An economic interpretation of a biblical tale
Unlike Noah, contemporary conservationists face constraints: they cannot save everything. The patriarch was able to fit a breeding pair of each of the 5.6m or so terrestrial species onto his 300 cubits-long ark.
Animals have two sources of value in Weitzman’s model. The first is the utility they provide humanity: economists now call this “ecosystem services”. They vary from the delight that megafauna provide those visiting a safari park to the more prosaic: pollinators fertilising crops; earthworms keeping the soil healthy. A forthcoming paper by Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago and Anant Sudarshan of the University of Warwick looks at the economic benefits of “keystone species”.
That led to what some conservationists might consider a repugnant conclusion: counterintuintively, the best way to preserve biodiversity is for the resource-constrained ark to pick a single species and squeeze in as many as possible. Preventing just one type of animal from going extinct preserves not only what is distinct about that animal, but everything it shares genetically with every other animal as well. Trying to keep two species alive, and failing, means losing everything.
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