An Essay by W. W. Weeks
This is an appropriate time to explore the latest conservation phenotype. The evolution of a form, however, is driven by the living context in which it exists, and the exploration of a new form might well commence with a discussion of that context.
To begin, recall two of the fundamental driving evolutionary forces for conservation. Perhaps the most fundamental force is scarcity. People don’t and haven’t worried about conservation of resources that are available and abundant. But almost any resource can become scarce when demand changes or when the number of consumers expands.
Thus, among the most important forces associated with scarcity, so important that it could almost itself be called a driving force is the human population. I will make note of population numbers several times in the reflections that follow.
Sometimes, when scarcity has become a less pressing issue, a seemingly contrasting force, prosperity, can make conservation a societal priority. We will consider why that is a little later.
The driving forces can create tributaries of a river that has flowed through much of human history. There are times the conservation river has flowed fast and deep. At other times, the surface flow has disappeared. The times and places in which the flow has disappeared have suffered the consequences for failing to attend to resource conservation. The base flows of the river support life. The surplus flows support the flowering of a rich, diverse, and wondrous life.
In my own state, the river was at low ebb around 1900. By 1916 natural-appearing places were scarce enough that our governing institutions were moved to formally conserve some of the best remaining of them.
At about that time, forest cover for my once overwhelmingly forested state was at its historical low: more than ninety-seven per cent of the forest that existed in 1600 CE had been cleared. In 1916, the state’s sense of scarcity and its rising prosperity combined to make the conservation river flow.
That was one hundred years after statehood was granted; thus the state was also affected by another key conservation driver. Conservation generally becomes an objective when population exerts local pressure on key resources and that pressure is not relatively easy to resolve by moving into less densely unoccupied territory.
Island nations are natural examples of that phenomenon. Some of the early examples of conservation codes come from island nations. The fish that Pacific island peoples depended upon might have been abundant in other places but they were subject to local depletion with devastating consequences. So restrictions on fishing in spawning and aggregating areas were imposed and enforced.
Elements of the local resource pressure story have long been evident, and not only on islands. To take a case in point: estimates of the population of ancient India vary widely, but in 250 BCE, 30 million or so seems to be the consensus. The pressure on resources was sufficient anyway that the emperor Ashoka issued edicts we can read today because they were engraved on boulders and iron pillars. He listed wild animals that were to be protected and decreed that forest should not be burned without reason, nor with the objective of killing wildlife.
At about that time, Middle East populations were outgrowing their resources, too, but it takes broad thinking to find conservation themes in the Bible. The most obvious is the injunction to let land rest and lie fallow every seventh year.
At about the time of the writing of Leviticus and the reign of Ashoka, the population of the world has been estimated at less than 150 million souls. It would be 22 centuries before it reached a billion.
By 500 CE, potable water and beach space were rare enough resources in the Roman Empire that the Code of Justinian specified that they were not subject to exclusively private ownership: “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind – the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea.” This, of course, is the oft-cited foundation of the modern public trust doctrine.
There is more to be said about the antecedents modern conservation but the themes are by now clear enough to allow us to jump forward, and consider conservation as it evolved nearer our time and place.
Within a couple of centuries of the time Europeans arrived to stay in what is now the United States, some American leaders began to understand that we were losing landscapes, resources and wildlife that we valued. Widespread acceptance of that fact wasn’t immediate, and action upon its implications was slow in coming. For example, at the same time -1872 – that we were decimating the unbelievably large herds of bison that once roamed widely over the continent, we were establishing the first national park: “Be it enacted…that the tract of land lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River…is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
And yet, by1886, in order to preserve that vision, the nation’s best option was to give the United States Army the assignment of seeing, by force if necessary, that the Yellowstone lands were in fact mostly reserved from settlement, occupancy and sale. The Army administered Yellowstone until 1918.
From a distance, the people of the United States understood that Yellowstone represented a scarce resource. Locally, it was harder to accept a decision made in Washington D.C. to go cold turkey on a habit of exploitation of Yellowstone’s resources. Ways to reliably make money are always prized in the place they exist (and for conservationists, it is worth thinking through the implications of that proposition.)
It seems evident that in the United States at about that time, the second tributary of the conservation river was emerging. I have called scarcity the source of first trib, a stream we might call “Resource Stewardship.’ To reiterate a point made earlier, scarcity has two elements, one geographic—specifically the capacity of a landscape to produce and support life—and the other, population. The world’s population had reached about one and a half billion by the time the United States set aside Yellowstone. The sense that there notably more people everywhere, and notably fewer frontiers, helped to alight a political will to restrain ourselves so that we did not, before our own eyes, transform the earth so much that we would lose too many of the earthly features that both supported us and stimulated wonder in us.
