As the seal hunt begins on the east coast, we’re seeing substantially more sturm and drang over it than the average year. This mostly seems to stem from Paul McCartney’s intervention attempts. It’s all over the newspapers, and it’s on the radio. I guess we should stop the baby seals from being beaten to death, that doesn’t sound like a good thing. I suspect it’s not as black and white of an issue as it’s usually made out to be. I don’t know.

It does illustrate just how narrow-focus our environmental perspective continues to be. Why is the most important, most documented, most discussed environmental topic of the season baby seals?

We are actually starting to see major media coverage of global warming issues. But it’s in the form of journalistic reports on the release of scientific papers. Currently it’s regarding predictions of artic ice melt and consequent sea rise, last time it was fresh data from the antarctic ice coreing programs. And that’s good. It’s about time those kinds of real-science reports got some coverage. But it’s not a replacement for national concern and discussion. As far as that goes, all we have is baby seals.

Just about a half century into the environmental movement, we’re still mostly focusing on charismatic species-of-the-moment conservation efforts. I’m not aware of a country in the world that has something like an Endangered Ecosystem Act. Canada certainly doesn’t. We just don’t seem to be able to get a focus on conservation questions that are larger than a specific creature under threat or a certain valley being logged. And so our wilderness and our resources get degraded or destroyed through extraction or expansion, year in and year out, at regional and provincial scales, without much comment.

Sometimes when we take a stand to save a species, be it salmon or bear or wolf or marmot or cod or what have you, we are forced to preserve it’s ecosystem as part of that process. What we have learned about ecosystems is that they cannot be genuinely preserved piece-meal, they must be maintained as a cohesive whole of functioning species and physical cycles. I suppose if it works it works, but surely the conservation community in Canada would love to lose it’s reliance on foisting off flagship species on the public? And surely we would have more success in preserving ecosystems if we actually made that our acknowledged goal, and saw species preservation as a means to that end?

I’m don’t necessarily think the conservation community is at fault for this. I imagine that most working conservationists are fully convinced of the desire to save whole systems rather than parts, but are faced with the fact that no single group has the power or reach to change the environmental perspective of a society. But it seems to me we do need to think more seriously about what possibly could be done to facilitate that shift of perspective.

One thing at a time, I suppose. Canada doesn’t even have a federal Endangered Species Act, and perhaps it’s asking too much that we skip straight to an Endangered Ecosystems Act. So save the baby seals by all means. But afterwards let’s start thinking about saving the ecosystems they are a part of.