The Wild?

October 14, 2014 11:54 AM

Some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They are making a big mistake

Leave Wilderness Alone - 'There are many threats to the 50-year-old Wilderness Act. But the most dangerous, Kenneth Brower says, comes from those who are chipping away at the very idea of wilderness itself.'

Words of Wilderness

posted by the man of twists and turns (37 comments total)

Amen.

Best thing about my summer Boundary Waters trip - 1,000,000 acres of continuous roadless, powered vehicle free wilderness. The guys who pushed for this earlier in the century were heroes, and they held off a potential boom not just of mining, but of float plane lodges and luxury outdoor sports tourism. Many species need the pure scale involved in roadless areas, and keeping roads out makes a very big difference to preserving true wild.

That's the practical side, I also believe there's a spiritual side as a human being to experiencing true wild.

When its gone, its gone.
posted by C.A.S. at 12:01 PM on October 14, 2014 [16 favorites]

Great article, thanks. I'm a bit wary of the word wilderness for some of the reasons Kenneth Brower mentions, but mostly because I don't really know what it means. Growing up in western Canada, we have tons of forests, Boreal forest, seascapes, mountains... except that apparently just makes it easier to say, "well, we've got tons of forests etc.- sure we can exploit a bit here and there. what difference will it make?" Until we find out that Canada is one of the problem areas for deforestation.

More and more I see this as an issue of city dwellers (I am one) having corporate and political clout, but no idea what the word wilderness could mean, or the implications of why one innocuous development or management change should be such a big deal. Is it any better to try to convince people that habitat loss and commercial exploitation of animal populations is causing huge problems, and that we should sit up and take notice before we erase a huge swath of the Earth's inhabitants?
posted by sneebler at 12:23 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

From the article: According to green modernists, mainstream conservationists are hopelessly fixated on a 19th-century vision of virgin wilderness unsullied by human hands. Consumed by nostalgia, they’ve failed to grasp the historical extent of humanity’s ecological influence, practicing a wilderness-worship that’s not only ineffective but delusional.

This attitude drives me up the wall. It's completely self-contradictory -they're simultaneously arguing that conservationists are all Chicken Littles who have nothing but sob stories of ecological destruction to contribute, but that they also are starry-eyed idealists who think the wilderness is totally untouched by human influence. Believe me, every conservationist I know is fully aware of the extent to which humans have influenced wild places. Most of us are fighting tooth and nail to try to make even the smallest bit of difference for even the smallest places - we're fully aware of the socially constructed/gradient nature of wilderness, and we're fully aware that these places are not literally untrammeled. We're just trying to restrict the degree of trammeling, is all. Furthermore, just because these areas aren't perfectly pristine doesn't mean it's suddenly our right (nay, responsibility!) to go in and trammel all over them.

I hate the way these arguments are always framed, too, like wilderness must have some tangible line-item value or it won't be worth preserving, and since wilderness is socially constructed, what's the point of it at all? As if everything on Earth needs to have a human-serving purpose or we're within our rights to completely eradicate it without a second thought. This is such an unethical, selfish attitude, and it's exactly this kind of thinking that keeps accelerating us headlong into the Holocene Extinction event that is continuing to pick up steam (see the recent news about Earth losing 50% of its wildlife in only the last 40 years)
posted by dialetheia at 12:25 PM on October 14, 2014 [18 favorites]

Interesting to see Kenneth Brower recapitulating the same use vs. preservation argument famously described by John McPhee between his father David Brower and Charles Park and Charles Fraser in Encounters with the Archdruid. I found the Brower article (haven't read the others yet) very thoughtful but I also see the pragmatic logic of the other side; if you define success as winning every time and failure as extractive industries winning once, sustaining a political movement becomes very difficult. In a world that seems irreversibly headed for 10 billion people and a global avg temperature rise of 2-4 degrees by the end of the century the mixed-use garden model may be the only realistic path. I still want Brower et al. to make their argument, if only to shift the Overton window (a role Brower alludes to his father and Foreman playing in his piece).
posted by Wretch729 at 12:34 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

"I hate the way these arguments are always framed, too, like wilderness must have some tangible line-item value or it won't be worth preserving, and since wilderness is socially constructed, what's the point of it at all?"

One of the central failures of capitalism (and the attendant neo-liberalism, libertarianism, etc.) is that there are many things in life that are poorly represented by markets and money.
posted by klangklangston at 12:39 PM on October 14, 2014 [18 favorites]

This attitude drives me up the wall. It's completely self-contradictory -they're simultaneously arguing that conservationists are all Chicken Littles who have nothing but sob stories of ecological destruction to contribute, but that they also are starry-eyed idealists who think the wilderness is totally untouched by human influence.

