Biodiversity – a Biblical-Theological Perspective Living in an Age of Mass Extinction

In a recent book Heather Rogers describes a scene in Indonesia (now the world’s third largest emitter of carbon dioxide, after China and the USA):

Imagine millions of acres of dense rain forest teeming with the world’s most diverse flora and fauna. A crew armed with chain saws and bulldozers forges a narrow path through the trees. The workers begin to rip away and flatten the forest, as wildlife, including endangered species such as orangutans, flee for their lives. Abulldozer shoves innumerable splintered trees into tangled piles that stretch for miles, and crews set them alight. Ferocious fires blast through what was once a dynamic web of life, leaving behind a carbon dioxide-filled haze and a silent, charred wasteland. After the forest has been erased it’s almost impossible to imagine what was done there.[1]

These huge clearances are to make way for oil palm plantations, which are grown partly to be used as vegetable oil in all sorts of processed food, but also to a considerable extent to produce biofuels, the allegedly green fuels that it was hoped would cut the level of carbon dioxide emissions from cars. In fact, burning the forests releases massive amounts of CO2 and the palm oil plantations themselves cannot absorb nearly as much CO₂ as the rain forests they replace.

Deforestation globally accounts for 20 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, Indonesia aims, despite its formally strict environmental regulations, to expand the acreage it devotes to oil palm plantations from its current 16 million acres to almost 26 million by 2015.[2] (Brazil, on the other hand, has had some success in reducing the rate of deforestation in the Amazon.) The Indonesian story goes to show the complexity of the predicament the world is in. What seemed like a good way of slowing climate change without having to reduce automobile use in the USA (and other parts of the affluent West) turns out to exacerbate perhaps the most effective way in which human beings are currently destroying the world’s biodiversity – and without even reducing CO2 emissions.

In most people’s environmental awareness the ongoing process of mass extinction of species has been overshadowed recently by climate change – or else simply absorbed into climate change. It is true that climate change will magnify the processes of extinction that are already underway, but those processes have a momentum of their own. There was, of course, a green movement and much public concern about the environment long before climate change entered our radar. There was already much to be concerned about, and while too many people are still sceptical about climate change, there is no denying the destruction of the rainforests or the worldwide decline of amphibians, the emptying of life from the over-fished areas of the oceans or the very worrying decline of bees. Understandable though a focus on climate change may be, the loss of biodiversity for other reasons merits our attention.

The statistics of biodiversity are staggering. About 1.8 million species have been described, classified and named. But the number of unknown species is undoubtedly much higher than that. Scientists can only make informed guesses, but the guesses range from ten million to a hundred million. A vast number of these are insects and micro-organisms – without which the rest of the community of living things would disintegrate. Globally there are biodiversity hotspots, many in the tropics or on islands, where the concentration of biodiversity is astonishing, but it is remarkable enough in many other places. Previously unknown species are turning up all the time, at the rate of more than three hundred a day. Many, of course, are the insects and micro-organisms, but there are plants and animals too, even large ones. In 2008 a massive palm tree, eighteen metres in height, one of the largest flowering plants on the planet, previously unknown to science, was discovered in Madagascar. More than four hundred new species of mammal have been described since 1993, and they include twenty-five new species of primate discovered as recently as the last decade. Asingle expedition to north Vietnam in 2002 discovered more than a hundred new plant species. New species still appear even in the United Kingdom. Increasingly, it seems, known species are being found actually to consist of two distinct species, as in the case of the British pipistrelle bat, which was recognized to comprise two species only in the 1990s. The ocean floors, 70 per cent of the surface of the planet, are undoubtedly rich in undiscovered species of astonishingly different kinds from anything we otherwise know.

Of course, a great many species are disappearing from the world before they have even been discovered. One small piece of tropical forest might contain thousands of species limited to that area. Who knows what industrial trawling of the ocean floors must have destroyed forever? One reaction to such considerations is to point out that extinction of species is a natural part of the history of life on earth.

Species have always gone extinct and new species evolve. While this is true, the scale is incomparable. What the scientists call the background rate of extinction – the normal rate at which species go extinct outside abnormal periods of mass extinction – is one species per million per year. The current rate is estimated to be at least a thousand species per million a year. The current rate is at least a thousand times the normal. To replace those extinct species with new ones would take nature thousands, probably millions of years. As one source puts it, ‘The extinction outputs far exceed the speciation inputs, and Earth is becoming biologically impoverished because of it.’[3]

We are living through an age of mass extinction, the sixth in the history of life on earth. The last such extinction, the fifth, occurred 65,000 years ago, when the dinosaurs, after dominating the earth for 150 million years, died out, mainly, it is now thought, through the effects of an asteroid hitting the earth. In the sixth mass extinction, humans are the asteroid.

