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Prudence Demands Wildlife Conservation

March 27, 2007

“What good are they?”

That is a question commonly raised by wise-use types who see no benefit in protecting wild creatures unless their existence can be reduced to dollars-and-cents commodity throughput.

Such arguments are frequently tagged as “conservative” when the media reports on endangered species controversies. But there is nothing conservative about them. Reverence for creation--all creation, not just the glamorous creatures exhibited in zoos--is one of the fundamental values of traditional conservatism. Wildlife have intrinsic value because, as the conservative agrarian Richard Weaver wrote, raw nature demands "a decent humility in the face of the inscrutable."

As John Saylor, the conservative congressman who co-sponsored the 1964 Wilderness Act, put it: "To permit the despoilment of our natural resources would be to desecrate a divine inheritance." Even more eloquent is the 104th Psalm: “O Lord how manifold are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures.”

But for argument’s sake, let’s accept for the moment the premise of the critics’ question that the only measure of a species’ value is its utility to concrete human needs.

A recent study by the National Cancer Institute found that nearly three-fourths of the new drugs marketed in the United States during the past 25 years were derived from natural sources. The reason is that Mother Nature’s chemistry lab is vastly more sophisticated than even the advanced synthetic chemistry techniques used by most pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The most oft-cited example is Taxol, a drug used in cancer therapy. Taxol is derived from the Pacific yew tree. Before the drug was developed, the yew had been dismissed by the timber industry as worthless. By their lights, it was worthless, since the yew is not suitable for saw timber. Asking whether the yew had other possible uses was beyond the industry’s ken, since it’s in the business of producing wood products, not pharmaceuticals.

Which is why allowing natural resources management to be dominated by the agendas of politically favored industries is a symptom of dangerously shallow thinking. Resource managers who adhere to the conservative virtue of prudence are aware that they don’t know enough to have all the answers, or even to ask all the right questions.

Does every obscure creature have potential medicinal value? Maybe not, but who is wise enough to know for certain that a given creature will never yield a life-saving drug or something else of value? Even accepting utilitarian arguments for conservation demands a measure of prudence. Remember Aldo Leopold's first rule of intelligent tinkering: save all the parts.

It’s better to practice humility, err on the side of caution, and avoid decisions that have irrevocable consequences. Even if one is not convinced that wildlife have intrinsic value, conserving species, rather than driving them into extinction, reflects the deepest and wisest conservative thinking.