In the Tree Hugger a Discovery Company article “We’re Killing Everything, Including ourselves: Royal Society Sort of Says” (11 October 2010) the author, Matthew McDermott discusses the effect that humans have on the environment and the earth as a whole. His major argument is that the human race causes so much destruction to ecosystems and the earth we will eventually kill ourselves because we will have driven everything else to extinction.
It is the mass extinction currently underway, caused by overexploitation of natural resources, that needs to worry us.(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)
Unfortunately McDermott shows no hard evidence to back up his idea, though he does believe that his argument will ultimately come true. His argument functions around the ideas that: animals are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, there has been no other species on record to has such a large impact on the Earth, and that everything is connected.
First off I think there are a couple of things wrong with McDermott’s argument, although losing species and ecosystems ultimately going to negatively impact the environment there is no hard evidence stating that it hurts humans every time. This shows that McDermott’s argument is approaching a slippery slope. Secondly it is based on the assumption that humans are generally negatively impacted when a species or ecosystem is destroyed or becomes extinct, but it doesn’t consider the benefit that may come from the action that caused the destruction or extinction and how it may outweigh the negative. This brings in the idea of opportunity cost and how it applies to environmental situations. These two weaknesses in McDermott’s argument will be further discussed below.
McDermott’s basis for his argument leads to a slippery slope ideology. Allowing for the argument to be based the idea that every time an organism or ecosystem dies or gets destroyed somehow negatively effects humans. This becomes a problem because there isn’t a way to draw a line separating the two. If you were able to draw a line and argue that one side has value, and the does not there would be no problem. Since you are unable to specifically state that the destruction of ecosystems negatively affects humans every time, a line cannot be drawn within this argument leading it down a slippery slope. Although it can be thought that the extinction of certain species can lead to the eventual collapse of any ecosystem throughout the world. It is highly less plausible that enough extinction could happen to cause mass collapses of ecosystems that would ultimately have a negative effect on people. This is partially in place due to the regulations we have to stop the outright extinction of major specific species throughout the world.
If the slippery slope argument was not an issue with McDermott’s argument there would still be the question of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost as defined by the Risk & Policy Analysts Limited is
...for environmental services their opportunity cost is the net benefit forgone because the resources providing the service can no longer be used in their next beneficial use...” (Tietenberg, 1992).
The opportunity cost of destroying environment may have negative effects on the environment as a whole, but the benefit of destroying it to create something for human use maybe greater than the negative cost making it more beneficial to destroy it. This idea in conjunction with the slippery slope idea poses a major problem with McDermott’s argument. Though his idea can be read to be true, when the issue that not all destruction of the environment can be concluded to have a negative effect on humans is looked at, since the negative effect cannot be totally assed the opportunity cost will almost always be greater in favour of humans. With that in mind opportunity cost can also become a matter of opinion to what is more important since there is no universal way to give value to the environment.
McDermott’s argument that humans are killing everything and entail killing themselves is slightly skewed. His argument is based on the premise that whenever something in the environment is destroyed or becomes extinct somehow negatively affects humans. This leads to a slippery slope argument to the effect that there is no way to determine which side of the argument can be certain to have a negative effect on humans. As well the opportunity cost will almost always favour for the development of human lifestyle over the destruction of the environment. Unfortunately McDermott’s argument does have some logic to it, the fact that humans do destroy a major portion of the environment for the progress of their species also has the reproduction that if we destroy to much we will suffer as a species.
References:
Risk & Policy Analysts Limited, Induced and opportunity cost and benefit patterns in the context of cost-benefit analysis in the field of environment.(1999) Pg(17)
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/enveco/others/pdf/costbenefit_patterns.pdf
McDermott, M. Treehugger a Discovery Company, We’re killing everything, including ourselves: royal society sort of say. (2010)
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