THE BOULDER DAILY CAMERA - Guest Opinion
December 20, 1992
One of the pleasures my wife and I share is our Saturday morning perambulations
along the Boulder Creek Path. We disembark at the intersection of Boulder Creek
and 30th; she walks an easterly circuit on the creekway and I run west to Eben
Fine and back.
We used to look forward to the scene of perky prairie dogs surveying their private domain in a large empty lot just south of the creek. They seemed unperturbed by our presence or the constant traffic up and down 30th.Suddenly, one Saturday not long ago, this scene was dramatically different. The little dogs were gone, and only empty mounds suggested that a thriving colony had lived there. A sign announced that the prairie dogs had been exterminated and a telephone number was provided to call for information.
Sendora Chappelle in a letter to the Open Forum (Nov. 13) reacted to this outrage much as we with anger that such an evil thing had been done and with frustration that there was nothing we could have done to stop it. As she did, we implore: why?
I called the number on the sign and spoke to John Bruning of Facilities Management at the University of Colorado. I was told that the extermination was necessary because a biology greenhouse was to be erected on the site next spring. What monstrous Irony! We need to kill these harmless creatures in order to better study their species and their kin in a controlled environment!
The larger problem that this small incident epitomizes - the endless conflict between human and animal interests - apparently defies any solution that is satisfactory to all. We humans profess and mostly believe that animals have a deserved and essential place on the planet; yet, when it comes to a question of priority, we always win and they always lose. The idea that our lives may be inextricably linked to theirs - for our spiritual as well as material well-being - is gaining currency and urgency among earth-minded and thoughtful persons.
The principal source of the conflict, viewed objectively in terms of the global ecosystem, is not the destructive habits or the reproductive capacity of animals; it is the rapid and uncontrolled growth of the human population. The late 18th century English economist Thomas Malthus enunciated the thesis that an uncontrolled species (he was thinking of humans) has the potential of outstripping the carrying capacity of the land on which it lives. For the species to survive, individual lives must be limited by some countervailing force.
Only in recent times has the government of the United States (often goaded by private organizations) recognized that, under certain circumstances, a group of animals has definable rights (e.g., the Wild, Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971) and, at the same time, that some sort of population control is required for the good of the species itself and its environment. Under the protection of law, government agencies manage allegedly self-endangered species by the generally accepted practices of hunting and exporting animals to other venues; by the less palatable practices of poisoning and uncropped shooting; and, more recently, by the novel and often contested practice of reintroducing natural predators.
Lurking beneath all of this activity is the tacit anthropocentric notion that the animals must ultimately give ground; that they live or die by and for our indulgence and convenience. In Western culture this idea follows logically from the cherished Judeo-Christian tradition in which mankind is the supreme divine achievement in all the universe to whom all other creatures are subordinate and subservient.
A cosmic appraisal of the respective roles of humans and animals in the natural scheme of things would not support this proposition. In terms of the long term health and ecological balance of the planet, things appear quite different. Despite our often-stated, well-intentioned goals and precepts, humans are relentlessly destroying all other species (larger than insects and microbes) in staggering numbers. Like a malignant cancer that feeds on its host, there is no countervailing force to stem or even to slow the irresistible process of human expansion.
Warren Hern, Boulder anthropologist and physician, finds a grim similarity between the human effect on the global environment and a malignant neoplasm's effect on an individual. There are four main characteristics common to both: * rapid, uncontrolled growth * invasion and destruction of adjacent tissue * metastasis to remote sites * de-differentiation. The first three traits ought to be intuitively recognizable patterns of human use of the Earth. The fourth is less so until one contemplates the fact that cancer cells look about the same wherever they occur in the body, and, similarly, the absence of basic differences between modern cities anywhere on Earth at the close of the 20th century.
On a micro-scale it is not difficult to see that the prairie dog colony at the intersection of Boulder Creek and 30th succumbed to these processes. The only unconfirmed element in the analogy between human growth and a cancer is that untreated cancers usually kill their hosts even though, in the process, it means that the cancer cells themselves must die.
Howard Garcia is a Boulder physicist.