Bioproportionality: a necessary norm for
conservation?
First online: 3 December 2019
Freya
Mathews
Freya
Mathews is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University,
Australia. Her books include The
Ecological Self, For
Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism and Reinhabiting
Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture, amongst others. She is the
author of over eighty articles in the area of ecological philosophy and is a
fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
F.Mathews@latrobe.edu.au
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DOI: 10.3197/jps.2019.4.1.43
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Mathews, F. 2016. 'Bioproportionality: a necessary norm for conservation?'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 4(1): 43–53.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2019.4.1.43
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
In
the early stages of the environment movement, one of the principal objects of
conservation was wilderness. In the 1980s, the category of wilderness gave way
to that of biodiversity: conservation was reconceived as biodiversity
conservation. With this change of categories, the focus of conservation shifted
from the saving of vast and abundant terrains of life to the saving of types of
living thing, particularly species. A little-noted consequence of this
reframing was a reduction in scale: minimum viable populations of species, which set targets
under the new biodiversity-based conception of conservation, were often orders
of magnitude lower than the populations that might have occurred in wilderness
areas. Exclusive focus on the value of diversity thus tended to lead conservationists
to lose sight of the value of abundance. To correct this disastrous miscarriage
of environmental intentions, a new complementary category is here proposed: bioproportionality. It is not enough to conserve
minimum viable populations of all species. The aim should be to optimize such
populations. Optimized targets will be estimated by reference to the principle
of bioproportionality: the population of each species should be as abundant as
is consistent with an ecologically proportionate abundance of adjoining
populations of other species. Applied to the human population, this principle
will require a dramatic reduction.
Keywords:
Anthropocentrism; biodiversity; bioproportionality; environmental ethics;
optimal population; wilderness.
This essay is adapted from a much longer paper, “From
biodiversity-based conservation to an ethic of bio-proportionality” (Mathews
2016). Please refer to that paper for full bibliography and further details.
In
our current era of ecological emergency, in which more than a million species
have recently been deemed to be at imminent risk of extinction (IPBES 2019),
how should we value the living matrix of our planet? How should we share the
resources of this planet with our fellow creatures? How much do we owe them?
What, if any, are the limits on the uses we may make of them and of the living
systems in which they are embedded?
This
has been the great ethical blind-spot of the Western tradition, and it is the
blind-spot around which modernity – now exported, in the form of science-based
industrial development, to most corners of the globe – has organized itself.
From the perspective of modernity, ‘nature’ is a moral nullity, there for the
taking. Of no ethical significance in itself, it merely sets the stage for
ethics, which begins with the entrance of el
supremo, the mighty human – the protagonist relative to whom the
rest of reality acquires meaning.
The
story of this blind-spot – which is known as anthropocentrism – has become
familiar in recent decades thanks to environmental philosophy and cognate
discourses. But in practice anthropocentrism has continued to define the
project of modernization and industrial development throughout the world. This
has led, as we all know, to a human population that is now splitting its
ecological seams and progressively and inexorably annexing the habitats of all
wild species.
To
the limited extent that there has been moral pushback against this human
annexation of the planet, it has been via the environment movement and its
correlative ethos of conservation. In the early stages of this movement, one of
the principal intended objects of conservation was wilderness.
Environmentalists campaigned in the 1970s and 1980s to save forests and other
extensive tracts of relatively ecologically intact land, wherever these still
remained. For conservation purposes, wildernesses were generally defined as
large areas in which ecological and evolutionary processes were free to
continue unfolding without undue human disturbance. (Devall and Sessions, 1984,
126-129; Rolston, 1988)[1] Implicit
in the defence of wilderness was an anti-anthropocentric acknowledgment that
wild communities were morally entitled to their own existence – that other
beings and life forms were created not merely for the (human) taking but
existed in a kind of parallel moral universe which it was not always our
prerogative to appropriate or disturb.
The
notion of wilderness was a legacy of 18th-19th century
Romanticism, where Romanticism had been the first major episode of reaction
against the regime of modernity instituted in Europe by the Scientific
Revolution of the 17th century, followed by the triumphal 18th century
Age of Reason. With its implied threat to anthropocentrism – and hence to the
project of industrial development – Romanticism was historically short-lived,
and, not surprisingly, so was the 20th century wilderness movement. The very
category of wilderness, with its aesthetic and spiritual overtones, seemed out
of place in the otherwise thoroughly modernist – scientistic and
instrumentalist – discourses of governments and policy makers in the 1970s
-1980s. So, mid-1980s, a new, more congenial category came to the fore as a
basis for conservation: biodiversity.
