Triage is a messy business. You choose who to salvage and who to let go. So leave your rose-colored glasses at home. Decisions must be made. Some will lose the one thing you can never retrieve …life itself. Sometimes those decisions haunt the deciders. But when you’re in the thick of it, reality punches you in the face. You can’t pretend that everything is possible.
The question of what to save is front and center again as the Trump administration opted out of saving 26 species, some of which are threatened by climate change. Most of us are outraged. We know that the decision wasn’t based on science. Stepping back from the political fire that issues like this fuel, maybe we need to ask some other questions about the concept of wholesale species protection. I know, I’m treading into sacred territory, but suspend judgement for a moment, and read on.
We’ve entered the Age of the Anthropocene, a time when human dominance over nature has altered the course of life on the planet in profound ways. The war to mitigate the impact of the Antropocene has a simple but daunting goal — prevent catastrophic Climate Change and mass extinction. Like all wars, it will be fought on multiple fronts and will yield a lot of casualties. To win we will need resources, savvy fighters, and a strategy. Maybe most importantly, we will need the courage to challenge our assumptions about the role environmentalists should play as well our beliefs about what or who to save and how to save it.
Those of us who identify as “environmentalists” are poised to become a part of humanity’s battlefield triage staff. Most of us are unprepared. Environmental leaders, from the grassroots to national standing, are in the throes of self-examination as we face demographic changes in our membership, a decrease in environmental activism among youth, and a shift in media emphasis from traditional environmental concerns to worries about the impact of climate change. In 2010 Grist identified the emergence of a new kind of eco-warrior: the Climate Hawk. Hawks, reluctant to adopt the environmentalist label, have a pure agenda: combat climate change with any means necessary, including civil disobedience. They reject focusing on the usual environmental campaigns — like saving whales and polar bears or lobbying to protect wilderness. They wanted to save humanity. Period.
As often happens during transitions, some Hawks, looking for a comfy place to roost, eventually find their way into traditional groups like the Sierra Club. They embrace some of the concerns of the old-fashioned environmentalist but are most energized by combatting the threat of Climate Change. And being a feisty sort, they have converted some of the old guard into Climate Hawks too.
It’s 2017 and the folks who’ve dedicated their lives to preserving wilderness and species of all kinds (let’s call them the Conservationists), sit cheek to jowl with those Hawks, making decisions on messaging, campaign strategies, and resource allocation. Climate Change increasingly dominates the environmental agenda though the groups known collectively as Big Green (Sierra Club, NRDC, the Wilderness Society and others) continue to simultaneously pursue traditional initiatives (i.e. wetland conservation, wilderness preservation, species protection). As we debate what it means to embrace an agenda that combats the looming existential threat of climate disruption, an uncomfortable question arises: How do we do it all? Or from those who are even more heretical: Should we even try to do it all?
Since the emergence of Hawks, the picture has become more complicated. Headlines shout that 50% of species and maybe more, could be extinct by 2100, which is within the lifespan of children born in this decade. Photos of those on the “likely to die forever” list are iconic species: certain types of elephants, rhinos, leopards, and sea turtles…almost certainly polar bears; it is both terrifying and heart wrenching. The Conservationists rush to print up donation requests with big-eyed lemurs on them, urging us to “Save the Lemur”. But those aggressive Hawks raise their hands and ask some dicey questions. What is the root cause of all these extinctions? What can we effectively do? And will it even matter if we do save the lemur?
Let’s take a moment to explore what we know about species extinction. Poaching is high on the list of root causes and likely most responsible for the decades-long dwindling of the numbers of elephants and tigers. Habitat loss is rising to number one, as human populations grow and consumption soars, pushing out all life but humans. But the emerging, least understood, and most potentially catastrophic cause is surging … climate change and the disruption that comes from it. Research published in May of 2015 identified the risks of unabated climate change. To quote an article in The Guardian:
If manmade greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current record-breaking rate, leading to a temperature rise of more than 4C by the end of the century, 16% of species, or one in six, face extinction.The study also emphasizes that even for the animals and plants that avoid extinction, climate change could bring about substantial changes in their numbers and distribution.
What does this mean? Well, when we try to figure out how to intervene, we can’t be assured that any short-term effort focused on a single species will yield much gain. What if their current habitat disappears as the climate changes? Can we transport an entire ecosystem to a safe haven? How well can we predict what changes are likely in which habitats? If the Arctic and Antarctic melt, will any of those species survive? You can’t go further north than the Arctic or further south than Antarctica. While buying land and setting up a preserve used to be a reasonable strategy, today we have no idea where to put one as the ground beneath us (and the air above) is changing too fast to anticipate the next 5 years, let alone decades ahead.
