Endangered Species Debate Touches on Ethics, Motives

The idea of preserving endangered species at all costs is still a matter of contention between conservationists and developers.

Environmentalists argue that all such organisms should be protected, if only because we still know so little about the natural world.

“Why carelessly toss away potentially valuable living things?” they ask. Medicines and other useful items often come from unassuming plants and animals. Scopolamine, commonly used to control motion sickness, is found in the lowly jimsonweed; aspirin first came from willow bark; quinine, used against malaria, came from cinchona bark.

Also, what we don’t know can hurt us.

Biologists no longer speak of a food chain, but of a food web, complex interrelationships that they admittedly don’t know all that much about. They don’t know, for instance, what strands of the web can be safely cut, if any; that is, what single species can be lost without catastrophic effect.

“You’ve got to know why they are where they are,” says Clyde Eriksen, professor of biology at the Claremont Colleges and director of the Bernard Biological Station, “or you can’t manage them, you can’t move them, you can’t deal with them. You put them over here and they die, and you don’t know why.”

Scientists do know when an entire food web collapses. One terrible summer on Lake Erie is a popular example.

Mayfly larvae were normally a major food source for fish on Lake Erie. But the increasing pollution of the lake with sewage, fertilizers and other nutrients during the 1950s greatly increased the minute underwater plant life at the base of the food web. All life in the lake is dependent on oxygen, much of it carried underwater from the mixing action of wind-driven waves. But in August, 1955, 10 rare uninterrupted windless days left the bottom of the lake void of oxygen. The mayflies were the first to go, followed by aquatic insects and clams, and, ultimately, most of the commercial lake trout and whitefish. Many commercial fishermen around Lake Erie went out of business that year and the next.

But just as compelling to Eriksen and many environmentalists is an ethical argument.

“Who the hell do we think we are?” he asks, to lightly discard another living species.

Many developers these days have become more sensitive to these arguments, as well as to the heavy shift of public opinion toward preservation of the environment.

“But developers are different than environmentalists and slow-growthers,” observes John J. Kirlan, a University of Southern California professor of public administration “Of course, I know some developers who are also environmentalists. . . . But by and large, their orientation is that the human environment, the built environment, is an improved environment. I know a man who is an attorney for developers who says: ‘I love to look out over a steel mill, a development. I think that’s human progress.’ And you know, it’s hard logically to fault that argument. I think you can temper it somewhat and say, ‘Well, could we have done it in ways that were less environmentally disruptive?’ But I think their starting premise is that we improve humans’ lives when we build things.”

Developers point out that the cost of protecting endangered species is passed along to home buyers, making it more difficult for people to buy their chunk of the American dream. For example, as much as $1,000 is expected to be added to the price of nearby new homes to provide a preserve for the endangered Stephens’ kangaroo rat in Riverside County. Meanwhile, as Mel Wynn, president of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, notes, the average price of a new home in Southern California is pushing $200,000.

Other developers question where environmentalists have put their social priorities. For instance, they ask, how much low-income housing could be bought for the estimated $104 million that it will likely cost to preserve the habitat of that same kangaroo rat?

Finally, many developers persist in their conviction that many environmentalists are using endangered species as a smoke screen, that their true agenda is simply to slow, or stop, development.