Diversity as Source

One of the failures of the conservation movement, at least the conservation movement as it has existed for the past forty years, has been its inability to explain how its concepts affect humanity's living standards. This is largely because conservation began as an elite movement, specifically, as a movement intended to keep the hunting grounds well stocked. This was back when hunters actually went into the wilderness to shoot large and occasionally dangerous wild game, as opposed to today, where well-to-do hunters go to small plots of private land to shoot farm raised animals.

To have a wilderness the wild has to function. This wasn't a problem in the early twentieth century. The wilderness worked because there was so darned much of it, but by the time of the latter twentieth century, things were looking a little different. Larger groups of species, whole families, in fact, were about to be gone forever.

Right around now is when the pragmatist in me says, "So what?". Everything has to die sometime. In one sense, this is correct. Cheetahs are probably overspecialized. Blue whales probably are stretching their environment to the limit, in terms of calorie per hectare. Why not accept fate? Even humans have to be extinguished sometime, don't they?

The difference here is a matter of attitude, an attitude of ownership. The difference is, do we want humans to be users of the system, or do we want humans to be administrators?

How does this work? Don't things come and go by chance? This is a situation similar to explaining the concept of source control. Source control is basically a way of preserving every step in a software project. Ideally, you can go to source control, say "I want today's application window with last year's login screen", and with a bit of pushing and huffing, get exactly that. At some point, non-technical staff- the users of the system- will say, "Why are we using all this disk space on historical source code?". The answer is, "Because we don't know how to make it anymore". We hold onto last year's login screen because- surprise!- it has a "Forgot my Password" widget that does things just so, in a way that no one can manage again.

So when we have an animal that eats this particular plant that no one else wants to eat, or if there's a termite that clears away all the shit, or if we have anything that fills a niche, we want a backup- because there is nothing else that can do what it does. Letting an insect leave this world is like removing a branch of the tree from a software project in the hope that something better will come up. Conservation, when you get past the cuddly animals and failed liberal arts majors, is a matter of source control. It's an attitude of ownership, of administering what is, after all, the most complex system of all.