This process of anthropogenic mass extinction is not of recent origin. It seems to have begun many thousands of years ago as humans spread across the earth. Before they arrived there were megafauna in most places – the big animals (weighing ten kilograms or more), such as now survive only in Africa and tropical Asia. There were, for exampole, the big flightless birds (nine or ten feet tall) of New Zealand and Australia, the elephant birds of Madagascar, tortoises the size of cars, woolly mammoths, gigantic deer, giant ground sloths, twenty-three feet long lizards, and in the oceans the sea-cow – I mention only a few of those that are easily described or have names other than Latin ones.

There were many more. Whether the megafauna went extinct mostly because humans hunted them is debated. There are at least three other suggested explanations (including the possibility that humans successfully competed with them for the same resources). But there is a common pattern: the megafauna of an area of the globe go extinct soon after humans first settle there. As one scholar puts it: ‘Direct human responsibility for these ancient extinctions . . . has not been conclusively proved, but we have been repeatedly found at the scene of the crime holstering a smoking gun.’[4] These were animals with no natural predators until humans arrived, therefore easily hunted, and with a slow birth rate that made it hard for the species to recover from losses.

In the case of New Zealand, the phenomenon happened as late as the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, because the islands had no human inhabitants until the Maoris arrived, a few hundred settlers who soon butchered some 160,000 moas.

It is not perhaps appropriate to pass moral judgment on our ancestors, who lived, after all, before agriculture made hunting less vital to survival. But don’t we feel the loss of the megafauna? Aren’t we thrilled to hear about them, like the fabulous beasts in the medieval bestiaries? Medieval people thought they could find the griffons, the unicorns and the dragons if they travelled far enough; we know that the elephant birds, the giant koalas and the ground sloths are gone forever. Small children are fascinated by dinosaurs, but for most adults the age of the dinosaurs seems alien. We humans would not belong in it, but the megafauna lived in our world and we miss them.

Let’s look at the scene in Genesis 2 where God brings the animals to Adam for him to give names to them, for him to recognize them as fellow-members of his world, and I see not just the familiar species, but also the ten-foot high moas, the giant kangaroos and the huge lumbering beasts whose proper names, given to them once by their human predators, we have forgotten.

Nostalgia for the megafauna has a more practical effect in the contemporary world. It is the surviving megafauna that most people most want to save from extinction. The flagship species, everybody’s favourite endangered species, are mostly big ones: the giant panda, the mountain gorilla, the tiger, the bald eagle, the humpback whale, and others. We love them now that we have lost most of them.

The megafauna were not the only casualties of human colonization.

Across the Pacific islands where the Polynesians settled, half the species of birds vanished, especially the flightless ones that didn’t

know they needed to fly until humans arrived. ‘Homo sapiens, serial killer of the biosphere,’ biologist Edward O. Wilson calls us.[5] Modern Europeans and Americans continued the process by bringing technology to bear. The invention of steam-powered trawlers in Victorian Britain began the deadly trawling of our seas that has turned habitats once teeming with life into oceanic deserts. But the engine of the mass extinction now occurring all around us is, of course, destruction or pollution of habitat.

Humanity today is on a rampage of changing natural habitats dramatically: cutting them down, plowing them up, overgrazing them, paving them over, damming and diverting water, flooding or draining areas, spraying them with pesticides and acid rain, pouring oil into them, changing their climates, exposing them to increased ultraviolet radiation, and on and on.[6]

It is important to remember that living creatures belong to ecosystems, delicately balanced communities of life. If we wish to preserve biodiversity we shall not get far by saving individual species, even if some can be transplanted elsewhere, with unpredictable results as the history of invasive species shows. Preserving ecosystems has to be the priority, and it is at least moderately good news that the Nagoya protocol, agreed in October 2010 by 103 nations, sets targets of increasing protected land across the world from the present 12 per cent to 17 per cent and protected oceans from the present 1 per cent to 10 per cent.

---

[1] Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy is Undermining the Environmental Revolution (London: Verso, 2010), p. 2.

[2] Rogers, Green Gone Wrong, pp. 99–100.

[3] P.R. Ehrlich and A.H. Ehrlich, ‘The Value of Biodiversity’, in Biodiversity and Conservation, vol. 1: History, Background and Concepts (ed. Richard J. Ladle; London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 609–89, here p. 683.

[4] Jonathan Silvertown, Fragile Web: What Next for Nature? (London: Natural History Museum, 2010), p. 167.

[5] Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (London: Abacus, 2003), p. 94.

[6] Ehrlich and Ehrlich, ‘The Value’, p. 683.