Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (63 page)

In March 2009, an agreement was finalized between environmental campaigners, the provincial government, First Nations, and forest companies to preserve one-third of what is now called The Great Bear Rainforest on the Central Coast of British Columbia. The agreement should be applauded because activists, industry, government, and First Nations were able to come together and build consensus around a seemingly intractable dispute. Yet the anti-forestry campaign that preceded the agreement and targeted B.C.’s forest product customers, particularly in the United States and Europe, was entirely unfair. That campaign was squarely based on allegations that “BC’s coastal grizzlies will likely face extinction in the next four decades if logging operations continue to move north up the coast” and “142 stocks of salmon are now extinct” and logging is “a primary threat” to the remaining stocks.
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Yet environmental campaigners failed to mention logging had been taking place on the Central Coast for more than 100 years. It is a fact that grizzly bear populations are classified as “viable” in areas where logging is the main industrial activity. It is only in areas of urban development and extensive cattle ranching that grizzly bears are threatened or extirpated.
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It is true that 142 stocks of the 9,663 known stocks of migratory salmon and trout in British Columbia and the Yukon are considered extinct. It is also true all but three of these stocks were either in the populated southwest corner of B.C. in and around Vancouver and Victoria or in the Columbia River watershed, where hydro dams were the cause of extinction.
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Nearly half of them were in what is now Vancouver, where the former spawning creeks have been replaced with drainage pipes. Only one of the 142 extinct stocks is in the Central Coast and there is no evidence to link that stock’s demise with logging. Even the authors of the report conclude, “The largest proportion of the 142 extinctions we note resulted from urbanization and hydropower development.”
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An exhaustive review of the factors influencing declines of fish stocks in the Strait of Georgia concluded that the main causes are overfishing, climate change, and urban development.
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The report did find that logging practices had contributed to habitat loss but concluded, “Now that logging standards are improved under the Forest Practices Code, it is unlikely that the type of logging-related habitat change documented…will be a continuing problem in the Strait of Georgia in particular, and for British Columbia generally.”

Most recently, Greenpeace has waged successful international campaigns to damage the reputation of forestry practices in Canada’s boreal forests. This has forced an industry agreement on a great swath of largely uninhabited forestland stretching across the continent from Alaska to the Canadian maritime provinces. Greenpeace has claimed species face extinction due to forest harvesting. People in far away places who have no idea of the vastness and wildness of the boreal forest can be forgiven for sending money to Greenpeace to “save the boreal.”

The campaigns to link forestry with species extinction have been very successfully communicated through the media to the general public. The release of each report published by activists or announcements they make is carefully orchestrated to reach media outlets like the Associated Press, CNN, and the BBC and also widely distributed via blogs or other Internet resources. As a result members of the public, who often trust the major environmental groups, think species are going extinct by the thousands and that forestry is to blame.

Where did WWF and other environmental groups get the idea species were becoming extinct at the rate of 50,000 per year or 137 per day? It seems this estimate stems from the work of entomologist (insect specialist) Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, who is widely cited as the expert on the subject.
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Wilson’s reasoning goes something like this:

Scientists have named and recorded about 1.7 million species. There are probably many more, particularly in tropical forests, that have not been discovered, possibly as many as 50 million in all. Forests are being cleared, mainly for agricultural purposes, and this is surely causing species to become extinct. Using the theory of island biogeography, in a computer model, as many as 50,000 species are calculated to be going extinct each year.

By choosing the number 50 million, Wilson and others are implying that 48.3 million of the species on earth are unknown and not named. So if some of them became extinct, we would never know it happened because we didn’t know they were there in the first place. This does not strike me as a good example of the scientific method but rather a good example of hocus-pocus. In addition, it is likely we do know 90 percent or more of the larger species (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, etc.). It is likely there are many smaller species of insects, worms, and other invertebrates yet to be discovered, but I would hazard a guess that 50 million is wildly exaggerated.

This model also assumes that an island of forest surrounded by land disturbed by human activity is analogous to an island in the sea. Very few of the terrestrial species found on an island can live in seawater. Yet a large number of species found in a forest can survive in habitats such as second-growth forests, agricultural landscapes, and even urban areas.

The model is therefore flawed in two fundamental ways. First, it is impossible to verify that species we are not aware of have disappeared; under this model five million unknown species could go extinct and we would not have a clue that it occurred. Second, the model assumes the land surrounding intact forest areas has no habitat value for species living in that forest. And it is simply not believable that we have discovered less than four percent of the living species on earth.

Another problem with this theory is that the species are going extinct according to a computer model when there is little actual evidence of these hypothetical extinctions in the real world. WWF authors take the speculation a step further. Forestry occurs in areas where biodiversity it richest; they argue, therefore, that forestry must be the main cause of biodiversity loss. They fail to consider another possibility,
that the reason those areas where forestry occurs are so rich in biodiversity is because forestry causes less damage to biodiversity than other types of land use
.

It is true our species has caused the extinction of hundreds of other species. The causes of those extinctions have been clearly documented as previously mentioned: overhunting and eradication, clearing for farming, and introduced species of predators and disease. Forestry and forest management are decidedly not a cause of species extinction and yet anti-forestry groups have been willing to launch aggressive campaigns based on the myth that forestry is a primary cause of extinction. If I thought forestry were the main cause of extinction, I would be against it unless it could be changed to eliminate that problem. So I don’t blame members of the public who oppose forestry if they are convinced it causes extinction. But I do blame the people who spread this misinformation under the guise of saving the environment. When the public is misinformed about such an important topic, it is unlikely to help find solutions to the real causes of extinction.

National Geographic
Gone Bad

I had subscribed to
National Geographic
since my father first gave it to me as a gift when I was in school. I always looked forward to the latest issue, with all the wonders of the world between its covers. Over the past decade even this stalwart of objective science has fallen prey to the prophets of doom who believe a human-caused “mass extinction” is already under way.

The February 1999 special issue on “Biodiversity: The Fragile Web” contains a particularly unfortunate article titled “The Sixth Extinction.”
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The first two pages of the article feature a photo of the Australian scientist Dr. Tim Flannery looking over a collection of stuffed and pickled small mammals that are now extinct. The caption reads: “In the next century half of all species could be annihilated, as were these mammals seen in Tim Flannery’s lab at the Australian Museum. Unlike the past five [extinctions], this mass extinction is being fueled by humans.” To be sure, the article subsequently mentions that the Australian extinctions were caused by the introduction of cats and foxes when Europeans colonized the region more than 200 years ago. This resulted in the loss of about 35 animal species, mainly flightless birds and ground-dwelling marsupials that could not defend themselves against these new predators.
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This is hardly a “mass extinction” and the cause was a one-time introduction of exotic species. The rate of extinction of Australian mammals has slowed considerably in recent decades, partly because the most vulnerable species are already extinct, and partly because people started to care about endangered species and began to work to prevent further extinctions. In Australia today programs exist to control wild cats and foxes, some of which have resulted in the recovery of native animal populations.

The use of the Australian example to justify claims we are experiencing a mass extinction is put into focus by Brian Groombridge, the editor of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, when he states, “around 75 percent of recorded extinctions…have occurred on islands. Very few extinctions have been recorded in continental tropical forest habitat, where mass extinction events are predicted to be underway.”
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It is misleading to point to the specific and exceptional case of extinctions caused by the introduction of new species to islands as evidence of a worldwide mass extinction. The
National Geographic
article goes on to quote the biologist Stuart Pimm; “It’s not just species on islands or in rain forests or just birds or big charismatic mammals. It’s everything and it’s everywhere. It is a worldwide epidemic of extinctions.” Yet nearly every example given in the article involves islands such as Australia and Tasmania, Mauritius, Easter Island, and the many islands of the South Pacific.

On pages 48 and 49 of this article a graph depicts the number of taxonomic families that have existed on Earth for the past 600 million years. In taxonomy a family is a large grouping of species, examples of which are the cat family, the weasel family, and the ape family, of which we are proud members. The taxonomic name of a species goes family, genus, species, as in
Ursidae
(bear family)
Ursus
(bear genus)
maritimus
(species), the polar bear. There are often many species in a genera and usually more than one genera in a family. No entire family of species has become extinct in the past 20 million years, never mind in the past 100 years. It is unlikely that any entire family has become extinct since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

During the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, nearly half of all the taxonomic families of life, and about 80 percent of all species, became extinct. The graph shows that despite the five great extinctions that occurred during this period, the number of living families has risen steadily, from around 200 families 500 million years ago to more than 1,000 families today. This tendency to diversify over time is one of the major features of evolution. The line of the graph is a thick, solid one until it reaches the present day when it turns abruptly downward as if to indicate a loss of families due to the “mass extinction” now under way. But the line does not remain thick and solid; it turns fuzzy right at the point where it turns down. I wrote to
National Geographic
and asked, “Why does the line turn fuzzy? Is it because there are actually no known families that have become extinct in recent times? I do not know of any families of ‘beetles, amphibians, birds and large mammals’ that have become extinct as implied in the text.”

The reply to my inquiry came from Robin Adler, one of the researchers who worked on the article. She thanked me for “sharing my thoughts on this complicated and controversial issue” but offered no answer to my question about the graph. Instead she asked me to “Rest assured that…the many members of our editorial team …worked closely with numerous experts in conservation biology, paleobiology, and related fields. The concept of a ‘sixth extinction’ is widely discussed and, for the most part, strongly supported by our consultants and other experts in these areas, although specific details such as the time frame in which it will occur and the number of species that will be affected continues to be debated.”

The
National Geographic
article makes no mention that the “sixth extinction” is a controversial subject. It is presented as if it is a known fact in the article, whereas in her reply Ms. Adler refers to it as a “concept.” Her reply indicates that the “mass extinction” will actually occur in the future (“the time frame in which it
will
occur” [emphasis added]). In other words there is no evidence that a mass extinction is occurring now, even though the article plainly implies that it is. Perhaps a better title would have been “No Mass Extinction Yet, Maybe Someday.”