Trouble in the Rockies

So at risk of making this a depressing blog about the terrible effects of global warming, this post is about an alarming consequence of climate change that I witnessed firsthand this past weekend. (Who knows, maybe all these depressing posts will get the message out to someone, somewhere. Or maybe it's just me venting)

This past weekend I took a trip with my family to go snowboarding at the gorgeous ski resort of Breckenridge, Colorado. I was thrilled to get out west and into the mountains- it had been too long. As we drove up the highway with mountains on both sides, I began to notice more and more that something was wrong with the trees. Thousands of them were dying! My heart sunk as I watched through the window as the car zoomed past more and more of these reddish brown trees, that should be evergreens.



I asked around, and did some research, and found out that this epidemic was caused by invasive pine beetles that are eating the trees away. Apparently, extremely cold winters have historically managed the beetle populations. And people, let's connect those dots. Why haven't the winters been cold enough? Could it be..... global warming? Dare I make that connection?

Of course. People need to start allowing those connections to be made. An estimated 90% of the pines in the Colorado Rockies will die in the next few years because of this infestation. And of course, trees are an essential carbon sink. When they disappear, global warming intensifies even more. A scary snowball effect, for sure.

During that car ride, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the same mountains but with only 10% of the trees. It was a sad image- both aesthetically and in terms of the consequences to the ecosystem and to the climate.

Who, and what, has rights?

A question recently occurred to me: what would a human do if, hypothetically, he or she had to choose between saving THE last of a species or a human child?

Coming from the background of ecology (and as an animal-lover) I know what I would do- I would save the species. Even if it wasn't a charismatic species like a polar bear or dolphin. I would sacrifice ONE human child for a species, an essential link in the food web, the ecological balance.

Of course, one could argue the point of evolution and survival of the fittest- that as humans our sole purpose is to promote the life of our own species to ensure its survival. This would have made perfect sense thousands of years ago. But by now, we humans have declared ourselves exempt from the laws of such "wild" and "uncivilized" things such as survival of the fittest, carrying capacity, etc. We are definitely in no danger of going extinct (unless we ultimately decimate ourselves by destroying other species and toppling the ecological pyramid). We have developed our brains, technology, and philosophy to think as a culture in a way that is totally removed from Darwinian instincts.

So... save the baby or the species?

This brings into question our ethical values as modern-day people. We have laws protecting human rights, and now environmental rights- but are our environmental protection laws only justified because they ultimately protect humans? Yes, you can argue for almost any kind of environmental protection by pointing out its advantages for humans.

But does an animal, or even a mountain, tree, rock, or river have rights that we as ethical people should respect? Does a rock have the right to exist simply because it is a rock, and not because it's beautiful to people? Had the Grand Canyon been considered ugly by our species, would it have had no right to remain preserved as a national park? We have gotten to an advanced philosophical stage where these questions are going to emerge. In the age of destruction of all that is not human, who will speak for dirt, bugs, trees, sky, wolves? Who will fight for the rights of the wilderness to exist simply because it is wilderness?