Farewell, oh Beautiful Baiji

So, the Yangtze River Dolphin is officially the first large vertebrate to become extinct since the Japanese Sea Lion. Not a single specimen of the Baiji, as it was locally known, was found in an intensive six-week search of its habitats, carried out by a team from the Zoological Society of London.


I have to say that the story brought a tear to my eye when I heard it on the radio at lunch. I know, of course, that the Chinese have as much right to develop as we British did when we killed off our resident populations of bears, wolves and wild boar in the the name of progress. But that doesn't make the story any less sad, nor the Baiji's disappearance any less tragic. As Richard Dawkins once wrote in reference to the Thylacine: "It may be true that it was a pest to humans, but humans were a bigger pest to it, and now there are no Thylacines left and a considerable surplus of humans." The development of the Chinese economy, like the development of our own, has lifted millions of people out of poverty; if only it could have been achieved without the loss of the river dolphin.

Nevertheless, there's cause for hope. The Baiji died out, some believe, at the cusp of a 'casual' period, in which humans caused extinctions wholly inadvertantly, due to ignorance and accident. With increasing development comes increasing awareness of environmental issues and the importance of conservation, and no country has proven to be as single-minded in its pursuit of a goal as modern China. Part of the reason for the Baiji's disappearance was because Chairman Mao believed certain local suspicions about the creature were irrational and the way to 'cure' those suspicions was to eradicate the animal. China's current leadership have distanced themselves from Mao in almost every respect, and we can be optimistic that respect for the environment is one of those areas also - there are now 40 panda reserves compared to just 13 twenty years ago, for example. How sad that it will all come too late for the Baiji.

Equality and Proportionality

.
I've been watching Save Planet Earth on the BBC these last couple of nights. It's nice to get the chance to see intelligent programming about the environment that doesn't mention carbon footprints and emission trading (yawn). Instead, the series has focused on plain, old-fashioned conservation: protecting endangered species from disappearing.

It has concentrated to a large extent on what is, to me, the key issue regarding conversation - namely the importance of balancing the progress of the developing world with the safety of animal populations in those areas. The programmes have been very careful to highlight the importance of incorporating the needs and desires of local people into conservation efforts; hence tonight's episode (on the Ethiopian Wolf) devoted some minutes to investigating how environmentalists in Southern Ethiopia concentrate much of their efforts on educating people in sustainable farming and development.

I'm all for supporting such projects, but whenever I hear about them I'm always reminded of the apparently inescapable hypocrisy of the West - the different standards we set for developing countries and ourselves. We've seen it most recently from the attitude towards China's rising carbon emissions; people worry and fret that "two coal power stations open in China every week" - the implication being that China is the real threat regarding climate change and the rest of us need not bother doing anything about it - forgetting that, per capita, Western countries produce vastly more Carbon than China. But we also see it in the conservation movement. Western countries have been singularly poor at conserving their animal populations - wolves, bears and wild boar were hunted to extinction over a few hundred years in Britain, for example - and yet we're the keenest to force other people in the world to inhibit their own development in order to protect other animal species.

I'm sure that it can be argued that we, in the West, having effectively destroyed our countries as natural "wilderness" environments, are now in a good position to persuade people in the developing world not to make the same mistakes that we have. But I'm not so sure. That position, I think, would require a genuine recalcitrance on our part which doesn't actually seem to be there. (It might be demonstrated by a greater willingness to reopen areas to wilderness.) As it stands, our position is essentially that people in developing countries should make sacrifices for the environment that we never made during our development, and which we are still largely unwilling to make. Do as we say, in other words, not as we do. I hardly need point out how inadequate that is.

It reminds me of a statement I read recently made by a Chinese representative to the Human Rights Committee in 1997, in defence of his country's human rights record. "The developed Western countries," he said, "have the unshirkable responsibility for the human rights problems the world faces today...how come 1.3 billion people are living in poverty? Does it have nothing to do with the aggression, exploitation and plundering by the colonialists of the past? Isn't it the consequence of the irrational international economic order established by the developed countries?" One is tempted to note that much the same argument can be applied to environmental issues: the West is largely responsible for the damage that humans have done to the natural world, and yet we are mostly happy to foist future responsibility, and blame for current problems, onto the Third World. Why, when we abused our own environments during our industrial development, do we expect other countries to do the opposite?

That doesn't mean that efforts don't need to be made on the part of developing countries to protect their natural places (nor to protect the human rights of their citizens); it just means that those efforts should be concurrent with equal and proportionate efforts on our part, too. Otherwise our hand-wringing and moralising is worse than meaningless.