Who counts as endangered?
Who counts as endangered?
by Lisa H. Sideris
In conservation biology, being endangered means to be at risk of extinction. The primary driver of extinction is loss of habitat: the place where a species makes its home. Habitat losses can occur naturally, as when the dinosaurs famously died out in the wake of an asteroid impact that radically changed the climate. In most cases, however, the collective, day-to-day, earth-bound activities of humans are to blame. Agriculture, industry, deforestation, and development of land all take their toll on the places where species live. Protections for endangered species are of little use if their home is not simultaneously safeguarded. Endangered species are vulnerable to additional future harms, and the more intimately connected an organism is to specific features of its environment the more precarious its status.
Peering beneath the surface of the word “endangerment” we quickly uncover layers of meaning that link the term to conceptions of home and lordly rule. “Danger” is rooted in the Anglo-French daunger, which connotes “power to harm, mastery, authority, and control,” and the implied authority relates specifically to the power of a lord or master over a household (dominarium, meaning the power of a lord, stems from domus or “house”).
Humans, creatures purportedly fashioned in the image of the divine and granted dominion over the Earth, have subsumed virtually all of nature under our domain. In exercising our dominion, we threaten countless other lifeforms with homelessness and death. Yet nothing in the Genesis 1 creation story that references humans as imago Dei—the image or likeness of God—condones such destruction. The story does not specify what about the human shows us to be in the divine image. This ambiguity can create an opening into responsibility and an invitation to honor the mystery by imagining better possibilities for the exercise of dominion. Rather than a marker of exceptionalism, imaging God might be understood as a process of becoming that unfolds within ecological constraints and through relationships of reciprocity with myriad other creatures.
Currently, the path that leads to a species being recognized as endangered—and thereby potentially “saved”—is strongly influenced by human preoccupations. Conservation priorities skew toward charismatic megafauna, including our close primate kin, with whom humans share many genetic and anatomical similarities. The beauty and grace of these creatures more easily attracts public attention, empathy, and funding; in their complexity, we discern an image of ourselves. Conferral of endangered status, then, involves a form of recognition in a literal, but ultimately inadequate, sense of seeing something of ourselves in other creatures.
Endangered status, then, is both a red flag and a mark of some distinction that signals a creature’s power—or powerlessness—to gain visibility in the distorted prism of human-centered perceptions and self-regard. The El Segundo blue butterfly, which, through a series of contingent historical events, came to be known by the Spanish word for “the second,” invites reflection on what it means to have secondary status as a small, inconsequential organism in a human-made world.
Scholars working in the area of extinction studies note that recognition of endangerment entails selective care. That is, awarding protected status to some species always involves a choice not to care about others. Prioritizing species for endangerment status means that others are rendered killable—an acceptable sacrifice.
Despite their critical role in the functioning of ecosystems, invertebrate species, and especially insects, are often regarded as killable, compared to other creatures. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation laments that “many people can identify an endangered Bengal tiger, but few can identify an endangered Sand Creek tiger beetle.” Insects comprise the vast majority of known animal species, yet only 84 insect species are listed as endangered or threatened in the United States compared to 439 vertebrate species. Even among butterflies, many of which are considered charismatic microfauna (and more appealing to humans than other insect species), the fact remains that most people can only name one iconic butterfly—the monarch—among the more than 20,000 species of butterflies in the world. Humans’ disproportionate regard for monarchs vis-à-vis other butterflies speaks to our fascination with movement and scale—our wonder at the ability of these fragile creatures to migrate up to 3,000 arduous miles.
None of this bodes well for the El Segundo blue (ESB). It is a creature so small as to be virtually invisible and so tied to its fragmented habitat as to be practically immovable. Written descriptions and photographs often emphasize the butterfly’s thumbnail size. Joel Sartore, who has spent decades compiling a “Photo Ark” of endangered species is a case in point. It is equally common to see the butterfly’s image so greatly magnified that its body dwarfs other bodies and details in the frame—big blue wings superimposed on a topographical map of Los Angeles; the butterfly and a buckwheat flowerhead scaled up to human proportions, sharing airspace with rockets and jets. These images suggest how challenging it can be for small invertebrates like the ESB to solicit our attention and care.
Masthead image: El Segundo blue butterfly habitat restoration area, Los Angeles International Airport. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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