When a trickle of political will meets a stream of prosperity, the second conservation driver, it can form the headwaters of the second major tributary—the preservation trib—of the conservation river. Without a critical level of prosperity, the conservation issue for lands and waters is how to preserve their productive capacity so that we can get from them the things we need to live. Once a threshold of prosperity is reached, we find ourselves considering “withdrawing” some lands from their role in supporting us physically and allowing ourselves to fulfill our desire to preserve their capacity to support us spiritually. Thus was John Muir a man of his time, and Teddy Roosevelt a similarly timely political leader who embraced both wise resource use and preservation ¾ in service of both tributaries of the conservation river.
The evolution of conservation becomes more familiar to us at this point, but it is worthwhile to mark some key moments. The breadth of participation in Roosevelt’s Conservation Congress in 1908 was stunning: almost all of the nation’s governors and most national legislators, as well as judges and other leaders attended a gathering in Washington to discuss conservation. We haven’t seen the like since.
Gifford Pinchot, who was central to the establishment of the national forests, was a leading spokesperson at the time for the utilitarian side of the conservation movement. He was right at the center of Conservation Congress planning. Conscientious management of natural resources was the driving theme of his work. The objective, in his words, was: “the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”
But seven years before the Conservation Congress, Muir had already published a very successful book on the nation’s parks. Though he would not be successful in securing protection for all of the treasures he cared for, he had some intuitive political sense. He knew, corresponded with, lobbied, and indeed had hiked with Roosevelt. Muir’s aesthetic sense led him to what I would call proto-ecology. His often paraphrased observation was that “when we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.”
(Muir has lately joined the ranks of other founding fathers to have been derided for elitist and racist writings—it is wisely said all statues have feet of clay.)
Roosevelt said “we are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible. This is not so.” He presided over the establishment of five national parks, fifty-one bird sanctuaries, and a hundred million acres of national forest.
The bird sanctuaries are a case in conservation point. The demand of a growing population with growing discretionary resources for bird plumes (to be used making hats) was great enough to threaten the shorebirds that were the source of the plumes. As the nation watched the last passenger pigeons pass from this earth due to habitat loss and over-hunting, it was the millinery trade that contributed mightily to the awakening of the American people to their capacity to destroy resources that had once seemed infinite. Private non-profit conservation organizations such as the Audubon Society sprang up; W. T. Hornaday wrote in 1913 that “no unprotected wild species can long escape the hounds of commerce.”
The same prosperity that made preservation a possibility created a mostly richness-of-life scarcity that made conservation a priority.
In 1916, not long after the Conservation Congress was concluded, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act became law. By the time challenges to the constitutionality of the Act reached the Supreme Court in 1920, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was moved to call the purpose of the Act “…a national interest of very nearly the first magnitude.” Thus, the United States got national hunting limits…only a few centuries after such rules existed in the Pacific Islands.
Nonetheless, there remain those who cannot understand why we would commit to protecting birds at the cost of making a little more money, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who ridiculed the Act during the 2012 campaign, and later candidate and President Donald Trump. The Act survives still, more than one hundred years after its passage.
By the 1920’s the tributaries to the conservation river had become too diverse and numerous to fairly recount. The utilitarian stream surely got bigger.
Q: What conservation group that still exists was by far the largest in the nation in the Roaring 20’s?
A: The Isaak Walton League, which had over 100,000 members, mostly sport hunters and fisherman, a couple of decades into the 20th Century. The concerns of sportsmen were among the reasons the nation dedicated an incredibly important source of funds to game and wildlife protection. As prescribed by the Pittman-Robertson Act, certain taxes imposed on firearms and ammunition were and are devoted to wildlife management.
Also in the 1920’s, Aldo Leopold was already mulling over the experiences that allowed him to perceive and describe the connectedness of things. He would eventually write that we needed to learn to “think like a mountain”; to expand the time horizons of our decision-making.
A less well known proto-ecologist emerged in the 1930’s, in response to the dreadful collapse of Great Plains agriculture in the midst of what has been called “the dust bowl.” The politically astute Hugh Bennett is said to have extended his testimony before a Congressional Committee until a dark cloud of dust from the Great Plains that was sweeping across the country could be seen from the windows of the reached the Capital Building. “No Man,” he said, “should have the right legally or otherwise, to recklessly and willfully destroy or unnecessarily waste any resources on which public welfare is dependent.” At his urging, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, and Bennett’s efforts to transform the way we looked at farming became another trib of the conservation river.
