The Author Responds

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Letters and Comments

Mark Jerome Walters wrote about efforts to save the ‘alala in “Do No Harm,” in the October-December 2006 issue. Below he responds to comments from John Marzluff, a professor at the College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, and Burr Heneman, director of the Commonweal Ocean Policy Program.

I greatly appreciate the thoughtful responses by John Marzluff and Burr Heneman to my article. I also applaud the valiant efforts of Marzluff and the many others but for whose dedication the ‘alala might now be extinct, indeed. But this misses the point.

In the thousands of pages of political correspondence, hundreds of books and studies, and the endless hours of interviews I gathered during my almost ten years of research on the ‘alala, I was dismayed by how hard it was to find discussions about the rightness or wrongness of the actions being taken to save the raven. Almost no one dared to voice the most enduring of questions: Were the actions taken ethically justified? For whose gain (it clearly wasn’t always for the ravens’) were the actions being rationalized? Almost no one asked the questions that, in Heneman’s words, go “beyond science and involve our emotions and philosophies.” And therein lies one of the greatest failures in the effort to save the ‘alala.

The recovery project lacked quantifiable scientific data, creating a void that was filled with the rush to do something—anything—just so long as something was done.
Nothing in the article suggests that actions should never be taken. Indeed, in the article I lauded the successful captive breeding efforts of The Peregrine Fund.

But the enduring power of the missive “Do No Harm” lies not in its practical advice but its plea to consider the ethics of every action we take when the fate of a life—or in the case of the ‘alala, the fate of a species—hangs in the balance.

Are we of such a mind that we dare not ask the questions, at least in respectable scientific circles, for which we can offer no promise of quantifiable answers?

Conservation scientists need to begin asking them, as physicians do every day, or include in their deliberations ethicists who do. If they don’t, we will continue to miss one of the lights of reason that can help us to make more informed and enlightened decisions of what actions to take—if any—when the rush to do something threatens to overpower the imperative to first, do no harm.