Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 26/06/2013
Event: Extinction event "will result in the loss of about a quarter of our species within the next 50 years"
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
Justin Webb: What is the impact that human beings have on the world? And what is the impact that we have a right to have, a moral right, based on the fact that we live here, the fact that we're quite clever and resourceful? Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study is bringing together some of the finest human minds, today, to wrestle with the issue of our footprint - in particular our impact on other species - and Professor Veronica Strang is an environmental anthropologist and is also Director of the Institute, and is here. Good morning to you.
Veronica Strang: Good morning.
Justin Webb: Let's deal with extinction, first of all, because the case, that people who are particularly worried about our footprint make, is that we are extinguishing other species in a way that just didn't happen in the past. There's always been extinction, but we're now contributing to it hugely.
Veronica Strang: Yes. Yes, there have been major extinction events in the past, but what we have done, in the last few centuries particularly, is to accelerate those, massively. And we're now looking at an extinction event that's caused fundamentally by human activities, which will result in the loss of about a quarter of our species within the next 50 years.
Justin Webb: Which raises two things really, I suppose. Number one, the morality of that, which I know you are going to touch on, but also the, kind of, practical impact on us as a species ourselves - the extent to which we are simply damaging ourselves by doing what we're doing to others.
Veronica Strang: Yes, I mean clearly there are many knock-on effects, in terms of human impacts on humans. For example, there's been a lot of discussion recently about bees and their well-being - they pollinate three quarters of our crops and that means about a third of our food. One of the other things to come out recently is the disappearance of the coral reefs entirely, in the next 40 years. About a quarter of the ocean species are dependent on them, 500 million people are dependent on those species. But I think that, actually, simply thinking about what it does to us is possibly the wrong way round, because what we have here is a problem - these extinctions are fundamentally symptoms. And they're the symptoms of our activities involved in expanding our use of land, water, resources, bringing in introduced species - all of the things that stress species to the point where their populations collapse.
But underlying that is really a way of thinking. And that's what we're really interested, in Durham. We're interested in interdisciplinary thinking that transforms how we think, and that allows us to approach this in fresh ways. And one of the things that I think we need to consider here is: what kind of relationship are we constructing with other species? And it seems to me that the underlying problem is our vision of nature as somehow separate from ourselves.
Justin Webb: But that's been part of us, hasn't it, as human beings.
Veronica Strang: It has been, for a very long time. But it's a specifically cultural view that tends to prevail. But there are of course other cultures that don't think that nature is quite so separate. And in many ways -
Justin Webb: Are there other cultures that - I mean, we all sort of talk about having a respect for nature, but are there cultures that genuinely say: in a choice between, I don't know, killing an earwig and killing a person who is part of our culture, we don't see a moral difference?
Veronica Strang: Uh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but if you think about -
Justin Webb: That's the crucial thing, isn't it - we do tend to think of ourselves as not just physically superior and mentally superior, but morally superior.
Veronica Strang: We do. We tend to think we have the right to manage the world. And, you know, for example I work with aboriginal Australians who don't have a, sort of, divided idea of nature and culture. And they have a more reciprocal kind of view of other species, a more sustainable view. I mean, there's a very nice example - you've got a culture which has had a relatively sustainable way of life for 60,000 years. In the last 200 years, our imported way of life has massively devastated a number of species in Australia. So there are other cultural ways of thinking about these things, and positioning humankind in relation to other species. And I think that maybe what we need to start thinking about is a different bio-ethics in which we recognise that we're inside nature, not outside it.
Now I do a lot of work on water, which is a very nice thing to think with, because if you start to think about how you're composed of water, how the water that flows through our bodies flows through every other organism on the planet, then you start to get a little sense of how we're very much part of the flow of events. And when we dam water and deprive other species, or pollute it, or simply create climate change that makes the glaciers melt so there isn't enough, those are all material effects.
So I think it's about thinking about ourselves in relation to our material relationships with other species, and the way in which we consider their needs, reciprocally. So it's about: do we compete with them? Or do we collaborate? And at the moment, what we've got are growth-based economies and an attitude of competition, which isn't working.
Justin Webb: Professor Veronica Strang, thank you very much.