← Return to search results
Back to Prindle Institute

ecosystem

Posted on

Reintroducing the Gray Wolf

photograph of two wolves stalking in the snow

Earlier this month, the citizens of Colorado passed Proposition 114, a measure that reintroduces gray wolves into the local ecosystem. The measure involves a plan to reintegrate the wolves by the end of 2023. It passed with 50.4% of votes in support and 49.6% in opposition; it was quite controversial. Some citizens of Colorado view the proposal as a way to honor the promises we made when we passed the Endangered Species Act. Others are concerned about the potential threats posed by reintroducing a predator into the community.

The story of the disappearance of wolves from their native habitats is the story of human western expansion and colonialism. Wolves didn’t simply disappear all on their own. During this time, many people hunted recklessly and decimated populations of elk, deer, and bison. The result was that the food source for predators like gray wolves became limited. Some populations of wolves turned to eating livestock to survive. In response, humans killed every last gray wolf in Colorado. In fact, they killed virtually every gray wolf in the contiguous United States.

As time progressed, humans stopped hunting deer and elk at the same rates that they once did. At this point, however, wolves, the natural predators of these species, no longer existed. This imbalance fundamentally changed ecosystems. Deer populations exploded and ended up harming forests in various ways. Forestry departments embarked on deer-culling missions — the practice of killing deer in order to keep ecosystems and the other living beings that participate in them in some kind of equilibrium.

The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. It required the Federal Wildlife Service to, if possible, restore animals that have been eliminated from ecosystems. All species of wolves in the contiguous United States were listed as endangered so, in keeping with the act, the FWS was obligated to restore them. In some areas they satisfied this obligation. For example, in 1995 the federal government reintroduced gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park. The findings in Yellowstone suggest that reintroduction of wolves into an ecosystem appears to lead to greater biodiversity in that system. The carcasses of the animals on which wolves feed also serve as a source of food for scavenger species.

Some concerns with Proposition 114 are procedural. Many felt that the issue should not have been up to voters to decide. Reintroduction of gray wolves will impact some areas of the state more than others. Critics are concerned that those who voted in favor of reintroduction are not the people who will have to face the consequences. For example, some rural voters argue that it was urban voters who dictated the trajectory of the vote. Urban voters won’t have to deal with the wolves.

Farmers and cattle ranchers are concerned about the impacts that the presence of wolves might have on their livestock. Ranchers are concerned about the well-being of their animals. Despite the fact that they are raising them to be slaughtered, ranchers would like to be able to allow cattle to freely graze without concerns that they will fall prey to wolves. They feel it is their obligation to protect their livestock up until the time when they send them to CAFOS and slaughterhouses, and the reintroduction of wolves into the ecosystem makes satisfying that duty more difficult. What’s more, because gray wolves are endangered, if a rancher actually witnesses a wolf threatening their cattle, they cannot kill or harass the wolf without risking jail time or a $100,000 fine. That said, there is no reason to believe that scaring the wolf off would expose the rancher to the threat of fine or jail time.

Another pressing concern is that cattle are an investment. To make a living, ranchers need that investment to pay off. If their animals die before they can be sold, the ranchers lose money. In response to this concern, however, advocates of the measure point out that it includes a commitment to offer compensation to ranchers who lose livestock to wolves.

Many ranchers also consider these kinds of environmental policies to be an existential threat to their way of life. They claim that the environmental movement, and conservationism in particular, needs rural allies. Some rural dwellers feel that urban environmentalists are not looking out for the interests of farmers and ranchers and as a result they feel little motivation to cooperate on issues related to public lands.

There are also concerns for the deer and elk populations who will be hunted by the wolves. When we reintroduce a predator into an ecosystem, we increase the extent to which that predator’s prey will experience fear. We also increase the likelihood that deer, elk, and other potential wolf prey will experience more painful deaths than they otherwise might have. It may be true that some of these animals will ultimately be killed by humans as part of wildlife management efforts, but deaths by these hunters are more likely to be fear and pain free.

There is also a metaethical question in play here. Do we have moral obligations only to individual, sentient beings who live in and have experiences of the world? Or do we have moral obligations to species, abstract groupings that are conceptual and not sentient?

Advocates of Proposition 114 argue that we have a moral obligation to protect endangered species. Arguments for this conclusion take several different forms. One is that we have a moral obligation to rectify harms and injustices that human beings have brought about. To the extent that wolves ever did humans any harm, they did so because of the changes that we made to their ecosystem. Advocates of Proposition 114 argue that it was unjust for us to kill off wolves en masse, so we now have an obligation to restore what we have diminished. Human beings are responsible for mass extinction events, and we need to take responsibility for that. The form that this responsibility takes should be more than feeling guilt and mourning the loss. We should actually do something about it, in those cases in which we still can.

