Virtue Signaling While Running Red Lights
We all do it. We need to stop.
The other night while out to dinner with friends, we got into a brief, half-hearted debate about a local zoo called The Living Desert.
My friends’ position was that The Living Desert rescues endangered animals and is therefore a net good. My position was that all decent zoos now claim to provide this service, but their activities are a net drain on resources that could better be allocated to save wildlife by preserving habitat.
For example, The Living Zoo has a pen full of desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelson), which are native to the mountains of the Peninsular Range, part of the Transverse Ranges that run east-west here, unlike most mountain ranges in the world, which run north-south. Herds of native desert bighorns live wild in the San Jacinto Mountains, which partly define the Coachella Valley. They are federally endangered, but conservation efforts since the sixties have doubled their numbers in California to about 5,000. (Only about 27,000 individuals in seven states were counted last time surveys appeared in 2018.)
Here’s a desert bighorn at the Lake Mead National Recreation area, courtesy of the National Park Service (Andrew Cattoir photographer):
According to the Living Desert website:
Bighorn sheep are threatened by disease, habitat degradation, care [sic] collisions, and habitat fragmentation due to urban and commercial development. The Living Desert actively supports the national conservation of this species through the leadership of the Species Survival Plan and local conservation efforts through collaborative efforts with local programs.
I don’t doubt any of this, and one might argue that conservation efforts are not a zero-sum game. As the Living Desert claims to be doing, one can fairly assert that a well-intentioned organization (or group of individuals) can pursue protection of a species both by helping preserve habitat and caging and breeding animals as living representatives of the group in case the worst happens and they become extinct in the wild.
The problem arises, in my mind at least, that in practice there are limited resources for conservation at the scale required to protect endangered species—and to protect species that may become endangered one day soon. Furthermore, confining a bunch of animals for their entire lives to serve the greater good feels speciesist to me and makes a convenient excuse for the entertainment that zoos provide their visitors under the guise of education. The bighorn sheep at the zoo, although given rocks to climb, simulating their natural habitat, don’t get to live as nature intended because…why? Well, because we have collectively acted in ways that culminated in the bighorns’ overall endangerment.
Of all threats to natural ecosystems—and they are myriad—habitat destruction is generally considered the most devastating.
My question is this: What if, instead of building and maintaining zoos, we put all our efforts into restoring and maintaining wildlife habitat? What if, in addition to worrying about the distressed animal we see right in front of us, we took actions to protect the mass of wild things that are harder to see?
People fill social media with stories of saving individual animals from immediate harm, and I would certainly not gainsay these efforts. Yet I have an unsettling feeling that saviors and perpetrators are one in the same most of the time.
The guy cutting loose the pelican entangled in fishing line could easily be a fisherman himself—and if you fish enough, you inevitably lose filament into the environment, endangering wildlife.
The woman rescuing a lone bee with a cup of nectar might, at other times, easily be the same person encouraging European honeybees at the expense of native species.
The bird-lover setting out seed may also deploy poison against rodents, thus indirectly sickening and potentially killing raptors and scavenger birds.
The person rescuing a sea creature from plastic pollution most certainly supports the plastic economy at the same time, because that’s how we humans roll.
One can call it hypocrisy, a sin that we all indulge, but it’s more than that. It’s a kind of immediacy bias, whereby we admirably pursue the small act of altruism right in front of us while not so admirably ignoring the much harder work of changing our lifestyle and our society to improve the survival chances of the very creatures we claim we want to protect.
In short, the small, easy action serves as virtue signaling. Meanwhile, we speed through nature’s red lights, and the harder, broader, more meaningful action or set of actions goes neglected.
My proposition is that we are destroying the ecosystems that support life at scale and therefore our efforts must be undertaken at enough scale to meet the moment.
This is the brief of the backyard steward.
Don’t only build a collection of native plants. Renew natural landscapes.
Don’t seek conventional garden beauty. Appreciate natural beauty in your own yard.
Don’t look at your property as an isolated patch. See it as part of a regional tapestry.
Imagine felling an entire forest to make way for a bird bath. That would be absurd, right? Yet, metaphorically speaking, we do something like this all the time.
I’m not arguing that zoos can’t serve the greater good. I am arguing that the greater good exists more meaningfully and critically outside the zoo fence, and we neglect that fact at our peril.
Native beavertail cactus blooms in the desert garden:
Non-native aloe vera readies for its big moment:
Baja passion flower, native to the greater region but not the desert, shows off in the rain:
