Obama and Extinction
There is more to protecting the environment than mitigating climate change.
You wouldn’t know that just from listening to the campaign speeches we’ve all heard over the last few months. The one environmental topic that ever got brought up was climate change. Reducing our dependence on oil, supporting renewable energy, pushing for emissions standards and hybrid tech, energy conservation, that kind of thing. All of them laudable goals, all of them crucial.
But we’ve heard nothing, during this season, of the mass extinction in progress, though it is possibly — in terms of the sheer number of species eradicated so far — already the worst one in Earth’s history. (The end-Permian extinction still holds the crown for percentage of species wiped out, but life has gotten more diverse since that one happened 250 million years ago. There are more species to wipe out now.)
Climate change would certainly aggravate that mass extinction. Quite a few threatened species — the one I’ve studied intensively for a decade being just one example — are likely to be done in by warming temperatures.
But stabilizing the climate won’t reverse all the causes of that mass extinction. We could become carbon-neutral overnight. We could ban all fossil-fuel-burning vehicles. We could replace every last incandescent light bulb with LEDs that use 1/100th the power, put photovoltaic panels on every rooftop and sequester thousands of tons of carbon in salt mines and subduction zones. We could get the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2 back down to pre-industrial levels and still lose species after species as the living systems of the world unravel.
John Muir famously said that when you try to pick one thing out by itself, you find it hitched to everything in the universe. There are few ecosystems not already partly affected by changing climate, few environmental issues not closely interwoven with our bad habit of putting carbon in the air. But we could stabilize the climate and still use the chemical pesticides implicated in the frightening die-off of amphibians. We could stabilize the climate and still trawl the ocean floors, a practice roughly equivalent to clearcutting old-growth forests so you can eat the animals that lived there. We could stabilize the climate and still introduce invasive species to wetlands and estuaries and deserts, still plow under mile after square mile of grassland or forest for monocultured organic crops.
If there is a root cause of this extinction, it is habitat destruction: the conversion of more and more of the Earth’s surface area and biological productivity to human use.
And many of the measures proposed to combat climate change would actually accelerate the pace of habitat destruction. In the desert, we’re faced with projects from concentrating solar generating stations — paving the desert with mirrors — to new transmission lines greenwashed as routes for “renewable energy,” to massive windfarms. There’s renewed interest in fish-killing hydroelectric dams. People still seriously study the feasibility of projects like staggeringly large plantations of fast-growing trees or seeding the ocean with iron dust to promote phytoplankton bloom and consequently boost CO2 uptake. Developers promote new “sustainably-designed,” human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly towns built on what was once undeveloped land.
And it seems, to this observer, like an increasing number of putative environmentalists are ready to sacrifice habitat in the name of “green” energy generation. Some cloak their dismissal of habitat protection in concern-trolling over NIMBYism, while others, for instance some of the commenters in this thread over at Pharyngula, pretty much come out and say “we’re facing Peak Oil, and if the bighorn have to go extinct so that we can meet our energy needs, then that’s the way it is.”
What did our President-Elect say about habitat destruction during the campaign? Not a whole lot, at least not during the debates and major speeches.
The Obama-Biden campaign did release an Energy and Environment policy brief, an honestly wonderful document that does address some major habitat-related issues: restoring the Great Lakes, Gulf Coast, and other wetlands; protecting National Parks and National Forests, and rationalizing water use in the arid West, praiseworthy initiatives all.
The document also details plans to protect and restore clean air and water, has an environmental justice plank more far-reaching than Bill Clinton’s, and speaks in support of sustainable agriculture. It’s a great document and I support its implementation in full, as should you.
It’s also a woefully incomplete document.
It mentions the Endangered Species Act not once.
It doesn’t even mention endangered species. The word “endangered” does appear once in the nine-page document, on page eight:
Barack Obama is also an original cosponsor of the [2007] Combat Illegal Logging Act, which would prohibit the importation of illegally harvested wood products. This would make foreign companies much less likely to engage in massive, illegal deforestation in other countries. Saving these endangered forests preserves a major source of carbon sequestration.
