Learning to Protect Life
Belgium-based philosopher/curator Sue Spaid is the author of five books on art and ecology and numerous philosophy papers regarding biodiversity, degraded lands, hydrological justice and wellbeing. Her latest book is The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice:Between Work and World.
By Sue Spaid
Learning to Protect Life: Tracing the Lineage from Conquistadors to Extinction & BLM
Learning to Respect the “Most Vulnerable” Among Us
The ruthless, “take no prisoners” approach of the conquistadors can be linked to both species depletion and police brutality, demonstrating how our disrespect for the most vulnerable among us inevitably endangers everyone. Unless everyone adopts new habits that maximize ecological and cultural diversity, we will remain mere conquistadors, readily destroying whatever we can’t extract for profit, simply because we don’t understand its value. Despite five centuries of data indicating the negative correlation between immunity and deprivation, we still send essential workers to work while the wealthier shelter in place. And then we act surprised when COVID-19 spirals out of control, infects ever more people, and leaves the socioeconomically deprived to suffer higher death tolls. The same goes for systemic police brutality, which similarly inflicts its outsized anger (and extralegal forces) on the least advantaged. Whenever I’m asked why I privilege environmental justice over social justice, I say I favor forward-looking strategies that necessitate people’s changed behaviors, not backward-looking schemes that remunerate, yet allow business-as-usual to continue.
Spain’s Magellan-Elcano Expedition (the Earth’s first circumnavigation), set sail in 1519 with three boats and 270 sailors, yet only 19 survived scurvy, battles, and mutinies to return three years later. Aside from Magellan, who died in battle, the other 93% sacrificed for Spain’s gain are long forgotten. That very same year, Hernando Cortés landed in Veracruz with an army of less than one thousand men, including an African slave with smallpox (Pringle 2015).[i]Having scuttled his ships to prevent his men from retreating, Cortés marched his army toward Tenochtitlán, setting off a wave of smallpox in their wake, as depicted in the Florentine Codex (compiled 1540-1585). “By the time Hernán Cortés and his troops began their final assault on Tenochtitlán, bodies lay scattered over the city, allowing the small Spanish force to overwhelm the shocked defenders” (Pringle 2015). By 1600, the Aztec population had fallen from 15-30 million to 2 million, thanks in part to conquistadors whose foreign diseases devastated native populations.
Around the millennium, Mexican epidemiologist Rodofo Acuña-Soto found it suspicious that indigenous Mexicans faced two major epidemics of cocoliztli, a viral hemorrhagic fever that twice halved the Aztec population (26 and 57 years after Cortés’ arrival). The “gruesome” symptoms, which King Phillip II’s personal physician Francisco Hernandez described in 1576, were “not consistent with known European or African diseases present in Mexico during the 16th century” (Acuña-Soto 2002: 360). When he studied tree rings, he discovered that each of these megadeaths had followed megadroughts, which likely led rodents to intrude on human habitat in search of water. When the rains returned, rodent populations swelled, transmitting cocoliztli to people.
Those most affected were the over-worked, malnourished, and under-clothed populations living in cramped quarters, as compared to the well-fed Spanish colonizers, who inhabited spacious homes managed by servants. “These infections appear to have been aggravated by the extreme climatic conditions of the time and by the poor living conditions and harsh treatment of the native people under the encomienda system of New Spain. The Mexican natives in the encomienda system were treated as virtual slaves, were poorly fed and clothed, and were greatly overworked as farm and mine laborers” (Acuña-Soto 2002: 360).
That 60-70% of the local population was ravaged by a rodent-borne virus hardly absolves the Spanish, who forced the Aztecs to inhabit easily governable reducciones (settlements), dense towns that left inhabitants particularly susceptible to animal-borne diseases. In fact, five cocoliztli outbreaks occurred between 1545 and 1815. Although Acuña-Soto has yet to identify the etiological agent, let alone explain its demise, his research clearly forecast the vulnerability of “essential workers” under Covid-19. His closing sentence rings prophetic, “If not extinct, the microorganism that caused cocoliztli may remain hidden in the highlands of Mexico and under favorable climatic conditions could reappear” (Acuña-Soto 2002: 362).
Learning to Value Ecological and Cultural Diversity
This same “take no prisoners” approach inspired “civilized” Europeans to destroy local forests to build sea-faring vessels, carve mountains to construct glorious cathedrals, and roam Earth in search of profitable resources to extract, eventually wreaking havoc on biodiversity. Given the environmental destruction and monolingual nations already in place by the 16th Century, it’s hardly surprising that no European nation ranks among the world’s top 50 biodiverse nations. Since 45 of the top 50 are former colonies, colonies appear to have fared much better than their colonizers, but in fact important species disappeared. The Wikipedia page “List of Extinct Animals of Oceania” identifies scores of animals lost since colonists first arrived 10,000 years ago. In Mauritius, the giant dodo bird, which had no known predators, was last sighted in 1662 (hunted to extinction). The website “Nature Fiji” offers an alarming figure: “Using statistical analysis researcher Richard Duncan (Univ. of Canberra) and his colleagues have concluded that human settlement of the Pacific islands resulted in the loss of about 1,000 species of nonpasserine landbirds (birds other than seabirds and songbirds which, if included, would have increased the number). This is about 10% of the current global total of about 10,000 birds of all sorts.”
