“EVERYTHING THAT LIVES is HOLY

… life delights in life” declared William Blake in America. A little more than 200 years after he wrote those words, the only seriously holy item on earth is profit. Dozens of the orders of creature that lived holily on the planet in Blake’s day no longer exist. The dodo was the proverbial extinct bird in my childhood, but by now the dodo is just one of many casualties of the greed of man.

At the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan these last few days, delegates were advised that one fifth of all animal and plant species are now classed as endangered. The CBD decided to adopt some targets. They agreed to halve the rate of loss of habitat, including forest, by 2020. Note that there is no notion of making up the loss already sustained. Halving the rate of loss merely extends the period during which habitat may be destroyed and be assured that the destruction will continue.

Going ... the orangutan ...

The British coalition government, with that cynical sense of timing that has become its habitual method of making announcements, has just now revealed that it will put Britain’s national forests up for sale. Expect Epping Forest – renamed Tesco ‘Every-Little-Helps’ Woods – to be cleared for potato cultivation so that the supermarket chain can grow its “own-brand oven-ready chips” at a knockdown price, thus making the loss of the forest well worthwhile.

... going ... the cheetah ...

Also agreed at Nagoya was that by 2020 “at least 17 percent” of “terrestrial water bodies” and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas will be protected as biodiversity zones, under a measure known as the Aichi Targets. Given the nature of most everything in water – including water itself – to move freely, unaware of zonal restrictions, it’s difficult to see how the protection will be of much use. As soon as a minke whale swims out of protected water, some Japanese profiteer will harpoon it. The only (theoretical) beneficiaries of the protection will be those organisms that are anchored within the zones – coral reefs, for instance – but as such organisms are characteristically destroyed by pollutants and as the drift of pollutants will not be inclined to recognize the parameters of protection zones, it seems doubtful that such decreed protection will actually protect anything for very long.

... going ... the white pelican ...

It was the Brazilian delegation, representing one of the most enlightened and progressive governments currently in office, that pressed hardest for this measure. Such crumbs are the best that enlightenment can secure. The convention was told that the goal on biodiversity loss sustainable by this year, agreed at an earlier CBD summit, had not been met by a country mile. On the contrary, biodiversity loss has increased more sharply than all predictions had anticipated. It just fills you with confidence, doesn’t it?

... going ... the black lemur of Madagascar ...

Does it matter if the creatures that innocently share the planet with us die out? You tell me. I would argue that it is not a moral issue. For half a century, I have cleaved to the view – and argued the case whenever I was granted the platform on which to do so – that “moral issues” are really nothing of the kind. A moral argument, I venture, is just an aesthetic response tempered by a judgment concerning practicality. Take abortion for instance. The mountain of morality that is built upon this matter consists largely of a confrontation between those who are repelled by the idea of “a life” being sacrificed (viz the anti-abortion lobby calling itself “Pro-Life”) and those who favour a woman being permitted to control her own destiny. It’s a pretty straightforward confrontation between an assertion concerning what is tasteful in polite (and particularly religious) society and what human beings can – and therefore “should” be able to – determine about their own condition.

... going ... the high brown fritillary of Great Britain.

The supposed morality – as to whether disposing of a foetus is “right” or “wrong” – is, I would contend, wholly beside the point. Anybody of any sort of sensibility might be repelled by a newly pregnant woman determining that, even supported by a wholly responsible and sensitive partner, she cannot, in a phrase, “be bothered” to “go through the hassle” of carrying a child to term – quite how many impregnated woman promulgate such a rationale for abortion I cannot guess. But at the other end of the spectrum there are individuals standing for public office in the US as I write who would not allow the victim of a gang-rape by HIV-positive, drug-addled psychopaths to terminate a resultant pregnancy. Neither of these extremes deserves to be subsumed under any notion so elevated as “morality”.

Gone in the last five years ... the golden toad to the effects of global warming ...

