ETHICAL AMBIGUITIES

MICHAEL TOBIAS,hereafterMT: Looking up at those cliffs and talus slopes, waterfalls and snowfields, with the fair breeze of a high-altitude Colorado summery morning, with the birds singing and our local world carpeted by gorgeous flowers and adrift with attendant butterflies, there would hardly seem to be any justification for griping. We're in paradise at nearly 10,000 feet.

But we are also in global hell, up against some incredibly high stakes—nothing short of the fate of the Earth. What are the core issues of the conscience, activism, and idealism that underlie—as well as those undoing, undermining, and confusing—the debate about animal rights, biological conservation, and the stakes for the future of life on Earth? That's what is thoroughly nagging at my scientific and intuitive clockwork.

Pursuing that direction, let me say that one of the underlying premises that I hear constantly from committed individuals of the conservation biology world and of the animal rights, animal protection, and animal welfare worlds (all of whom are in some form of slight or radical disagreement over levels of protection) is as follows: If you focus in your own personal life upon saving individuals, that's going to be about as much as you can do. Applying your knowledge, experience, skills, data sets, and compassion to an individual who needs you is all-encompassing, typically exhausting, and, yes, usually deeply rewarding. But it is not going to provide you much energy or time for field research that would give you the information needed to help save populations or even whole species. It's not that saving an individual is fundamentally different than saving an entire species—but, in truth, it is, and we all know it.

It is an ancient Greek paradox that Plato elaborated upon in his dialogue Parmenides, which weighed in on the great Eleatic meeting of Parmenides and Zeno and their debate regarding this "one versus the many." Of course, humanity has grappled with the dialectic ever since. We're still in the throes of it, by all appearances.

PAUL EHRLICH,hereafterPE: This reminds me of the efforts made on behalf of the oiled birds during the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf disaster. You just could not save them all. And it is an even more difficult problem when the issue is which of many species to save, which is increasingly the case. And this obvious but intractable dilemma is not unlike the paramedics' paradox of World War I that poet e. e. cummings experienced as a volunteer ambulance driver on the front: Whom do you save? How do you determine and justify the candidates for triage? And that dilemma becomes even more horrible when one considers that today we are already triaging human populations (who gets fancy cars and clean water versus whose children must walk far to gather firewood and could die of waterborne diseases), and that situation is likely to get much worse.

MT: Precisely. I viewed the HBO documentary Saving Pelican 895, which shows efforts to save what avifauna could be spared, but at least 7,000 birds died following that April 2010 British Petroleum oil spill. I'm sure that the numbers are going to escalate as more and more biological opinions come in over the years. The 2012 book by Antonia Juhasz, Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, chronicles, under the Freedom of Information Act, countless health problems, both for wildlife and humans, in particular assessing reports from the Joint Unified Command Center in Houma, Louisiana, and those of the U.S. Coast Guard.

In the case of the Exxon Valdez disaster on March 24, 1989, the biological fallout continues. It's hard for me to absorb what transpired, even though I made a film about that crisis. I waded ankle-deep in oily mousse six months after the accident, and 1,500 miles to the west of the Valdez spill in the Aleutian Islands, I saw yet more dead oiled birds. Today's undergraduate students weren't even alive at that time. Yet we do not seem to learn from our mistakes as a culture. We pass down these terrible environmental legacies, but the meaning—the substance—eludes us. Director Rob Cornellier followed up in 2009 with his own documentary, Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez, and revealed how twenty years later citizens of Cordova, Alaska, were still dealing with the ecological impacts. These things stay with us, even if the majority of humans are far removed. Which speaks again to the issue of individuals versus groups; saving individual birds versus protecting their entire colony, rookery, habitat, or elements of the global avifauna that depend on the area during migration.

In March 2012 the French firm of Total SA was described by the Wall Street Journal as having "reported a sheen of gas condensate six nautical miles wide around the Elgin platform. The leak is thought to be originating below the pumping platform at the well bore-head. The gas is flowing up the piping structure onto the platform, spewing out as gas, with some turning to liquid," about 150 miles off the coast of Scotland's city of Aberdeen.

The peril to wildlife will only escalate as humanity's hegemony escalates. Add yet another component, that of aging pipelines. In the wake of the recent March 2013 Mayflower, Arkansas, ExxonMobil spill, there are other legal complications, such as the differing classification for tax purposes of tar sands oil versus conventional oil. The former, which spilled in Arkansas, evidently is exempt from the Oil Spill Liability Trust. This might seem like an arcane detail, but it underscores the complex wrangling of major multinationals, the IRS, and the continuing legacy of liability, particularly as concerns wildlife across the planet; wildlife that just gets more and more hammered.

PE: First of all, efforts to "rescue" wildlife probably don't work most of the time. It takes a relatively gigantic effort to save a single oiled seabird or seal. Similarly, on land the efforts to rehabilitate orphaned or injured great apes are fraught with all kinds of difficulties. For any rehabilitated animals, the issue of successful reintroduction to the wild is ordinarily problematic. Especially with great apes, our own gang, the ethical issues of what's worth the effort are especially heartrending. One major question is, how much do you count the opportunity costs: Would the same effort do more for Earth's flora and fauna, and for us and the other great apes, if directed elsewhere?

OPPORTUNITY COSTS

MT: How would you define "opportunity cost"?

PE: Opportunity cost is what you've forgone to make the effort; what you think would be the second best use for funds versus the...