by Dan Hannan| May 10, 2019 12:00 AM
Not long ago, a new variety of orchid was discovered at the Newmarket racecourse in Suffolk, England. The track’s managers were horrified at first. When an endangered plant is found on your land in England, eco-regulators seize control; and this flower was, apparently, the only one of its kind in the world.
But the Jockey Club came up with an ingenious defense. If the orchid truly was unique, it argued, and if it flourished only on ground that had been churned up by horses’ hooves for the better part of 400 years, then surely the correct course was to maintain that unusual habitat.
The inspectors accepted this logic, and the orchid continues to thrive on the turf upon which, in 1672, Charles II became the only reigning monarch to ride a winner.
I thought of Newmarket when I read the United Nations report claiming that a million species faced extinction as a result of population growth, the exploitation of resources, and capitalism in general.
Although the figure has been uncritically relayed by broadcasters, a moment’s thought should make us suspicious. For one thing, we have been here before. In 1980, for example, the Jimmy Carter administration distributed to foreign governments a report claiming that, by the year 2000, 2 million species would be wiped out. In fact, by 2010, there had been 872 documented extinctions.
It is possible, of course, that additional species are being eliminated before they can be classified, though not on anything remotely like the scale suggested here. There are varieties of bacteria, for example, that exist only in one cave or in one grove. If that is what we mean by “species,” then their extinction, coming about through tiny environmental changes, is presumably a common event, with or without human agency.
That, however, is not what most of us understand by the loss of biodiversity. We think, rather, of species failing to survive contact with homo sapiens. We think of polar bears and tigers disappearing, going the way of Galápagos tortoises and Tasmanian tigers.
That would indeed be depressing if it were happening. But it isn’t, at least not in the way that is claimed.
There are five times as many polar bears now as there were 60 years ago. The number of tigers in India has risen by a third over the past decade. As for the giant tortoises and Tasmanian tigers, modern science is close to resurrecting them decades after the last of their kind perished.
Which brings me to the error that lies behind not only this report but much modern eco-thinking: namely, the idea that economic growth is bad for the environment.
Tigers are doing better than lions but not as well as wolves. Why? Because wolves live in rich countries, tigers in middle-income countries, and lions in poor countries.
The wealth generated by markets gives us the luxury of being able to shoot animals with cameras rather than guns. I wrote here a while back about how Alaska — a state which, in the public mind, is run by anti-tax Republican businesses — has seen an almost miraculous recovery in the numbers of previously endangered species, such as eagles, whales, and sea otters.
You breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water in Washington, D.C., than in Windhoek, Namibia, or Wuhan, China. Why? Because Washington is a wealthier city.
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These days, if a population of something dies out, then it’s recoded as an extinction. Like a population of non-migratory caribou in the mountains of BC. which is ridiculous, as all caribou are the same species. There are millions of caribou around the world, but caribou extinctions are continuously in the news. The same is true for many species. Barn owls, for example, are reported to be in danger of extinction….in Ontario. so what? Ontario has never been a great place for barn owls. Barn owls, by the way, are common in many areas all around the world. Dozens of so-called imminent extinctions fit this mold. Ridiculous.
Nobody really knows how many species exist today on earth, but the general estimate or guess seems to be something on the order of 1 trillion.
So losing 1 million species over the coming century or so represents approximately 1 in one million species. And this is a “crisis”???
We know of specific actual extinction crises in geologic history wherein approximately 65 to 90 plus percent of all then-existing species disappeared more or less instantaneously due to major disturbances.
I submit that losing 1 millionth of today’s species over the next century does not even fall into the noise level of the number of species on earth at any time in the last half billion years. Natural selection and continuous evolution likely causes vastly more species extinctions than any sort of interaction with humans ever causes.
Oh, and all those lovable species (???) like polar bears and penguins and bald eagles and baby seals will NOT be among the species lost. The lost species will be the ones that virtually no actual people have ever seen or heard of in their entire lives, including PhD degreed scientists, not just the unwashed masses.
Devils Duke is about 12 km long and only a small section of it runs along one side of Newmarket racecourse. It has provided a refuge for a range of species along its entire length; there is greater variety including woodland at the southern end away from Newmarket. There is no likelihood that the racecourse has had any special role in the conservation of the plant species. The dyke is just a narrow linear ridge that didn’t lend itself to farming or building, so retained the natural vegetation. Perhaps legends about it, note the name Devils Dyke, discouraged people from doing anything to it. Perhaps a lesson? Deter humans from a place, and vegetation and wildlife will flourish c.f. Chernobyl.
“In fact, by 2010, there had been 872 documented extinctions.”
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ctm, in order to prove this claim, you must now seek out all possible habitats for these species, accessible or not.
And you have to prove for each one of these possible habitats that there is not a single individual of the searched for species.
have fun!