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty initiated at the 1992 Rio Summit to prevent species loss, and since signed by 193 nations, claims that “we are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs,” what scientists term the “sixth mass extinction.” The CBD’s website claims that 3 species go missing every hour, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 801 known extinctions (primarily animals) since 1500. Based on IUCN’s data, a team of Mexican scientists attribute the global loss of 477 animals (146 amphibians, 80 birds, 158 fish, 69 mammals and 24 reptiles) since 1900 to human activity, since it would ordinarily take 800 to 10,000 years for so many species to go extinct (Ceballos 2015). In a later paper, Gerardo Ceballos denies the possibility that this loss is actually the inevitable consequence of the process of evolution, as some scientists claim, since the sixth mass extinction’s rate is 100x that of the normal rate (Ceballos 2018). Even so, he believes it’s still possible to avert “a dramatic decay of biodiversity and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services…through intensified conservation efforts, but that window of opportunity is rapidly closing” (Ceballos 2015).
While researching my first book Ecovention: Art to Transform Ecologies (2002), whose focus is artists’ innovative strategies to restore habitat, reclaim water and conserve species, I was struck by the statistic: “Of the nine countries where 60% of the world’s remaining 6500 languages are spoken, six (Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Zaire [Democratic Republic of Congo] and Australia) are also centers of megadiversity for flora and fauna” (Spaid 2002: 65). From this statistic, I inferred, “Biodiversity and cultural diversity are directly proportional.” Inspired by this notion, I later devised three corollaries derived from related facts, which I term the Protect-Respect-Multiply mantra (Spaid 2015: 122).
Fact: A breadth of human languages correlates with biodiversity.
Corollary i: Human beings who value their culture protect their natural environment.
Fact: Languages tend to survive where diverse species thrive.
Corollary ii: Respect for habitat encourages cultural diversity and biodiversity.
Fact: Biodiversity is relational and interactional with human beings.
Corollary iii: Mixing it up, difference, and convergence compound biodiversity
My 2015 paper concluded that biodiversity is a bio-indicator for human cultural engagement.
My earlier ‘hunch’ that biological and cultural diversity are linked came to fruition when UNESCO finally claimed that “new studies suggest that language loss, in its turn, has a negative impact on biodiversity conservation” (UNESCO).
Even more exciting, scientists such as zoologist Shahid Naeem now connect biodiversity, which scientists use to gauge ecosystem functioning, to human wellbeing, making the Protect-Respect-Multiply mantra especially relevant for human wellbeing. Implicit in routine species loss, whether human or nonhuman, is the tendency to favor survivors over losers. Problem is, if we aim to maximize human wellbeing, we’ve got this @&#backwards! Maximizing ecological and cultural diversity requires protecting the most vulnerable, so that every living thing survives. It’s no wonder that millions of masked demonstrators across the globe risked their health in the streets to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Police acting more like conquistadors than law enforcers constantly endanger black lives. Even worse, courts that uphold police brutality trivialize the lives of those who don’t survive such belligerence.
The view I propose echoes the “Cousteau family” philosophy, as relayed by Jacques Cousteau’s grandson “aquanaut” Fabien Cousteau: “People protect what they love, they love what they understand, and they understand what they’re taught” (Evans 2020). If we truly aim to protect life, we must teach biodiversity’s foundational role for human life, so that people understand why the vulnerable deserve our respect. By titling this essay and its sections “Learning to …”, I am arguing that unless we change our educational system, we will continue to destroy things of great value, such as species whose usefulness we cannot fathom or indigenous people speaking languages we’ll never understand. Michel Serres observed something quite similar when he wrote, “I sometimes fear that modernity is allowing that whose usefulness we no longer understand to die or [is] even destroying it, meanwhile the violence that besieges us isn’t being controlled”(Serres 2015: 6-7).
Acuña-Soto, R. (2002), “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, 8:4 https://www.academia.edu/11473896/Megadrought_and_ Megadeath_in_16th_Century_Mexico Accessed 24 October 2020.
Ceballos, G. (2015) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279042244_Accelerated_ Modern_Human-Induced_Species_Losses_Entering_the_Sixth_Mass_Extinction Accessed 25 October 2020.
Ceballos, G. (2018) file:///C:/Users/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois/Downloads/2018Ceballos EhrlichSixthMassExtinction-Science.pdf Accessed 25 October 2020.
Evans, C. O. (2020), “Fabien Cousteau,” How to Spend It, 24 October.
Knight, R. (2012) 24 April https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17826898 Accessed 25 October 2020.
Nature Fiji https://naturefiji.org/over-1000-extinct-pacific-birds/ Accessed 25 October 2020.
Pringle, H. (2015) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/06/how-europeans-brought- sickness-new-world Accessed 25 October 2020.
Serres, M. (2015), Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Spaid, S. (2002), Ecovention: Art to Transform Ecologies, Cincinnati: Contemporary Arts Center.
Spaid, S. (2015), “Biodiversity: Regarding its Role as a Bio-indicator for Human Cultural Engagement,” Rivista di Estetica, 59:116-130.
Spaid, S. (2016), “The Kinship Model: Why Biodiverse Cities Matter,” Ana Rita Ferreira (ed.), Philosophica, 48(2): 73-87.
Spaid, S. (2020a), “The Aesthetic Enchantment Approach: From ‘Troubled’ to ‘Engaged’ Beauty,” Journal of Somaesthetics, 6(1):166-182. https://somaesthetics.aau.dk/index.php/JOS/article/view/3660, Accessed 23 October 2020.
Spaid, S. (2020b), “Be Biodiverse: Bees, Art and Diversity,” forthcoming www. thelearnedpig.org
UNESCO http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/biodiversity- and linguistic-diversity/ Accessed 12 August 2020.
[1] I include this detail not to blame an African slave, but to reinforce the ‘revisionist view’ that African slaves contributed to ‘colonial empires’ from their onset. Even if this army record is more myth than truth, the fact that a slave was blamed proves that slaves accompanied conquistadors to México.