Leopold continued to think about people and conservation into the 1930’s. and 1940’s. Those of us who think we have a book that ought to be published can take heart from Aldo Leopold’s experience with the manuscript of A Sand County Almanac. It was rejected dozens of times before Oxford Press agreed to publish it; it came out, in fact, in the late 40’s, after Leopold had died. Millions now know the timeless words that are at the heart of the book: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
A Sand County Almanac was not an overnight success. Aldo Leopold Jr., known as Carl Leopold, was himself a biologist and university professor. He enjoyed presenting a slide that depicted the trajectory of citations of his work, alongside a similar graph of references to his father’s work. Carl’s work was cited far more than Aldo’s until the 1960’s, at which time the lines on the graph crossed: the Almanac eventually found an unmatchable audience of scientists and the general public. Sales now exceed two million copies.
The forties and fifties also saw the population of the world reach more than two billion. The modern version of an organization I worked in for more than 20 years, The Nature Conservancy, was founded in the 1950’s. Its early tag line was “Preserving Living Museums of Primeval America.” Then firmly in the preservation stream, the Conservancy would become by many measures far the largest conservation organization in the world.
The conservation river flowed merrily in sixties, watering a decade of conservation flowering. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring reminded us that we are not as wise as we are clever when it comes to the effect of otherwise apparently useful chemical solutions on the natural world.
The Wilderness Act made it through Congress, as did as early endangered species legislation. And consciousness of impacts everywhere of our burgeoning capitalism was giving form to legislation that would impose restrictions on the disposition of the waste we were creating, and would mandate attention to the environmental consequences of government decisions.
Thus by the early 1970’s, we had the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. Soon, these laws were joined by the modern Endangered Species Act, the Clean Drinking Water Act, federal regulation of toxic substances and the truly revolutionary Superfund (every land–fill polluter is fully—“jointly and severally”— responsible for all clean up costs).
A less well-known conservation initiative of the 1970’s also deserves mention. The Nature Conservancy’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Robert Jenkins, had concluded, along with leading spokespeople such as Edmund Wilson, Michael Soule, and others, that the highest priority use of conservation resources was the conservation of biodiversity. In order, then, to allow the Conservancy and others to intelligently allocate resources to that purpose, and even more important, to make the most of the environmental planning opportunity afforded by the National Environmental Policy Act and state analogs, Jenkins began to work with states to establish biological inventory programs often called “natural heritage programs.” The effort was highly successful. Most states still support these programs, and enormous amounts of biodiversity information at state, national, and global scales have been developed. These programs are collaborate under the umbrella of a Conservancy spin-off call NatureServe. They are routinely consulted during the planning of all sorts of government-supported infrastructure projects: in the early stages of such projects, it is simpler to make changes that will allow the project to move forward without damage to important natural areas and species. This conservation-by-data-gathering-and-management is perhaps the most under-appreciated conservation success story of the past 70 years.
The identification and initial protection of conservation priorities through the acquisition of high quality nature preserves and rare species habitat inevitably led to consideration of how to economically maintain the biodiversity of those reserves. Because of the effects of island biogeography on inland islands of natural habitat species and natural integrity would, over time, be lost without additional protection. Some guidance emerges from a rough hierarchy of conservation imperatives: if rare species are to be protected aside from constant human attention that amounts to gardening and zoo-keeping, the ecosystems that sustain them need to be protected. If ecological systems are to be protected, the landscape scale processes that sustain them must be conserved.
As a start, we have to acknowledge that at landscape scale, the preservation stream of the conservation river must merge with the best waters of the utilitarian stream. The strict rules that define nature preserves are usually either impossible or uneconomical to impose at landscape scale. Thus, the conservation task became more complex. First, we need to continue to work out ways to promote working landscapes that remain compatible with the conservation of the nature preserve jewels contained within them. Second, we need to find ways to generate much more money than governments have to date been willing to appropriate and private funders to provide for the task of conservation.
Among the arguments made for devoting more resources to biodiversity conservation was one that has been called “the utility of diversity.” Leopold had referred to it: “to keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” We do not and never will fully know what use some species might be to us, nor even to any great extent what role a species plays in its ecosystem; Jenkins, paraphrasing Huxley, said that “ecosystems are not only more complex that we know, they are more complex than we can know.”
