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Against Biodiversity By Prof. Andrew LinzeyBack to Cat Facts
The idea that there should be a diversity of species sounds plausible enough.
Most of us have some moral qualms about letting species go extinct, and almost
everyone has some sense that there is a richness in natural systems that
depends, at least in part, on the coexistence of one species with another.
That said, biodiversity has now become a key concept for biologists and conservationists
who want to "manage" the natural world. In the name of biodiversity,
these "managers" regularly kill one form of life in order to "allow" another
to survive. The latest manifestation is the government-backed systematic killing
of thousands of gray squirrels in England in order of facilitate a comeback by
the indigenous red squirrel.
So entrenched has this thinking become - and, it must be said, so respectable
in university departments of biology and ecology - that news of this ongoing
slaughter hardly raised any objection at all. The underlying assumption that
we have not only a right but also a duty to "manage" the environment
is seldom contested. Currently, biology students are taught every year that it
is a self-evident good to kill in order to preserve biodiversity.
I am sure that I am going to make myself unpopular in some quarters, but I have
to say that the notion of biodiversity is philosophically vacuous. It has no
coherence as an idea, despite its superficial plausibility, and the view that
it can somehow justify killing is quite absurd.
If tomorrow we found on our streets government-appointed cullers who eliminated
at random particular kinds of people they regarded as too numerous or nonindigenous,
we would all be rightly shocked. But with as little justification, "eco-managers" do
the equivalent to hundreds, if not thousands, of individual sentients every day.
They are armed not only with the concept of biodiversity but also with the even
more dubious (and incoherent) notion of "carrying capacity."
There is something really quite ridiculous in human species - which has, above
all the rest, shown itself incapable of regulating its own population - now presuming
to dictate to all others where they should live, in what numbers, or indeed whether
they should live at all. There has got to come a point at which someone calls
the bluff on this kind of thinking. Tom Regan was surely near the mark when he
dubbed it "ecological fascism."
The very notion of ecological management is ineradicably hubristic. It presupposes
that we know what's right for the earth, for each and every species, and - most
foolishly of all - that we can be trusted with such power. We need an alternative,
deeply spiritual, insight: not management, but rather letting be. For myself,
I recoil at the idea of ever-increasing human dominance, manipulation, and control
of the natural world.
We need to learn again Henry David Thoreau's famous "word for Nature, for
absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and a culture merely
civil." There is a case for wildness that has gone unheard. I know some
will regard all this as ecologically naïve. I can hear the objections as
I write: "But we must interfere with nature if only to repair the consequences
of our own past mismanagement." But, I ask, what makes you think our current
management is less unenlightened?
"But if we didn't manage nature, some species would overpopulate." Well,
perhaps they would, and perhaps populations rise and crash as a matter of course.
Despite all the lip service paid by ecologists to the great system of nature,
we seem to have forgotten - as the Greek philosopher Theophrastus saw - that
it is a self-regulating system.
In the end, everything depends upon our own moral vision of ourselves in the
world of nature. I believe that we should be not the master species, but the
servant species. That means as little interference as possible, and only then
with genuinely benign intentions. Biodiversity is a classic tale of how an idealized
view of the world can result in individual harm.
The Rev. Professor Andrew Linzey is Senior Research Fellow in Theology & Animals,
Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, England. The American edition of his
book Animal Gospel is published by Westminster / John Knox Press.
This article appeared in the Animals' Agenda magazine, March/April 2001.
It is re-printed with permission from The Animals' Agenda.
(c) Copyright, Andrew Linzey, 2003
The Revd Professor Andrew Linzey, PhD, DD
Member of the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford,
Senior Research Fellow in Ethics, Theology and Animal Welfare,
Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford,
and Honorary Professor in Theology, University of Birmingham.
Books include: Animal Theology (SCM Press/University of Illinois Press,
1994), Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society (Routledge, 1996), After
Noah (Mowbray/Continuum, 1997), Animals on the Agenda (SCM Press/University
of Illinois Press, 1998), Animal Gospel (Westminster John Knox Press,
1998), Animal Rites (SCM Press/The Pilgrim Press, 1999), Animal
Rights: A Historical Anthology (University of Columbia Press, 2005), and Gays
and the Future of Anglicanism (O Books, 2005).