Singer and Posner: African economies, ivory and the elephants

Both the slaughter of the African elephant and the Bluefin Tuna have direct ties to Japanese culture and the arguments for tradition (equally so for South Asia and the fate of rhinceros and sharks.)

The hermeneutical trend in theistic political philosophy has no clear reply when a tradition within a culture represents a threat to a mere non-human species.  Consider hermeneutically-oriented  political discourse in Africa or churches funding African missions: no tradition which places the hominids as "disclosing" Being with their speech, poetry, theatre or religion is going to have an easy time of balancing the economics requirements for funding faith-based universities in African countries with elephant herds (or at least with ivory stockpiles) and undermining the ivory trade.  Mutual respect for traditions here encounters imperatives: man-made species extinction ranks among our most immoral acts when viewed as one self-aware species among others (elephants are now known to be self-aware and appear to suffer grief reactions not unlike those of primates) - there is a clear imperative not to treat these species as only means to our ends but as ends in their own right.

The classic sophomoric issue would be posed as follows: choose to place funding in medical research which has a high probability of providing a medical treatment permitting your congenitally ill child to live significantly past age 18 - say to age 40-45 - or significantly improve the probability that we will succeed in preserving elephant populations and habitat.  Now flip the setting to where the ill child is that of an ivory poacher - a female child for whom he will have to provide a dowry.

Matters would only be worse if a significant human group, say a  group with Bushman tribes, were in a region dependent on ivory or in a region likely to be the final viable choice for an elephant reserve but clearly incompatible with the Bushman way of life.

Prior to the utter relativizing of all values to traditions, we might have had a prospect for a "Copernican" displacement of our species-centrism.  Open misanthropy aside, ( and such misanthropy, in my experience, is not as foreign to animal rights proponents as you might suppose ) we should be able to recognize that our populations now exceed what one might reasonably expect for our species in the natural environs of this planet.  This view, however, is not acceptable to most Catholic, Protestant or Islamic theologians.

If it is true that some million elephants (some number on that order) were slaughtered for ivory in a single decade in the late 20th Century and if in that same century, the elephant went from being a dominant species in its range to being a rare and endangered species often absence from its former range, then we could apply the "American Bison" precedent: allow extinction to proceed and then later reintroduce a subspecies or another species in tiny herds in tiny numbers and declare the outcome to have been inevitable.  A similar rule could be applied to Bluefin tuna, only with the prospect being of aquaculture, in which the tuna are fewer rather as are todays domestic cattle as the result of our selective breeding to suit our needs.  What we can argue is that this sequence is a well-understood economic transition and point to the thriving economies in the prairies states of the American Midwest.

Has this not already become the case with large elephant herds in Africa and large schools of giant tuna in the open ocean?

That the Japanese nation should not have entitlement to quality sushi that is not from their own domestic waters does not sit well with our acceptance that nations with vast petroleum resources are permitted to be major consumers of foreign petroleum resources.  How could the economics of sushi (presumed to be somehow central to Nihon-jin culture in a manner rather more significant than, say, whale-meat) - an economy embedded in tradition - be compared to petroleum?

The history of petroleum is interesting in this regard because of paraffin.  Whale oil lamps were smoky and smelly.  But we now know that the white waxy petroleum product was carcinogenic!  White paraffin, like translucent petroleum jelly, is one of the more fascinating transformations on the black ooze of rotting plant and animal matter that we politely refer to as crude oil.  That drawing up crude oil from pockets in underground shale is possibly the most disgusting practice in which the human beings have ever engaged in, is a perspective which must be left for future generations.  The building of cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix to draw down the water of the Colorado River could be viewed as technical miscalculations rather like permitting intense smog in flood-prone Los Angeles: these were technical problems.

The hermeneutical view in social science is thought to alert us to discourse which has been preverted by the view that there are technical problems that we face and not problems in our very understanding of our situation and the relations of power and domination.  At the moment this hermeneutical view is most common in America and in Europe, but imagine that it had arisen in parallel in Africa and in Japan: what hope would we have of addressing the future of elephant and tuna in the face of an over-populated Japan and an over-populated eastern and southern Africa?

One view is to trust the demographics of economic advance: the population growth will peak, enter decline and then we can resort to frozen DNA to reintroduce small populations to ensure the survival of these species.

Quite another view would suggest that the hominids have always been eliminating other species and that it is both historically and economically naive to protest the fate of North Atlantic cod or Bluefin tuna or orangs or elephants.  Consider the Asian Elephant.  The most often brutal "taming" of these animals has a clear parallel in our taming of horses, dogs and oxen.  Asian elephants will survive as domestic beasts of burden.

Given the fate of Neanderthal, what reason could be given for the protection of primates which are not robust enough to adapt to their changing environments?  The red fox and the common raccoon have no such problem in America.

There are of course distinct issues: elephant species versus elephant populations.  Perhaps here there could be a trade-off between nations: Borneo could pay Rwanda to protect gorillas as the price for the extinction of orang habitat and naturally occurring orang populations.  There appear to be precedents in law in the form of trading pollution credits.  Variant: no species lasts forever, our own has had but a brief run, so perhaps a case can be made that the older pachyderm species should make way for the newer hominid just as some reptilian marine carnivores gave way to major marine mammals.