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Iain Hunter . Going the way of the dodo

Iain Hunter
The Victoria Times Colonist

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The trouble with endangered species is most of them don't taste very good. If they did, people would go to better lengths to protect them.

I've always been a little suspicious of fishermen preaching salmon conservation. Those Ducks Unlimited folk are pretty well-regarded now, but I'll bet they started out campaigning for the preservation of wetlands so there'd still be lots of birds around to blast out of the sky.

It's unlikely that even Nigella Lawson could come up with a recipe using endangered critters on the West Coast. Vancouver Island marmot and Salish sucker would not make a very tempting surf-and-turf.

And who'll stand up for the Nooksack dace? At less than 15 centimetres long, a Nooksack snack wouldn't amount to much. Maybe that's why the federal government seems reluctant to spend much effort to protect the fish's habitat in the handful of Fraser Valley streams in which it cowers still.

Lawyers for the government were in Federal Court last week fighting environmentalists demanding a more effective recovery strategy for the little fellow whose habitat is being poisoned, polluted, ditched, diverted and dried up by urban growth and development.

Rejecting the advice of its own consulting biologists, Fisheries and Oceans doesn't want to identify the specific locations, in the recovery plan, of what's left of the Nooksack's critical habitat. It thinks a simple description of what it looks like will do.

The environmentalists say this is just one of many examples of the strategies drafted by the government as required by the Species at Risk Act that don't accomplish what they're supposed to because they don't identify an endangered species' critical habitat.

Why all this fuss over a homely minnow? Why do people get concerned over the decline and/or disappearance of a particular species that's practically indistinguishable from other critters?

Are we spending all this research money just to entertain biologists who've made a study of a particular beastie their life's work? Why are we telling miners that they can't mine, loggers that they can't log, farmers that they can't farm and people who build things that they can't build where the mining, logging, farming and building is best just to make sure a few lousy fish who happen to be in the way won't be stepped on?

Who's running things on this planet, anyway? Who did God give dominion over all other creatures to?

I'm sure this isn't raised by George W. Bush in one of his chats with God. His administration missed a deadline this week for deciding whether the polar bear should be placed on the U.S. endangered species list. It's difficult for the government of a nation doing so much to heat up the world's furnace to acknowledge that global warming is melting the bears' icy playground.

But Bush had no difficulty on Jan. 3 in issuing an intent to allow oil drilling leases over 29.7 million acres in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's north coast where bears, birds and other animals swim.

Is Canada much better? Ottawa has struck a deal with the Inuit of Nunavut to determine jointly what species should be put on our endangered list, in order to help settle Nunavut land claims.

This will mean more delay in listing species. It's supposed to acknowledge the traditional knowledge of the Inuit about these things, but I wonder how much the traditional uses to which northern species have been put will determine what gets listed and what doesn't.

Everywhere in the world species are going the way of the dodo, predominantly because of human activities. Unique creatures are disappearing in isolated ecosystems like Madagascar.

Migrating geese, elk, salmon, dragonflies, zebras and leatherback turtles are finding there's no way home any more. All kinds of fish, birds and animals are collateral kill for human harvesters. As Southern California bee colonies collapse, almond trees, which depend on bees to pollinate them, can't reproduce. As barns disappear across Europe, so do barn swallows.

And where man has spurred the recovery of once-threatened eagles and falcons, those species are preying on already-disappearing partridges and curlews. We just can't get it right.

But we have to keep trying. We have no predators to fear but ourselves yet we're caught in the food web with the Nooksack dace.

Our planet is wondrous, even as it changes. It won't always be if, through carelessness, selfishness or greed, we condemn other creatures to extinction, let weeds take over and rats multiply -- and only starlings fly.

Iain Hunter is a columnist with the Victoria Times Colonist.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008