Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
ZOOS HAVE SHIFTED TOWARD CONSERVATIONISM AS THEIR MAIN ETHICAL OBJECTIVE*
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- Ext 4 – Resillience
ZOOS HAVE SHIFTED TOWARD CONSERVATIONISM AS THEIR MAIN ETHICAL OBJECTIVE*Donald G. Lindburg, Zoology Society of San Diego, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 471* It is widely recognized that the original objective of zoos in maintaining collections of wild animals can no longer be condoned. Modern-day zoos, therefore, have redefined their missions in light of questions about the right to hold animals captive and the relevance and humaneness of this practice. They have done so by aligning themselves with conservationist objectives, a process that has entailed the investment of substantial resources in education, improved training of staff, modernization of exhibits, breeding, and in some cases, reintroductions, and research designed to improve health, welfare, and propagation efforts. The modern zoo also takes note of the world-wide decline in populations and their habitats and increasingly envisions a time when at least some species will exist only within their confines. For the vast majority of those who labor in the profession, therefore, pride of achievement and a personal sense of fulfillment are commonly found. Indeed, for most it is a pursuit to be nobly and passionately held. ZOOS COMMITED TO THE HOLISTIC GOALS OF SPECIES PRESERVATION – DOES NOT MEAN THAT ANIMAL WELFARE IS DISCOUNTED* Donald G. Lindburg, Zoology Society of San Diego, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 478-9* It is fair to presume that zoo professionals are strongly committed to animal welfare, but less so to animal rights. Theirs is a profession that, by its very nature, shares the holistic ethic, viz., that preservationist goals can only be achieved by unfailingly giving highest priority to collections of individuals. Zoo professionals frequently find individual welfare and species preservation to be in conflict and in such cases will give higher priority to the preservation of species. It does not follow, as it often claimed, that there is indifference to the interests of individuals or lack of respect for them. In fact, goals of species preservation are more likely to be realized where the lives of individuals are given the highest respect, and where every effort is made to safeguard their interests. These dual concerns indicate that those who toil in zoos readily embrace the ethical pluralism that offers a basis for reconciliation with any who question the morality of their acts. Ext #4 – ResillienceECOSYSTEMS HISTORICALLY RESILIENT –LITTLE EXTINCTION DESPITE MASSIVE ECOSYSTEM DISRUPTIONS Niles Eldredge, Curator-in-Chief of “Hall of Biodiversity” American Museum of Natural History, 2000, Species, Speciation and the Environment, October, http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/eldredge.html Instead of prompting adaptive change through natural selection, environmental change instead causes organisms to seek familiar habitats to which they are already adapted. In other words, "habitat tracking," rather than "adaptation tracking" is the most expected biological reaction to environmental change -- which is now understood to be inevitable. For example: During the past 1.65 million years, there have been four major, and many minor, episodes of global cooling resulting in the southward surge of huge fields of glacial ice in both North America and Eurasia. Yet, despite this rhythmically cyclical pattern of profound climate change, extinction and evolution throughout the Pleistocene was surprisingly negligible. Instead, ecosystems (e.g., tundra, boreal forest, mixed hardwood forest, etc.) migrated south in front of the advancing glaciers. Though there was much disruption, most plant species (through their seed propagules) and animal species were able to migrate, find "recognizable" habitat, and survive pretty much unchanged throughout the Pleistocene Epoch. Botanist Margaret Davis6 and colleagues, and entomologist G. R. Coope7 have provided especially well-documented and graphic examples of habitat tracking as a source of survival of species throughout the Pleistocene. GENERAL BIODIVERSITY ADVANTAGES DON’T APPLY TO SAVING PARTICULAR SPECIES – MARGINAL BENEFITS OF PARTICULAR BIODIVERSITY SMALL Roger A Sedjo, Sr. Fellow, Resources for the Future, 2000, Conserving Nature’s Biodiversity: insights from biology, ethics and economics, eds. Van Kooten, Bulte and Sinclair, p. 120-1 Some biodiversity is necessary for human existence, so in some sense some biodiversity is infinitely valuable. However, at the margin, biodiversity is less critical to human life and thus less valuable. How valuable is biodiversity as an input into pharmaceutical products? There are two possible answers to this question. First, the values may be substantial, but the absence of clear, well-defined property rights may make the resource rents difficult to capture. The absence of property rights may result in the market and the social system substantially undervaluing these resources. Hence the inadvertent losses of wild genetic resources may reflect not their low value, but the inability to capture that value due to the absence of adequate property rights. Second, it may be that biodiversity, like a lottery, has only limited value at the margin. For example, there may be so much wild genetic resources available that any particular part of this stock has only a very low expected value. Reviewing the evidence, we find that there has been some emergence of property rights for valuable common property resources, as anticipated by Demsetz. However, the evidence also finds relatively few natural product based drugs being developed by pharmaceuticals, and there is some evidence that developers are losing interest. Furthermore, a recent study by Simpson et al (1996) suggests that the marginal value of wild genetic resources as input into pharmaceuticals is at most modest and probably very small. The conclusion therefore, is that the contribution of biological diversity to the production of products and services (viz, ecosystem function) is small, mainly because such values are relevant only at the margin. Unless biodiversity has significant value as a final consumption “good”, principally existence value, the economic case for incurring large costs to protect biodiversity at the margin is weak. LITTLE SUPPORT FOR INVISIBLE THRESHOLD OR CATASTROPHIC, NON-LINEAR ECOSYSTEM IMPACTS FROM SPECIES LOSS R. David Simpson, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future, 2000, Conserving Nature’s Biodiversity: insights from biology, ethics and economics, eds. Van Kooten, Bulte and Sinclair, p. 100 Another important assumption underlying much of foregoing discussion is that things are generally continuous. This means that small actions have small effects. Reducing habitat by a small amount, for example, results in small reduction in biodiversity supported in that habitat. This assumption is not innocuous, because many biologists are concerned with radical discontinuities. The state of a system may change suddenly when a threshold is exceeded, or a little additional degradation may result in an irreversible unraveling. At the risk of sounding cavalier about such an important issue, let me just say that natural scientists have failed to convince this reasonably inquisitive layperson of the likelihood and imminence of such threats. Directory: files -> documents documents -> North Mankato Taylor Library documents -> In the Red and Brown Water documents -> - documents -> I. Disaster Summary Sheet II. 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