WHY CONSERVE WILDLIFE

Population biologist Paul Ehrlich illustrates the danger of potential species losses, with a dramatic example:  the ecosystem is like an airplane in which we are passengers.  We can go on removing the rivets that hold the plane’s wings up, one by one, for quite a while.  While no single rivet may determine when we will crash, ultimately one particular rivet surely will.  Each species that becomes extinct is like one more rivet wrenched from our plane.

Going beyond such arguments wildlife and their habitats provide us with tangible benefits.  The forests that clothe the habitats of our wildlife like tigers, elephants, hornbills, lion-tailed macaques, king cobras are also watersheds of major river systems of Karnataka such as Cauvery, Bhadra, Nethravathi and Tunga.  These forests regulate the flow of water after the seasonal rains and protect the soil underneath from erosion.  The survival of these forests is, therefore, critical to the welfare of millions of farmers who depend on these rivers.  When we protect wildlife from human destruction we are not indulging in a luxury that we cannot afford in a poverty-stricken, overpopulated country as argued by some.  We are, in fact, protecting the soil-water resources that sustain millions of people in our state. 

Our forests are also treasure troves of biological diversity.  They harbor millions of species of plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.  These life forms took millions of years to evolve; we have only just begun to document their extraordinary variety and diversity.  Consequently, we barely understand the complex ecological linkages among these plants and animals: certainly not enough to predict how the elimination of one species may affect the fate of others. 

Often, extermination of species can disrupt links between predators and prey, flowers and pollinators, fruits and the dispersers of their seeds.  Wild plants and animals have to be primarily saved wherever they occurring in the living landscapes around us. 

The diversity of plant and animal life needs to be preserved also because of the immense current benefits and future gains that it can bring to us.  Most of our crop plants and domestic animals are bred from wild relatives and can potentially greatly benefit from the vast, barely tapped wild gene pools.  Many of our current drugs, as well as sources of energy, fibers and structural materials, come from a few exploited species that we have discovered.  As biotechnology becomes an increasingly important weapon in our fight against hunger; homelessness, poverty and diseases, the role of those as yet undiscovered life forms would become even more central to our welfare.  Yet the natural habitats that harbor potentially useful life forms are being lost everyday in a massive extinction spasm that we inflict on nature with such metronomic regularity.  Sometimes we humans seem determined to burn this unique insurance policy that nature has generously provisioned for our future. 

The remaining wildlife habitats are wonderful laboratories of nature, an irreplaceable library of life.  In these we can study nature at work and benefit from the knowledge we gain.  Moreover, the wild landscapes that now harbor our wildlife comprise less than 3 percent of our country’s landscape of which only 1 percent is inviolate for wildlife.  Apart from such practical reasons, there are also ethical and aesthetic reasons for saving wildlife.  Forests that sustain animal and plant communities are products of millions of years of natural evolution.  Don’t they have a right to survive and evolve as nature intended them to, at least in some parts of the once-green earth that we have so drastically modified?

This country has a history of thousands of years. Obviously there are a lot of social injustices that have gone on over this vast landscape.  But do you think that by sacrificing this 3 percent land in protected areas we will be able to make a dent on these long standing social problems? If the problem is something we have not been able to solve on 97 percent of the land, we are convinced that it cannot be solved by sacrificing this 3 percent of the land that is now in wildlife protected areas, to meet some temporary social need. For the same reason, to a country that is endowed with such intelligence and resources, it will not involve any major social sacrifice to protect these remnant natural landscapes. 

We need to view our protected areas very differently.  If the Taj Mahal, for instance, is dynamited and broken up into pieces and the stones used to build a housing colony in Agra, we would all undoubtedly call that stupid. Even then, the Taj Mahal can be rebuilt, if we have its design and plan. But once we destroy these intricate ecological webs there is no bringing them back!