Biodiversity and the Burden of Responsibility
Ernest Partridge
(Summer, 1998)
The Summer, 1998 issue
of Defenders ("The Conservation Magazine of Defenders of
Wildlife"), contains reflections by thirteen philosophers and
theologians on the topic of "The Moral Case for Saving
Species." The following is The Gadfly's
contribution.
Modern science burst forth from the Renaissance, proclaiming
boundless potential for humanity's "conquest of nature." This
hubris was encouraged by philosophers such as Rene Descartes
-- who proclaimed that mankind's essence, "thinking substance," was
fundamentally separate from the "stuff" of nature -- and Francis
Bacon, who counseled that "nature can not be commanded, unless
obeyed" though he was clearly more interested in "command" than
"obedience." Such opinion was the fruit of the earliest successful
sciences: physics and chemistry.
At last, the life sciences have yielded a fuller wisdom:
we
are natural creatures. Our breath of life is a gift of the plant
kingdom, just as the carbon dioxide we exhale is their nourishment.
Our food is digested by countless symbiotic microorganisms, without
which we would starve. The DNA code that spells out our inheritance
is composed of the same four molecular letters that define all life
on our common planet. The salinity of our life-blood is the same as
that of the sea from which we came. And our brains, with which we
have claimed "dominion" over the Earth, were selected and fully
formed in the company of wild nature, before we settled our first
agricultural villages a mere ten millennia ago. In E. O. Wilson's
memorable words, "we stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of
the world." Our species evolved, survived and prevailed in the
company of our brother species, whose continued existence is now in
our careless yet powerful hands. Nature begat us, nature
sustains us -- nature is us! Thus anthropogenic extinction
is far worse than "imprudent policy." It is, as Paul Shepard put it,
"an amputation of man." And it is fratricide!
Are we our brothers' keepers? We are indeed. The
advancement of science and its byproduct, technology, have bestowed
upon us an inalienable burden: moral responsibility. Science
affords us knowledge of the consequences of our
interventions in nature, and technology gives us the
capacity to choose among alternative futures: on the one
hand, a biotically impoverished world, with homo sapiens
precariously adrift on an alien planet from which it has cast out its
source and sustenance; on the other hand, a world for ourselves and
our posterity, luxuriant in the natural biotic abundance that gave
our species life, and which nourishes our minds and souls with its
boundless wonder and mystery.
Rational beings, thus possessed of knowledge and capacity, are
necessarily morally responsible beings. This analysis of
"responsibility" incorporates an ancient wisdom: from the ancient
Hebrews, an understanding that the fruit of the tree of knowledge
makes us liable to sin; and from the Greeks, a realization that when
Prometheus stole fire, mankind could never again put aside the burden
of his responsibilities.
The problem of biodiversity vs. extinction is momentous, and the
outcome is in doubt. But who can doubt our responsibility -- to
ourselves, to our posterity, and to our brother species?
Copyright, 1998, Defenders of Wildlife
