Red listed - biodiversity threatened

The numbers represent more than cold calculus. Each individual of each species has an amazing, mysterious face, possesses a personal biography and a primeval lineage. One study has shown that the fate of every threatened species involves countless other co-dependents, usually beneath our radar and legal screens. The cumulative hazards are such that eventually whole systems involving potentially millions of ecological community members will break down and perish.

Yet, for all this jeopardy, there is a clamour of pro-active hope. The combination of science, legislation, community and individual activism, increasing concern about animal rights and new tools for honing the science of conservation biology represents a convergence of forces that constitutes nothing less than a 21st century incarnation of the sanctuary movement.

For a thousand years in England, sanctuary from harm or arrest has been afforded anyone who could physically enter the confines of a sanctuary-designated church. In the last decades of the 20th century, the sanctuary ideal was applied by human rights and religious groups to provide safe haven for immigrants and political, ethnic and intellectual refugees facing deportation and possible death. Today, ecological circumstances have propelled another sort of outpouring of support for the at-risk underdog in the form of a rallying cry to save habitat and countless species from obliteration.

One potent data-set used by governments to assess some of the most critical areas of high biodiversity is known as the “hotspots” methodology. Coined by Norman O. Myers and effectively applied by Conservation International in Washington DC, this cathartic tool for shaping conservation policy recognises that an overwhelming share of the world’s most diverse biological heritage is actually consolidated in 2.3 per cent of the terrestrial Earth, as measured by the number of rare flowering plants found nowhere else. Comprising a known 35 domains - from Southern California, New Zealand and Japan, to the Tropical Andes, the East Coast of Brazil and areas from the Himalayas to Central Africa - these hotspots have become magnets for timely action to save what is left of the Earth’s richest biological treasures.

Other ecologically redemptive approaches have also been initiated. For example, goals set for the year 2010 by the European Union seek to create larger protected areas. The World Wildlife Fund has come up with a priority list of 200 Global Ecoregions or areas “of the Earth’s most biologically outstanding terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats” needing continued or newly formulated protections.

In the United States, where most environmental discussion appears focused on the price of oil and of food, exuberant advocacy for the protection of what remains of America’s rich biological heritage is in serious play.

As of April 2008, at least 22 major bills were before Congress seeking to advance legislation that would enshrine wilderness areas within the existing Tongass National Forest and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, as well as adding additional acreage to, or designating new protected areas in Washington, California, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, the Northern Rockies, Georgia, Idaho, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. In Wyoming a strong coalition of citizenry is fighting to save some of that state’s most precious habitat from more oil drilling.

Other trends are equally encouraging: the EPA last year banned Carbofuran, a toxin that kills nearly as many birds as DDT, while new visions of “Wildlife Without Borders” are circulating throughout Washington’s Natural Resources Subcommittees.

US consumer trends have increasingly looked to organics and cruelty-free agricultural products, as well as goods locally-produced, bearing low-carbon trails. Everyone is flashing green, from catwalks at Cannes to the covers of nearly every magazine. Moreover, investors, stockholders, environmental auditors, food manufacturers and service industries are taking a hard look at the most serious arena of pain in the global landscape: slaughterhouses that mark the assault on the largest number of victims of human consumerism.

All these trends are part of the sanctuary movement, that long called-for reconciliation between humans and other species. Improving interspecies relations may also result in preserving that which is best about human beings: our innocence. After all, as biological timelines go, we are a young species, filled with hopes, dreams and idealism. Now it’s time to go to work.