Does it matter? To most of those who govern us, plainly not. To most of the rest of us, the answer seems to be yes, but we are not quite sure why. We have little difficulty in recognizing the importance of other environmental issues. Climate change causes droughts and floods, ozone depletion gives us skin cancer, diesel pollution damages our lungs. But, while most people feel that purging the world of its diversity of animals and plants is somehow wrong, the feeling precedes a rational explanation. For the past 30 years, the conservation movement has been trying to provide one. Its efforts have, for the most part, failed.

The problem conservationists face is this: that by comparison to almost all other global issues, our concerns about biodiversity seem effete and self-indulgent. If we are presented with a choice between growing food to avert starvation and protecting an obscure forest frog, the frog loses every time. If climate change is going to make life impossible for hundreds of millions of human beings, who cares about what it might do to Boyd's forest dragon?

So they have sought to confront utilitarianism with utilitarianism. If the rainforests are destroyed, they argue, we may never find the cure for cancer. If the wild relatives of our crop plants die out, we might lose the genes which could be used to breed new pest-resistant strains. Many of the world's indigenous people depend upon a wide range of species for their survival. An impoverished environment is likely to be less stable, and so less productive, than a diverse one.

All this may be true, but it doesn't solve the problem of justification. Most of us don't need biodiversity to survive. The farmers who produce our food try to keep the ecosystem as impoverished as possible. A utilitarian approach, long favoured by communists as well as capitalists, would integrate indigenous people into the mainstream economy, drag almost all the population of the countryside out of its "rural idiocy", and turn every productive acre of the earth over to crops.

Utilitarianism also suggests that the value of biodiversity is exhausted once it ceases to be useful to us. When a rainforest has been screened for pharmaceutical compounds, it offers, according to this doctrine, no further benefits. We can grow the useful species in plantations, or produce the compounds they contain in the lab, and junk the rest. By arguing for biodiversity on the grounds of human need, in other words, conservationists play into the hands of their enemies.

The lovers of fine art or rare books don't feel the need to set this trap for themselves. They never suggest that money and effort should be spent on restoring Old Masters because one day someone might want to eat them. They can defend the things they value, even while accepting that there may be a conflict between their protection and other social needs. We could solve London's housing crisis by leveling its historic buildings, grubbing up the parks and building high rise homes in their place. But the aesthetes can confidently assert that the lives of its people would scarcely be improved by those means.

The special problem confronting the conservationists of nature is that in many parts of the world their cause has been used as an excuse for the maintenance of a colonial model of exclusion. Nothing has done more harm to conservation than the work of people like Richard Leakey, Joy Adamson and Diane Fossey. [3] To white tourists, who now have more or less exclusive access to the places they helped to protect, these people are heroes. To local people they are villains, and the wildlife they protected is perceived as a threat. If every time a public gallery was built, thousands of us were kicked out of our homes to make way for it, then told we could enter only by paying the equivalent of our annual income, we would feel the same way about art.

This legacy of exclusion makes conservation look harder to justify on the grounds of aesthetics. But it seems to me that this is the only sensible argument which can be made. It is surely sufficient to say that wildlife should be preserved because it is wonderful.

But, somehow, most conservationists can't quite bring themselves to do so. Even those who admit that they want to protect it because they love it can't leave it at that, but insist on seeking some higher justification. It used to be God; now they claim to be acting for "the sake of the planet" or "the ecosystem" or "the future".

As far as the planet is concerned, it is not concerned. It is a lump of rock. It is inhabited by clumps of self-replicating molecules we call life forms, whose purpose is to reverse entropy for as long as possible, by capturing energy from the sun or other life forms. The ecosystem is simply the flow of captured energy between these life forms. It has no values, no wishes, no demands. It neither offers nor recognizes cruelty and kindness.

Like other life forms, we exist only to replicate ourselves. We have become so complex only because that enables us to steal more energy. One day, natural selection will shake us off the planet. Our works won't even be forgotten. There will be nothing capable of remembering.

But a curious component of our complexity is that, in common with other complex forms, we have evolved a capacity for suffering. We suffer when the world becomes a less pleasant and fascinating place. We suffer because we perceive the suffering of others. It seems to me that the only higher purpose we could possibly possess is to seek to relieve suffering: our own and that of other people and other animals. This is surely sufficient cause for any project we might attempt. It is sufficient cause for the protection of fine art or rare books. It is sufficient cause for the protection of rare wildlife.

Biodiversity, in other words, matters because it matters. If we are to protect wildlife, we must do it for ourselves. We need not pretend that anything else is bidding us to do so. We need not pretend that anyone depends upon the king protea or the golden toad or the silky sifaka for their survival. But we can say that, as far as we are concerned, the world would be a poorer place without them.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper of London. His recently released book, The Age of Consent (Flamingo Press, 2003), puts forth proposals for global democratic governance. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com. 

Other Recent Articles by George Monbiot

* Invasion of the Entryists
* The Bottom of the Barrel: Oil is Running Out, But No One Wants to Talk About It
* Dreamers and Idiots: Bush and Blair did Everything Necessary to Prevent the Outbreak of Peace
* Acceptable Hatred: Beneath Enduring Hostility to Gypsies Lies Ancient Envy of Nomadic Life
* Tony Blair’s New Friend: A Dictator Who Boils Prisoners to Death
* Back to Front Coup: The Military is Being Invited into the Heart of Politics in the US
* Enemies of Science: Nothing Damages Science More than Forcing Researchers to Develop GM
* The Philosophy of Cant: Part Three of Three-Part Series on Trade
* Whose Side Are You On?: Part Two of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* The Worst of Times: Part One of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* Beware the Bluewash: The UN Should not Become the Dustbin for America's Failed Adventures
* Poisoned Chalice: IMF Medicine Only Compounds Economic Crisis 
* SleepWalking to Extinction
* Driven Out of Eden
* America Is a Religion
* Shadow of Extinction
* I Was Wrong About Trade: “Localization” is Both Destructive and Unjust
* Seize the Day: Using Globalization As Vehicle For the First Global Democratic Revolution
* Let’s Do a Monsanto
* How to Stop America
* Trashing Africa: Blair Has Ensured that Europe and the US Will Continue to Promote Famine
* War Crimes Case in Belgium Illustrates Folly of Blair’s Belief That US is Interested in Justice

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