(Mathews, 2016)
The
category of biodiversity was scientifically respectable. It had a veneer of
objective descriptiveness that ‘wilderness’, with its perceived, culturally
idiosyncratic (and very Eurocentric) loadings – aesthetic, spiritual or
otherwise subjective – patently lacked. The fact that when biodiversity was
cast as a goal for conservation it too became subtly normatively loaded –
incorporating an ‘ought’ as well as an ‘is’ – was often overlooked.
Nonetheless, it seemed to be a norm to which scientists and policy makers could
comfortably assent, and soon it became the avowed object of conservation:
conservation came to be understood almost universally as biodiversity
conservation.
With
historical hindsight it is possible to see in this shift from wilderness
preservation to biodiversity conservation a logical though unintended
contraction in the scope of the conservation project. Where wilderness
preservation had mandated the setting aside of vast and often abundant realms
of earth-life for their own sake, biodiversity as a norm referenced only the diversity of the bios and not the size of its populations.
In other words, when the object of conservation was defined exclusively in
terms of diversity, its
implied purpose was merely the saving of types rather than instances: if one
hundred instances of type A and one hundred instances of type B exist, and
fifty of A and fifty of B are lost, there has been no net loss of diversity.
But if a hundred instances of A exist and a hundred of B, and a hundred
instances of A are lost, then a net loss of diversity has indeed occurred. The
same number of instances is lost in each case, but only in the latter case does
a loss of diversity occur. In a conservation context, this means that huge
reductions in the population of a given species may occur without this
registering as a loss of biodiversity. Conservation focussed exclusively on the
loss of biodiversity will accordingly serve to mask major absolute losses of
earth-life.
In
line with this reading, biodiversity conservation did become popularly
understood as a project dedicated to the prevention of extinctions: the
principal trigger for the activation of conservation measures was species
endangerment. A social consensus seemed to obtain that extinctions ought to be
averted. The implied locus of value, and hence moral considerability, in this
new conservation scheme of things was thus not the individual organism, which
could be dispatched at will, nor vast wildlands, which could properly be opened
up for economic development, but the type or species, which alone warranted
protection.[2]
Conservation
biologists proceeded to estimate minimum
viable populationsfor different species – the minimal population of
a particular species required to avert local extinction. Official Minimum
Viable Population figures of course varied from species to species, but were
generally in the order of only hundreds or a few thousand: one meta-study of
different estimates in the literature put the average figure at 4169
individuals (Traill et al., 2007). Such figures generally of course fell orders
of magnitude below pre-disturbance populations or populations that might be
present in large wilderness areas. Using such figures as targets thus
drastically curtailed the potential scope of conservation.
Resort
to estimates of minimum viability also made little ecological sense: ecology is
generally premised on abundance. Tens of thousands of seeds are produced to
replace a single organism; huge populations are required as buffers against
environmental set-backs and unforeseeable contingencies. At the individual
level, organisms may indeed compete for scarce resources, but at the population
level, plenitude is the rule: nature operates with large numbers. If nothing is
protected until it becomes endangered, and if it is then afforded no more than
a minimal level of protection, consistent merely with its non-extinction,
eventually only remnants will remain. Viable ecologies cannot, as studies in
island biogeography have consistently shown, be constituted indefinitely out of
such remnants: attrition will inevitably occur. (Quammen, 1997;
Whittaker and Fernandez-Palacios, 2007)
A
simple change of framing categories thus in effect historically transformed the
arithmetic of conservation, putting the movement on the back foot, ultimately
dooming its small victories to attrition in the face of inexorable human
encroachment.[3]
At
the same time as the transition from the category of wilderness to that of
biodiversity was taking place, the category of development, in the
sense of large-scale modernization and industrialization, was undergoing
revision. Wherever development could be pursued consistently with the
maintenance of minimum viable populations of species, it was now legitimated as
‘sustainable’. Indeed the two terms, biodiversity and sustainability,
became inter-defining, as evidenced first in the Brundtland Report of the World
Commission on Environment and Development of 1987 and then in the United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992, in which biodiversity
replaced wilderness, or earth-life under any of its other sovereign aspects, as
the variable to be sustained. The category of biodiversity was well adapted to
the project of development not only on account of the minimalist population
targets it set for developers, but also because, as a scientistic category
amenable to reductive quantification, it precisely purged earth-life of the
sovereign aspects that concepts such as that of wilderness had captured.
Biodiversity as a category was consistent with images of earth-life subjugated
and consigned to the fragmented interstices of human installations, subject to
surveillance and control via scientific methods such as counting, culling and
tagging, forced sterilization or test-tube reproduction. The conservation of
biodiversity could arguably even be represented in terms of storage of DNA in
laboratory freezers. Well might industry welcome conservation under a
conception of earth-life so deeply attuned to instrumentalism and well might it
endorse the injunction to ‘sustain’ such life reduced in this manner to a
valuable resource. In the guise of ‘sustainable development’, as articulated in
the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), society was
offered a moral inducement to co-opt the biosphere for its own use, subject
only to the condition that other-than-human species, however reductively
articulated, not be entirely extirpated.
