Wildlife
Wildlife In The New Millennium
As the twenty-first century begins, our ideas of wildlife are being transformed through the advance of the natural and human sciences. Humankind has engendered a mass extinction event and caused "the death of birth" (i.e., disrupted the processes of speciation), thus creating uncertain prospects for plants and animals, and ourselves, over the millennium. Three pivotal themes stand out.
Economically considered, the value of nature, including the plant and animal species (the total number of which are unknown to the nearest order of magnitude), has been calculated to exceed the value of the artifice of the human economy by two to one. Potential uses of great significance in medicine and agriculture alone give ample reason to work toward international solutions for the biodiversity crisis.
Humanistically considered, interdisciplinary inquiry has established a close connection between the extinction of experience and the extinction of wildlife. Cultural diversity goes hand in hand with biodiversity. The almost unchecked processes of globalization, legitimated under the banner of progress, and euphemistically termed cultural homogenization and assimilation, are rushing literally thousands of indigenous cultures, their languages, and the associated wild places and things to extinction.
Finally, humankind vitally needs the others in ways that we barely comprehend. Our natural history reveals that continual close interactions with the plants and animals are the norm. The small interval of time beginning with the Neolithic revolution and continuing to the present is a mere moment in that long history. There is increasing agreement across a variety of scientific communities that we ignore our continued need for and value of the others at great peril.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ackerman, Diane. The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Grumbine, Edward. Ghost Bears: Exploring the Biodiversity Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992.
Maffi, Luisa, ed. On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment. Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.
Matthiessen, Peter. Wildlife in America. 2nd ed. New York: Viking, 1987.
Mighetto, Lisa. Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991.
Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991.
Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995.
White, Lynn, Jr. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207.
Max Oelschlaeger
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Well-being to Jan Łukasiewicz BiographyWildlife - Changing Conceptions Of Wildlife In Darwin's Century, Wildlife In The Twentieth Century, Wildlife In The New Millennium