WildEarth Guardians

Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Show Endangered Species the Love Every Day

Valentine's Day Biophilia
Contact: Nicole J. Rosmarino Ph.D.

Valentine's Day has rolled around again, and hearts, chocolates, and flowers are everywhere, as symbols of love that we humans feel toward each other. In some ways, protecting endangered species is all about love. It is about the love lives of animals (and some plants) on the brink. Whether individual animals date and mate can determine the future of an entire species.

There is a female aplomado falcon who has been doing her best to find a date in the wilder parts of the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico since 2000, in Luna County. She found an able partner in 2002 and in late July or early August successfully fledged three young, marking the first time in 50 years that aplomados were documented as breeding in the state.

The same female falcon is thought to have occupied the Luna County territory to the present, sometimes lucky in love, sometimes not. But rather than give her every fighting chance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began a falcon reintroduction effort last summer which, ironically, strips habitat protections away for this rare raptor. The Service's goal seems to be to remove obstacles to oil and gas drilling on Otero Mesa and other harmful activities on public lands that pose a threat to falcons. By stripping away Endangered Species Act protections, industry can do what it pleases, despite the impact to falcons in the wild.

Where wild falcons are having trouble finding dates, lesser prairie-chickens are having trouble hearing their dates. This southern plains grouse has disappeared from 90% of its range over the past century. In southeast New Mexico, the artful, ancient mating rituals of lesser prairie-chickens are being disturbed or drowned out. While the booms of male chickens trying to attract females historically carried for miles, the din of pumpjacks makes it very difficult for the females to hear the males at all.

In a spring 2004 survey, one lone male prairie-chicken would have never been detected by federal biologists had a compressor not shut off in the course of a survey. In the Carlsbad Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management, public lands visitors (including prairie-chickens) are 19 times more likely to hear a pumpjack or a compressor than to hear the wind. The Bureau is failing to adequately rein in the oil and gas threat to chickens.

The lack of safeguards for the love lives of non-humans has resulted in a fraying tapestry of life. The Service is authorizing the removal of both individual Mexican wolves and whole wolf packs at the very hint of predation on cows. Lovers and families are being killed, torn apart, or relocated with low prospects of success. The result: under 60 Mexican wolves remain in the wild. As the wolf declines, so do the prospects of seeing dramatic natural restoration that would result if Mexican wolves occurred in numbers sufficient to shape their ecosystems.

With talk of love and animals, am I anthropomorphizing? Consider that Dr. Marc Bekoff at the University of Colorado and others have documented a wide range of emotions in the other-than-human world. Pick up "Smile of a Dolphin" and you'll see complex feelings such as guilt, envy, and, yes, even love among our animal brethren.

Species conservation is also about human love for the natural world that sustains our economies and our love of life. The latter is a concept two-time Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson has promoted, calling humans' affinity for nature "biophilia." According to the biophilia hypothesis, because humans have spent more than 99% of our species' history in nature - evolving in nature, shaped by nature, eking out an existence within nature - that experience has been hard-wired into our brains.

We can see shades of biophilia in the fundamentals of human cognition, culture, and language. Over 90% of objects in children's books are natural objects, lending the building blocks for human learning. Nature has long been the setting and provided the characters for fairy tales, folk-tales, and legends that provide codes for social conduct. Birds taught us how to fly.

Are we biophiliacs? We just might be: over the course of two decades of research, Stephen Kellert of Yale University reports that the leading attitudes in the U.S. toward wildlife are those of moralism (wildlife has a right to exist for its own value) and affinity (affection or bonding toward wildlife).

This Valentine's Day, let's broaden the celebration of love to the other-than-human community that is rife with tales of courtship, sex, and intrigue, and protect endangered species' prospects for survival through strong legal safeguards. In doing so, we re-affirm our interconnection with the natural world that has made us the loving animals that we are.

Copyright 2007 Albuquerque Journal - Reprinted with permission