We do know that significant percentages of medicines we use have their origins in wild organisms, and that organisms have evolved the ability to form compounds of great potential benefit to us. Of benefit to us, that is, if we keep them around long enough to identify, face, and try to address some future problem such compounds might solve.
Robert Costanza, followed by Gretchen Daily and others began to think about the utility that nature provided at larger scales, and went about valuing ecosystem services: the storage, release, and cleansing of water, the moderation of temperature, the pollination of food plants, and the recycling of nutrients, among others. “Ecosystem services” appeared in scholarly discussion of conservation a couple of handfuls of times in 1995. By 2012, the phrase appeared more than 4,000 times annually in the literature.
Ecosystems provide measurable value to human economies; quite striking measurable value: value comparable to more conventional measures of economic output, such as gross national product.
Costanza’s work, and Daily’s, was valuable for the conservation movement. It was also attached to new problems. Perhaps, some began to think, ecosystem services could be provided by human-engineered systems using natural components, but not necessarily components native to the region in which the engineering takes place. Maybe , it was thought, that would be cheaper than protecting the native systems, especially given the by-the-late-20th-century-ubiquitous issue of exotic and invasive species turning up to alter natural systems around the globe.
It has become harder, not easier, to retain our fidelity to some of the goals originally associated with of the second driver of conservation: prosperity. With prosperity, as mentioned earlier, we could afford to think of preserving natural things for the spiritual refreshment we have evolved to crave from them. But prosperity also tends to relegate to the background our most fundamental concern of acquiring and maintaining what we need to survive; when we are prosperous the conservation tributary driven by scarcity doesn’t seem to have the same urgency. Prosperity permits us to ask not about what we need, but rather, what we want. Our needs are finite. As a society, our wants are infinite. When we can afford to preserve nature for our delight, we can also aspire to any number of strictly material comforts. To supply ourselves with those comforts, we aspire to be even more prosperous. To be even more prosperous, we put more pressure on our natural resources.
Thus, some observers have realized that as more parts of a world now supporting seven and an half billion humans become relatively prosperous and impose attendant pressure on our resources, we have entered a new era in world geology. They call it the Anthropocene, an era in which the globe is affected everywhere by human presence. There is increasingly little doubt that the diagnosis is correct. The mark of our industrial society is already everywhere around the globe, in chemical signatures, in climate, and even in the bodies of humans and wildlife.
The diagnosis, thus, is correct. But some prescriptions offered as a cure are foolhardy. Another evolutionary branch of the conservation movement originated with “conservationists” fascinated—one might say allured—by the identification of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene diagnosis is right, but the proposed prescription is wrong.
Here is the prescription, in a few short quotes from a seminal paper published in 2012. Peter Kareiva (then the Nature Conservancy’s Chief Scientist, and a joyful provocateur), was one of the authors.
“Conservationists’ continuing focus upon preserving islands of Holocene ecosystems in the age of the Anthropocene is anachronistic and counterproductive.”
“…conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness—ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science–and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.”
“In the developing world, efforts to constrain growth and protect forest from agriculture are unfair, if not unethical.”
If this view had prevailed a hundred-fifty year ago, would we have sent in the Army in order to preserve Yellowstone? Wouldn’t a treasure of global significance have been lost? Won’t many more?
To conclude an introductory description of Anthropoconservation, two selections from other Anthropocenists are illustrative:
Geographer Erle Ellis: “the history of human civilization might be characterized as a history of transgressing natural limits and thriving.”
And from yet a different source, Mark Lynas: “Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do.”
These short declarative statements illustrate the wrong turn that the realization that we are in the Anthropocene has caused people to take.
It is a wrong turn that humans have taken often, and the turn is always preceded by the popularization of a new insight—like the insight that spawned the label Anthropocene. Having absorbed the new insight, we think we understand. We are sure we finally have it.
And we are wrong. We do not understand.
TNC had to unlearn its conviction that natural lands generally reach static climax states and can be thought of as living museum pieces.
Leopold discovered the folly of the widely accepted norms of the game management paradigm he had been taught. He saw that singular focus on the maximum production of game animals we favored didn’t produce the expected results.
Bennett saw the folly of the applied science of agriculture as it was being promoted by his own government when it became clear to him that not only did water not follow the plow, but that there were some lands on which things could grow but that should probably never be plowed.
Can we really transgress natural limits and thrive? Ask the Mayan people, who once lived alongside still awesome, now abandoned monuments to their wealth and power. Consider the coming water conflicts identified in recent years as a threat to world security by the Defense Department.
