Misframing the Question

This story, from NYT, I think misframes the essential question, although it does offer some good insights:

Mr. Karanth, who has aided relocation efforts here and in several nearby sanctuaries, said that India today can have room for its tigers and its people but that the government must make it worthwhile for villagers to empty the national parks.

“I’m against any moving of people unless there is a positive improvement in their livelihoods,” he said. “If this happened in the ’50s and ’60s when India was starving, I would have said, fine, we don’t have room for tigers. Now we have 9 percent economic growth, and we don’t have room for tigers?”

To see this in terms of "tigers vs. people," as is the tenor of the Times article, is missing an essential point. As we are learning, what we tend to see as "habitat destruction" for a particular species is also destruction of necessary components of our own habitat. The projected climate effects of logging and large-scale slash-and-burn farming in the tropics are significant; when added into the effects of our use of fossil fuels, is it any wonder the weather's a mess? I'm also going to advance the idea that loss of species diversity -- our ongoing facility for driving other species to extinction that we seem not to want to talk about -- is a bad thing in itself; it also deprives us of as yet often unknown resources. (I'm not going to belabor the origins of most of our life-saving drugs in plants found in forests and jungles. That's a simple fact. To think that we've discovered everything at this point is sort of arrogant, don't you think?)

I think it's also a mistake to tie wildlife preservation to current economic conditions. Granted, once you're behind on this kind of thinking, it's hard to catch up, but two points: First, if preservation of species and habitat is already part of the game plan, the economic considerations are built in. Of course, there is a certain element in government that would always prefer to pay for a war (or not pay for it but have it anyway) than for anything of benefit to the populace, but we just have to deal with that. One of the problems with economics as the ruling paradigm is that it is so easily perverted. (And let's face it, a philosophy that gives the bottom line pride of place is a barren place to live.)

Second, neglect of the environment is only going to make economic slumps worse. If you take out one component of the system, you're making the whole system less resilient. Is this so hard to figure? We're seeing the beginnings of the result of years of environmental neglect -- no, let's call it what it has been: exploitation. We haven't been putting anything back, and now we're getting to pay for it. It's not all global warming/climate change (whatever the catch-phrase du jour is this week). We've spent the last hundred years damaging the system, and it's only gotten more extreme as the pace of our societies (and I use the plural here -- China and Brazil are dead set on replaying our mistakes) gets faster.

And, as is so often the case, at the root of the problem is the way we frame the questions.