I’m coming a little late with this commentary. A week ago, the science blogs were abuzz about the extinction of the Baiji (Beiji), or Yangtze/Chinese River Dolphin. Found in only the Yangtze River in China, the Baiji was first decimated by hunting during humanity’s Great Leap Forward. The period of time, about 50,000 years ago, when we experienced a huge growth in population, culture, knowledge, and spread further across the world. Since then, hunting, irresponsible fishing, clumsy boating, and habitat reduction have limited the population of this species, giving rise to many conservation efforts.

Alas, they did little good, for today, the Baiji is believed to now be extinct. Search after search, no Baiji have turned up. It is possible that some Baiji remain alive today, as science can never absolutely prove a negative, but there would be so few that the species could never rebound. Before this time, I didn’t know much about the Baiji, hell, I didn’t know it existed. I only knew about the River Dolphins in the Amazon and other rivers in South America. Now there’s one less to know about.

Whatever secrets the evolutionary history of the Baiji and its genes held for us, are now gone. (Unless someone saved some tissue from a previous specimen.) The complexity of its language, the speed of its swim, the way it coped with the murky waters of the Yangtze, the saltiness of the river mouth, and the freshness of its furthest reaches.

The social behavior of the Baiji. Its mating behavior, and it’s nursing behavior. How it fit into the ecology of a river increasingly used to drain the excesses of the society living around it. In-depth knowledge of this creature is now beyond our reach, now that our submarine mammalian cousin has left the world.

Goodbye! So long! And thanks for all the fish…

No, no Douglas Adams song can put a cute veneer on this departure. There’s something ominous and tragic about how the first evolutionary renaissance of our species was directly linked to the first decline of the Baiji. As if the world could only tolerate so much brain mass in existence, as if someone had to go to make way for us. As we move forward with our science, technology, and culture, are any more big-brained species on the chopping block? Or how many ecosystems must collapse before we realize that we are part of this world, like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, and to sit idly by while more wonderful things pass from this world as if it isn’t our battle to fight?

Some people get anti-science, technology, and human when it comes to events like this. The Great Leap Forward, Agriculture, The Internal Combustion Engine, Cities, Civilization. All these together conspired to eliminate the Baiji, yet, had we not gone through that Leap, had we not grown in capability, knowledge, and reach, would we have never known of its passing. Maybe it was nearing the Baiji’s time. Maybe a few hundred thousand years from now it would have gone extinct without our help, as most species eventually do? Blissful ignorance sounds like a warm refuge from the bitter harshness of existence and the knowledge of it. But no, that alsos mean ignorance of the ways and means of the survival and passing of species. The values inherent in knowing of the kinship of these two social species, Lipotes vexillifer and Homo sapiens. Without that Great Leap Forward, this would not be a tragedy, but merely a blip on our species’ radar screen. We have to take the bad and the good together, as we become more knowledgeable, responsible, and necessary for the survival of all things on this planet. The wrong lesson to take, as uttered by Homer Simpson, is “never try.”

The genus name of the Baiji, Lipotes, means “left behind.” With the appearance of a wry smile, the Chinese River Dolphin reminds us as it leaves us behind that there is no easy answer to existence, and that we have to figure it out for ourselves, because no one else will do it for us. We have the power to decide when things live or die, and its high time that we learned to use it better.

Surprisingly, people still want to weaken the laws that we have in place to try to protect species that have been put at risk of extinction, Like the Endangered Species Act, or ESA. From a paper published at the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise:

Most Americans are surprised to learn that only 12 of these 1304 species have been recovered in the Act’s history, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s data on de-listed species. That is an abysmal, less than 1 percent rate of species recovery. The FWS’s statistics show that only 30 percent of species are “stable” and only 9 percent are “improving.”

They must think we’re idiots. At Thoughts from Kansas a couple years ago, Josh Rosenau wrote:

It’s what my old roommate Ben Estep called a “ban the fire department” argument.

