From: Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 1996 14:37:59 +0800
To: Alan Horowitz <alanh@infi.net>
Subject: [NOISE] Re: Eggs at Customs (fwd)
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Message-ID: <Pine.ULT.3.91.960115193628.29666Y-100000@Networking.Stanford.EDU>
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On Mon, 15 Jan 1996, Alan Horowitz wrote:

> Well, who is a non-native?   If it walked across the Bering Sea land 
> bridge a few thousand years ago, does it have a higher moral value than 
> if it hopped a ride on the bilges of a cargo ship in 1957?

Morality has nothing to do with it. It's the speed of the evolution. If
you walk across the straits, the system has the time to react and restore
a dynamic equilibrium. If you immediately release a new species with no
natural predators, the system is shattered, and it might not survive. 
This is not to say that ecosystems and societies are static -- they evolve
constantly, displaying unpredictable punctuated equilibrium (Steven J.
Gould was right, Edmund Burke and Karl Marx were wrong).

Usually, the mutations (in biology or politics) are minor, and almost
always, they are localized.

Large-scale catastrophes like a meteor hitting the earth and killing all
the dinosours (or whatever happened), or nuclear war, or whatever, are
larger punctuation than normal. Sometimes the ecosystem recovers,
sometimes a completely new ecosystem forms, sometimes all life but the
cockroaches is wiped out. 

Politically and morally, I'm a follower of the realist school (Morgenthau
et al). It is right for the US to dominate the world because it has the
most power. On the level of international relations, it doesn't matter how
it got that way; trying to reverse the power realities would be like
trying to dam the Pacific Ocean. Of course, in specific cases in the
present, we can make moral choices, and if we feel like it, we can help
out the present victims of historical "immorality" (like the fact that the
descendants of slaves weren't born into the same inheritance as the
descendants of the Carnegies and Vanderbilts). 

> If you want to isolate the rainforest until mankind has had time to 
> completely inventory all the species and test them to see if they are the 
> next cure for malaria or an exploitable raw material, well, now you have 
> my sympathy.

Sympathy is the wrong emotion for both politics and science, but then,
what you're talking about isn't sympathy. 

Cute cuddly seals and frieldly dolphins and teddy bears get "sympathy"
among mainstrean "environmentalists," and the Sierra Club and World
Wildlife Federation calendars raise a lot of money, but it's the plants
and bugs and bacteria that are really important. Elephants and blue whales
look big and important to us, but they're really inconsequential in the
larger scheme of biodiversity. They could go extinct and the planet
doesn't really care. But kill the blue-green algae and the trees, and
we're all dead. 

-rich