International Year of Biodiversity

2010 is declared "The International Year of Biodiversity" by the UN. Apart from the purely instrumental importance of biological diversity - we as humans need it to provide us with "food, fuel, medicine and other essentials" - biological diversity serves as the basic foundation of life.

It is a fairly common view that we as humans stand apart from nature, or even that we were placed on this Earth and given the task to rule over nature. This idea has never sat well with me. We are an integral part of nature and we have evolved within nature not out of it. We do, however, differ in some way from a lot of the current life-forms present on Earth in the sense that we have a further evolved capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection.

Self-awareness and self-reflection grant us a strong sense of imagination and creativity, and are powerful evolutionary tools, allowing us to "side-step" what can (very simplified) be considered the flow of evolution. We have the ability to consider our actions and to plan ahead, much like in a game of chess. We can weigh our actions, abstaining from a course of action that would grant us immediate gratification and benefit now yet would be harmful in the long run, in favour of a future course of action that would be less harmful. In that sense we are not only adaptive with regard to the present, but also to the future.

Of course, we cannot know for certain what will happen, but we can gain an understanding of the dynamics of the system we are part of. What we cannot do, despite intense efforts during several thousand years, is detach ourselves from "nature", since doing so would mean detaching ourselves from the system of life which we are part, i.e. collective suicide.

Now then, all that aside, what is the Swedish government doing in this International Year of Biodiversity? Well, so far they started by issuing 12000 hunting licenses in order to decrease the Swedish wolf populace, from 210 to 182 (it was supposed to be 183, but the quota was exceeded).

The reasoning? It has varied somewhat, but I think the latest argument has been that it was needed to improve the genetic pool. If they would have made sure that only "genetically damaged" wolves were killed, and if they would bring in new, healthy, wolves from elsewhere then perhaps there would be some validity to this argument.

Other arguments for reducing the Swedish wolf population have been that wolves threaten people (or at least make them feel unsafe), that they kill hunting dogs or that they kill cattle. There's also been arguments for removing the wolf population entirely. Some of these have been that the Swedish wolves are so "genetically damaged" that it would be cruel to let them live, that we don't need wolves in Sweden since globally they aren't threatened by extinction. Apparently, Sweden is too small a country (or too densely populated) to accomodate more than roughly 200 wolves.

To make matters worse, funding for the wolf hunt comes out of the budget for biodiversity. So I can only assume that decimating the wolf population in Sweden is meant to fall under "promotion of biodiversity".

I think the reasoning in all of this shows that biological diversity is valued in a strictly, and quite narrow, instrumental way by our government. If it is, in fact, valued at all. And when you value biological diversity in this way, you make the mistake of placing humans somehow apart from the rest of nature - attempting to remove humans from system of life of which we are a part.

Edit: An interesting post about the absurd idea of strengthening the wolves' gene pool through hunting, can be found at the blog Biology & Politics (in Swedish).