Environmental Violence and Its Consequences

Violent action against nature and fellow humans is a commonplace of the capitalist mode of development. Activities such as open pit mining in Brazil and Mexico, overfishing on the Atlantic coast of Canada, and the Seven Gorges dam in China are rampant across the global landscape and reflect the extent of the unsustainable development that threatens nature and humans. These activities are driven by the short-sighted, predatory exploitation of “common” goods described by Hardin (1968) as a natural trap of capitalism. Unregulated use of natural resources maximizes profit in the short term at the expense of a more equitable use of resources among humans and the unaltered development of biological, ecological, and evolutionary processes. The work of activists such as Vandana Shiva (1994) can be analyzed within an environmental and biological framework that transcends the body politic, part of an ecological and evolutionary context in which we can minimize our impact on natural biological processes.

Scientists studying evolutionary processes work on time scales of millions to hundreds of millions of years and have a different perspective on what changes are sudden or important. Tracking evolution alongside mass extinction rates gives us a perspective on the tremendous impact of humans on the biosphere. Our exploitation of natural resources is bringing extinctions to the level of any of the big five extinctions of the past. ¹ Just as those extinctions changed the face of the Earth and the dominant animal groups on land and in the oceans, we are changing the biosphere, perhaps irreversibly, and opening the way for new life forms. Nowhere is the survival of humans guaranteed as we destroy important blocks of our global environment through massive deforestation, unrestrained release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and desertification. Reversal of these changes on the time scale of human generations, the scale that concerns us most, may be impossible. Nonetheless, we must find ways of adapting our lifestyles to the new circumstances that are the product of our activities, and we must protect ecosystems and their components—the species that inhabit them, their interactions, and their products and services.

Three examples from northwestern Mexico—the vaquita, the masked bobwhite, and the California condor—show how much has to be done to provide the resources needed for these species to thrive in their natural environment. It would be naïve to believe that we can restore the original habitat where they evolved and thrived, but we do need to reduce our violent, unbridled, and unprecedented assault on nature if we want life to maintain its normal processes. Without proper and profound knowledge of nature and the consequences of our violence against nature, we will sooner or later become one more of the planet’s extinct species, with the difference that this extinction will be our own fault. Here I will first discuss the concepts in ecology, population dynamics, evolution, and sustainable development that contribute to an understanding of how environmental violence arises and then go on to describe how it is shaping our use of local and planetary resources. I will conclude by arguing that environmental violence could be ameliorated by sustainable use.

Violence, which implies the conscious intent of the perpetrator to harm its victim, is not part of nature, humans notwithstanding. Violence in nature is in the eye of the beholder, the human observer. The idea of “nature red in tooth and claw” is a misrepresentation, an exaggeration, and an anthropomorphic view of nature at work. Death occurs constantly in nature, and most organisms die of natural causes, primarily predatory acts in which a carnivore feeds on an organism lower in the food web or the consequence of an infection in an organism with a compromised immune system or a parasite’s overcoming its host. All organisms die, and only a few of them die peacefully in their sleep. Some organisms within a species leave descendants that will keep the species going. Those descendants are the products of natural selection, ² the main force behind evolution. Thus everyday acts in ecological contexts, the here and now, affect the evolution and future of species.

For a predator, an infectious disease, or a parasite, feeding oneself and one’s kin for survival and reproduction is neither violent nor unnatural. Predators go for the weak and the old, those whose genetic makeup will not contribute to the persistence of the species and those who have already contributed to the persistence of the species. Predation, infection, and parasitism are only three of the many interactions in nature that are studied by ecology. The consequence (but never the purpose) ³ of predation, disease, and parasitism is the regulation of numbers in prey species. This regulation is used as an indicator of environmental balance; fairly constant numbers are considered a good sign of this balance.

Populations are members of a species within a space whose change in numbers is defined by the numbers of births and deaths over a time period. Populations increase when there are enough resources to maintain or increase their growth rate. It has been known since the time of Malthus (1798) that if resources were limitless populations would increase infinitely but that populations tend to maintain their numbers over time. ⁴ Individuals within a population and across species compete for resources, ⁵ and those capable of obtaining more resources or using given resources more efficiently will leave more progeny and contribute to the population growth of the species. The study of species in nature requires that we understand and make predictions about population numbers and how they vary over time, and the study of population dynamics gives us that understanding and predictive power.

