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Drawing a line in the sand: Bioengineering as conservation in the face of extinction debt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2022

Josh Wodak
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Abstract

What conservation could possibly become commensurate with the rates of human-induced biophysical change unfolding at the advent to the Sixth Extinction Event? Any such conservation would require time-critical interventions into both ecosystems and evolution itself, for these interventions would also require domains of risk and ethics that shatter normative understandings of conservation. Yet a line appears to have been drawn in the sand against such experimental conservation. Holding the line will retain conservation practices that are null and void against the extinction debt facing multitudes of species. Crossing the line would invoke scales of bioengineering that appear abhorrent to normative morality. This article explores the question of whether this line in the sand could, and should, be crossed through a detailed case study of current and proposed conservation for endangered Chelonia mydas sea turtles on Raine Island, a small coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Chelonia mydas and Raine Island are presented as synecdoche for conservation across diverse species across the world because turtles are among the most endangered of all reptiles and Raine Island is the largest and most important rookery in the world for this species. With such lines disappearing under the rising seas, the article contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.

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Articles
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 28 , Special Issue 2: Between pride and despair: Stories of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics rainforests , December 2021 , pp. 169 - 182
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022

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References

Notes

1 Andrew Dunstan and Katharine Robertson, Raine Island Recovery Project: 2016–17 Season Technical Report to the Raine Island Scientific Advisory Committee and Raine Island Reference Group (Brisbane: Queensland Government, 2017).

2 Jeffrey Lovich, Joshua Ennen, Mickey Agha and Whitfield Gibbons, ‘Where have all the turtles gone, and why does it matter?’, BioScience 68(10) (2018), 772.

3 David Hopley, Raine Island: Its past and present status and future implications of climate change: Project report (Townsville: School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, James Cook University, 2008), p. 1.

4 Hopley, Raine Island, p. 13.

5 Peter Beattie and Lindy Nelson-Carr, ‘World’s largest green turtle rookery given highest protection status’, ministerial statement, Record of Proceedings, First Session of the Fifty-Second Parliament of Queensland, 22 August 2007, p. 2727.

6 Hopley, Raine Island, 68.

7 Hopley, Raine Island, 1.

8 Andrew Dunstan, quoted in Neil Mattocks, ‘Natural history and research and management of Raine Island’s green turtle rookery’, eAtlas, https://eatlas.org.au/ts/raine-turtles.

9 David Attenborough, quoted in the ‘Be part of the largest green turtle recovery project in history’ poster, Department of Environment and Heritage Workshops, Brisbane, 2016.

10 Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher (eds), Nature Inc.: Environmental conservation in the neoliberal age (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2014).

11 Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. (London: Edward Moxon, 1850).

12 Hopley, Raine Island, 48.

13 Camryn Allen, quoted in Craig Welch, ‘99% of Australian green sea turtles studied turning female from climate change’, National Geographic, 8 January 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/australia-green-sea-turtles-turning-female-climate-change-raine-island-sex-temperature; Michael Jensen, Camryn Allen, Tomoharu Eguchi, … Peter Dutton, ‘Environmental warming and feminization of one of the largest sea turtle populations in the world’, Current Biology 28(1) (2018), 154–9.

14 Hopley, Raine Island, 48.

15 ‘Green turtles die on Raine Island, unknown provenance, courtesy Qld Govt’, eAtlas, https://eatlas.org.au/media/977.