Successes and failures in biological and environmental conservation

Usually, when the media talk about environmental conservation and endangered species, the news they give is almost always negative: Everything is going very badly; there are ever more species at risk of extinction; human activities are corrupting the environment; our planet is in danger of becoming a wasteland incompatible with life… Actually, when we say the highlighted phrase, we are using the trope called synecdoche in the form called macrocosm, that is naming the whole by the part, because it is not the planet that is in danger, but us, human beings, along with many other living beings.

I have just read a book published in 2012, written by Andrew Balmford and entitled Wild hope: on the front lines of conservation success, which tries to emphasize the opposite: not all the news is negative; lately there have been a few successes in the conservation of animal species in danger of extinction, or of environments endangered by human voracity. His analysis of these cases points to shortcomings in environmental conservation processes led by politicians, which sometimes achieve exactly the opposite of what they intended, as I indicated in this blog in a post published almost six years ago, entitled The ecological ignorance of ecologists.

The anthropomorphism of animalists

Flag of the animals in
Animal Farm, by George Orwell

A year ago I published an article in which I showed with multiple arguments that man is not just an animal, despite attempts by materialists to reduce us to that level. In fact, many animalists seem to do exactly the opposite: they inadvertently raise the animals to the human level. They do this even with insects, as when they speak of the horror suffered by a caterpillar being devoured by a hymenopter larva, although they reserve their special compassion for the higher animals: birds and mammals.

In their campaign against animal acts in circuses, animalists use the following motto:

A circus is a prison

They usually say the same of zoos, even though modern zoos have little resemblance to those of the early twentieth century, the so-called menageries.