June
1999
Editorial: Signs
of the Future
By Martin Rowe
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In
ancient China, diviners used many techniques to find out what the future
promised. One of them was to heat tortoise shells until they cracked
and then read those cracks to determine what would happen to future
harvests or whether the ancestors were satisfied with the devotion offered
by their descendants. According to an article in the New York Times (“Turtles Vanish in Black Hole: Soup Pots and Pans of China” 5/4/99),
the same family of animals is providing another sign of the future.
Turtle soup and turtle body parts have for centuries been a source of
food and medicine in Chinese society. The increasing purchasing power
of the Chinese in recent years has meant, however, that trade in turtles
has boomed. Herpetologists (turtle specialists) have discovered that
whole countries in Southeast Asia have been vacuumed of their turtles
to sell in China. So complete has been the emptying of habitat in Laos
and Vietnam for instance that field workers are forced to visit markets
to catch a glimpse of these creatures, species of which have been discovered
shortly before being sold for food. In 1996, according to the Times, “two
to four tons of turtles were being exported each day from Phnom
Penh in Cambodia” (emphasis mine). It’s not just
Southeast Asia that’s fulfilling demand. In 1995, the United States
shipped out 84,000 map turtles, 23,000 snapping turtles and 38,000 softshell
turtles—an increase of up to fortyfold since 1990. And it’s
not just Chinese medicine that is creating the demand. There is increasing
concern that the international pet trade—in the U.S., Europe and
Japan—is creating a significant shortage.
The decimation of turtles around the world is yet another—and remarkably
concise—exemplification of the problems that will increasingly
beset our globalized world in the next few decades. In a perverse way,
tortoises and turtles have been and continue to be greatly valued by
the Chinese: they are the keys to the future and the pathway to health.
It is also, in China, a status symbol to be able to afford to eat them—something
that will only increase their desirability and expense as stocks fall
still further. As countries like China and India with their vast populations
acquire more purchasing power, demand for goods and services will increasingly
be met. The argument of those espousing this development model has
been
that greater material wealth will lead to greater concern over environmental
exploitation as well as the self-regulation of human population. This
hope, however, may either be realized too late or in vain. If these
turtles are representative of the pattern of our consumption of natural
resources, then unfettered demand will lead to rapid extinction: more
of us will want more. Moreover, greater purchasing power has meant
not
protection for turtle habitat or a respect for these animals in the
wild, but the acquisition of them as pets.
Oh, what a piece of work is Man! Our motivations are such a mixture
of selfishness and superstition and our use of animals so confused
and
contradictory. When we do things like read the cracks on their shells,
animals become our way of looking into the future and reaching beyond
ourselves. They help us understand our relationship with the past and
frame the future. But the very same family of animals is used merely
to satisfy our need to be amused and feel important. When we have exhausted
this particular resource, there is no doubt we will move on to another.
Either that, or we will be obliged to “farm” these animals
intensively to keep enough of them alive to satisfy the demand. Thus,
by driving down the price, it will be less profitable to poach them
from the wild and make them less exclusive—and thus less desirable—a
commodity. We will save a few by killing many.
International and governmental regulations clearly work: they saved
the elephant (perhaps temporarily) from extinction, and might do so
here. The challenge here, however, is that some of the species that
are most endangered may not have even been discovered yet, and you cannot
protect an animal under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species or the Endangered Species Act if its existence is unknown. Furthermore,
the World Trade Organization is increasingly becoming a forum where
countries who stand to make money from trading in endangered animals
or whose business practices threaten or pollute habitat can overturn
what they call unfair tariffs and restrictions on free trade.
Among this host of ironies, one thing is clear. Animal activists and
environmentalists are going to have to wise up to the need to protect
animals and habitat in a global marketplace where millions of consumers
are driving animals to extinction in shrinking habitat. It may mean
that more animals will have to be killed to protect them in the wild.
It may mean allowing endangered species to be killed so that money
will
go to safeguarding the future of their habitat. It will mean acquiring
the diplomatic skills to force developing countries to change centuries-old
customs and accept new paradigms—and for the developed world to
do the same. It will mean spending enormous amounts of money to make
it economically viable as well as environmentally sensible and socially
responsible to save animals and protect habitat—both here and overseas.
And it will emphatically mean dealing with the superstition, greed,
desperation, and perverse regard for what animals can do for us that
have characterized human beings’ relationships with the non-human
world for millennia—and making tough, unpopular decisions to change
them. Long ago the cracked tortoise shells answered questions about
our future. What happens to these turtles today may do just the same.
