an inconvenient frog

I recently read something that boggled my mind. (I say that as though it was an unusual occurrence!)

Richard Martineau, a rogue journalist whose no-nonsense approach I find refreshing, posted this on his blog earlier this week. The one topic on which we consistently fail to see eye to eye: the environment. He says that most environmentalists are hysterical tree-huggers who cry wolf at every turn. He often refers to them as eco-terrorists, even the mild, mainstream ones like Al Gore et al.

To him, the equation is simple:

Comfort(Homo sapiens) > Health(Universe - Homo sapiens).

In his post, he states that stopping construction of bungalows and shopping malls is preposterous, following an article in La Presse about one of the Quebec wetlands' most rapidly declining inhabitants, the Western Chorus Frog (Pseudacris triseriata.) I can only call his approach nearsighted.

He mentions that his stance might be different if the argument was made that building these bungalows and shopping malls encourages urban sprawl and the unsustainable consumption that follows. Newsflash: the two are not mutually exclusive. He just can't seem to bear the thought of being perceived as one of the tree-huggers he consistently vilifies.

It was also said, "What's next? Worms? Bugs?" What exactly is the criteria for the worthiness of preserving wildlife, anyway? Kermit isn't cute enough? Demetan doesn't do it for you?

Please note that frogs, other than filling their ecological niche (which is indirectly useful to humans), are used as a simple indicator of the health of the ecosystem as a whole, as they tend to be among the first groups to show signs of environmental stress. So in that sense, they are a pre-alarm system - useful for humans.

Besides, I hate to break it to you, but nature is a package deal. Just because you can't immediately grasp the role/impact of a particular species does not make it useless. Let's say you lose a bolt on your car. Just because you don't know what it does doesn't mean you won't replace it, because you just don't know how often that can happen before the entire vehicle falls apart and kills you. Since we can't replace the cog/part/thingamabob once it's gone, we have to take steps to make sure it stays put and healthy. It really is that simple.

On a societal level, reducing your ecological footprint is an attempt to minimize the temporal version of the butterfly effect, because we just don't know how Mother Nature will re-establish balance once we throw it too far off. It may not include Homo sapiens at all.

How's this for an equation:

Health(Homo sapiens)/Health(Earth)=B(alance) (a dynamic constant)

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