I'm not sure that's really the case—but it's the article that's misleading. Though I'm far from an expert in environmental science/history/philosophy/sociology/etc., much of Keim's descriptions of the debates don't look familiar, either in the language or the wider intellectual field that I know better.

This makes me suspicious, and dubious.

Just one example: Keim does a lot of name calling and imputing that people who contest "wilderness" are all "green modernists." Not so.

A better example of the trouble with "wilderness" is, well, Bill Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness". Cronon's point is—oversimplified—is that categories of "wilderness" structurally operates to discursively remove people from relations with the natural world. "Wilderness" is a way of structuring a dualism, between people and nature, that fundamentally sets them at odds and with competing needs. Keim wants to use " ideals of wilderness and wildness as guides." But the broader trajectory of the counterargument—the one that Keim's piece fails to do justice to—is that "wildness" and "wilderness" reiterate the very things that he's fighting against.

Criticisms of "wilderness" are, as in Cronon's case, a lot more about the makeup of the world on a very complex terrain. Moving away from wildernerss is not simply the need to regretfully accede to/accommodate the anthropocene or whatever.
posted by migrantology at 1:11 PM on October 14, 2014 [5 favorites]

Theodore Roosevelt always seems to say it best:
“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, 1916
posted by OHenryPacey at 1:26 PM on October 14, 2014 [11 favorites]

Criticisms of "wilderness" are, as in Cronon's case, a lot more about the makeup of the world on a very complex terrain.

So how would you explain to an indifferent public why it's important that a functioning forest ecosystem not be criss-crossed with roads, cutlines and ATV trails? Because from an ecosystem perspective that's not the same as a undamaged block of forest.
posted by sneebler at 1:28 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Gah! Every time I learn a little bit more about Teddy Roosevelt, I have that weird desire to give him a big hug and punch him in the gut. Then shake his hand and run away and hide before he gets his gun.
posted by General Tonic at 1:43 PM on October 14, 2014 [7 favorites]

Every time I learn a little bit more about Teddy Roosevelt

I'm reading his autobiography and really liking it.
posted by RolandOfEld at 2:27 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

One of the central failures of capitalism (and the attendant neo-liberalism, libertarianism, etc.) is that there are many things in life that are poorly represented by markets and money.

I'd switch those "central failures" for "singular failure". That is, capitalism fails utterly when it seeks to impose market value on everything. And what's more, the true believers seem to take it personally when you try to point this out to them -- that they're perfect system isn't, that the harder they try to make it so, the more catastrophic the results, and catastrophe is the word.

Which is annoying because capitalism as a complimentary system to other systems actually has a lot going for it.
posted by philip-random at 2:43 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Something rubbed me the wrong way about Keim's article. Part of it was probably the overdone and polemical framing, where a whole field of experts is turned into two teams, one made up of knaves and dupes and the other of good, noble, salt of the earth folks, but I think part of it was also the normativity underlying it all. It's really great that a personal idea of wilderness is a motivating force for many conservationists, but that's by no means the only reason why someone might want to be involved in environmentalism or conservationism. To make that one thing the only acceptable reason to get involved is honestly kind of off-putting.
posted by Copronymus at 3:35 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

In America we like everything to be all-or-nothing. We set up all kinds of fake dichotomies, as if the only choices are extreme CrossFit or being confined to a mobility scooter, and one of those fake choices is around "wilderness." I'm glad that we have protected some of those big areas as wilderness and as state and national parks (though it's also worth noticing how that land was taken from the tribes that were already living there, and how it is located almost entirely in the west, where it was largely protected at a particular juncture in the continuing history of extractive land uses after we were done logging and mining it), but it's frustrating how in the US we basically only have those extremes: fully protected public land, and fully exploited private land.

What we don't have is a land use history or regulatory regime that allows and encourages access to private lands or land management regulations that preserves public values. No right to roam here, and remarkably few restrictions on land exploitation. The writers being criticized in the first piece (and much less convincingly so in the second) are, however imperfectly, recognizing that a much more nuanced approach is going to be needed to create a livable world going forward, which is something I fail to see in the previous generation of conservationists and in their critics.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:44 PM on October 14, 2014

"I'd switch those "central failures" for "singular failure"."

Weirdly, I think your construction ends up being more sanguine about capitalism than mine. (And to be fair, the materialist dialectic of Marx also often oversimplifies things to economic forces.)
posted by klangklangston at 4:48 PM on October 14, 2014

Cronon's point is—oversimplified—is that categories of "wilderness" structurally operates to discursively remove people from relations with the natural world. "Wilderness" is a way of structuring a dualism, between people and nature, that fundamentally sets them at odds and with competing needs. Keim wants to use " ideals of wilderness and wildness as guides." But the broader trajectory of the counterargument—the one that Keim's piece fails to do justice to—is that "wildness" and "wilderness" reiterate the very things that he's fighting against.

