have no psychological or even faintly residual phenotypic record of having ever dealt with so unflexing an ecological ultimatum, never mind that it is solely our doing and that one would naturally assume we should therefore know some route toward rectifying it. We don’t. The Holocaust was a microcosm of what, presently, is occurring in every geographical quadrant, often at levels we can neither visualize nor process. And if we could process (we usually can if we but attempt to do so), there are only so many solid and sustained examples of human restraint, historically, by which to gauge and extrapolate positive outcomes, where science policy and human nature are so frequently at loggerheads.

We can try and fiddle with the numbers, tilting reality and our very response to the hard sciences, toward any pre-existing bias. There are countless ways to prove that one plus one equals three.¹ But there is no evidence-based reason that can reverse the quite obvious contention that the sixth mass extinction is not likely to also sweep away Homo sapiens in its undiscriminating embodiment of a planet-wide biological crash. Either it is too late to meaningfully address what we have been doing for countless millennia, or, all has come down, in our case, to the failed notion of adaptive radiation being potentially self-guided. The big debate of moment-by-moment traits, the byproducts of some combination of nurture and nature, taking matters into their own hands. Informed re-evolution, re-genesis. Or, muddling through its philosophical hurdles, the Jack London inflection point between the canine hero, Buck, of his wildly popular Call of the Wild , and the author’s proposed reversal in a new novel to be named White Fang , whereby Instead of devolution of decivilization ... I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog, he said (Fig. 3.1).²

../images/491739_1_En_3_Chapter/491739_1_En_3_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Fig. 3.1

A Dog in the Eastern Himalayas. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)

Attempting to clarify tongue-twisting breakthroughs of science, de-extinction technologies have thus far engendered the seven-minute wonder in the crossing of a rare ibex and a goat; or back-bred echoes of former selves; or, worse, fashioned freakish hybrids. Most DNA molecules have completely withered within a million or so years, so cloning of now extinct species with older lineages is not a foreseeable possibility.³ Along with such constraints come the added hurdles of thinking through re-wilding scenarios, with their many perceived compromises in restoring partially healthy ecosystems. Our struggle to steer evolution is abetted by tens of thousands of finely nuanced research projects that have accelerated our capacities for best practices in the design of more high-confidence eco-restorative techniques. They incorporate literally hundreds of millions of data points from field researchers in every conceivable realm of the ecological and evolutionary sciences. Such collective energies, one would think, should hone, advantage, and ethically improve our re-adaptation and system resilience know-how. Such methodologies include mainland island and island biogeographical invasive species understanding advances; corresponding engineering breakthroughs; an avalanche of insights into biosemiotics, behavioral ecology and molecular biology; as well as important rapid advances in field acquisition data technologies, such as improved UAVs (conservation drones) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS ) that have been successfully employed, for example, in so-called polygon-to-point deployments in analyzing and monitoring protected areas and corridors.⁴

In recent years, the most comprehensive initiative to provide transparent overviews of the collective efforts at eco-restoration is found in the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA ),⁵ a cooperative effort stemming from the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and launched online by Protected Planet.⁶ Such research, stated goals, and mechanisms applied by all those, in every discipline, who care, are both a learning tool and generally recognized work in progress, entailing an enormous catch-up if our species is to engage in anything approaching successful ecological redemption. This is the case whether in reaching certain goals set by the Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity,⁷ the 2030 UN Sustainability Development Goals,⁸ core indicators of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES ),⁹ the United Nations List of Protected Areas , updated from 2014 to 2018, Protected Planet Report, 2018 (PPR )¹⁰ and the 2018 analysis of the comparable effectiveness of management, according to numerous IUCN designated criteria, of those protected areas.¹¹