The Combat Illegal Logging Act is an important law, finally passed this year as an amendment to the Farm Bill, written by a coalition of environmentalists, organized labor, and representatives of the domestic wood products industry, which extends the scope of the Lacey Act to include regulating timber imports. Though there’s argument over its effectiveness, it probably will help protect forests in the Amazon, Siberia and Southeast Asia. It’s also a done deal, and the Obama-Biden campaign document offers no expansion, strengthening, or extension of it, merely reporting a past co-sponsorship of a bill that failed to pass in its original form.
The omission of any mention, in the Obama-Biden campaign’s environmental policy document of the US’s keystone species- and habitat-protection law is disappointing in the extreme, but it doesn’t mean the President-Elect hasn’t gone on record as regards ESA. In a March, 2006 letter to a constituent who wrote to support strengthening the ESA, Obama replied:
“The goal of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 is to conserve and protect both the species that are threatened or in danger of extinction and the ecosystems upon which they depend. It currently protects more than 1,200 animal and plant species, of which approximately 25 are found in Illinois. The law can become controversial, however, when projects that may conflict with the ecosystem of species listed as threatened or endangered are proposed in a particular area.
I strongly support the goals of the Endangered Species Act, which has paved the way for a number of species — such as the bald eagle — to return from the brink of extinction. However, during the past 30 years the Endangered Species Act has not always worked perfectly. With all of its accomplishments, we have learned not only what works, but also what is ineffective. Consequently, the Endangered Species Act needs to be updated and improved. And that means moving past rigid ideological positions so that we can reach consensus on the right solutions.
This concord-flavored language may appear reasonable at first reading, but there is nothing in those paragraphs that would be out of place in a speech by former Representative Richard Pombo of California, the worst enemy the ESA ever had. The law becomes controversial when actually enforced against developers of the kind of projects that prompted the passage of the law in the first place, and we must therefore “improve” the Act so that all voices and interests are reflected, not just those of the rigidly ideological wildlife biologists with their non-economically based scientific study and data and such. Language like this has been used to cover over every single weakening of the ESA since its inception, from the development of the Habitat Conservation Plan and Multiple Species Conservation Plan compromises, to the erosion of the Critical Habitat process, and the Executive Branch decisions to impede the listing process.
It’s the wildlife biology equivalent of the creationists’ “Teach the Controversy” line: an apparent compromise that cedes ground in only one direction, and not the direction we want.
The environmental website Grist reports that in the landmark issue of northwestern salmon protection, a dire extinction crisis if ever there was one, Obama has pledged to make sure the interests of agriculture were represented in any solution. It is the interests of agriculture that have put the salmon in the vulnerable position they currently enjoy: federally subsidized dams and diversions for crop irrigation have devastated salmon populations by destroying their spawning habitat.
On the other hand, says Grist, in the public discussion these last weeks of the lame duck Bush administration’s eleventh-hour attacks on ESA, the President-Elect vowed to “fight to maintain the strong protections of the Endangered Species Act and undo this proposal from President Bush.”
The Obama administration’s actual policy toward ESA will likely be determined, to a significant extent, by his Cabinet picks. ESA is mainly administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, part of the Interior Department, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the Department of Commerce. The President-Elect’s choices for the Interior and Commerce Secretary positions will signal his intent toward the law, if any, and give us a taste of what lies in store for endangered species in the US over the next four years. Clinton-era FWS director Jamie Rappaport Clark has been mentioned as a possible Interior Secretary, and though she’s publicly criticized Bush’s interference with wildlife science, she also presided over the implementation of the ruinous Safe Harbor program, a weakening of ESA under which landowners can disrupt endangered species habitat all they want if those species weren’t found on the property until after the paperwork is done. Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, a promoter of Big Coal and a gut-level libertarian, is another often mentioned as a likely nominee. We’d be better off with Clark, who would at least make wingnuts’ heads explode: she’s currently employed by Defenders of Wildlife, and probably wouldn’t be worse than Bruce Babbit was.
Whichever way Obama goes with his Cabinet picks, we need to start pushing him now to strengthen the Endangered Species Act, the single most useful tool we have to slow down the extinction crisis in the US. The Center for Biological Diversity, probably the most effective (and not coincidentally most uncompromising) organization working on endangered species issues, has spent the last eight years suing the Bush administration to force it to obey the ESA, and they’ve adopted a tone of cautious optimism as regards working with Obama’s administration. You should sign up for their online activist bulletins and join them or donate or both..
