good evening everyone
species extinction depressing right you
know you came here tonight you want to
be enlightened inspired maybe
entertained and here comes come delis go
talk about species extinction and real
downer well I’m hoping the first half of
this might be a downer so just fair
warning but I’m hoping by the second
half I’ll leave you with something
that’s somewhat empowering and something
which I think is unique to human beings
as a species I want to start out with
this little guy this is the bramble Cay
Melanie’s just by a show of hands how
many people have ever heard of the brand
bouquet Melanie’s I see one hand out
there maybe two probably what I expected
coming in most of you have never heard
of this species before and bad news
you’re never going to meet a member of
the species again because it was
declared extinct in June of 2016 now
there’s two reasons why I wanted to
start with this little guy the first is
that I suspected probably most of you
had never heard of him before I’ll come
back to that a little bit later the
second reason I wanted to talk about him
or at least begin my discussion talking
about him is because this is the first
mammalian species at least as far as we
know that’s gone extinct primarily
because of climate change will it be the
last probably not right in fact there’s
probably some that have already gone
extinct that we haven’t quite identified
yet but basically what happened is this
was a very low-lying species and its
habitat was more or less flooded by
rising sea levels by the Great Barrier
Reef
okay now species extinction is occurring
at an incredibly fast rate this is just
a sampling of some of the species that
have gone extinct just since the year
2000 these are the more sort of
charismatic species that have died off
this is an image of lonesome George who
was the last Pinta island tortoise at
least we thought he was there may be
hope now we might have found some other
ones occasionally we have some good news
to spread but species are dying out an
incredibly fast rate
so fast in fact that it’s basically
matching some of the major extinction
events in the history of the earth and
there’s been five of those the most
famous of those events was the last one
that happened at the end of the
Cretaceous period right this is when
this giant asteroid hit in the Yucatan
Peninsula and basically ended the age of
the dinosaurs right so this is the one
that we’re most familiar with that was
the fifth mass extinction it’s pretty
clear now to most scientists that we are
right now in the midst of the sixth mass
extinction in 2014 Elizabeth Kolbert
from The New Yorker wrote a book called
the sixth extinction it’s an incredible
book again not exactly a cheery one but
an incredible book in the sense that
each chapter is devoted to a particular
species that either gone extinct or is
on the verge of extinction and drawing
upon the scientists who are really close
to the ground with these various species
and basically the consensus is that
species have always gone extinct
throughout the Earth’s history but if
you compare the background extinction
rate to the rate of extinction today
it’s almost undeniable that we’re in the
midst of the sixth mass extinction why
is that well it’s a combination of
factors its global warming
it’s the acidification of oceans its
deforestation its invasive species its
over hunting its poaching it’s a lot of
things but all of those things by the
way come back to us like we are causing
the sixth mass extinction in the Earth’s
history again not exactly great news if
we look at where things are going moving
forward this is an image from the New
York Times from a couple of years ago
roughly a quarter of all mammals are
endangered at this point you see
amphibians are actually doing much worse
41% of amphibians are thought to be
endangered at this point one of the the
chapters in Colbert’s book is is devoted
to amphibians and the Amazon rainforest
which are dying off in huge numbers
because of a fungicide that that’s
actually killing them off it at a quite
rapid grade so what do we do with this
the big question that I want to talk
about today is well why should we care
okay I’m not going to address all of
these questions today but one of the
things that
lot of people say in the face of species
extinction well aren’t there bigger
problems aren’t there more pressing
problems what about human beings who are
suffering right how do we basically
align or how do we make sense of where
our priorities lie others might say hey
survival the fittest right we’re the
fittest we want so if other species are
dying off we just weren’t strong enough
right can we spin it that way and maybe
not feel quite as badly about ourselves
and really the bramble came LME’s nobody
heard of this five minutes ago so you’re
asking me to care about something that I
never heard of before why should I care
okay I think the easiest argument to
make is to say this comes back to bite
us in the end and it’s already doing so
whether we’re talking about
interruptions to the food chain
ecotourism right how ecosystems are
being thrown off by removing one species
and maybe oftentimes introducing a
foreign invasive one human beings are
suffering directly because of this and I
think that’s the easier argument to make
philosophers refer this is the sort of
anthropocentric argument but I think
