Abstract
In the United States, the northern spotted owl has declined throughout the Pacific Northwest even though its habitat has been protected under the Endangered Species Act. The main culprit for this decline is the likely human-facilitated invasion of the barred owl. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service conducted an experiment in which they lethally removed the barred owls from selected areas in Washington, Oregon, and California. In those locations, the northern spotted owl populations have stabilized and increased. Some have argued that we should kill the barred owl to protect the northern spotted owl. In this essay, I argue that the competitive displacement of northern spotted owls by the barred owl should not be addressed by killing the later to save the former. The most powerful objection to this conclusion is that we will lose old-growth temperate rainforest without an indicator species like the spotted owl protected under the Endangered Species Act. In response, I argue that we should directly conserve old-growth temperate rainforest independent of the northern spotted owl. In effect, we need legislation and policies that protects endangered ecosystems.
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Notes
This “viability standard” was removed by President George W. Bush’s administration.
For a fascinating history of these events, see the autobiography of Jack Ward Thomas (2004). He was the Chief of the USFS at the time.
For the purposes of this paper, I will not try to examine what sorts of experience owls can have. The important point is whatever they are, they are likely to be very similar given how closely related they are. For some very interesting work on animal minds, see Tye (2016), Carruthers (2019), and Andrews (2020).
I am indebted to Katie McShane for raising this objection.
It is worth noting that if the number of barred owls killed is fewer than the morally relevant number of northern spotted owls, then my criticism is turned back. However, there is nothing in our knowledge of the population ecology and demography of these owls that suggests this is so.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
One might insist that we should prevent the decline of species even if they are not formally recognized as threatened or endangered. However, there are two problems with this claim. First, a recent report argues that one third of the United States’ wildlife is vulnerable to extinction (Stein et al., 2018). They suggest as many as 12,000 species merit conservation action. It is unclear how we prevent the decline of so many species one-by-one through some federal or state level policy. Second, I worry that this leads to a radical form of “policing nature” where for example humans try to settle every instance of competition, predation, and parasitism through a utilitarian calculus (Cowen, 2003). However, some are committed to such radical interventionism (Johannsen, 2020). Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising pressing this issue.
It is worth noting that that if species and subspecies have intrinsic value and we have to kill a larger number of sentient organisms to save the focal species, this might be morally justified. The crucial problem we face in the case under discussion is that the killing of barred owls to save the northern spotted owl would continue with no end in sight. Thus, if a large number of barred owls needed to be killed, but this number was well short of the entire barred owl species, then I would be more likely to endorse killing them to save the northern spotted owl. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on these points.
It is also worth noting that my criticisms of applying the principle that we should harm the few rather than the many in this case probably lose force. We are considering killing many barred owls to protect organisms of many, many different species.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to think more deeply about this objection.
Of the listed species in the United States, 884 are plants; 307 are invertebrates, including insects, mollusks, and others; 163 are fishes; 95 are birds; 96 are mammals; 36 are reptiles; 35 are amphibians; and two are fungi – lichens, actually. There are 26 species that are candidates for listing under the ESA.
It is interesting that the ESA is defined in such a way to protect ecosystems as well. In Section 1531(b) is states that the purpose of the ESA is “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved.”
The term ‘interaction strength’ comes from food web theory (Mittelbach & McGill, 2019, 185 – 187). But we can generalize the concept to include abiotic components as well. One interesting thing to note about this causal interactionism is for any given region, only some of the biotic and abiotic components will be parts of ecosystem. The interactions between components might be too weak. This accords with food web theory since there often only a few strong interactions and many weak ones in a given ecological community.
For discussion of the history of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
To be clear, I think the term ‘ecosystem’ refers to many different groups of abiotic and biotic components, and interactive ecosystems are one type of groupings, but they are not the only type.
Though Rodriguez operationalizes notions of endangerment for token ecosystems, we can easily adopt their notion to apply to biomes. For example, if (a) every instance of a given biome has been observed or estimated to be reduced by more than 70% and (b) the threat(s) continue to exist, then it is endangered.
The Nature Needs Half movement proposes to conserve at least 50% of 846 ecoregions by 2030. The beginning of the movement can be traced to Eugene and Howard Odum when they wrote, “It would be prudent for planners everywhere to strive to preserve 50% of the total environment as natural environment” (Odum & Odum, 1972, 183).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philip Cafaro and Ronald Sandler for inviting me to their workshop on the ethics of mass extinction and also the participants Philip Cafaro, Eileen Crist, Thom van Dooren, Martin Drenthen, Helen Kopnina, Greg Mikkelson, Clare Palmer, Christopher Preston, Holmes Rolston, Ronald Sandler, and Ian Smith for their critical engagement with this essay. Also, I would like to thank Joel Martinez, Katie McShane, Michael Nelson, and Levi Tenen for very helpful feedback. Finally, I would like to thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
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Odenbaugh, J. Owl vs Owl: Examining an Environmental Moral Tragedy. Philosophia 50, 2303–2317 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00521-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00521-z