Some thinkers, like ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, have argued that species have intrinsic value. The continued existence of any given species is testament to the fact that it has endured the harsh tests of time and the ravages of nature. When the story of a species is brought to an abrupt end unnecessarily by humans, it’s a great tragedy.

Still others argue that it is best for ecosystems to manage themselves naturally. They contend that the equilibrium established by nature is usually more sustainable than a balance that human beings attempt to artificially establish. The reintroduction of the wolf renews the potential that the ecosystem has of attaining that natural balance. This is better, in the long run, for the ecosystem, and ecosystems are worth preserving.

At the end of the day, this case lays bare a fundamental tension in our country that is about more than just gray wolf populations. Environmental change, and what many would refer to as environmental justice, requires people to adapt their lifestyles. Making these changes is easy enough for some, but it is much more difficult for others. Some people’s livelihood, and, indeed, some people’s very identity, is tied up in practices that will be dramatically altered or even eliminated by efforts to protect and preserve the environment and the living creature that inhabit it. It’s no wonder the country is deeply divided.

Posted on

The Ethics of Sending Life to the Moon and Beyond

image of space with stars and emission nebulas

It was recently reported that an Israeli organization SpaceIL sent thousands of dehydrated tardigrades to the moon. While the capsule crashed, and thus there is no way to know for sure if they survived, tardigrades are very resilient creatures who may be able to remain alive on the lunar surface in a dormant state. With this admission, a large host of ethical issues have been raised in the aftermath. These include the ethics of sending earth species to foreign environments and the ethics of private space organizations being able to act in space without regulation.

With regard to the issue of regulation, aerospace engineer Natalie Panek and NASA astrobiologist Monica Vidaurri have expressed concern. Viduarri is concerned about the fact that private organizations do not answer to any protections or ethics office. As reported by Vice, she and Panek have urged for more accountability when it comes to private organizations. Mika McKinnon of Vice notes, “while not illegal, the idea that a private company could accidentally scatter living creatures on the Moon within any oversight or even disclosure is unnerving.” To resolve this issue, many have urged for new regulations and laws to ensure that careful conversations are had before further life forms are sent into space.

The issue of sending earth life to foreign environments like the Moon or even Mars is even more complicated. For decades the idea of terraforming or changing a planet or other body to make it more habitable to human life has been considered. Ethically, there may be good reasons to do this, including allowing for more space for habitation, advancing our ability to study space, and because it may help preserve the human species in the long term.

The idea is also problematic. This is partially because we can’t be certain that there is no life in some of these locations. If we seed life to Mars and there is already life that we have not previously discovered, then it has the potential to drastically affect the planetary environment and harm local lifeforms. This can be ethically problematic not only because of the harm we could inflict on extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial ecosystems, but if extraterrestrial ecosystems are contaminated it could also mean that we lose the ability to answer important scientific questions about the development of life in the universe.

One of the concerns is the possibility of interfering with an environment that we may not fully understand and may wish to study. This raises issues beyond merely interfering with potentially already existing life. A broader issue involves affecting or changing environments in space that do not have life. This concern is raised by Vidaurri who points out, “WE made something on ANOTHER world that we do not fully understand. It has an environment, even if we deemed it ‘barren’ to any life on earth.” If we wish to engage in any kind of terraforming or significant alteration of the Moon or Mars, then we face an inherent risk of contaminating a hitherto pristine environment.

Alternatively, this raises an important question about whether environments, even lifeless ones, have some kind of moral status. For instrumental purposes, preserving a pristine, lifeless environment may allow us to study it better. However, the concern raised by Vidaurri seems to be that an environment, even a lifeless, barren one, may have some inherent moral worth and so interfering with it is morally wrong. Environmental philosophers have considered similar questions.

According to Ronald Sandler, for an environmental collective to have inherent worth it must be goal-directed since otherwise we have no clear way to determine if it has been harmed or benefited. One environmental collective which he suggests may have such worth is ant colonies. However, ecosystems as a whole, he argues, are not cohesive or goal-directed enough to possess inherent worth. If an ecosystem can’t claim to have inherent worth, then it is even more difficult to claim that a lifeless environment does. If it does not, then it isn’t obvious why it is inherently wrong to change extraterrestrial environments like the moon.

This issue is not necessarily new either. In his 1997 book Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan addressed the matter. Where life may already exist, he suggests that safeguarding our species by settling other planets may be offset by the danger we pose to such extraterrestrial life. But in the absence of such life, he notes “here I find myself an unapologetic human chauvinist…on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with the full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.”