  • Fires used to destroy houses.
  • Fire departments are supposed to put out fires.
  • Fires still destroy houses.
  • Fire departments don’t work.
  • Let’s abolish fire departments.

But it gets better (or worse). The article then goes on to set up the case that environmental law itself is preventing the species from being protected. Furthermore, that “the best science” wasn’t defined into the 1973 ESA.

The Endangered Species Act relies on a standard of “best scientific data available” for regulatory decision-making such as listing a species as threatened or endangered and designating critical habitat. Unfortunately, Congress failed to define “science” when the law was written in 1973 and to specifically outline whether or not particular data would meet this standard.

The problem with a “best available data” standard is that ‘best’ is a comparative word. Thus the data need not be verified, reliable, conclusive, adequate, verifiable, accurate or even good. The best available data standard hampers the effectiveness of the program.

My thought is, ask the scientists working in the field (not a cherry-picked few) to determine what the best available data is, not the law.

This is certainly true in practice. Agencies that evaluate scientific data under the ESA - and courts forced to evaluate agency decisions based upon such data - have found their efforts severely hamstrung by two factors: (1) the ESA’s lack of definitional terms and (2) the fact that species data is, by its very nature, often vague, ambiguous, and frequently subject to best-professional judgment rather than objectively quantifiable.

Some of our nation’s other environmental laws have avoided this problem by requiring peer review. The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), for example, employs the “best available” standard, but also requires that data be “peer reviewed” and “in accordance with sound and objective scientific practices.” Given the fact that FWS will even consider oral and anecdotal data on species, the need for a more rigorous scientific review for the ESA, such as that used in the SDWA, is clear.

Here we go… the same sort of thing that Chris Mooney wrote about the “Data Quality Act” is going on here. Science just isn’t as absolute and perfect as the politicians think is necessary to allow clear-cut logging to occur, so we need to cull the “low-quality” data. Notice how they said that species data is, by its very nature, often vague, ambiguous, and frequently subject to best-professional judgement rather than objectively quantifiable. Then they go on to describe how they want to prevent vague data from being considered through a politically-generated “peer-review” process. So therefore, species data itself, does not enter into the picture because its very nature doesn’t conform to their standards.

The peer review process of scientists in the fashion already employed is the best system we have for determining what we know and do not know. This kind of imitation “peer-review” process employed by politicians is designed to do only one thing: keep science out of the picture. Whereas earlier in the article, the CDFE argued that litigation was draining money away from conservation efforts, now they propose draining the science away from conservation efforts, which will do even worse!

The article concludes with a few problems that have come about because of the way the ESA is used:

Or, consider the case of the endangered longhorn elderberry bark beetle and the Arboga levee in California. Weak levees went without repair because the work might have disturbed the habitat of the endangered beetle. The result: a huge flood broke the levee at the exact point where repairs were needed. Three human beings lost their lives. Approximately 500 homes, 9000 acres of prime farmland, and the four largest employers in the poorest county in the state were flooded. Overall, 35,000 people where displaced.

It seems to me that both these folks, and some environmentalists miss the point. We are not separate from the natural world, and a hands-off approach to ecology is ultimately wrong-headed for both ourselves, and the species we wish to protect. Not repairing levees not only led to the destruction of human habitat, but also the habitat of the beetles that it was supposed to protect. Finally, the levee itself was a part of that ecosystem, and you’d think that protecting the ecosystem that supports that beetle would involve maintaining the integrity of the levee.

Environmental legislation needs to recognize that humans are a part of the picture in a very intimate way. We can’t just declare some area off-limits when we’re already involved in it, and then think that it will bode well for the species we are trying to protect in that area. We would end up “protecting” them from ourselves, and what we do to contribute to the habitats of other species, for good or for ill. On the other hand, the kinds of “reform” called for by many of the anti-ESA groups would only accomplish one thing, the gutting of a monumental legal document, and the destruction of its legal and environmental potency. We would then experience the passing of many more things in this world that are wonderful.

One thing to consider, what if we reformed the ESA into something more like an “Endangered Ecosystems Act”?