Endangered Species & Biodiversity: Ethical Issues
— Enc of Bioethics
2004, 2014

“Endangered Species and Biodiversity: Ethical Issues,” in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, Revised Edition, Warren T. Reich, ed. (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, Simon and Schuster, 1995), volume 2, pages 671-75. Republished, pages 748-752, volume 2, in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3rd ed., 2004. Bruce Jennings, ed. 4th ed. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014. Titled simply Bioethics. Rolston, "Endangered Species and Biodiversity," vol. 2, pp. 966-972.
Online at: https://hdl.handle.net/10217/233922

Reliable estimates are that about 20 percent of Earth's species may be lost within a few decades, about evenly distributed through major groups of plants and animals. The United Nations at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro launched the Convention on Biological Diversity. The U.S. Congress has sought to protect species through the Endangered Species Act. Almost all inhabited lands are impoverished of their native fauna and flora. On an anthropocentric account, the duties involved are to persons; there are no duties to endangered species, though duties may concern species. There is something something morally naive, about living in a reference frame where one species values everything else relative to its utility. Biodiversity is the common heritage of humankind, all nations share duties to protect it.