As the Executive Summary of the PPR points out, progress is being made, with a doubling in 5 years of marine protected areas to over 3% globally (though a far cry from the hoped-for CBD Aichi Target 11 of 10% coastal and marine protections by 2020) and, terrestrially, an increase to over 15%, close to the 17% goals set for 2020 (a target hard to envision given the global economic downturns of that year). But of significant interest, since 2008, the number of protected areas in the world overall has gone from just over 206,000 to 238,563 protected areas from 244 countries and territories, covering more than 46 million km² (as represented in the 2018 United Nations List of Protected Areas), including the Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ—i.e., the High Seas as designated in the 1982 UNCLOS treaty.)¹²

In those areas where the WDPA protected area monitoring effectiveness has been unclear or ambiguous, data gap analyses—as reflected in the monitoring criteria of the GD-PAME, a searchable database known as The Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness—¹³ were not included in the 238,563 total. As of late 2019, there were 2071 such ambiguous units.¹⁴ Encouraging though the overall number of protected areas around the world may seem, in the first ever comparable study of underfunded biodiversity locales, it was made clear that biodiversity declines have progressed rapidly, and further delays in improving finance are likely to lead to even greater global extinction risks….¹⁵ Conversely, what would it take to rapidly alter the course of inadequate funding for global biodiversity? The problem, at its source, is the paucity of actual fieldwork on species diversity, a gap that impedes the critical arguments needed to confidently solicit requisite levels of private, corporate, and government financing. According to one finding only 33,536 of the 91,000 species on the IUCN Red List have been comprehensively assessed. The word comprehensive is a human word; and relative in every human sense.¹⁶

By the most conservative estimates, there are 8.7 million species on earth.¹⁷ But a later study argues that the number 8.7 million fully underestimates, to begin with, microbial species, which researchers have now placed at upwards of 1 trillion species. And, to the point, have suggested that for a price tag of $500 million to $1 billion per year (for 50 years) every species could be identified, the scaling and actual species numbers accurately calculated.¹⁸ Even at that scale, and in view of several conservation cost/benefits assessments, it is clear that money alone will not necessarily save species, although in the case of one parrot taxon, approximately US$2.26 million spent over 25 years brought the Lear’s Macaw from the Critically Endangered to Endangered status in Brazil.¹⁹ That might seem like a negligible step, but it is the hardest, most critical one on the path toward species restoration. Numerous other taxa-specific cost/benefits studies have been done with respect to North American mountain lions, California condors, and New Zealand kakapos, as examples. The costs per species are always in the millions of dollars. And while various research estimates for saving all presently identified globally endangered species, at between $59 and $76 billion annually, sound more than possible (given the value of estimated free natural services exceeding $125 trillion, and the actual ability of mints to print emergency dollars), the bigger looming costs are outside cost/benefit algorithms (Fig. 3.2).

../images/491739_1_En_3_Chapter/491739_1_En_3_Fig2_HTML.jpg

Fig. 3.2

A California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus ). (Big Sur, Photo © M.C. Tobias)

3.2 Trigger Effects and Moral Half-Resolutions

The inflictions that drive species to endangerment and extinction are simply too myriad to simplistically capture in linear economic projections.²⁰ In 2012, the US government spent approximately $1.7 billion to work toward saving its regional endangered species.²¹ At the same time, however, that meager investment was calculated to generate some $1 trillion per year in benefits.²² Because the field data is constantly being appended, the real cost/benefits over time has proven difficult to track. Moreover, at every cusp of spending decisions, there are predictable other, competing emergencies that drive dollars down toward the inevitable triage factor in policy-making.

Average costs for simply doing the review of each of the more than 500 species petitions pending before the US Fish & Wildlife Service are $140,000 per species.²³ Other research suggests that globally to provide sufficient information on the status and necessary recovery financing of IUCN Red Listed species would cost approximately US$174 million, plus other costs of US$114 million annually to maintain baselines on existing data.²⁴ Others have argued that protecting all the world’s threatened species will cost around US$4 billion a year.²⁵ By percentage of US GDP, such numbers are almost an aside. US expenditures for healthcare in 2015 were $3.2 trillion (17.8% of GDP.)²⁶ But spending on threatened species is different than those expenditures targeting the endangered, vulnerable, critically endangered, at risk, and so on. Grammatically, they are all threatened, all at risk. But financial instruments are blunt objects insensitive to the subtleties of differentiating categories of risk that differ from country to country, taxon to taxon, population to population, policy expert to policy expert.

