Day 79: C’mon, Ehrlich. You have to admit this is cool.

Baby orangutan. ©Orangutan Foundation

I admire Paul Ehrlich for his sustained warnings about human overpopulation and the environmental degradation we cause.

But sometimes, I wish he’d lighten up.

For example. Five days after I published this blog post in early February, about the discovery of a dozen new species in Columbia, Eurekalert came out with a press release that read like a wet blanket:

No joy in discoveries of new mammal species — only a warning for humanity, Paul Ehrlich says.

And so now, as 300-plus news outlets are gleefully reporting the discovery of hundreds of previously undocumented orangutans in Indonesia, my spirits are dragged down by the realization that, according to Ehrlich, the discovery spotlights “how little we actually know about our natural capital” and “how much bigger our conservation problems are if we’re going to maintain the life-support services that we need from biodiversity.”

Sure, Ehrlich is an expert. His findings (I’ll write more below) are based in science. But I want to believe in magic. I want to believe there are plenty of animals living where we don’t see them, wise enough to stay out of our way and safe from our clumsy, damaging lives.

The Associated Press reported the discovery of the new orangutan population over the weekend, but it was first announced in a Nature Conservancy blog post by Erik Meijaard at the tail end of March. 

Meijaard explained that the Nature Conservancy field team discovered the new population after traveling to the heart of a 2-million-acre forest situated in Indonesia’s rugged Sangkulirang mountains.

“Since I first surveyed the vicinity of these mountains in the mid 1990s, I had heard rumors of orangutans in this largely unexplored part of the island,” he wrote. “In 2003, The Nature Conservancy organized a major expedition to this same region, and confirmed that at least on the western fringes of the area there were orangutans. But we didn’t expect any significant orangutan populations further east.”

But now, new scouting has revealed 219 orangutan nests along six miles of a forest transect. “We cannot yet determine the density from this, but such number generally indicates medium densities of orangutans,” Meijaard wrote, adding that the untrammeled region could support more than a thousand of the tree-dwelling animals.

For a total population on Borneo of probably fewer than 50,000 animals, such a find is really important, he wrote. He called the discovery “welcome news on a generally gloomy conservation agenda.”

I wonder if Ehrlich would agree.  

Ehrlich, of Stanford University, and Gerardo Ceballos, a biologist at the National University of Mexico, analyzed 408 new mammalian species discovered since 1993. They published their findings in the Feb. 9 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The newly discovered species amount to approximately 10 percent of the known species of mammals. 

Baby Oranguans at the BOS Foundation (Borneo Orangutan Survival) in Kalimantan, Indonesia ©Greenpeace/Natalie Behring

It is not that surprising that multitudes of new insect species are still being discovered, or that new species are found in extreme conditions along hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, he said. But more new mammals are being discovered than statistics would predict.

“Our analysis indicates how much more varied biodiversity is than we thought and how much bigger our conservation problems are if we’re going to maintain the life-support services that we need from biodiversity,” Ehrlich said.

Most of the ideas Ehrlich presents in the analysis are not new — they’re the same warnings he’s been issuing for decades. Our “natural capital” generates income in the form of “ecosystem services:” disease control, carbon dioxide absorption, fresh water, flood prevention, pollination and crop pest control, among others.  

Ehrlich said the answer to the question, “What difference does it make if we put a strip mall in here and this little fly goes extinct, or this little mouse goes extinct?” lies in the rivet-popper hypothesis, which he and his wife and Stanford colleague, Anne Ehrlich, developed in the 1980s.

An airplane wing has a certain amount of redundancy in its design, as does much of nature. So you can pop off some of the rivets and the wing will still hold together and the plane will still fly. But at some point, you’ll have removed one too many rivets and the plane will crash.

“Even though you don’t know the value of each rivet, you know it’s nuttier than hell to keep removing them,” Ehrlich said.

Boiled down, Ehrlich’s position seems to be that more species discoveries should only beget the unsettling knowledge that we have more to lose.  It’s an awfully pessimistic view.

I prefer to think there are reservoirs of animals living in such variable habitats that we haven’t yet envisioned technologies with the potential to destroy them, just like I hope the orangutans have plenty of hidden forests — and radio-collared adult wolves birth secret pups the federal biologists never see. I need to feel free to celebrate the life that thrives despite us, and hope that it means our impacts to the natural world aren’t barreling along as an unstoppable train.

Otherwise, Ehrlich, what’s the use in trying?

Source: Ehrlich’s quotes came from the Eurekalert press release about his study.