It
might have appeared to conservationists that they had little choice but to
embrace the mutually defining categories of biodiversity-based conservation and
sustainable development. Capitulation to the sustainability rhetoric served to
bring conservation back into line with the anthropocentric outlook which held,
and continues to hold, almost exclusive sway in the developed world and from
which the wilderness movement had marked a temporary deviation. The claims of
conservation, from the viewpoint of a biodiversity-based ethic, make minimal
inroads into the entitlements of a privileged species, homo sapiens, which
considers all living things, as individuals, subject to its will, and all the
resources of the biosphere as properly its own, provided only that other
species qua species are not by human appropriation entirely eliminated. Even
this latter condition was arguably a precautionary one traceable to our
uncertainty as to which species were dispensable, from the viewpoint of overall
ecological functionality, and which were not. To assure overall ecological
functionality for the sake of human amenity and survival, it might once have
seemed prudent to place a general ban on extinctions. It is worth noting
however that today this precaution no longer seems necessary: as we stare into
the abyss of a million imminent extinctions (IPBES 2019), with biosphere
functionality evidently still relatively intact, it no longer seems arguable
that the entire net of the biosphere will unravel if individual species are
removed. It may be for this reason that new trends in policy are now retreating
even from the bottom line of conservation, established in the 1980s: that
extinctions must be prevented.[4]
Be
that as it may, the historic shift from wilderness preservation to biodiversity-based
norms of sustainability in practice validated populations in the billions for
humans while mandating ‘minimal’ populations in the low hundreds or thousands
for most wild species. Such a version of conservation was well placed to
appease moral qualms about the destruction of the natural world while subtly
reinforcing the human development imperative and the anthropocentric
presumption on which it rests. This perhaps explains the routine if nominal
incorporation of conservation into government policy since the 1980s – and the
simultaneous collapse of biospheric systems since that time.
If a
conservation ethic based solely on the category of biodiversity, with its
implied exclusive valorization of types or species, is then ultimately
self-defeating, what might a sounder basis for conservation look like? What
further categories could be invoked to protect earth-life not merely as a
vehicle for civilization – a vehicle that might become increasingly superfluous
as geo-technologies and bio-technologies progressively mimic and replace
ecological processes – but as a realm entitled to its own existence?
Arguably
any such – bio-inclusive as opposed to merely anthropocentric – version of
conservation must rest on a generalized respect and appreciation for all living
things and for the naturally evolved relationships that knit them into the
ecological systems that co-constitute them.[5] Such
respect and appreciation cannot readily translate into the kinds of ethical
categories that as humans we apply to one another. It cannot, for example,
translate as the right
to life of
every organism, because all organisms live off the lives of other organisms,
and hence are often entitled to take the lives of others in the interests of
sustaining their own. But it does mean that no living thing is, ethically
speaking, merely subject to our will, let alone to our whim. We, like all
species, are entitled to make use of our fellow beings in order to preserve our
existence, but we must devise moral categories that allow for this without
cancelling a generalized respect and appreciation for life at large and
recognition of the conditional entitlement of all living things to their own
lifeways and existence.
If a
generalized respect and appreciation for all life is taken not merely as anorm but as the ethical foundation for human life, as
an alternative to anthropocentrism, then two complementary categories may be
proposed which together would help to give ethical structure to this
foundation. The first category is indeed that of biodiversity. Ecological
diversity is, as is already so well recognized, a necessary condition for the
adaptability, resilience and robustness of biotic communities and for their
capacity to colonize new environments and recover from all manner of
adversities. However, as we have seen, though biodiversity is a necessary
condition for the flourishing of earth-life, it is not a sufficient condition, since
taken as a stand-alone norm it exerts a downward pressure on conservation. A
generalized respect for life must also acknowledge the tendency of life to
proliferate, to make itself abundant, continually adapting itself to fill
available niches and make the most of every opportunity (Crist, 2019). Since
this expansiveness of the life process – upward, downward, sideways, along both
quantitative and qualitative axes – is its very telos or intrinsic tendency,
respect for life must honour this tendency, allowing the biosphere to continue
its work of not only diversifying but also optimizing – optimizing the
populations of all its constituent species. Such a process of optimization will
be limited only by the internal constraints imposed by the (trophic and other)
checks and balances inherent in ecosystems: the population of each species will
be as abundant as is consistent with an ecologically proportionate abundance of
adjoining populations of other species. (An optimal population of predators,
for example, will be smaller than the correspondingly optimal population of the
herbivores on which those predators prey.) Optimization is achieved,
consistently with the maintenance of biodiversity, when ecological
proportionality of populations – let us term it bio-proportionality – obtains across all species.
To
acknowledge a generalized respect and appreciation for earth-life as a
normative foundation for civilization then is not to insist on the sanctity of
individual life, after the manner of human ethics. Rather, such an underlying
commitment may be articulated via the two normative categories of biodiversity
and bioproportionality. In line with the requirement of biodiversity, we must
not eliminate individual organisms if doing so would place the future of a
particular species at risk. But further to this – very minimal – requirement,
the principle of bioproportionality enjoins us to allow populations of all
species to optimize themselves in accordance with inherent ecological dynamics.
These dynamics include, amongst other more overtly positive forms of
collaboration and initiative, the strategies of predation and competition. To
follow an ethos of respect and appreciation for earth-life then is not to rule
out the mutual utilization of individual organisms as necessary but to accept
that such utilization is only justified when it contributes to an overall
pattern of population optimization.
Optimization
of the populations of all species is an aspirational state that could be
achieved only in the context of the like optimization of the human population.
In order to optimize the human population we would need to bring human numbers
into ecological proportion with those of other species. Such optimization of
the human population would of course entail dramatic reduction, since the size
of our present population has been achieved at massive cost to other
populations. Such reduction would not be a matter merely of actual numbers
however, but of offsetting the ecological costs of human activity against any
positive ecological contributions that a prospective environmentally reformed
civilization might make to the biosphere[6]. In the absence of any environmentally
reformed civilization on the planet today however, the principle of
bioproportionality does call for major reductions in the human population, by
whatever consensual or incentive-driven methods might be available.
Since
no methods commensurate with this task have as yet materialized, this might
seem an unsatisfactory point at which to conclude the essay. But in fact my aim
has been less a practical one than a conceptual or philosophical one. I have
sought to show that organizing conservation exclusively around the category of
biodiversity has sold conservation disastrously short. When we look at
conservation exclusively through the lens of biodiversity, the only evident
constraint on the population of homo
sapiens is that it
should not be so large as to leave no room on earth for (minimum populations
of) other species. Otherwise biodiversity specifies no limit.
Bioproportionality as a norm, by contrast, sets a very definite limit: it
specifies (in the sense of rendering calculable in principle) optimal
population sizes for all species, including ours. To entertain a population in
the billions for us, while countenancing populations in the hundreds and low
thousands for most other species, flagrantly violates bioproportionality as a
precept. This precept thus helps to show up a critical normative blind spot at
the core of our conservation thinking.
Notes
[1] See, for example, the landmark US
Wilderness Act of 1964, Section 2.C. https://winapps.umt.edu/winapps/media2/wilderness/NWPS/documents/publiclaws/PDF/16_USC_1131-1136.pdf
[2] The diversity implied by the term
‘biodiversity’ is generally taken to include not only species diversity but
genetic diversity within species and diversity of ecosystem types. (United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, Article 2) But, for the
purposes of this paper, I shall focus mainly on species, since it is species
which figure most prominently in the rhetoric of conservation. Conservation
campaigns are often headlined by a requirement to save particular threatened
species.
[3] Note that a limited amount of wilderness
legislation continued to be passed; in Australia, for example, the NSW and SA
Wilderness Acts appeared in 1987 and 1992 respectively, while the Wild Rivers
Act appeared in Queensland in 2005 – and was repealed in 2014. Conservation in
general however became overwhelmingly defined in terms of biodiversity.
[4] See, for example, the influential
Ecomodernist Manifesto of 2015 that advocates, on both ethical and pragmatic
grounds, the rooting out of bio-inclusive tendencies within conservation
discourse in favour of an exclusively anthropocentric orientation. From this
latter perspective, the independent moral considerability of earth-life,
whether in the guise of individual organisms, ecosystems or species, will no
longer be countenanced; only its value for human communities will be taken into
account (Asafu-Adjaye 2015).
[5] Of all the versions of environmental
ethics developed in earlier decades, such “generalized respect and appreciation
for all living things” perhaps equates most closely to that of Paul Taylor
(Taylor 1986). For a convenient survey of the various versions, see Andrew
Brennan 2008.
[6] Architect William McDonough points out
that the combined biomass of ants on earth is greater than the combined biomass
of humanity. But the ant population is still optimal because ant activity
contributes more to ecosystems than it costs them. (McDonough and Braungart
2002).
Asafu-Adjaye,
J., et al., 2015. Eco-modernist
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<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf>
[Accessed 29 November 2019].
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A., 2008. Environmental ethics. Stanford
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