But accounting for 30% or higher medical care in America than elsewhere in the world, such (approximately) $10,000 per person costs annually, scaled up to 7.8 billion people, would far exceed the total global economy. Whereas estimated conservation costs to protect hundreds of billions of individual taxa—quadrillions of individuals if one extrapolates to invertebrates throughout all the protected areas of the world—suggest that single-matrix-targeted (multi-tiered) conservation biology looks impossibly inexpensive, by any reconciling of benefits and costs common-sense analysis, incorporating intangibles, particularly at the invertebrate and microbial levels.

The deep moral realities are conclusive: Human economics is at best a vague source of guidance for grasping how relatively clear the path for a conservation conscience should be; at least did we inhabit a world where budgets were balanced according to an ethical proposition, posed by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), which forcefully argued for the greatest amount of good for the greatest number. Then integrate added value factors predicated upon the shortest time frames, most expansive and diverse habitats (e.g., shrublands and rocky landscapes, bryophytes and deserts ignored no longer, for starters) and a net zero-triage methodology, however incomprehensible at first. These components would inexorably amplify the topology of virtue, provisioning the broadest possible medical responses to the biodiversity crisis we have unleashed.

Footnotes

1

See, for example, 1 + 1 = 3: Synergy Arithmetic in Economics, by Mark Burgin and Gunter Meissner, DOI: https://​doi.​org/​10.​4236/​am.​2017.​82011, Scientific Research, AM> Vol.8 No.2, February 2017, https://​www.​scirp.​org/​journal/​paperinformation​.​aspx?​paperid=​73964, Accessed February 21, 2020.

2

See Labor, Earle; Reesman, Jeanne Campbell (1994). Jack London. Twayne’s United States authors series. 230 (revised, illustrated ed.), Twayne Publishers, New York, p. 46.

3

See The sixth mass extinction, explained, The Week, Staff, February 17, 2019, https://​theweek.​com/​articles/​823904/​sixth-mass-extinction-explained, Accessed February 21, 2020. See also, Loss of land-based vertebrates is accelerating, according to Stanford biology Paul Ehrlich and others, by Lindsay FIlgas, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, June 1, 2020, https://​news.​stanford.​edu/​2020/​06/​01/​loss-land-based-vertebrates-accelerating/​Accessed June 5, 2020. …scientists estimate that in the entire 20th century, at least 543 land vertebrate species went extinct. Ehrlich and his co-authors estimate that nearly the same number of species are likely to go extinct in the next two decades alone. Importantly, they call for all species with populations under 5,000 to be listed as critically endangered… A case in point being the Sumatran Rhino, of which no more than 80 individuals are left.

4

See A Polygon and Point-Based Approach to Matching Geospatial Features, by Juan J. Ruiz-Lendínez, Manuel A. Ureña-Cámara and Francisco J. Ariza-López, December 5, 2017, International Journal of Geo-Information, https://​pdfs.​semanticscholar.​org/​67f9/​2b05d2c02b1f6eab​9813d2fbebdbb889​9478.​pdf, Accessed February 21, 2020.

5

https://​www.​protectedplanet.​net/​c/​world-database-on-protected-areas

6

https://​www.​protectedplanet.​net.

7

https://​www.​cbd.​int/​sp/​targets/​

8

https://​sustainabledevel​opment.​un.​org/​?​menu=​1300

9

http://​www.​ipbes.​net

10

See https://​www.​protectedplanet.​net/​c/​united-nations-list-of-protected-areas/​united-nations-list-of-protected-areas-2018; and https://​www.​protectedplanet.​net/​c/​protected-planet-reports/​report-2018, Accessed March 3, 2020.

11

See 2018 United Nations List of Protected Areas – Supplement on protected area management effectiveness, United Nations Environment Programme (Eric Solheim, Executive Director) and UNEP-WCMC (Director Neville Ash), UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, UK 2018, in Collaboration with the CBD (Executive Secretary, Cristiana Pasca Palmer), the IUCN (Director General, Inger Andersen), the WCPA (World Commission On Protected Areas, Chaired by Kathy MacKinnon) and UN environment, Editors: Marine Deguignet, Heather C. Bingham, Neil D. Burgess and Naomi Kingston, https://​wdpa.​s3.​amazonaws.​com/​UN_​List_​2018/​2018%20​List%20​of%20​Protected%20​Areas_​EN.​pdf

12

See https://​www.​un.​org/​depts/​los/​convention_​agreements/​texts/​unclos/​unclos_​e.​pdf.

13

See https://​pame.​protectedplanet.​net

14

ibid., https://​wdpa.​s3.​amazonaws.​com/​UN_​List_​2018/​2018%20​List%20​of%20​Protected%20​Areas_​EN.​pdf, p.8.

15

Targeting global conservation funding to limit immediate biodiversity declines, by Anthony Waldron, Arne Mooers, Daniel C. Miller, Nate Nibbelink, et.al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(29), July 2013, DOI: https://​doi.​org/​10.​1073/​pnas.​1221370110, Pubmed, PY 2013/07/01, VL110,https://​www.​researchgate.​net/​publication/​244482672_​Targeting_​global_​conservation_​funding_​to_​limit_​immediate_​biodiversity_​declines, Accessed February 21, 2020.

16

See Matches and Mismatches Between Global Conservation Efforts and Global Conservation Priorities, by David F. Willer, Kevin Smith, and David C. Aldridge, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 07 August 2019, https://​doi.​org/​10.​3389/​fevo.​2019.​00297, https://​www.​frontiersin.​org/​articles/​10.​3389/​fevo.​2019.​00297/​full, Accessed February 21, 2020.

17

See How many species on Earth? About 8.7 million, new estimate says, Census of Marine Life, Science News, August 24, 2011, https://​www.​sciencedaily.​com/​releases/​2011/​08/​110823180459.​htm

18

See There Might Be 1 Trillion Species on Earth, by Stephanie Pappas, May 5, 2016, LiveScience, https://​www.​livescience.​com/​54660-1-trillion-species-on-earth.​html, Accessed February 21, 2020.

19

See How much does it cost to save a species from extinction? Costs and rewards of conserving the Lear’s macaw, by Antonio E. A. Barbosa and José L. Tella, July 10, 2019, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1098/​rsos.​190190, Royal Society Open Science, Royal Society Publishing, https://​royalsocietypubl​ishing.​org/​doi/​10.​1098/​rsos.​190190, Accessed February 21, 2020.

20

See Conservation Will Cost $76 Billion, by Dan Cossins, TheScientist, October 11, 2012, https://​www.​the-scientist.​com/​the-nutshell/​conservation-will-cost-76-billion-40357, Accessed February 21, 2020.

21

See How Much Did the U.S. Spend on the Endangered Species Act in 2012? by John R. Platt, November 1, 2012, Extinction Countdown, Scientific American, https://​blogs.​scientificameric​an.​com/​extinction-countdown/​how-much-did-the-us-spend-on-the-endangered-species-act-in-2012/​Accessed February 21, 2020.

22

See The Endangered Species Act Is Criticized for Its Costs. But It Generates More than $1 Trillion a Year, by Justin Worland, July 25, 2018, Time Magazine, https://​time.​com/​5347260/​endangered-species-act-reform/​Accessed February 21, 2020.

