Hysteria and Irrationality

The following is an example of how humans let their fears get to the best of them:

"If the most dire climate predictions come to pass, the Arctic ice cap will melt entirely, and polar bears could face extinction.

So why not pack a few off to Antarctica, where the sea ice will never run out?

It may seem like a preposterous question. But polar bears are just the tip of the "assisted colonization" iceberg. Other possibilities: moving African big game to the American Great Plains, or airlifting endangered species from one mountaintop to another as climate zones shrink.

"It's a showdown. The impacts of climate change on animals have become apparent. And it's time to decide whether we're going to do something," said Notre Dame ecologist Jessica Hellmann, co-author of an influential 2007 Conservation Biology paper (.pdf). "Reducing CO2 is vital, but we might have to step in and intervene."

Once dismissed as wrongheaded and dangerous, assisted colonization [emphasis mine] -- rescuing vanishing species by moving them someplace new -- is now being discussed by serious conservationists. And no wonder: Caught between climate change and human pressure, species are going extinct 100 times faster than at any point in human history." [Source: Wired]

The basic premise is that species transplantation is a necessary action in light of cataclysmic climate change. This could be for a number of reasons not mentioned explicitly in the article. I can think of two:

• Because climate change is anthropogenic (caused by human beings), humans have a responsibility to preserve species that they are indirectly killing. This implies that animals have some degree of "rights," moral limits on our behaviors due to them by virtue of their being alive.

• Certain species have an intrinsic value to mankind that warrants human action to preserve their existence. Whether this value goes beyond mere aesthetics is unclear, but the value is more than the millions (billions?) of dollars it would take to transport thousands of animals to the other side of the earth.

Of course, all of these premises follow from the dubious postulate that global warming will have rapid and disastrous effects on ecosystems and species, based on highly complex and highly arbitrary computer models of global climatic patterns. However, I don't wish to go into my doubts about the climate change disaster scenarios.

What I want to point out is that professional biologists are seriously calling for a forced migration of entire species to other regions of the planet to prevent their extinction. This process is not only costly but is unlikely to work. There are good reasons that "assisted colonization" was "once [and still is] dismissed as wrongheaded and dangerous," and these reasons have not changed. Experiences with the transplanting of species into non-indigenous ecosystems, both intentional and accidental, have often been marked by disaster. Entire food chains have been disrupted, and native species have gone extinct as they fail to compete with the foreign invaders. When it comes to assisted colonization, it is a real possibility that healthy ecosystems could be destroyed in an imprudent attempt to save dying ones.

In the fear of losing certain animals to a soon-to-be scorching climate, normally rational and level-headed scientists are advocating desperate and short-sighted solutions to an imagined apocalypse. Not only is there little reason to believe that global temperatures will increase to the point of melting the entire polar ice cap or desertifying the African savanna, but it is well-documented that assisted colonization is potentially disastrous to indigenous species.

There are thousands of examples of reasonable people being led to irrational decisions by exploited fears. In a way, this response is rational -- if you believe the end is near, then you'll do anything to prevent the end, even if you would normally dismiss the action. On the other hand, it is only through our reliance on reason that ultimately keeps us alive. Because of this, we must not allow our base emotions to override our rational faculties, as they are prone to do in times of stress or crisis.

Humans will maximize their survival when they use their emotions as a guide and not as a master. When fears begin to override reason, the only safety net we have is our faculties of observation. We must ask ourselves, "Do the data support our fears?" And, we must trust the conclusions that follow logically from the answer, even if our feelings disagree. It may be frightening to abandon our comfortable subjective reality to rely more directly on an indirect perception of external objective reality, but the results speak for themselves. Look no further than the obvious benefits of the Scientific Revolution. The more we trust in perception, the better off we are.

In this case, I believe the data speak against assisted colonization of elephants to Kansas.