Comments
Great post, Chris, clenched-fist-salute-worthy. Extinction is, to coin a phrase, forever, but the enraging thing is that even people who understand this don’t necessarily care.
Everytime I read such a thoughtful post, I start wondering about every one of my personal habits, from wanting luxuries like electricity and computers to be able to read blogs like this, to basic food and water and medicine that I demand as a human being who would like to lead a comfortable life. How different am I from the ATV driving razers of delicate ecosystems or the wolf hunters? I am as much a plague as them, except that I wear some guilt while doing my butchering. A fat lot of good my anguish does to the dying species. How can I support science and technology and space exploration and healthcare and all those things that need huge investments in manufacturing and raw materials and still call myself someone who cares for the environment? Sometimes I feel my hypocrisy is heavy enough to crush me.
What’s the address for writing to the president-elect? Does anyone know?
Hi, Rana!
I found several snail & email mail addresses for President-Elect Obama here and the Obama/Biden transition team has email contact info here. I swear I saw another address earlier specifically for President-Elect, but I can’t find it just now. I’ll keep looking.
Hope this helps!
Chris, thanks for this. Your analysis—as usual—makes it perfectly clear why we should be worried about things like this.
Are there specific things that we can do—besides writing to Obama and the transition team—about this?
Space Kitty - thanks!
so—Chris… what are you waiting for? Dept. of Interior?...this man has one thousand pushes…it’s every man , and women, for themselves…we do our small parts, right?... [and go for that position—the O-man and me are like {clasps hands—spouse rolls eyes}]—i’ll put in a good word…Mr. Clarke…i see it
The other day i was looking for a passage of text that i couldn’t quite remember all that well (age and time being what they are). Digging around i recalled, that if nothing else, i could find the primary source cite in Devall and Sessions’ DEEP ECOLOGY. As so often happens, i didn’t stop after i located the source (and just the right paragraph) but ended up rereading most of it.
Now i read your post and am more bereft than i ever was {same as it ever was}; that book was written 23 years ago and predicted these mass extinctions if nothing was done. And nothing really was done, nor it seems will be done (and Maureen’s worries are especially viral). Too many humans are going to wake up one morning and realize that without the greatest possible diversity of species, this planet cannot fully sustain life, especially human life. They will sob and say something like they didn’t mean for that to happen, but that their kids really need the next toys and the family trips to fast food.
I have, and i will continue, to advocate passionately for participational parity for all species.
It certainly is a passionate read and, unfortunately, there is no hyperbole, no exaggeration, rather just the way it is. The earth is the ultimate need since it provides us with everything from food to energy,but we seldom see it as a living organism that provides us with water, oxygen and food. We continue to degrade and abuse this planet, but for what reason. The real reason is simple and that’s ignorance, it all seems so vast and all these insults seem so small, but they build up slowly as the human population grows and requires more resources. I believe part of a multifaceted solution is environmental education in primary and secondary education. I also think a better understanding should exist in all levels of government.
You’re so very right here, our lifestyles and our insistence on finding ways to maintain these lifestyles rather than reduce our consumption are driving so many species to extinction its terrifying and most people seem not to care. We’re just sleepwalking our way into a nightmare….
Couldn’t agree with you more, but seems like you’re dancing around the gorilla of population size.
Chris,
Excellent commentary. Now’s the time for all of us to contact the Obama Team about Secretary of Interior and US Fish and Wildlife Service positions. We’d recommend Congressman Raul Grijalva (AZ) for the former, and Dave Parsons (former USFWS Mexican Wolf Recovery Coordinator) for the latter. Everyone—Let Obama heard from you now!
Tony
www.lifenetnature.org
one solution , the only good one : ZPG
I agree with Michele - zpg is part of the solution. Regarding endangered species, I am extremely hopeful that Obama will do the right thing - he has shown such genuine down-to-earth commonsense so far that I believe he will do what he can to reverse the ecological and environmental horrors of the last 8 years.
The overpopulation nightmare is not even on the political radar screen. When was the last time anyone heard mention of the need for a national population policy? The 1970s?