Predation, infection, parasitism, fires, spontaneous abortions, stillborns, and pup starvation are not violent events but mechanisms by which nature regulates numbers and drives evolution. Violence in nature can be found where those processes are disrupted by an external agent. Human disruption of natural processes is violent. Humans have reduced child mortality, increased life expectancy, and decreased the mortality associated with infectious and transmissible diseases, making human death a rare but unavoidable event, mostly at the expense of natural landscapes with the expansion of the agricultural frontier, efficient and predatory fisheries, and large-scale forestry and mining. Homo sapiens is a very successful species (>7 billion live specimens and counting) that has sequestered over 60 percent of the planet’s photosynthesis and uses many other nonrenewable resources. This takeover has been triggered by our unprecedented population explosion. The fact that we are the most successful primate in sheer numbers ever to inhabit the planet makes us prime suspects of a violent use of resources—of taking over and modifying beyond recognition various ecosystems and landscapes, making them unfit for the original forms of life that inhabited them. For example, the extensive agricultural fields of the prairies of the United States and Canada have displaced not only the buffalo but many native tall grasses, with a few relict populations in Manitoba and a few other places (Government of Manitoba, 2013).

Are we, then, as a species, inherently violent? Are we alienated from nature? Do we fear and thus turn violent toward nature, or do we love life in all its forms above all as part of our genetic inheritance? Demonstrating the intrinsic (genetic) love of life, nature, and the world as we know it that Wilson (1990; Kellert and Wilson, 1993) proposes would be as difficult as proving that environmental violence is inherent to human nature. I will not pursue this debate but simply argue that the current use of nature is violent and that it can and should be changed.

I define “environmental violence” as the use and extraction of natural resources in such a way as to preclude their sustainable use (e.g., Brundtland, 1987; Clark and Munn, 1986). With this definition, H. sapiens has long been violent toward the biosphere and the global environment that sustains it. A nonviolent or less violent use of natural resources has already been identified in Brundtland’s (1987) Our Common Future: Sustainable Development and the results of the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (United Nations, 1992). This approach requires that we take into account not only the needs of future generations of H. sapiens but also the functions of the planet as we know it.

As we use more of the planetary resource base, consciously or not we take away resources and compete ever more fiercely with other species, and we bring along species that would perhaps not have survived independently. Our everyday environment includes not only chickens, cows, corn, pigs, rice, and wheat but cockroaches, mice, rats, and other agricultural and household pests and pets that depend on our resource use for their survival. To understand how our resource use affects the environment we have to acknowledge that the living world is a dynamic system that has changed and will continue to change over time. H. sapiens is also modifying the environment, and with these modifications we are doing violent damage to it—damage from which it may not recover—that goes beyond the resilience ⁶ of the system and makes the area uninhabitable by its species. Thus, any concept we build of equilibrium in the environment must take into account that ecosystems change and that change is expected and can perhaps be predicted. Environmental violence disrupts the natural processes of a system and, generally, replaces them with simpler, less resilient systems that are prone to further disruption.

In three instances of environmental violence in Mexico, habitats have been modified by human actions to such an extent that species are prone to extinction. The vaquita (Phocoena sinus), the smallest living cetacean, inhabits the murky waters of the upper Gulf of California and is considered the most endangered cetacean in the world. (It acquired this dubious distinction when the pink dolphin of the Yang-tse River in China was declared extinct.) The Biosphere Reserve of the Upper Gulf of California and the Colorado River was established to protect it (Instituto Nacional de Ecología, 1993). As there was little knowledge about the species’s distribution and behavior, a large part of its habitat was not initially protected by the reserve, and a later amendment included a fishing-free area to increase its protection. Regular aerial surveys indicate, however, that fishing has not stopped there. The vaquita’s environment was first modified when the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams were built on the upper Colorado. The dams stopped the natural flow of the river to the delta at the northernmost tip of the Gulf of California, and this altered the salinity of the delta (Álvarez Borrego, 2002: 48–49). Given the high rate of evaporation of the upper Gulf caused by high irradiance (sunlight), the sea is highly saline and the delta has become an inverse estuary, ⁷ changing the environment in which the vaquita evolved.

The vaquita became known to science in 1958. It is a shy species living in a low-visibility environment. Its interactions with other species and the environment (see, e.g., Campos, 2012) provide us with insight about the everyday life of a predator that is threatened by other cetaceans such as the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) and the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis). Most encounters between humans and vaquitas are through bycatch while fishing for shrimp and other species both inside and outside the vaquita protection area. These encounters are deadly for vaquitas. Scientific research estimates that for the species to maintain its natural population dynamics vaquita bycatch should be limited to about half a vaquita per year (Wade, 1998). As with most cetaceans, the vaquita has one calf at a time, and it is estimated that the females reproduce every two years. Any species with a reproductive rate as low as this is highly susceptible to incidental bycatch in a fishery.

Trying to establish the number of vaquitas in the wild has become a large and important scientific endeavor. Visual surveys have yielded poor results, with large margins of error in the population estimates, and sonic encounters have proved useful only since 60 passive sonar detectors were placed in the reserve because the species shies away from the sound of powerboats. Recent studies of vaquita phonations (speech sounds) to estimate population size have shown that the vaquitas are diminishing, although the rate has slowed, and that the population is probably fewer than 100 individuals (CIRVA, 2015). If this trend continues and the fishing behavior and modes of sustenance of the surrounding human communities can be changed, both the species and the communities will survive (Robles, 2010: 74–75). A seemingly irreversible change of the natural environment, artisanal fisheries bycatch, and an ever noisier water environment are forms of environmental violence toward the vaquita. Even if we are able to reverse bycatch trends, its environment will be very different from the one in which it evolved.