Theoretically, I agree that this argument has some merits. Yes, since wilderness is generally considered to mean "untrammeled by humans," by definition it sets up some sort of division between humans and wilderness. The part I take issue with is in bold: that this division is necessarily a duality, and that we are incapable of existing with wilderness under that definition simply because we are humans. The problematic definition in that conception isn't "wilderness", it's "humans," and specifically the idea that endless trammeling is the sole and inevitable way for us to interact with the world.

"Wilderness" doesn't truly mean unaffected by ALL humans, because we include all kinds of areas that were influenced by all kinds of Homo sapiens in all kinds of complex ways. What we really mean in practice is more like "untouched by modern petroleum-fueled humans," which is quite different. Outside of truly unexplored places, almost everything is only wilderness in the sense that modern humans haven't built roads through it, extracted most of its resources, and extirpated much of its flora and fauna.

This slipperiness about what we mean by "human" isn't a convincing argument against using the term wilderness, though, because it's still quite useful to be able to identify and value the places we haven't made sweeping, drastic changes to landscapes and ecosystems. It's still useful because the changes we are making to our planet are different in kind, not just degree, from the changes our predecessors made due to the speed, severity, and extent of those changes. It is, however, an argument against reflexively identifying the modern trammel-based way of life with "humanity" as if it's the only possible way for us to live.

So in order to resolve this apparent contradiction, we just need to be more specific about exactly which kinds of "humans" we're trying to exclude when we talk about wilderness. The problem with this is that nobody really wants to admit we're making active choices every day to be such terrible ruiners; it's easier to navelgaze about the definition of wilderness than it is to admit that our current way of life truly is incompatible with wilderness in the long run (as well as wildlife, and ecosystem services, and a stable climate...).

And fundamentally, it's true - wilderness is completely incompatible with our way of living because eventually we are going to invade it and use it up and extirpate the creatures that lived there. We're already well on our way. That's why half of the wildlife has disappeared over the last 40 years - those animals and plants and landscapes had no explicit value to us. We considered them worthless.

Devaluing wilderness due to semantic quibbling certainly isn't going to help slow that destruction. Instead we should just be more honest and say more plainly that modern petroleum-based humans are the ones doing most of the trammeling here, and that wildernesses are areas that are explicitly protected as much as possible from that influence. They are worth protecting.
posted by dialetheia at 5:48 PM on October 14, 2014 [8 favorites]

...but it's frustrating how in the US we basically only have those extremes: fully protected public land, and fully exploited private land.

Except that city parks have a different level of protection from State Parks, which have a different protection from State Forests, from National Forests (timber production, roadless areas, special Botanic Areas), National Parks, BLM land (whose protection ranges from "mining and other extraction subsidized" to complete, federally designated Wilderness), Scenic Areas, Historical Battlefields, rights of way, University reserves, National Monuments, non profit public trust lands, private preserves, conservation easements, cemeteries, National Wildlife Refuges, State Wildlife Areas, rail trails, botanical gardens, Scenic Rivers, National Trail Systems, designated Critical Habitat for endangered species... Yes, we Americans sure have a strict dichotomy of wilderness vs. urban areas! That was always the thing that bugged me about Cronon's essay, and continues to bug about the conservation/preservation debate that has waged for over a century (even if Kareiva et al. want to act like they invented it): there's room for all of these strategies in our country, and many more we haven't dreamed of.
posted by one_bean at 7:45 PM on October 14, 2014 [5 favorites]

The problem with wilderness is people want all the modern petroleum-based humans out except themselves when they go for spiritual communion.

A national park in my region established around a biodiversity hotspot has a problem with foreign tourists coming in and taking unlicensed tours that hack and slash their way in, because everybody wants to step on uncharted, untouched wilderness and heaven forfend they see another white face coming the opposite way. Even the folks coming in the front door, staying on trail and behaving respectfully are still having an impact, and the draw is virgin rainforest and tropical biodiversity. Right next door is a patch of second growth that is visually indistinguishable from virgin to anybody without a PhD in cladistics - because who can differentiate between 300 species of dipterocarps? - but it's a non-starter as a tourist attraction because it was logged once.

Sites with high ecological value could be entirely roped off for pragmatic environmental reasons and lower-value sites could more than suffice for hikes in the woods after we've dispensed with the Nature worship.
posted by BinGregory at 8:51 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

we just need to be more specific about exactly which kinds of "humans" we're trying to exclude when we talk about wilderness.

This was on Aeon too, a nice counterpoint to the Keim piece.
Once the Wild is Gone:

As Mark Dowie chronicles in his book Conservation Refugees (2009), there is a long history of displacements in the name of nature protection. The Ahwahneechee people were removed from the Yosemite valley by the US military. The great East African parks – including the Maasai Mara and the Serengeti — banned traditional livestock herders who had lived alongside wildlife for generations. And the Mkomazi National Park in Tanzania was the scene of mass evictions in the 1980s. Protecting nature from people is a highly political act.

posted by BinGregory at 9:25 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

A national park in my region established around a biodiversity hotspot has a problem with foreign tourists coming in and taking unlicensed tours that hack and slash their way in, because everybody wants to step on uncharted, untouched wilderness and heaven forfend they see another white face coming the opposite way.

