27th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, March 22-24, 2002
Abstracts

Ethical Concerns in Biological Conservation

Edwin P. Pister
Executive Secretary, Desert Fishes Council, P.O. Box 337, 437 East South Street, Bishop, CA 93514

The various fields of environmental science are more abundantly endowed with technological expertise than with a broad ethical and philosophical base to guide application of this technology. Many "judgment calls" must be made, often without the benefit of procedural guidelines, and under strong political pressure from development interests to compromise the basic natural resource. Compounding this problem is a general failure of many university resource management curricula to require (or even offer) courses in the rapidly emerging fields of environmental ethics or philosophy, thereby producing (in effect) missiles without guidance systems. Evidence of this syndrome is universal, and related potential resource degradation is enormous.

Human impacts on biodiversity which essentially began with the era of industrialization and accompanying exploitation of natural resources, and more recently exacerbated by population explosion, have burgeoned since World War II to a point of critical concern throughout the world. Although much of this impact has resulted from activities designed to serve the needs of humankind (timber harvest, agriculture, hydroelectric dams, urban expansion, etc.), society has now reached a point where it must ask how much additional habitat destruction and species loss can be permitted before human standards of living and quality of life decline to unacceptable levels. As the only species known to possess a conscience, humans must now explore their ethical obligations to preserve ecosystem integrity. The lecture discusses these increasingly vital and pertinent issues, based upon the speaker's personal observations during the second half of the twentieth century and augmented by the views of renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold.