The osprey had been attacked by another bird. It couldn't open its eye because part of its eyelid was torn. We did the best we could to remove the section of eyelid that was bothering it and put antibiotic ointment from my emergency medical kit on its eyeball. A-Hong kept attributing the eye's recovery to that medicine.
Ospreys only eat live fish, so we had no way to feed it. We could feel its breastbone jutting out like a knife, like on a chicken skeleton picked clean. We had no way to make sure it would live to the next boat taking us off the island, to possible medical salvation at the zoo. Our only choice was to release it the next morning.
So we did. It flew off, for better or worse, into the wild.
I always wonder how much we should interfere with the lives of the animals we study. Sometimes it is clear, like maybe this case, where there is no way an animal will live without interference. But even then, I feel like it is still interference, for our own amusement. We are only satisfying ourselves when we play with nature. We saved an osprey (maybe), and then more fish die. Is the osprey worth more than the fish? Would we let it die for a "higher" animal? How are we to decide what's "higher," anyways? By complexity, cuteness, ease of transfer of favorable human characteristics?
But then again, what if we used more quantifiable methods instead of "cuteness." Genetic diversity? Importance of role in an ecosystem? But these are still doing the same thing, on a bigger, grander (more grandiose?) scale. We can't keep all ecosystems intact and ourselves with them. So how do we choose?
Or maybe we don't. Maybe nature is just nature and we are just stirring up mud by introducing our hand in it. And it will settle back down, slightly different, but still doing the same thing. Are we arbitrary arbiters, justifying intervention based on values that don't mean anything in nature?
The same processes of selection will continue to act on nature regardless of how heavily our hand plays into it. One could argue that the species going extinct now are the ones that are less fit to survive in the new human-dominated environment. And fitness seems to be the only rules that biology recognizes. The rest, I think, is human sentiment. We don't want to see biodiversity disappear. We hope to find a cure for cancer in an undiscovered species. Species deserve the right to exist (if I were a species...). And so we create constructions to save certain things in nature.
But when we do the selection, we add all of our human subjectivity. Who lives and who dies gets politicized, commercialized, and all the kinds of -izing that have to do with everything humans want, and not what nature wants. But what does nature want? Nature doesn't want anything.
We're just doing it for ourselves. For our survival. We're not going to give up all our technology and civilization to return the environment to a pre-human state. But we also worry about the collapse of the natural environment that is familiar to us and the hardship it would be to our species. We might go extinct too.
But something will live on.
