The Brutish Quality of “Usefulness”
I was just listening to NPR as I ate lunch and they had on a guy who has written a book on migration, and how climate change and habitat loss have affected migratory animals. At one point, he describes how he went out at night with other volunteers to help some endangered salamanders cross a busy road. The interviewer asked a question that basically presumed that this was a crazy thing to do that reinforced stereotypes about environmentalists. The assumption is that “ordinary” people don’t see any value in any creature if it isn’t directly useful to us. I thought the writer’s response was measured, considering I would have said, “In what reality is it morally or ethically responsible to condemn an entire species to extinction because we want to drive really fast along a road?” I mean, that’s bat-shit crazy. It is *insane* to basically say, “If we’re going to be at all inconvenienced, that species can go.” Millions of birds killed by cell phone towers. Idiots in Florida complaining because national forest is being made off-limits to vehicles because endangered species are literally being run over into extinction. More idiots who want the manatees taken off the endangered species list basically just because we want to drive our boats a lot faster.
To me, this is the insane, kooky talk. Not the guy who volunteers to help an endangered species. I’m not someone who goes out with PETA to demonstrate. I’m fairly moderate on a lot of topics, but this fixation on “usefulness” is deadly. It’s deadly when applied to the ecosphere, it’s deadly when applied to the arts. It’s the kind of thing that at times makes me think we really are nothing more than suicidal apes.
Jeff
December 5, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Ayup. And also hear hear. Amen, even.
December 5, 2007 at 1:04 pm
It’s not only morally blinkered but scientifically as well, seeing as we live in an interconnected ecosystem. A great example of meddling in the cause of human benefit came during the Great Leap Forward in the China of the 1950s when they inaugurated the Great Sparrow Campaign (no, I ain’t kidding) which was essentially a war against sparrows wrongly held responsible for damaging crops. Villages were mobilised to harass the birds with noise and destroy their nests; this was successful eventually, they drove away the sparrows and as a consequence the insect population (which the sparrows fed upon) ballooned and destroyed the crops. The famine of that period killed millions of people.
December 5, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Here in Ohio we used to kill Barn Owls and Black (Racer/Rat) Snakes ’cause we didn’t think they were useful, and the owls would just crap around in the barns. Once they were both endangered, we then had a problem with rats and mice eating all our food and destroying crops in the fields. Oppsie!
Say, who needs all these trees and algea? We should get rid of all that stuff. All they do is drop leaves and plug up intake valves. I mean, what could it hurt?
December 5, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Jeff,
What DID the author say in response? Do you have a link? I’m with you. What they (people who don’t care about “useless” species) don’t understand is that they’re next. And not just because they’re helping destroy the Earth. In my next book, Under the Suns of Sarshan, I’m trying to combat the dastardly lack of respect we have for our elders and our ability to send them to rest homes to die because it’s more convenient. In my own humble way, I want to show a society in which the elders are honored and cared for. In fact, I go a step further. If a traveling tradesman (I call them chokaars) becomes unable to work any more due to illness, injury or age while in your home, it is a special blessing for that household to care for him the rest of his life. The pen is mightier than the sword, right?
Ann
http://wilkes.zftp
http://sciencefictionmusings.blogspot.com
December 5, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Where I live they have “Frog Crossing” signs. Is that unique to Switzerland, or do they have them in other places?
December 5, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Dead on, Jeff. There’s a great great organization, co-founded by the husband of Lydia Millet in fact, called the Center for Biological Diversity http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/ and they are really great on this topic. Lydia writes their press releases, in fact.
December 5, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Everyone’s a second-rate economist these days, talking rubbish about the suboptimal wealth-maximizing utility of tree frogs and thinking it makes them look hard-headed and shrewd.
Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling’s Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing is very good if you like that sort of thing.
December 6, 2007 at 1:05 am
Here’s a like to an online version of the broadcast:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16919118
December 6, 2007 at 8:26 am
I wish that it were possible to banish our dependence on interstate highways, ten lanes of traffic, five running each way, at least in some places. Our arrogance in appropriating this much geography so that we can all “go fast” somewhere is incredible, and the fossil fuel we burn and the resources we consume doing so seem highly irrational, viewed under the aspect of eternity. I say this as someone who drives these highways and who on Saturday survived an accident that probably should have killed both Jeri and me (and Jeri through no fault of her own), owing to my own impatience. George Zebrowski argues that we may ultimately solve the problem of our arrogance and selfishness by driving ourselves (pun neither intended nor unintended) extinct, through a whole synergistic combination of factors. For which reason he himself refuses to own or drive a car at all. Would that such a thing were possible where we live. Or am I simply refusing to see the alternatives?