According to chemistry professor Michael Mautner, seeding the universe with life is a moral obligation. Since life on Earth will not survive forever, he claims that we have an obligation “to plan for the propagation of life” on other planets. He proposes a strategy to deposit primitive organisms on potentially fertile planets in order to help modify their environments and jumpstart evolutionary development. While he has noted the concern about interfering with potential extraterrestrial life that may already exist, he proposes to only target locations where life could not have evolved yet. However, this does not address the concerns of those who argue that it is wrong to modify pristine lifeless environments that may include the Moon.

In a 2009 article in the journal Bioethics, Mautner echoes Sagan’s point and the concern about modifying environments in space. Taking a more pragmatic view, he notes, “Seeding other planetary systems could prevent the study of pristine space but seeding a few hundred new solar systems will secure and propagate life while leaving hundreds of billions of pristine stars for exploration.”

Questions about the moral status of lifeless environments are going to be important as further exploration of space takes place. It joins questions like do we have the right to change environments in space to our liking? and to what extent should we take efforts to protect alien life that we may not even be able to detect? The answers to such questions may not only affect how we behave in outer space, but also on Earth as well.

Posted on

‘Toto Forever’ and the Ethics of Sound Pollution

Namibian sand dunes outlined against blue sky

In early 2019, Namibian artist Max Siedentopf revealed his newest sound installation: six solar-powered speakers hidden somewhere in the Namib Desert with an mp3 player programmed to repeatedly play one song – Toto’s quadruple platinum 1982 hit, ‘Africa.’ Dubbing the project ‘Toto Forever,’  the artist explained to the BBC “[I] wanted to pay the song the ultimate homage and physically exhibit ‘Africa’ in Africa…Some [Namibians] love it and some say it’s probably the worst sound installation ever. I think that’s a great compliment.”

With nearly 500 million recorded listenings on Spotify (and over 447 million views on YouTube), Toto’s rock-pop smash hit remains as unusually popular with contemporary fans as it was when first released nearly four decades ago. Dozens of covers circulate online, redone in genres ranging from heavy metal to 8-bit electronica to jazz saxophone, and ‘Africa’ has been featured in television shows like South Park and Stranger Things, tributed by celebrities in home movies, and sampled heavily in Pitbull’s ‘Ocean to Ocean’ from the soundtrack of 2018’s billion-dollar blockbuster film Aquaman.

But what are the ethical implications of consistent sound pollution in an otherwise untouched ecosystem? Should the widespread popularity of ‘Africa’ in America allow the song to pollute Africa itself?

Although it is designed to withstand the harsh climate of Namibia’s coastal desert, Siedentopf admits that the environment will eventually “devour the installation entirely,” leaving the plastic components of the project to decay in the sand – however, long before this sort of waste becomes an issue, the persistent drum beat of the four-and-a-half minute song will inevitably affect the local environment for the worse as it, among other issues, drives away animals, thereby disrupting the natural balance of the ecosystem.

Sometimes called the “forgotten stepchild of the environmental movement,” concern for noise pollution has increased as technological developments over the last century have led to ever-widening varieties of aural litter. Although activists groups like the Noise Abatement Society or the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse are often focused on the consequences for humans who cannot escape the sounds of traffic, phone notifications, emergency sirens, and the like, the broad ecological consequences of modern technology are also an area of real concern. Consider, for example, the NAS’s wind turbines campaign that aims to raise awareness about some unexpected side-effects of this green energy source that often sounds like, in the words of a family living near a wind farm in northwestern England, “a washing machine that’s gone wrong. Its whooshing drumming just goes on and on…it’s an audio version of Chinese Water Torture. The noise is such that it is felt as much as heard.’

While wild areas are often far from quiet themselves, it is not hard to imagine how the introduction of artificial sounds can adversely affect local populations. As Kirsten Parris and Robert McCauley explain, such noise “can affect an animal’s ability to hear or make it difficult for it to find food, locate mates and avoid predators. It can also impair its ability to navigate, communicate, reproduce and participate in normal behaviours.” Although the consequences of such disturbances can take time to present themselves, the ripple effects of food chain disruption can be catastrophic in the long run.

Often, environmental activism depends on something like cost-benefit analyses to determine how much inconvenience should be allowable in return for green initiatives; in the case of ‘Toto Forever,’ a largely conceptual artwork that has already started to fade from the public consciousness, the math does not seem difficult. Not only has whatever popular aesthetic value produced by Siedentopf’s piece already begun to fade, but that value must be weighed against the invasive effects of unnecessary noise on the local ecosystem of “one of world’s oldest and most biologically diverse deserts.” More importantly, this can be a case that draws popular attention more broadly to the ethical issues of noise pollution in general – something that “a hundred men or more” could certainly do something about.