The California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) is the largest extant flying bird in North America, with a wingspan of 3 meters (Snyder and Schmitt, 2002). Given its size, it requires large amounts of calcium for its bones and eggshells. Historically it ranged from southern British Columbia to northwestern Baja California, but human-induced changes in the environment and, most important, lead poisoning had brought it to the point of almost certain extinction by the 1980s. Condors feed on dead animals abandoned by hunters in the field and may ingest bullet fragments that dissolve slowly in their stomachs, producing ataxia. Although the banning of lead bullets can be expected in the foreseeable future, sport hunting and vermin hunting will continue.

The Northern bobwhite is a widely distributed quail across the Eastern United States and the Caribbean (Brennan, 1999). The Sonoran subspecies, the masked bobwhite (Colinus virginianus ridgwayi), is considered one of the most endangered bird species in the United States and Mexico. Its range extends from Guaymas, Sonora, to the southernmost portion of Pima County in Arizona (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1995). The subspecies was described from the environs of the town of Benjamin Hill, Sonora, in 1884 after its habitat had been modified by the introduction of cattle. It has been listed as endangered since the first publication of both the 1960 Endangered Species Conservation Act and the Norma Oficial Mexicana. To date not enough is known about the species’s foraging and reproductive habits or interaction with predators to support successful reintroduction to the wild. Severe habitat modification is the main cause of its extinction in the wild. The masked bobwhite inhabits plains with native grasses and forbs and seems to be dependent for its survival on the seeds of the prairie acacia (Acacia angustissima) in the valley bottoms (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1995). Cattle helped mesquite (Prosopis sp.) move from the arroyos to the fields, providing excellent perches for its aerial predators. The browsing habits of cattle, change in the fire regime, and the introduction of buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare), an African grass species preferred for cattle ranges, have drastically modified the masked bobwhite’s habitat.

There is one population in captivity at the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. This population was captured in Sonora and taken to the northernmost portion of its range. A recovery plan is attempting to modify the landscape of the refuge through fire or other management techniques so as to reintroduce the bird there (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1995). Budget limitations and life in captivity threaten this population, and new measures are being taken to ensure its survival in captivity while the possibility of a reintroduction to the wild in the proper habitat is assessed. The population in Sonora has diminished drastically from the 300–500 reported by Dobrott in 1990 (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1995). The species is now considered extinct in the wild; in 2009 no more than 7 were heard or seen in the field.

To ensure the survival of this species in its natural environment, two major tasks have to be accomplished. One is establishing additional captive populations. This strategy is being developed by the Sonoran Joint Venture, an international alliance for bird conservation, in conjunction with African Safari in Valsequillo, Puebla. The other is finding the proper habitat or reconstructing part of the habitat to the best of our knowledge. Without the restoration of the pre-cattle habitat in Sonora and Arizona or the discovery of remnant habitats in Sonora, saving the masked bobwhite is a quixotic endeavor. Its near-extinction is another consequence of environmental violence.

Environmental changes happen all the time in the natural world. Changing environments bring about selection of organisms, and there is no organism that does not modify its environment. These changes are the main motors of evolution and consequently the main cause of biodiversity, shaping everything from bacterial genomes through species, populations, and habitats to landscapes. Nonetheless, the rate at which humans are transforming the environment leaves insufficient time for adaptation. For many of the plant and animal species with which we share the planet, the time required to evolve along with new environments and circumstances is several orders of magnitude greater than the rate at which we are modifying the environment. Rapidly evolving species—those whose generation times are counted in hours, such as bacteria—will keep up with the changes we inflict on the environment. The other lucky species that may survive are those that we have already adopted and keep bringing under our direct management for use, but they will certainly have the same fate we are creating for ourselves.

Environmental violence has become an ever more integral component of the consumer-society lifestyle, in which acquisition of goods becomes an irreversible process of depletion of natural resources. As we push habitats to their limits, we should explore and implement methods that are less violent. It is impossible for humans to survive without extracting goods and services from nature. The way we approach and understand nature is an essential part of the way we use it. “Wilderness” is a concept that originated in European societies, where natural old-growth landscapes have disappeared, and is assigned to landscapes associated with “primitive people” imagined as having no effect on the landscape (Lewis, 1993). The wilderness concept is of little use to other cultures (e.g., Blackburn and Anderson, 1993). Better management of our resources can be accomplished by employing local techniques and knowledge in the use of resources. These, of course, have to be adapted to an ever-increasing world population with a vision of sustainable use of our resources.