The white rhino is trying to tell us something

The New York Times on Friday published an important guest essay by Tim McDonnell, a reporter covering global climate change and energy issues, entitled “Humans Have a Long History of Making ‘Very Bad Decisions’ to Save Animals.” McDonnell mentioned current attempts to save the northern white rhino from otherwise certain extinction by fertilizing an egg from one of the last two remaining females with sperm collected from the last male before he died, which is then to be implanted in the female of another species of rhino. This is the solution we have come up with to try to prevent the otherwise inevitable extinction of a species we humans have run into the ground. It is but one instance, unfortunately, of a combination of ignorance and arrogance that characterizes how we humans try to use new technology to hide the ongoing root cause — us — of the destruction of our environment and the world as we know it.
McDonnell goes on to cite a number of ever more imaginative and risky scientific approaches to combat biodiversity loss. Here are some of his examples (his article also deserves reading in full): “They are cryogenically banking reproductive cells collected via electroejaculation and using them to perform assisted pregnancies. They are physically relocating animals to safer habitats by truck and airplane. They are transporting animals over special bridges, shooting them through cannons and dangling them upside down from helicopters.
“To study shy animals, they’re dispatching robots and dressing in costumes. They’re concocting love potions and personally mimicking mating rituals. To knock out invasive predators, they’re chucking poisoned sausages and mice out of airplanes and dispatching more robots (weaponized to kill invasive starfish).
“Most controversial, they’re studying how they might alter the genes of wild animals to either confer resistance to climate shocks or, if the animal in question is an invasive predator, deliberately cause its population to collapse.”
His point is that we have gone so far in destroying the habitats of these animals, we have unleashed such terrible forces of pollution, overexploitation and now climate change, that biodiversity loss has never in history been so rapid and high “without the help of an asteroid or mega-volcano.” To us, only new science and technology seem to offer even a glimmer of a chance of “saving” some species from destruction by ourselves. That is the path we have chosen and we are doing our best to forget that the same human behavior that led us to this impending disaster continues unabated. It is a losing game.
Most importantly, McDonnell warns that many of these scientific experiments and novel technological answers to problems we ourselves created risk backfiring and causing immeasurably more harm than they were intended to offset. This includes past introductions of non-native species to get rid of invasive species that ended up destroying much of the local biodiversity and ecosystems themselves.

To us, only new science and technology seem to offer even a glimmer of a chance of ‘saving’ some species from destruction by ourselves. 

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

Today’s brave new idea is the so-called gene drive, in which genes are edited to provoke rapid mutations, mostly in order to collapse certain populations of animals that are considered invasive. The chance for this to go wrong, to escape its intended area of application and to have significant unintended consequences, is terrifyingly high.
Like me, I believe you are starting to recognize a dangerous pattern and form of behavior that we seem to be applying to every possible domain of life today. We are witnessing only the beginning of fertility clinics that allow you to choose the characteristics of your offspring. We have generalized genetically modified fruits and vegetables to increase agricultural yields that have already had deleterious effects on ecosystems around the world.
We see artificial intelligence as our new savior in matters of technology, yet we know full well that we risk a swarm of potentially dramatic unintended consequences. This is all indicative of a dangerous new human mindset that I have been referring to, where we try to forget our responsibility for creating problems by applying some novel technology or science to them, carrying tremendous risks of unintended consequences, and doing absolutely nothing to change our human behavior that created the problem in the first place.
We have painted ourselves into a corner through a combination of ignorance and arrogance, trying to hide the all-too-obvious fact that we ourselves are the problem. As McDonnell wrote, “humans have the ignominious distinction of being the only species to be individually responsible for a global extinction crisis,” and that is only the beginning of it.
The white rhino is trying to tell us that there was no need for all these invasive scientific experiments and procedures on him — that all we had to do was to take care of our planet, our habitats and our ecosystems, instead of ravaging, overexploiting and destroying them to the point where species like his can no longer survive. It should not be such a hard lesson for us to learn and accept.
The greatest danger today, though, may not lie in the destruction that we have already brought about, but in the scientific experimentation that we are employing to try to overlook our responsibility for it. So-called gene drives, excessive trust in artificial intelligence and trying to solve all of our problems through denial are examples where the medicine could be far worse than the disease. We must think very carefully about what we are doing, we must assess wild new ideas before we carelessly unleash them on the world and, most importantly, we must never forget what the white rhino has to tell us.

• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked closely with Saudi petroleum ministers Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani from 1959 to 1967. He headed the Saudi Information Office in Washington from 1972 to 1981 and served with the Arab League observer delegation to the UN from 1981 to 1983.