Within Karieva’s profoundly disquieting paper quoted earlier, there are some rays of hope, instances in which the authors make a bow in the direction I think conservation must evolve. First, I must say that I think it would be utter folly to abandon our concern about the natural world that we inherited, put aside our concern for biodiversity, and go about trying to engineer the earth, “enhancing natural systems” for what the latest newsmaker conceives as better way to “benefit…the widest number of people.”
On the other hand, the Karieva group is correct in suggesting, in effect, that we don’t have enough soldiers to post in the Yellowstones of the world if most people don’t agree that protecting them by doing so is worth the cost. It is true, then, that “conservationists must demonstrate how the fates of nature and people are deeply intertwined–and then offer new strategies for promoting the health and prosperity of both.”
That is the challenge the next generation of conservation practitioners must take up, with the assistance of all of the sciences that support the discipline. And for the benefit of both nature and humanity, these new approaches must bring forward the most obvious strategy: preserving as best we can some parts of the world as we now find them. Not only for their utility, but for their capacity to stimulate wonderment, their power to refresh our spirit.
I have been working in the field of conservation for nearly fifty years. I have learned enough to recoil at the stunning claim that nature no longer runs the earth. All I can think of when I hear it is the hubristic angels of our nature exulting as we proclaim that humanity has wrested back from Copernicus our place at the center of the universe. Nature will prove the claim that we run things disastrously wrong if we persist in promoting it.
And while Thomas Malthus hasn’t yet been proven right, if we insist to ourselves that there truly are no natural limits, there is a real good chance that he will eventually be proven right.
Mark Twain said that our problem ain’t what we don’t know, but what we know for sure that just ain’t so. But if I have learned anything over the decades I have thought every day about the natural world, it is that we ought to be humble about what we know in the face of what we do not know.
Let me insert at this point a word of particular caution for those who think we can engineer a solution to climate change by messing with the atmosphere and the oceans and the vacancies in strata deep below the surface of the earth. It bears repeating: we need to be humble about what we know in the face of what we do not know: and again “ecosystems are more complex than we can know.” A little modesty is in order as we consider applying our newest insights to the challenges we face. We need to be skeptical of expedience, to be respectful of the complex natural systems that support us even as we insult them, and to pay attention to that part of us that loves natural things.
That love is a powerful force, and it survives in in some form in most of us. It is not really part of Costanza’s calculation of the value of ecosystem services. But it will move us to be appropriately suspicious about the claim that we can get perfectly good forest ecosystem services from a plantation, and wetland services from an engineered wetland. And if that powerful force of love endures, there will be advocates for the ecosystem services of the infinitely more complex native forest and its unmeasurable potential. There will be more advocates for working to conserve that ten-thousand year old wetland instead of trying to replace it with a few water loving plants in a bulldozed lowland.
For reasons we don’t even know yet, we do in fact need do preserve what we can of Holocene ecosystems, though they be islands.
Too widely dismissed as yesterday’s news, the conservation river still flows, inevitably fed by the preservation and the utilitarian tributaries, even as challenged by the members of the cult of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene conservationists, after all, are more or less misguided utilitarians. The river needs both of the established tributaries, and new ones, because along with increased prosperity, our planet must soon support eight or nine billion people in a disrupted climate that is increasingly unpredictable and unfamiliar to us.
It is so hard for us to make wise choices. We have, nonetheless, made some over the course of the last 150 years. Anthropocence conservation can no more free us from the need to make wise, conservative, and humble choices than the claim that water followed the plow did.
Scarcity is an issue as real and present as it has ever been. Endangered species are by definition scarce, and any of the many threatened organisms will sooner or later prove essential. They are therefore appropriate targets of scarcity driven conservation. The variable is the other conservation driver, prosperity. Ungoverned, the pursuit of yet more material things will be a force that drives extinction and homogenization.
Choices.
Ungoverned, the drive to acquire will force us back to conservation solely for the provision of our needs. Governed, it will drive us to save endangered species because in their diversity, they are wondrous and awe inspiring. Governed, prosperity can be the driver of conservation for our souls and our bodies. Conservation is the tool of the governance we need.
Granting that there are scary truths underlying the grandiose human claim that we ought to have a geologic era named for us, it does not follow that conservation is a dusty relic invented by elitists of the 19th Century. Instead, we should invest anew in conservation—and take care to see that it flows with riverine sinuosity alongside other fundamental elements of the human condition.
