Musing about pests

2 hours ago

3 min read

Are Humans the Pests?

By John Reilly

Let’s imagine a non-human-centric approach to decisions about the environment, say a ‘council of beings’ that would oversee conflicts between us and other species. We humans would propose a path forward with an environmental assessment of how our actions would affect the planet. We’d have to guess at how the “Council” would evaluate our proposal. We can’t know other species’ preferences since we don’t speak “mushroomese” or “molluskish.” Realistically, we need to admit that we only have an inkling of the synergies, interactions, and communications among species—how they depend on each other, we on them, and they on us. What about conflicts that don’t involve us, at least directly? How should we weigh in on whether the lion can eat the antelope or the snake swallow the rat?

Back to the Council of Beings: I can imagine a motion being made and seconded (and easily passed) that the biggest pest on the planet is homo sapiens, and it should be eradicated. All in favor? We might get rats, roaches, and white-tailed deer on our side. They have done quite well in the disturbed path we’ve cut through ecosystems. By almost any standard, we’ve taken more than our share of the planet’s resources and have driven any number of species to extinction. How do we even allocate the world’s resources when ecosystems are so interdependent? But we surely have some right to continue to exist. The question is, at what level?

As an environmental economist, my training is to turn everything into dollars-and-cents to come up with a cost-benefit analysis as a basis for making decisions. It’s a clearly human-centric approach to managing the environment, particularly since other species don’t directly participate (i.e. buy things) in our market economy. Even when we try to account for nature through non-market valuation methods, soliciting opinions on the value of “non-market” goods, we are still relying on the views of human beings. Is this type of valuation the antithesis of environmentalism?

"An enlightened human-centric approach would recognize we need to tread lightly or risk undermining our own well-being."

If so, how do we make decisions when a conflict arises as we choose between starvation and clearing some patch of a native ecosystem to grow some food? Some might say this is a false choice. We have lots of ways to get food without clearing new areas—have you noticed the supermarket is open seven days a week? Okay, that’s a cheap shot. But, if we don’t need to clear, how much can we abandon?

Given our (human) history, it seems audacious to imagine that we should manage all the planet’s species and ecosystems and make judgments about them. No matter how “informed” our judgments are, they are still based on incomplete knowledge. Any decision to preserve one thing at the expense of another, to make tradeoffs that are inevitable, is establishing at least a relative value of who or what gets that patch of real estate. Shouldn’t we just recognize that we are only one of the many species that exist on the planet? And shouldn’t we, like the rest, use our resources and abilities to survive, prosper, and expand? “Let nature take its course” since we are part of nature, no more or no less important than any other species?

But what would happen if we actually followed that principle? A scary thought, that. We just expand and conquer endlessly until we so overuse the earth’s resources that our population completely collapses because we have no predator that we have not overcome, like other invasive pests. Eventually, some new quasi-equilibrium is established that may involve repeated population explosions followed by collapse, followed by… maybe biodiversity so narrowed that the earth can’t support us at all. The remaining forms of life breathe a collective sigh of relief that our infestation has finally been brought under control. It seems not in our interest to expand inexorably. If we can be just smart enough to realize that our existence and the quality of it depend on the intricate web of species arranged into an ecosystem of ecosystems (the Earth), then we can take a human-centric approach to how we interact with the rest of the planet. An enlightened human-centric approach would recognize that we humans need to tread lightly or risk undermining our own well-being. Use what we know, pests that we are, recognize our ignorance, and tread lightly.

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Photo Credits:

Forest Path & Wild River courtesy of Julie Reiff

Oiled Bird: Marine Photobank. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.