Does it “matter” if the tiger, say, or the mountain gorilla or the honeybee or the seahorse ceases to be? I think it may be argued urgently that it matters terribly if it may be demonstrated persuasively that the loss of such creatures imperils the survival of all of life on earth by skewing the balance of natural forces. The climate change deniers will no doubt argue that, as long as the car industry doesn’t take any kind of hit as a result, the polar bear may happily go the way of the passenger pigeon. But I maintain that, in a perfectly coherent and comprehensible sense, the world and we humans in it are “the poorer” for the loss of those creatures with whom we share the habitat and who depend on our benignity to be permitted to survive.


... gone ... the black-faced honeybird or poo-uli of Hawaii to starvation and disease ...

It may be merely sentimental to fear that succeeding generations – if indeed they are any such – will abominate ours for having the carelessness to allow the black-footed albatross and the sea otter to die out. But what we cannot know – and the tragedy would be to know it when it is too late to retrieve the damage – is the long-term impact of the loss of any species or sub-species. “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” as the title of Edward Lorenz’ famous paper on chaos theory demanded to know “set off a tornado in Texas?” The demise of the Indian elephant would, I venture, set off a far more far-reaching ripple effect that the flap of a butterfly’s wing.

...gone ... the black rhino of west Africa to poaching and loss of habitat ...

Science will endeavour to preserve the DNA of species so that, if and when (big if, big when) the time is propitious, a lost species might be restored. But the carnage individual by individual is vile, quite as much as the falling of whole orders. I know that creatures in the wild live severely circumscribed existences, even without man’s interventions. Wild creatures do not die of old age. They do not live to suffer the indignities of longevity – heart disease, cancer, dementia, organ failure – as pets do. The great majority of wild creatures, left alone by man, yet perish by starvation, extreme weather or being eaten alive. Man’s baleful additions to these fates embrace hunting, “pest control”, poisoning both deliberate and incidental, habitat destruction, food denial and the inadvertent results of unchecked global warming. If millions of people are killed, maimed, disease-ridden and starved by “natural disasters” – flooding in Pakistan and China, earthquakes in Haiti and China, wildfires in Greece and Australia, drought in East Africa and China – imagine the numberless, unregarded creatures that perish also. No one attempts to rescue any of them.

... gone ... the Madeiran large white to pollution and loss of habitat ...

Capitalism, the home of climate change denial, cares nothing for wildlife as long as there remain the tastier flesh providers and the more satisfying “sport” victims (huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ “bags”). But the indifference to animal catastrophe extends to human disaster too, provided the victims are of no account. The accidents at Chernobyl and Bhopal show that ordinary people unfortunate enough to be affected by industrial or nuclear spillage have little hope of proper recompense. Even in powerful and enlightened countries, authorities are tardy in helping to put back together the lives of those in the path of disaster: consider the insensitivity of Washington towards the city of New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina and the weak reaction of the Hungarian government when tons of toxic sludge poured free of a metals plant at Kolontar earlier this month.

... but not forgotten: the dodo

The media generally finds such diversion as the soap opera of Wayne Rooney more compelling than the fate of the planet. Those who aspire to stay considerably wealthier even than that pudden-headed ball-kicker hope that the day is far off when people with whom they identify and particularly people with powerful lawyers find their lives overwhelmed by the accumulating disasters of global warming. Meanwhile, the mute creatures die out order by order, leaving an increasingly gaping void in the beauty of what was once a natural paradise.

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When Showtime's Dexter began transmission on FX in Britain, I was intrigued by it but found most of the characters wholly unsympathetic. Some of the habitual aggression has been toned down – Keith Carradine's elegant (and sadly curtailed) participation helped with this – but the compelling imagination of the writing has gradually raised the series to a pretty high level. Michael C Hall's central performance has become infinitely subtle – I always liked his work in Six Feet Under – and perhaps his game has been raised by the quality of the actors called in to play the successive serial killers: Jimmy Smits in the third series, John Lithgow in the fourth just ended here. The sequence in which Lithgow, coolly feigning innocent curiosity, strolled into Miami Police HQ and confirmed Dexter's identity was a masterpiece of controlled cunning in its execution. The resonances rippled in multiple directions and the tension was screwed up wholly psychologically and without any action-movie tricks. Brilliant.