there’s a higher-level argument that we
could make here that appeals to
something that’s unique about us as
human beings frogs the wall as a
primatologist works out of Emory
University and he spent most of his life
studying other primates chimpanzees
bonobos in the last 20 years or so he’s
been making the argument that our
closest genetic relatives are much more
social dare we say even moral than we’ve
traditionally given them credit for
philosophers throughout history at least
in the Western tradition have spoken of
ethics is overcoming our animal nature
and to all thanks if that’s completely
unfair because animals especially those
closely related to us are quite social
and they oftentimes exhibit behaviors
that are pretty identifiable to us
consolation behaviors altruism even
sometimes a sense of justice and what he
wants to say is that there’s a moral
continuity here and that we shouldn’t be
surprised by that because we’re 98%
similar right so to think that all of a
sudden human being showed up and we’re
uniquely moral he thinks that gets it
now even if we acknowledge that moral
continuity Phillip pitcher philosopher
at Columbia University says there must
be something that’s different about
human beings right that we could
acknowledge this continuity but there
seems to be some kind of break some kind
of difference and what he suggests is
drawing what he calls altruism profiles
which basically say well how far are we
willing to go to help out people who are
unlike us who are strangers right
we have no immediate sort of a
relationship with at least familiarly
right and he suspects that well we might
see these sort of proto moral behaviors
and other primates but it seems like
human beings are capable and have
oftentimes gone further and helping out
those who are quite unlike themselves I
think Kitsch is probably right about
this you know if you’ve ever watched
your nature specials on you know your
planet Earth or you know the specials
you know chimpanzees can be terrifying
especially to members outside of their
group and human beings at least when
we’re at our best seem to be capable of
doing much more than that but of course
we also know that our worst we’re just
as bad right
so if we really want to say why should
we care about distinction of these
species perhaps we need to call upon
sort of a higher moral capacity that
human beings may in fact be uniquely
capable of even if we don’t quite
exercise as much as we should this
brings me back to my initial point about
the bramble Kaye Melanie’s Aldo Leopold
some of you may be familiar with it is
usually thought of as being the father
of American conservation his sand County
Almanac published way back in 1949 is
still widely read and used by
conservationists by philosophers by
people who just loved nature in the
environment and he spent a long section
of this book talking about the passenger
pigeon and the passenger pigeon is a
species that more or less we hunted to
extinction and he reflects on this
monument that’s erected to the passenger
pigeon in great sadness at the loss of
this species it would always kind of
strikes me when I read this with my
students as they you know they never
really heard or maybe they’ve heard of
the passenger pigeon but they didn’t
know it got extinct they certainly
didn’t know what it looked like and this
is kind of new
to them even though it’s from a hundred
years ago and this is where I see the
similarity with the bramble Kane
Melanie’s is that maybe the first point
is just to kind of notice what’s
happening and to realize that
something’s being lost here that again
if we’re true to who we are as human
beings maybe it should bother us maybe
it should impact us and I want to
include this really powerful passage
from Leopold write that in reflecting on
the loss of the passenger pigeon again
which a lot of my students had never
heard of before they started reading
about this he says that for one species
to mourn the death of another is a new
thing under the Sun had the funeral been
ours the pigeon would hardly have warned
us in this fact lies objective evidence
of our superiority over the beasts I
think what Leopold’s talking about here
long before kitc air is this notion that
if we’re really going to live up to our
highest calling as moral beings it’s
going to lie in our ability to care for
others that are very much different from
us and I think that the history of human
morality has been this struggle to try
to expand the moral universe to include
others who are different from us and
we’re continuing to fail in that regard
but will Leopold wants to say is that
not only should we include the people
people who are different from us look
different speak differently act
differently from us maybe the final
challenge is going to be to care about
species who really don’t give a damn
about us right because it’s not in their
natures to care about us but that’s what
makes us different that we have this
unique ability to care about individuals
and to care about species who ultimately
maybe we’re causing the extinction of
but maybe we could ultimately save and
I’m hoping that in reading Leopold and
taking in seriously that though this is
a depressing subject
hopefully we can empower to do better as
we move forward thank you
[Applause]
you
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