Inequality and Extinctions

Societies that allow income to concentrate at the top, a Canadian research team has found, tend not to be kind to plants and other living things.

May 21, 2007

By Sam Pizzigati

You consider yourself a thoughtful, caring person. So what should you care about most in our world today, our globe’s grotesquely unequal distribution of income and wealth or the escalating extinction rate among our Earth’s endangered species? A team of Canadian environmental scientists has just made that choice easier. If you want to protect our world’s flora and fauna, their new research advises, stand up against inequality.

This new research, the three scientists at Montreal’s prestigious McGill University note in their just-published paper, finds “striking relationships between income inequality and biodiversity loss.”

“Our study suggests that if we can learn to share economic resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species,” notes the McGill Environment School’s Greg Mikkelson, “it may help us to share ecological resources more fairly with other species.”

The McGill researchers compared data on inequality and biodiversity loss for 45 nations -- and 45 U.S. states. Their analysis of that data, funded by McGill and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, reveals a consistent “general trend.”

“Societies with more unequal distributions of income,” the research indicates, “experience greater losses of biodiversity.”

How significant an impact on extinctions does inequality make? If the developed world’s most unequal nation, the United States, were to distribute incomes as equally as Sweden, 44 percent fewer plant and vertebrate species in the United States would likely face extinction.

Why does inequality have this impact? The McGill environmental scientists are hoping that future research can help pinpoint the “underlying mechanisms.”

But certain dynamics already appear clear. One example: In nations where a wealthy few monopolize the best farmland, the resulting poverty pressures the poor to till marginal — and environmentally fragile — landscapes.

And in societies where a wealthy few accumulate grand fortunes, they also accumulate disproportionate political power, often enough to prevent — or bulldoze away — environmental regulations.

“With biodiversity loss,” sums up McGill biologist Andrew Gonzalez, “if we don't link the science to the social causes, we will never solve the problem.

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Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality.