David Nussbaum and Robert May decide the polar bears' fate
From Eureka, Times Online 8 Oct 09;
YES says David Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF-UK
At WWF, we’ve always placed protection of the world’s species and their habitats at the very heart of our mission. But with the world experiencing a serious economic downturn, and with climate change dominating the environmental agenda, should working to save well-known animals such as tigers and whales remain a conservation priority?
For us the answer is unequivocally yes. For a start, the animals we campaign for require large, well-connected habitats and healthy ecological systems to survive, so protecting them in turn benefits other species that share their living space, including people. While this in itself is a good reason for working with popular species our motives run somewhat deeper. Having worked in conservation for almost 50 years, we have seen how wildlife, the environment and human activity are interlinked, and it has become clear that any effort to safeguard the natural world must be a package deal. There’s little point saving the orang-utan if in the future there’s no rainforest for it to live in because of deforestation and climate change.
Without question further management is required to maintain populations of species, including less well-known ones, and this is generally supported by large-scale landscape conservation. We’ve made it a priority to work across the globe to halt — or even reverse where we can — dramatic declines in wildlife species and their habitats.
It’s an uphill struggle. Over the past 40 years 1,700 species have declined by nearly a third and almost a quarter of all mammal species and a third of amphibians are threatened with extinction. Much of this is caused by the effects of human consumption; our demand for natural resources exceeds the planet’s capacity to replenish itself by almost a third. In future there will be even more of us sharing these limited resources, which is why we are trying to encourage people to move towards a more sustainable way of life.
To make a lasting impact on the way we live we must feel strongly connected to the environment. “Flagship” species can help us to make that connection. We can see them on television, in books, on the internet and sometimes even in the flesh, and there are few people who don’t relate to these animals on some level.
So a threatened species such as the Amur leopard — a creature hunted to the point of extinction by Man so that there are fewer than 35 left in the wild — can be a key tool in helping us to tell the story of a fragile planet. A world without tigers, elephants or polar bears would be an impoverished one. Sadly, we are far too close to this possibility becoming a reality and the decline of such icons can only signal a greater problem in the ecosystem as a whole.
Thankfully it’s not too late to act and, in the words of Sir Peter Scott, one of the founders of WWF: “We shall not save everything, but we shall save a great deal more than if we never tried.”
NO says Robert May, former President of the Royal Society
It is extraordinary how little we know about the diversity of animal and plant species with which we share the world. Vertebrates, and particularly birds and mammals, are relatively well known and total around 50,000 species. The roughly 300,000 known species of plants probably represent about 90 per cent of their true total, but for the vastly greater number of invertebrate species our knowledge is woeful. Yet many believe that invertebrates — with more than a million species known to science, and a true total between three million and ten million or more — are the small things that run the world, playing the central part in the delivery of ecosystem services (decomposers, pollinators and much else) upon which human beings, like all other species, depend.
Given our ignorance of how many insect and other invertebrate species there are on Earth today, we cannot make direct counts of numbers of species threatened with extinction. But we can make indirect estimates. For bird and mammal species, at least one became extinct each year over the past century. This may sound reassuringly low, but it corresponds to an extinction rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than the average over the half-billion-year sweep of the fossil record.
This puts us on the tip of a sixth great wave of mass extinctions, similar to the “Big Five” in the fossil record (such as the one that did for the dinosaurs). The sixth differs from the previous five in that it is the direct result of the activities of a single other species, namely us.
Our pattern of differential knowledge reflects the distribution of the labour force of taxonomists and systematists, which is distributed roughly one third each to vertebrates, plants and invertebrates. In terms of the under-lying workload of species numbers, the distribution should be more like 1 per cent on vertebrates, 9 per cent on plants, and 90 per cent on invertebrates. Things get worse when we look at the conservation research literature: of some 3,000 papers in the two major journals, 70 per cent deal with vertebrates, 20 per cent with plants, and 10 per cent with invertebrates (and of these, one half were butterflies, a kind of honorary bird).
Our disproportionate focus on birds and mammals, along with a neglect of most invertebrates, reflects deep-rooted and unthinking attitudes. The megafauna are charismatic; invertebrates are creepy-crawlies. These same prejudices are reflected in most conservation activities. The worthy NGOs are not to be blamed for this.
Campaigns based on attractive mammals and colourful, interesting birds work. It is hard to imagine a successful fundraising campaign for a threatened slug species, never mind the important role that it might play in ecosystem function.
The real challenge is to deflect more funds into understanding and preserving endangered but uncharismatic invertebrates. Ultimately, our aim must be to save as much as we can of the evolutionary history and heritage present in today’s biodiversity, and to recognise that this requires us to use the emotional resonance that the charismatic megafauna engenders. This calls for a tricky blend of dispassionate appraisal of species’ roles in keeping ecosystems functioning, along with passionate motivation: a meld of head and heart.
