SAVE THE WHALE?
Foreword - This week's blog is potentially contravertial so this is as good a time as any to remind readers that all views in these 'Views From The Shed' are my views and mine alone. They may or may not align with the opinions of my workmates, the Old Moor management team or the RSPB as an organisation.
And now for our feature presentation...
Back in the 'seventies us prog rockers were listening to a band called Yes sing “Don't Kill the Whale”. A decade later new wave pop star Nik Kershaw took up the battlecry with his “Save the Whale”. It's time that a new generation of songwriters created a new anthem. If you know of any that already have, put them in the comments please. I love hearing different music.
It's an old-fashioned cry but it's as still relevant today as it was when Greenpeace and others were first making their voices heard decades ago. “Save the whale”. They definitely need saving. At least six cetacean species are currently classified as being close to extinction. And it's not just whales that are in trouble. On land, that most endangered yet undoubtedly cute monochrome bear, the Giant Panda also needs all the help we can give it in the survival stakes. And we should also save the Bittern and other terribly endangered birds, shouldn't we.
Shouldn't we?
Well...
What would nature do?
Did the whale – any whale you care to think of – care one jot or tittle when it outmuscled the Crocodilians to become the dominant creatures of our seas? Did Pandas give a stuff when they became the browser kings of the bamboo forests at the expense of all other creatures that hungered for the same foodstuffs? And what about birds? Did they give a flying fig when they grew feathers and watched while the Pteradons became extinct, leaving them free to soar the skies without competition?
For each creature that evolved into its best version, many other evolutionary failures became extinct. This didn't happen overnight; it was a millenia-long reaction to habitat loss, or a change in climate, or competition for space or food. Sound familiar? Aren't these the very same reasons that some of our favourite endangered species are on the edge of being wiped out right now? And if so, isn't this just the natural order of things?
And what if it's not 'natural', if it's mankind's fault, if we're speeding up the evolutionary process with our deforestation and coal burning power plants? Well, we're the current big kings of the mountain in this game of life and death, we're the current champions when it come to living our best lives, even if that's at the expense of everything else. That's how nature operates in the long run. The big winners win big and everything else fits in around it or fades away. It's worked that way since the world began and it's worked well, for the winners at least.
However right here in the twenty-first century 'nature' is being challenged in a way it never has before. The problem (if you choose to see it that way) is that humans have evolved something that no other creature that has ever walked the earth or swum the seas or soared through the sky has ever had before.
Human beings have a conscience. We know that while winners adapt successfully to planetary changes there are also losers who don't. They slowly but surely die out. And for the first time ever, an evolutionary winner – you and me – has developed empathy so that we can put ourselves in the place of the creatures that are becoming extinct due to our success, and we feel sorry for them.
While we have beaten off all comers to be the undisputed champion species of the world, we have become so successful that we have even overthrown the previously-natural order of things. We have developed ways to speed up or even divert the flow of ecological change to the point that, should we care to, we can even reverse it. We have effectively become our own gods, capable of creating and destroying that which previously was beyond the power of any single living organism.
As such, we've now placed ourselves in the position where out actions (and inactions) have not only endangered individual species but the entire world – ourselves included. You only have to look at the recent disastrous floods and wildfires on our nightly news to see the evidence of climate change is affecting all of us. Survival of the Fittest is all well and good until the current incumbent isn't up to the job. Can we humans really claim to be fit for purpose as guardians of the planet? At least some of us are trying.
I don't want to dig deeply into psychology or theology but the simple truth is that we – and only we – among all the creatures on the planet have the understanding, the ability and the will to save or eradicate any living organism and its home. We, among all the animals that have ever called this spinning mudball its home, can see what is happening to the world as a whole and to each individual creature on it, and we alone have the power to help each one of them survive and find its own little place to live out its best life.
Surely that is reason enough to do all that we can? As an old RSPB logo used to say, 'For birds, for people, for ever'. And for whales.
Volunteer Shaun welcomes visitors to RSPB Old Moor. He also writes a weekly blog about life at the reserve titled, "View From the Shed". He usually wears a big hat.