• Corpus ID: 156383135

Biodiversity and Ethics: Do We Have a Responsibility to Preserve?

@inproceedings{Picard2005BiodiversityAE,
  title={Biodiversity and Ethics: Do We Have a Responsibility to Preserve?},
  author={Kathryn T Picard},
  year={2005}
}

• Kathryn T Picard
• Published 2005
• Environmental Science

Biodiversity is the dynamic variability among extant organisms, including that within and between species and environments. An estimated 20 million species exist in the global ecosystem, the evolutionary progeny of a lineage stretching back 3.5 billion years. However, current levels of biodiversity are threatened by what scientists describe as a modern, anthropogenic mass extinction—a " human meteor " —with researchers estimating the accelerated extinction rate at 100 to 1,000 times that of natural background rates. 3 The mounting urgency to protect both individual species and whole ecosystems has thrust the matter of global biodiversity loss to the fore of international politics, precipitating the ratification of treaties such as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. 4 As politicians and scientists alike call for strengthened efforts to preserve threatened habitats and endangered species, one must wonder, are we morally obligated to do so? What responsibility, if any, do humans owe to other species, or to their environment? In this essay, I will address two reigning arguments in the conservation debate, one advocating stewardship as a moral imperative, the other attributing the current spate of extinctions to wholly natural, ecological processes. Here I contend that both stances are inherently flawed, and, ultimately, preservation as a solution to the current ecological crisis is neither in conflict with nature nor a normative duty, but rather a practical necessity. Stewardship, as a defense of ecological health, appoints humans as custodians of biodiversity. The vanguards of the natural world, we have a moral obligation to defend it from harm, specifically harm instigated by our own actions. We are no longer mere cogs in the ecological wheel, we are the mechanics as well. The motivations behind the stewardship argument stem primarily from either value claims or rights claims, whether our own, or those of potential persons. Many environmentalists take it as uncontroversial that there is an inherent value in biodiversity, in both ecosystems and individual species, and, perhaps, individual animals. By ascribing an inborn value to all things great and small, exponents of stewardship provide grounds for " the principles that we ought to try to preserve those species that have been driven to the brink of extinction by human activities and that we should make sure that no additional species are endangered or threatened by our behavior. " 5 Thus, in order to ensure the survival and propagation of endangered species, and the recovery of fragmented …