Teams of scientists are beginning to abandon traditional approaches in favor of creating models to help us anticipate where life will need to move based on shifts in terrain, rain and temperature. Already, the Endangered Species Act is becoming a paltry and flawed means for facing the onslaught of extinctions. As animals migrate, endangered ones with different needs will be competing for remaining habitat. Then what? The legislation was never meant to address the enormous environmental shifts occurring in whole ecosystems rather than relatively isolated habitats. In an article in the New York Times by Erica Goode (“A Shifting Approach to Saving Endangered Species”) she notes:
"If the projections of climate change and its impact on ecosystems hold true for the next 25 years, the act will simply be overwhelmed,” Professor Ruhl said.
In that future, he and other environmental experts said, humans will take up more and more space on the planet, their need for food, energy and material goods swallowing up the available land, leaving less for other species. And society will ultimately have to set priorities and make difficult decisions.
In some cases, scientists said, that might mean moving species whose habitats have disappeared to other regions or preserving them in limited numbers. Or it might mean devoting the majority of recovery efforts to species that play crucial ecosystem or evolutionary roles, and accepting that by doing so, others may go extinct.
Facing these realities is painful. But maybe given that life is disappearing at an alarming rate, it’s time to start talking about triage. Some people in the conservation movement are beginning to grapple with the implications of wholesale extinctions and quietly discussing new ways to think about conservation. While others feel that even having the discussion of what to save demonstrates human hubris and is immoral. Jim Robbins in his article, “Building an Ark for the Anthropocene” wrote of scientists around the world who are tackling the challenges inherent in climate change, recognizing that we need a method for choosing what to save and how to save it (yes, triage, again). Experiments such as seed banks; identifying and nurturing ecosystems that appear to have survived other radical environmental changes and might be more resilient; building migratory corridors; focusing on saving only the most valued species (like bees, without which we won’t eat) are emerging around the world.
With limited resources, and the unrelenting march of humanity’s suicidal, extractionist mission, wisdom may mean that we need to challenge our historical methods for saving the planet. One of the hardest things to do is to admit that continuing to do what we’ve always done is no longer wise or helpful. Tough questions persist. Where does habitat and ecosystem conservation fit into grassroots work where organizations have limited resources? How do we enlarge the scale of our vision to decide if locally at-risk species or habitats are going to inevitably perish as the climate changes? If we accept that we do not have unlimited resources, what issues and projects bring the most value to our communities?
First, we need to accept that our efforts to save as many species as possible may be nothing more than a foolhardy holding action destined to fail as habitat moves and plants and animals can’t adapt fast enough. Maybe we need to take a hard look at existing evidence and models to rank those ecosystems that will have the most significant positive impact on human survival. While our historic mission has been to treat all species equally, it is obvious that we do not understand the complex interactions between them and a rapidly changing climate. At some point we are going to have to focus on how to optimize the potential for human survival. Or just stand back and let the climate change scenario play out driven by natural laws without human intervention.
If we choose to intervene, then we will continue to fight for ANWAR as part of our battle against fossil fuels and climate change, not to save migratory corridors for caribou. The Climate Hawks would say that while habitat matters, keeping fossil fuels underground matters more. Giving the caribou a place to roam and breed is a byproduct of fighting climate change, not the other way around. This is a radical flip of the traditionalist’s agenda. Historically, keeping drilling out of ANWAR was a big environmental victory. But we didn’t win with the message that “drill baby drill” was a flawed energy strategy but rather that drilling in that specific place presented too great a risk to habitat and wildlife.
The challenge of climate change may be the greatest one we’ve faced since Earl Butz and Love Canal. We have some soul-searching to do. We need to consider where this existential battle fits into our historic mission and narrative. The time for deep discussion is at hand. How do we make environmentally responsible choices in this new Age? Do we have a strategy for making battlefield choices? Are we willing to take responsibility for triage? And if we do, what will that mean? The evidence is clear: 40-50% of all species will be extinct this century …. no matter what we do now. The risks are baked in. We don’t know which species will survive. Nature will choose. What we do know is that if we don’t survive, what remains will be irrelevant to human history. The only role left to us may be to forestall cooking the planet to death. The wolves and caribou will thank us.
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