It’s easy to talk about how looking out for wildlife is accomplished through wildlife biology, a science, when in reality, science plays a very small part these days. Administration of the Endangered Species Act is a prime example of this.
I tend to be an analytical thinker, not caring to be bogged down in discussions laced with subjective material. I grew up in a small town that each and every summer would host the National Training Laboratories, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that offered educational seminars and symposiums to help people become better at such things as interpersonal communications and human interaction – YUCK!
I grew up a country boy who learned early on that interpersonal communications meant a trip to the woodshed for an “attitude adjustment” when circumstances required it. I can vividly describe my “human interaction” when I got my father’s belt laid across my backside.
Over the course of human events, I found myself often mired in the doldrums of listening to people talk about “feel good” things. Example: A group of us were gathered a someone’s lake house one summer evening. In this group were three women visiting from Ireland. As the evening turned cool, we all migrated into the cottage and gathered around the kitchen table. This is when discussions got bad.
I weathered most of the conversation until I heard one person say, “If you were an animal, what kind do you think you would be?” And with that I promptly left the kitchen and went outside and sat on the dock looking at the stars. I was soon joined by the three Irish belles of which one made the comment that Americans were weird people (I won’t use her exact words as they wouldn’t be appropriate here.).
But let’s face it, sitting around talking about facts is boring, unless you’re a scientist, compared to the thrills people find in discussing subjective material. Both have their places for sure and neither should be introduced into the atmosphere of the other. Nothing will kill a discussion about what kind of animal you might be quicker than presenting scientific fact about that animal. On the same token, there’s really no place for subjective thinking in dealing with scientific fact.
A friend sent me an email the other day that contained an article written by Walter E. Williams. I later found the article at Townhall.com. The article, “Teaching Economics” is about how some professors in our education system these days use their position to proselytize their students. Williams further explains that in his classroom, he is there to teach them economics.
Learning how to think straight, as opposed to what values and opinions to hold, is the crucial part of education. Part of that learning is to be able to understand the distinction between subjective statements, for which there are no commonly accepted standards of proof, and positive statements for which there are.(emphasis added)
Some would see danger in this manner of instruction, perhaps fearing that if not influenced in some other way, a student may grow up and learn the truth, which might run contrary to one’s ideals and values. Williams, I assume, must be a man of great self confidence and faith in how the truth shall set one free as he shares this at the end of his article.
Personally, I want students to share my values that personal liberty, along with free markets, is morally superior to other forms of human organization. The most effective means to accomplish that goal is to give them the tools to be tough, rigorous, hard-minded thinkers and they will probably reach the same conclusions as I have.
How sweet it is!
How this relates to the loss of science in wildlife management is simple really. If you believe in science, that is real science, the kind that is an evolution into the discovery of facts, we can determine what is real and not real. To become educated as a scientist you need not know of the teachers values to become a good scientist. You need to know what kind of critical thinking, rooted in proven and unproven evidence directs you toward conclusions. What can be better than scientific fact?
I’ll admit I’m not the best at articulating what I’m thinking but I try anyway. I’m not afraid of science and in the discovery of truth. Take man-made global warming for instance. If science can prove it’s real, then I don’t have a problem with that but nobody has been able to convince we that it’s real. One of the reasons being was that as soon as I heard Al Gore and his flock of sheeple saying the science was “settled”, I knew somebody was hiding something.
Getting back to wildlife a bit more directly, I don’t want to see the spotted owl disappear or the polar bear or any other species for that matter. The problem that is occurring is that we’ve walked away from science as a determining factor for the protection of wildlife, say nothing of common sense.
Of Mice and Caribou (and Men and Wolves) tells this whole story far better than I could create it from my keyboard. The Western Institute for the Study of the Environment uses the work of scientists to make a grand statement that real science has been abandoned and in its place subjective theories thrown into the administration of the Endangered Species Act in order to accomplish special interest goals.
The ESA has spawned a massive bureaucracy however, and given rise to dozens of new species of government functionaries, regulations, taxes, takings, exactions, and entirely new branch of law, and courts, lawyers, judges, and advocates, as well as inflicting economic hardships nationally and worldwide. And contrary to the best intentions, “implementation” of the ESA has damaged ecosystems and extirpated species via “scientific” research.
Not only has the ESA given birth to what’s described above, but it has been allowed to sculpt out species that are not really species, once again in order to fulfill agendas.
Since regular, recognized species are not actually going extinct, the apparatchiks (agents of the apparatus) who make their livings playing the ESA game have invented a whole new world of partial subsets of species to get all exercised about (and to keep the gravy flowing).
These include: subspecies, evolutionarily significant units (ESU’s), evolutionary units, management units, metapopulations, distinct population segments (DPS’s), experimental populations, subpopulations, ecotypes, stocks, substocks, herds, pools, and gaggles (well, maybe not gaggles, but who knows when that will happen?)
W.I.S.E. does a great job explaining how the creation of all of the above are nothing more than subjective differences. As I pointed out in the beginning of this piece, good science as described by Williams is understanding the difference between subjective matter which provides no proof and a fact or positive statement that does. Being allowed to inject subjective topics into what is intended to be a scientific administration of a law to actually protect wildlife, yields an undesirable outcome – at least to those interested in scientific truth.
The art of creating subspecies, etc in the many ways it has been done is the equivalent of declaring my wife’s chocolate cake in danger of going extinct because I ate it all. First I have to convince someone that my wife’s chocolate cake is an “evolutionary significant unit” because my wife’s chocolate cake is different than any other (subjective and can’t be proven, even in taste tests). Once this is accomplished I can further manipulate the poorly worded ESA to achieve my goals, which in this case would actually be to keep everyone away from MY chocolate cake.
This is all inane discussion but hopefully it will help drive home the same inane point to which the ESA has morphed. There’s no science of proven standards we can rely on anymore. This is a game of manipulating words to achieve goals, none of which involve saving species.
But isn’t this only typical of big government, creators of the laws that ultimately strip Americans of their freedoms and then never watch over the execution of the orders they’ve given? Perhaps if enough of us begin speaking up and becoming better watch dogs we can begin to straighten the mess out.
It won’t be easy but we must be vigilant.
Tom Remington
