In her new book, Tickets for the Ark, ecologist Rebecca Nesbit says we need to make rational decisions about which species to save from extinction.
IMAGINE you are the last person on Earth. On your dying day, you cut down the only remaining oak tree, just because you can. Are you morally in the wrong?
Rebecca Nesbit would argue that you aren’t. A science writer and ecologist, she has form in tackling subjects where scientific rationalism and general intuition don’t necessarily line up. Her first book,Tickets for the ArkShe points out that, given we can’t save every species, we have some difficult decisions to make.
, we could as easily focus on genes, individual strings of DNA or the general health of whole ecosystems, she argues.reads as a catalogue of errors on the part of well-meaning conservationists. Many conservation projects are attempts to reverse human interference in nature – clearly an impossible task, considering we have been shaping the biosphere for at least 10,000 years.reveals the intellectual vistas that such blunders have opened up.
“If we accept that conservation is about the future not the past, the most troubling conundrums fall away”, and two, that conservation is about the future, not the past. Then the most troubling conundrums in conservation fall away, writes Nesbit. The death of the last oak, at the hands of the last human, becomes merely the loss of a category that was defined and valued by humans – a loss that was inevitable at some point anyway.
With this in mind, we can consider what conservation efforts will achieve for entire ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole without wasting our time agonising over whether, say, British white-clawed crayfish are natives, or if
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