23

See How much would you pay to protect an endangered species, by Jonathan Wood, The Hill, October 8, 2018, https://​thehill.​com/​opinion/​energy-environment/​410151-how-much-would-you-pay-to-protect-an-endangered-species, Accessed February 21, 2020.

24

See PlosOne, Assessing the Cost of Global Biodiversity and Conservation Knowledge, by Diego Juffe-Bignoli, Thomas M. Brooks, Stuart H. M. Butchart, et.al., August 16, 2016, https://​doi.​org/​10.​1371/​journal.​pone.​0160640, Accessed February 21, 2020.

25

See Cost of Conserving Global Biodiversity Set at $76 Billion, by Daniel Cressey, October 12, 2012, Scientific American, https://​www.​scientificameric​an.​com/​article/​cost-conserving-global-biodiversity-set-76-billion/​Accessed February 21, 2020.

26

See CDC Health Expenditures, https://​www.​cdc.​gov/​nchs/​fastats/​health-expenditures.​htm, Accessed February 21, 2020.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. C. Tobias, J. G. MorrisonOn the Nature of Ecological Paradoxhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_4

4. Protected Area Dilemmas

Michael Charles Tobias¹   and Jane Gray Morrison¹

(1)

Dancing Star Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Keywords

Net primary productionGreen RevolutionEPAUS Wilderness ActGross national happinessBhutanJohn RuskinGeorge Kennan

4.1 The Paradox of Ecological Comparisons

Russian scientists, going back to the 1960s, were among the first, and most outspoken, to bluntly summarize the acceleration of extinctions, under-represented groups within protected area networks, and current and future challenges to halting the irreversible damage being occasioned in the largest country in the world. By situating that nation’s vast biodiversity and range of biomes within a global human context of (seemingly) irreconcilable altruisms, waning sustainability options, and the essentialities of science and policy prioritizations, Pavlov and Shatunovsky made the frustrating expanse of human contradictions to overcome painfully clear.¹

Such fickle biological fates at the mercy of countries and transboundary conservation urgencies and abnegating partners are exacerbated by realizations of counter-intuitive scale, as well as a great variance in measurement modalities and scales of ranked importance. No one is likely to prioritize research or protected areas in those countries with the most freckled or green-eyed individuals; but fruit fly diversity may be another thing entirely. Botswana ranks number 1 out of 152 countries on the Megafaunal Conservation Index.² Elsewhere in Africa, abnegated wildlife has long represented a life-affirming and/or systemic cultural failure. Poachers, principally, have undermined every political advantage sought by both one and multiparty constitutional rule; whether during the single-party power of conservationist leader Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (1972–1991),³ or throughout the wildlife wars continuing across Central, East, and Southern Africa.⁴ Post-civil war Mozambique may have seen a stunning, poacher-free revival at Gorongosa National Park; even as tiny Gombe National Park in Tanzania, one of the world’s primate success stories—thanks, of course, to Jane Goodall and friends—has of late witnessed declining chimpanzee populations due to human encroachment.⁵ The bottom biological line for Africa, no matter how one presents the diverse tallies of conservation endeavors, is the continuing reality that over 40% of the human population in the continent’s 54 nations is under the age of 15, and population growth remains over 2% per year, suggesting an increase by 2050 from the present 1.340 billion people to 2.4 billion.⁶ That number figures starkly beside the current count of surviving mountain gorillas: slightly fewer than 800. But in context, 800 is a huge improvement over the 2003 census, which numbered 380 individuals left.⁷

On a very different note, not brighter, by any means, just quantitatively insightful, at least for terrestrial vertebrates, there are an estimated 24 billion mostly captive chickens at any one moment (not including hundreds of thousands of feral chickens, and a known 5 species of wild jungle fowl whose IUCN Least Concern status suggests large numbers); and trillions of bristlemouth fish distributed across 12 species in the oceans, particularly numerous in the genus Cyclothone.⁸ But we’ll discuss later on the true reality for those chickens.

