How Human Decisions Endanger Wildlife

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Human behavior affects the future of wildlife in various, sometimes unexpected ways. Psychology offers explanations as to why people behave as they do. Psychology may soon play a bigger role in conservation biology, because biodiversity has been victimized by the conditions of too little and too much.

Parts of the world struggle with too little income, poor education, declining health, and limited natural resources to sustain families and

 

still protect the environment. Those living under these circumstances may decide to clear a habitat to grow food or hunt an endangered animal because of either ignorance or desperation. It is difficult to blame people for harming the environment if they struggle in conditions in which their lives have little margin for error.

Religion also influences the fate of nonhuman species. Some religions embrace the idea that humans have more value to the universe because they are closer to God. As a consequence, their followers might assume that humans have more right to the planet than other animals do. War, too, is fought mainly for religious or political reasons. Some sociologists predict wars will be fought increasingly over natural resources such as water and land, diamonds, and oil. War zones wreak havoc on sensitive habitats. Animal communities of the deserts, forests, wetlands, and oceans have all been in the paths of history’s conflicts. “Warfare between modern and traditional societies has often involved what might be termed ‘ecological attacks.’ One of the most obvious examples of this is the final destruction of the great herds of American bison, the foundation of Plains Indian life in the United States, which closely coincided with the defeat of the Sioux and Cheyenne in the 1870s.” Those words were written by Jay Austin and Carl E. Bruch in their book published in 2000, The Environmental Consequences of War: Legal, Economic, and Scientific Perspectives. The authors refer to modern societies as those established by European settlers in the New World that would eventually evolve into today’s urban centers; traditional societies were the Native American societies based on hunting, fishing, growing crops, and trading. The Plains Indians used American bison in a way that preserved the enormous herds that once covered the western plains, but the westward migration of white settlements wiped out all but a remnant of the American bison population.

Some habitats such as the open ocean and the air serve as free-access resources. This means no person owns them and they are common property of all the Earth’s species. White settlers likely viewed the open plains and bison and other wildlife there as a free-access resource. Today, people may be less inclined to protect these things because they will not be held accountable. The psychology of free-access goes like this: “No one should care if I dump one load of trash into the ocean because it cannot possibly harm anything as huge as the ocean.” Of course, when a million or even a thousand people feel the same, the environment suffers.

Finally, the problem of too much threatens biodiversity. Affluence is the opposite of poverty, and it comes about through the ability to obtain the resources needed to sustain a healthy and constructive life. Affluenza, however, refers to an unsustainable desire to overconsume, meaning a person uses more resources and produces more waste than necessary. The large U.S. ecological and carbon footprints provide evidence that the majority of U.S. residents live a life of affluenza. One goal of sustainable living is to break the affluenza cycle and thereby reduce society’s ecological footprint. Sustainable living begins a process that leads to the preservation of biodiversity, but the question remains of whether these changes will occur in time, if they occur at all, to save thousands of species from extinction. In truth, the U.S. economy counts on affluenza to keep industry healthy and provide jobs, both of which contribute to the government’s income through taxes. It is easy to see why affluenza prevails, even though most people know that overconsumption puts the environment at risk.