Michele and Joan: how about launching a campaign for such. I’ll help.
Tony
www.lifenetnature.org
Hi all! Sorry it’s taken me some time to reply. Now that I have a more reliable net connection it’ll happen sooner.
The human population is certainly germane to the discussion of extinction, but I don’t think I was doing any “dancing around” the topic, as said above. I recognize that there are a lot of environmentalists who are reluctant to talk about the issue, but I’m not one of them. In fact, I’ve lost friends by pointing out that the environmental impact of having a kid undoes a whole lot of the good done by recycling and turning off lights and bicycling instead of driving and the like.
But neither do I think population reduction—and it is negative population growth, preferably voluntary, that we really need here—is going to stem this extinction by itself. We could halve the current world population and still depauperize the natural world, especially if a middle-class North American lifestyle is the goal to which those remaining 3.5 billion people aspire. The old IPAT equation is the key here: Impact = Population times Affluence times Technology.
In fact, I just went to this ecological footprint calculator and figured out that if we cut global population in half, we’d still need two planets Earth to give everyone a lifestyle like mine, and I don’t live all that high on the hog.
We need to stop having so many kids, in other words, but we also need to take a long hard look at the ways we live, and so to say that ZPG is the “only” answer is, I think, optimistic.
I’m of the school of thought that the only effective way to reduce global population in a humane fashion is to provide adequate education, health care, and political rights to the women of the world. I also doubt whether this will take place fast enough to make a difference, but I do have hope left. This is why Obama’s pledge to reverse the Global Gag Rule is a fantastic, if overdue, bit of environmental good news.
I also think that if people don’t think globally, problems arise. Reducing the population in one country is a fine thing, but it’s not more than a stopgap—especially if the country in question is a net resource importer, as the US is.
And I say “voluntary” with regard to pop. reduction because our choice is between a voluntary reduction and one forced on us.
Lastly: Tony, it’s great to have you here! Longtime readers who find Tony’s name familiar but don’t know why may find that this article I wrote a few years back will jog their memories.
Never downplay the impact of human population growth on nature. For too long weve rationalized doing little or nothing about the problem by suggesting its mostly about overconsumption.
The destruction of wildlife habitat and the making of endangered species have indeed much to do with human population growth. Over the past 40 years, Ive seen across the USA relentless habitat destruction by land development for housing alone. This would have been impossible without the addition of over 105 million people to the US population. (By the way, that number is greater than the combined current populations of our largest states CA, NY, TX, and FL.) About half of all sprawl nationwide is related to U.S. population growth and the other half is related to land use choices, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of the Census data on our 100 largest urbanized areas.
By the time President Obama completes a term in office, the US population will have increased by 10.5 million, a number bigger than todays populations of AZ, NM, and ID combined. Under the most optimistic smart growth scenarios, we cant expect even a no-net-loss of wildlife habitat. Id bet with population stabilization wed at least stand a chance.
Chris comment that we need to stop having so many kids is true only if we want to compensate for high levels of US immigration. Actually, the US population internally has for decades been at or below replacement. For a good read on social and political reasons as to why we have not addressed this problem see “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998): A First Draft of History” by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz. http://www.numbersusa.com/about/books.html
Folks, the US urgently needs a national population policy to stabilize its own numbers and help other countries do so as well. The need to do so has been long recognized on the US political scene (e.g. Global 2000 Report to the President 1981, and the 1996 Report of the Population and Consumption Task Force of Clintons Presidential Council on Sustainable Development), but the conservation community and citizens have failed to follow up.
There are things that could be done, such as:
*Ending mass immigration
*Launching national efforts to a) encourage people to limit family size and focus on quality versus size; b) targeting teens/young adults to avoid reproduction and enjoy the full benefits of their youth; c)offering tax benefits to couples who choose not to have children.
*Laying the foundation for a steady-state economy (impossible without limiting population).
*Supporting and encouraging other counties to limit population growth.
Want real CHANGE? Now is the time to campaign for a US Population Policy. How about a little 2020 vision so that by the year 2020 the horrific growth projection of 35 million more people in the US isnt realized?
My offer to help still stands.
Tony Povilitis
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