What is meant by the term ‘wildlife’?
Wildlife includes animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, spiders, and invertebrates such as earthworms, to mention just a few types.
This website is concerned with native wildlife local to Tasmania, rather than exotic species such as cats, rabbits and blackbirds.
Ecosystems
Pests
Why are ecosystems important?
If we removed ecosystems from Earth today, we would rapidly descend into an uninhabitable Venus-like state, polluted with plant waste. Only 3% of Earth remains ecologically intact, but at least 30% is needed to start reversing ecosystem collapse.
from ‘Wildlife in the Balance’ by Simon Mustoe
But what about all the pests?
In 1958, Chairman Mao identified tree sparrows (grain-eaters) as one of 4 great pests of the regime, and all across China sparrows were chased, shot, poisoned, netted and trapped – in Beijing alone, 3 million people mobilised to kill almost a million birds. Across China maybe a billion sparrows perished. In the following 2 years, China was plagued by locusts, collapsing grain production and causing the deaths of at least 15 million people. What was not realised is that particularly in the breeding season, grain-eating birds switch to insects like locusts for extra protein. China’s tree sparrows are now almost extinct.
It’s always best to resist the urge to kill inconvenient wildlife as they are almost inevitably protecting you from a greater risk. Abundant wildlife can easily be responding to a greater threat we haven’t realised yet. A belief that animals are mere commodities, rather than a functioning part of ecosystems, leads to atrocious assumptions and decisions that affect our very survival.
Australian farmers could be making an additional few billion dollars profit a year, if ecosystems were restored. That’s only production though; additional benefits to farmers would also be received as ecosystem services. By allowing land degradation,we are effectively removing the equivalent of an entire nation’s income from the economy. Killing wildlife is the worst thing a farmer can do, as they are critical to maintaining soil condition.
A person who runs cattle on their land may gain a benefit, but the environmental impact of those >
< cattle is divided among the many locals living in that ecosystem. Likewise, a farmer who applies fertiliser, herbicides or pesticides to crops, killing songbirds and polluting waterways, is depriving the rest of society the value that those songbirds and waterways would bring – because wildlife does not belong to anyone. When humans first appeared on Earth, it was because the world had an abundance of food and a suitable climate. Before that, more than 90% of all animal species that ever lived on Earth had already gone extinct. Our lives evolved in unison with wildlife; the longest-living species are those that contribute to the greater good be working together cooperatively. Animals that adapt too fast and disrupt too much cannibalise their opportunity and die out fast.
The need to protect wildlife for all our sakes has become more than just a belief. At current rates, massive ecosystem collapse due to loss of animals is predicted within as few as 3 of our lifetimes – that’s your grandchildren’s lifetime. We’re now living on a planet where we’ve killed two-thirds of all living wild creatures. But humans still regard animals as separate to ecosystem function.
The natural processes that animals provide can’t be replicated because they are delivered in an acutely accurate way based on millions of years of trial and error – and as they go extinct, we can’t even tell where the most important places are. Animals precisely distribute energy (eg nutrients) on a planetary scale, to sustain the system and respond adaptively to subtle fluctuations in patterns of weather and ocean currents. We can’t replicate conditions artificially.
Why bother about wildlife?
Simon Mustoe answers “because ecosystems don’t exist without them, and we need ecosystems to survive. Animals’ collective behaviour has evolved an alignment and co-dependence with ecosystem stability”.
Caring for your natural environment and its wildlife is really caring for yourself.
And Jane Goodall adds, ‘just like us, wildlife has personality, mind and emotions’. Wildlife are our immediate neighbours and everything we do has consequences for them.
We are all dependent on our natural environment for our survival – just talk to a hurricane or cyclone survivor about their experiences. Weak, degraded environments provide us with little safety and support, whereas healthy and flourishing environments provide protection and are resilient, recovering more quickly.
Wildlife help to maintain a healthy environment through the ‘ecosystem services’ they provide – eg fertiliser, pollination, burial of bark and leaf litter that reduces fuel for fire, weeding and mowing, removal of pests, etc. So all land occupiers have a reason as well as a responsibility to protect wildlife and enable them to survive and thrive.
National parks are just not enough – we need landholders to protect wildlife on their property, especially as climate change takes effect. Our gardens and properties are becoming crucial refuges for wildlife.
What are the results of ecosystem collapse?
Simon Mustoe explains that “the exploitation of a common resource (eg land, air, water) often benefits one person or entity but the negative effects of that exploitation are shared among the whole community”.
Unlike plants, animals can move, distributing nutrients. When you see a bird feeding in a park, it is moving nutrients around and re-depositing them in tiny areas around its nest and favourite feeding grounds.
Cooperation is the most evolutionary-stable survival strategy, not competition. Competition, conflict and disruption are features of a disturbed environment, in which there are many losers, and every past mass extinction has proved this.
Human animals cannot singularly create and maintain ecosystems; but we persecute animals despite the essential role they play in recreating a habitable Earth. The pandemics, floods, fires and locust plagues are all predictable consequences of ecosystem collapse when you kill all the animals. And the more diverse and abundant wildlife is, the quicker ecosystems can recover from the impact we have had on them.
Infestations such as rats or locust swarms are a consequence of our ecological management; they are capitalising on an abundance of nutrients. If our response is to poison the rats, we won’t ever fix the problem – more rats come or maybe we’ll end up with a cockroach problem, on top of poison-contaminated water. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more cost-effective to get our own waste management under control and rebuild a balanced ecosystem where predators and prey are harmonised and disease minimised naturally?
Wildlife transfers and amplifies nutrient processes, creating rich soil that is slowly released into the environment in just the right quantity to avoid becoming pollution. By cultivating plant diversity, animals also apply pressure on individual plants to store the maximum nutrients to survive. So an abundance and diversity of wildlife, alongside agricultural production, is a key to our own food security.
While we commonly think of animals as visitors in their habitat, that’s wrong. Animals engineer ecosystems – take animals away and there’s no ecosystems. Animals build and maintain the ecosystems that deliver our food, clean water, clean water, fertile soil, rich fisheries and a stable climate.
Animal Impact Statement
Animals create eco-systems that stabilise the planet and avoid catastrophic climate chaos, the death of the oceans and the collapse of human society.
Animals transfer, amplify and concentrate nutrients on a huge scale, delivering resources to make farms and fisheries economically viable and provide critical and sustainable human food security.
Animals suppress the eruption of pandemics and pests like locust, jellyfish and squid, which plague our farms and fisheries while putting lives at risk.
Changing our values
Accepting that we are all animals like any other;
Every small action we take individually has consequences for wildlife, but is a powerful contribution any creature can ever make.
We cannot survive unless we live alongside other abundant and diverse wildlife.
To start making a difference to our own survival, we have to stop seeing wildlife as an inconvenience, or a commodity to manage. We need to manage our own behaviour so we can live alongside animals with the degree of equity and respect we owe them for giving us ecosystems.