Feb 19, 2017
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We love our 2016 Annual Report! Check it out: http://bit.ly/2knsBOZ
BioIntegrity’s mission is to help the world’s most global environmental solutions succeed as fast as possible. Check out our 2016 Impacts Report! http://bit.ly/2knsBOZ
BioIntegrity’s mission is to help the world’s most global environmental solutions succeed as fast as possible. Check out our 2016 Impacts Report! http://bit.ly/2knsBOZ
BioIntegrity’s mission is to help the world’s most global environmental solutions succeed as fast as possible. Check out our 2016 Impacts Report! http://bit.ly/2knsBOZ
Protecting the Integrity of our Biosphere
BioIntegrity's mission is to help the world's most global environmental solutions succeed as fast as possible. Since Dec. 2014, BioIntegrity donors have offset San Francisco's community-wide CO2 footprint for more than 3 years, helped save over 15,000 threatened species, and protected more than 1 Billion gallons of annual water filtration. Check out our 2016 Impacts Report to learn more! http://bit.ly/2knsBOZ
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Michael Fagan responds to Flora Faun's letter to the Taipei Times on conservation and biodiversity. Although I don't entirely agree with Michael's rights-based individual freedoms approach he does make an important point in noting that the blanket conservation to maintain biodiversity is, although well intentioned, an erroneous strategy. In the field of ecological science, biodiversity as an indicator of habitat 'health' has long been regarded as a reductionist taxonomic way of looking at the extremely complex and shifting relationships between species and their environment. Accordingly, many ecologists now talk of biointegrity - how healthy a system is in regard to the balance of the food chain and its habitats. Michael is therefore right to say ...
However the sheer scale of this claim about biodiversity and global ecosystem collapse necessarily subsumes much uncertainty about the variety of consequences that may occur at far lesser orders of magnitude; for example, the trophic cascade effects of apex predators occur in some ecosystems, but are comparatively absent (pdf) in many others. To take that floating abstract claim about the importance of biodiversity generally as the basis on which to conserve any particular vulnerable or endangered species is simply risible: not all species of animals or plants are equally consequential for the ecosystems in which they are found.
He is also right to point to the often 'anthropogenic' aspect of conservationism - or at least that which emerges in its most visible campaigns. It is much harder to convince people to take action to save a particular species of bacteria, insect or flora when it doesn't have two big eyes, soft fur, or colourful blooms. An example here are the campaigns to save sharks. Sharks are an apex predator and widely confirmed to play a very important role in ocean habitat biointegrity. But when you talk to people about sharks all they can think of is Jaws and stories from the news of people who made themselves very attractive targets for hungry sharks in their own habitats. And so soup bowls in Taiwan and China continue to be filled with tasteless fin cleaved from still living sharks. I wonder if Taiwanese would be as interested in eating dolphin fin soup? The answer is of course not - dolphins have only positive adjectives applied to them. Boat tours leave Hualien every day to go and watch them. There are no boat tours to watch sharks. Yet both dolphins and sharks are both predators and both play an important role in ocean biointegrity. That we hail one as cute and intelligent whilst slaughtering the other in some vain and entirely symbolic attempt to demonstrate social prestige and status speaks to the limited cognitive capacity of our own species rather than the value of dolphins or sharks. There is a grave danger in letting aesthetics dominate our understanding of how we should manage the environment - efficacy based on a deeper multilayered appreciation for the immense complexity of ecological systems.