Editor,
Humans are an impactful species - no one would deny that our history has produced awesome changes to the planet. Here in academia, we will argue incessantly about the reasons why we are like this, but no one has a definite answer. For all of human history, we have been laboring under incomplete perceptions of our actual impacts upon the earth, which persist but are incrementally being re-evaluated.
In our quest to maximize our presence within the environment, we have marginalized and outright exterminated the similarly impactful animals, the keystone species of biology, many of which require as much land area as we do or more. "As the name implies," writes Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, "the removal of a keystone species causes a substantial part of the community to change
dramatically."
For this reason, there is a biological crisis, the "Sixth Mass Extinction," now underway, carrying severe repercussions for our future as a species. Global ecosystems are hemorrhaging because humans have settled and developed too much land and too many resources to preserve the biology of which we are a part.
The conservationist Aldo Leopold described the danger of our hubris: "If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."
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The small sprinkling of national parks and wilderness areas across the globe are not enough to sustain healthy ecosystems. Nor do constriction of habitat and extinction occur in only the rainforest - they are happening right now in New Mexico. The conflict between humans and one local keystone species, the Mexican gray wolf, is currently at a fever pitch. The citizens of this state have already exterminated New Mexico's wolves once, and with less than 50 animals hanging on against institutionalized intolerance and public apathy, New Mexicans are letting it happen again. In the service of cattle, which evolved to fit their native Asian subcontinent, native predators are once again threatened - this is a biological game of chance that we will ultimately lose.
Lobos are not the only local creature threatened with extinction, but they serve as a useful example. In the wolf reintroduction area, heedlessness and exploitation, unchanged since the 19th century, conflict with scientific advancements, some of which were developed here at UNM's natural science departments. At this juncture in human history, we have our best chance so far to take a stand for the rights of all interconnected organisms to exist and for adequately vast areas of wilderness to serve as a stage.
Beyond UNM's science department, we are all connected as Lobos, and one doesn't imagine that the mascot was chosen for fatalistic passivity. Rather, if we are content to let the wildness that wolves represent expire, then we should change our mascot. How about livestock?
Phil Carter
UNM student and president
of UNM Wilderness Alliance