Other large numbers of vertebrates—from brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) and house mice (Mus domestics) to red-billed quelea in sub-Saharan Africa (Quelea quelea, a small migratory weaver of the Ploceidae family)—together exceed the total human population by at least 10 billion individuals. But the numbers shrink rapidly with any species over 50 kilograms; just as intact faunal assemblages within habitats larger than 100 square kilometers are seen to be scarce when measured against smaller protected areas, which are the majority, 60% of them in Europe, and often extremely small. They account for less than 10% of all 46,414,431 square kilometers protected areas (14.87% of the land [excluding Antarctica] and 7.27% of the sea.)⁹ As tiresome as such numbers in array can be, they indisputably excite volatile emotional realities for the human species on a tightrope. In the United States (3.797 million square miles= 2.43 billion acres), there are 111 million acres in 44 states designated as wilderness. In total, approximately one-third of all US public lands—some 235 million acres—are described as wildlands, under some aegis of protection. Including Alaska, that represents less than 5% of America’s land base, 2% in the lower 48 states (Fig. 4.1).¹⁰

../images/491739_1_En_4_Chapter/491739_1_En_4_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Fig. 4.1

A Glacier in Southern Alaska. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)

Even many of those areas are not free of human interference, as hunting and fishing are frequently allowed. The US Wilderness Act of 1964 also allows for controlled fires under regimens designed to manipulate insect and disease vectors deemed harmful. Pre-existing water rights are left intact; and, obviously, weeds, air and water pollution, all the impacts of climate change and other subtler anthropogenic influences, while frequently monitored, interact across every designation.¹¹ As the National Park Service in America decreased by 11% its staffing between 2011 and 2018, and the Congressional Natural Resources Committee in 2017 passed legislation imposing additional hurdles to designating future national monuments, as originally envisioned by the Antiquities Act, it became clear that Republicans in Washington were turning their backs on the environment. One nation, one trend oriented toward undermining 50 years of NEPA, the critical National Environmental Policy Act, as well as nearly every significant piece of legislation in EPA history.

Such measures represent a form of reprehensible irrationality at the biological level. Even within ranks, there are social consequences. For example, there was the grassroots formation of an Alt National Park Service, devoted to continuing the values of the service for future generations, as embraced by NPS employees in collective ethical compliance with the substance of the original National Park Service Organic Act of August 25, 1916, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Perversely, the NPS’s first superintendent, Stephen Mather, was an industrial magnate who believed in as many automobiles and roads heading into the parks as possible, coinciding with the demise of resident indigenous peoples in the case of one of America’s most famous parks, Yosemite, and its former Southern Miwok occupants. And while the 417 park units covering 84 million acres have been slowly expanded in the century following Wilson’s mandate, most notably by President Jimmy Carter’s doubling of the acreage in the late 1970s in one fell swoop, trends into the twenty-first century have not boded well.

4.2 Psychology and Policy

Policies of national, psychological sovereignty have resulted in regard, or disregard, to economic and political vagaries predicating an outright negligence of moral duties on one continent after another toward the environment. Our species’ topographical hubris can be measured according to any number of distinct biases, some in accord with true nurturance, but most, deceptive and/or disinterested. The basis for environmental sophrosyne (excellence, soundness), as practiced, monitored, and policed by governance, is a fast-moving target subject to all the flaws built in to any collective tide of constituency discords. Realism and idealism, both, easily warp political aspirations; while real people can accomplish nearly anything. As ranked by the amount of terrestrial protection, the US is number 114, with 12.99% of its sovereign borders protected, as of 2018. Given the numbers, one sees how vague, diluted, and unclear the word protection really means. Rankings for New Zealand, Canada, Mauritania, Bhutan, and particularly Suriname are all soft data, riddled with complex, on-the-ground discrepancies in data assessment. To its significant credit, UN protected areas data management is continually soliciting updated information from those closest