Are You a Garbled Environmentalist?

God the Father. Attributed to Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, c. 1515, The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Meet Jason. Jason is a thoroughly modern, well-educated young man. He dabbled with agnosticism at school but is now a confirmed atheist and will only (reluctantly) enter a church for weddings and funerals. He cares about the environment, especially biodiversity, and sometimes lies awake at night worrying about the ever-expanding Red List of Threatened Species. He is involved with a local volunteer group that tackles invasive species, and he strives to save indigenous species, planting only endemic trees in his well-kept town garden. Living in New Zealand he is proud of his clean, green country, and, like any decent person, he welcomes new immigrants. Jason is so convinced of the moral rectitude of his position that he believes he could hold his own in any argument. Is he correct?

An important part of Jason’s atheism is his belief in Darwinian evolution. Science, he maintains, has shown beyond any doubt that the universe started with the Big Bang, and that it has rolled out ever since without a guiding deity’s intervention. Modern genetics has revealed the mechanism of Darwinism, whereby meiosis creates individuals that differ in their ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment, and they pass this ability on to their offspring. Here lies, in Darwin’s words, the origin of species.

Now the mechanism of speciation is, according to Jason’s beliefs, a purely random, physical process, generating genotypes with different phenotypes. A bit like the output of a random-number-generating machine. So, one might ask, what’s so special about a species? Because special they are. For example, a headline in the Otago Daily Times of 5 March 2022 heralded the discovery of a new plant species in the Livingstone Mountains of Southland, New Zealand, provisionally called Chaerophyllum sp. ‘‘Livingstone’’. (Jason was very excited when he read this.) As the article says, “The newly discovered plant will need additional research to compare it to its close relatives before being formally considered a new species. This research could take some time, but if it turns out the population is a new species, then its threat status would need to be determined [emphasis added].”

Once its threat status is determined, various conservation strategies will be put in place. These use taxpayer’s money, involve significant effort, and can affect the ability of people to utilise an area, or farm their land, or construct dwellings. It’s a big deal. Yet Chaerophyllum sp. ‘‘Livingstone’’ is indistinguishable from its closest relative without the expertise of a taxonomist and/or cytological analysis. In a Darwinian, materialistic universe there is no justification whatsoever for the value placed on this new, ever-so-slightly different species, this new, reproducible set of genes. It’s like saying 728439441 is valuable because it’s different from 728439440.

In fact, the only possible justification for attributing such intrinsic value would be a belief in Creationism. God created every species (all creatures great and small), and they are valuable in as much as they are the individual products of His divine work. It follows that Jason’s worry about threatened species is either completely illogical or commits him to belief in a creative deity.

Ruffled but undefeated, Jason points out the significance of what are known as ecosystem services. These are “the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and from healthy ecosystems”. This is where species get their value, he says: they provide valuable services. For the Creationist this argument is a godsend, coming almost straight out of Genesis (1:29): “I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth, and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed: they shall be yours for food.” Ecosystem services can be seen as just a fancy way of saying that God has provided for us. In any case, the fact that some organisms are beneficial to us – provide ecosystem services – doesn’t begin to justify the significance placed on the vast majority of species on Earth, such as Chaerophyllum sp. ‘‘Livingstone’’, which, nestling on scree slopes high in the Alps, provides no benefit at all. Finally, it’s a bit of an icky argument, environmentally speaking, to argue that organisms only have value if they are valuable to humans, like domestic animals. Is that really what you want to say, Jason, good environmentalist that you are?

Slightly more rattled, and remembering Gaia, Jason takes up this new point and stresses the importance of biodiversity, the biological variety of life on Earth. This is important because it is the very range of different organisms in an ecosystem that keep it functioning – from insects pollinating flowers to worms structuring topsoil and invertebrates breaking down leaf litter. Biodiversity keeps an ecosystem in balance through the way all of its constituent organisms interact. So it’s not just ecosystem services directly benefiting humans that are important: it’s also the overall functioning of ecosystems. This indirectly affects our ability to live on Earth, but also keeps Gaia functioning, even if all humans die and have no need for ecosystem services.

There are two problems here. First, it implies that all, or perhaps most, species are necessary to maintain adequate biodiversity on Earth. But consider the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which occurred about 252 million years ago: it killed off between 90 and 96% of all species on Earth. Of course this, the largest extinction event ever, had huge consequences, but it does suggest, as indeed the Gaia hypothesis proposes, that Earth is adaptable and resilient to change, and that biodiversity can quite effortlessly cope with losing a large number of species.

The second problem relates to Jason’s reverence for indigeneity, and especially endemicity. (Endemic organisms occur naturally only in a single geographical location, whereas indigenous organisms occur naturally in a geographical location but may also occur elsewhere.) If we are purely concerned with biodiversity maintaining ecosystem functioning, then whatever does the job gets the job. Invasive (what in gentler times were called exotic) organisms may perform biodiversity functions as well as or better than the locals to keep the ecosystem in balance.  In New Zealand much has been made of the fact that birds evolved in the absence of natural predators, making them particular susceptible to rats, stoats and feral cats, to name a few baddies. This means endemic birds tend towards extinction without massively expensive, labour-intensive measures, such as rodent-proof sanctuaries, in order to survive. But if the local species aren’t tough enough to survive, why not let the tough guys like sparrows, starlings and blackbirds take over and maintain biodiversity? Survival of the fittest. It’s how evolution works, remember Jason?

But, the now increasingly desperate Jason argues, creatures that belong in a place ought to take some sort of precedence. That is where they belong. Kiwis are at home in New Zealand, koalas are at home in Australia. They are adapted to living there, and they have a right to live unmolested by invasive species who come in and occupy their ecological niches and make it impossible for them to thrive. Our native species are attacked and killed. They need to be protected against aggressive, exotic outsiders, which should be stopped at the border, or, if they are here already, trapped, poisoned and exterminated. Let stoats stay in the countries where they are endemic. They don’t belong here.

That’s an interesting argument, Jason, from the point of view of moral reasoning. Because it follows that you believe we should keep out human invasives (immigrants) because they don’t belong here, because they occupy our ecological niches (take our jobs) and make it impossible for us to thrive (are a drain on the social welfare system). In many countries native species (citizens) are attacked and killed (Islamic terror attacks). Such immigrants need to be stopped at the border, or, if they are already living here, trapped, poisoned and exterminated, much like the Final Solution devised for unwanted residents of the Greater Germanic Reich.

I trust it’s very clear that this is a reductio ad absurdum argument. I want to show that rationally arguing the viewpoint of a nice, decent, environmentally sensitive atheist leads to a belief in Creationism, a disregard for endangered species, and an advocacy of hard borders for immigration and persecution of migrants. Just the sort of horrendous beliefs Jason despises in people who spread “disinformation” on the internet. If Jason had said he likes and values the native species in his environment and feels a strong desire to protect them, say, then that would be the end of it. De gustibus non est disputandum. But he was convinced he could argue the merits of his moral position.

 

David Wolcott