That sounds like an argument for better regulation and enforcement, BinGregory, not against protecting those places or against "Nature worship." People aren't wrong for wanting to enjoy these places - I wish more people wanted to spend time exploring outside and I wish there were more wild areas for them to explore - but we do need to implement measures and actually enforce them to prevent everyone's enjoyment from negatively impacting those places. That's the rationale behind designating them as wildernesses: it provides a framework for protecting them through regulation and enforcement.

That said, I agree that it's unfortunate that everyone spends so little time outdoors that when we do, people feel like it has to be Blockbuster Cinematic Wilderness Landscape or nothing. I would much rather have people regularly spend time exploring their local natural environments. But ecotourism comes with its own set of issues beyond simple wilderness designations.
posted by dialetheia at 9:28 PM on October 14, 2014

The problem with Conservation Refugees and other similar arguments is they totally ignore the alternative to protection. Native people in the U.S. were not exactly treated well outside of current day National Parks or other federal land. The military was coming to the Yosemite one way or another. Protection is the least bad form of capitalism, although I recognize it can still be unjust. As far as restoring some traditional use of the land, that's going to be a lot easier in the Sierras than, say, the Central Valley.
posted by one_bean at 9:46 PM on October 14, 2014

I have so much to say to anyone who thinks that wilderness is a false dichotomy, but for now I'll just say that when you protect regions of the world with uncontacted tribes (parts of the Amazon, islands off India, etc) you can preserve both cultural and ecological diversity at the same time!

An example of this sort of approach, albeit in a very crude, simplified form, is Aldous Huxley's Savage reveservation in Brave New World. As the world "progresses" (quotation marks most assuredly needed) it is beyond vital that we create and maintain large swaths of land outside our hegemonic sphere of technologically exploitative influence.
posted by Perko at 10:17 PM on October 14, 2014

I don't think that the critics of "wilderness" are against protecting important natural areas. I certainly am not. I'm saying the theological position underpinning Wilderness is counterproductive. It leads - has already led - to militarized park guards keeping out desperate hungry people from their own land. That Brower piece establishes people with and without an innate understanding of the Truth - I'm pretty sure he capitalized it - and the rest is hoping we'll become proper Cannots like him through mystical experience. Another memorable writer of that ilk is John Terborgh in "Requiem for Nature". Here's a biologist who spent his whole career highly placed in the international conservation movement recounting his every failed attempt to save Nature - read Wilderness - from people and at the end throwing up his hands that we're doomed because People - meaning developing world people in his case - just don't have the right values: they just don't appreciate Nature for it's own sake. Appalling.
posted by BinGregory at 10:21 PM on October 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'll add this to my cynical comment series. If you want more wilderness, build cheap Nuclear plants.
posted by vicx at 10:25 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Let's never stop defending open range, swamp, prairie, forest, tundra, desert, mountain, wetlands, river and shore, and never stop supporting the imperfect but moral stewardship of our planetary zones off-limits to most of what we call civilization.

Just because the environmental movement is mostly funded these days by guilty capitalists and industrialists doesn't change the fact that conservation of our wildest natural places is morally and aesthetically valid behavior. If you can't figure out why an aspen grove in a mountain range or a Joshua tree forest in the high desert is important to our greater well-being, you can at least acknowledge that the landscapes our current resource-heavy society have protected are "carbon sinks" and "biodiversity factories" that just might get us through mitigated global warming without catastrophe.

Besides that, we all deserve and need open space—places to walk without cell-phone coverage, huge granite blobs to fall off, beautiful dangerous beaches full of great white sharks and sneaker waves, woods and swamps to escape to, deserts to go mad within, ice-choked trails for hypothermia and inspiration. I'm supposed to quit demanding wilderness because some overpaid publicity-hungry marquee scientist or two says wilderness doesn't matter anymore? Bullshit!
posted by kenlayne at 11:48 PM on October 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

the materialist dialectic of Marx also often oversimplifies things to economic forces.

Marx’s contributions to an ecology ethic is a neglected aspect of his work. While he does tend to privilege mankind, he also acknowledges the intrinsic value of other life-forms. He writes:

Man is a genus-being [Gattungswesen] in that he not only makes his own genus [Gattung] and also that of all other things the object of his practical and theoretical activity, but—and this is to say the same thing a different way—he relates to himself as the actually living genus [Gattung], that is, he relates to himself as a universal and therefore free being.--Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

This line of thought stretches back through Feuerbach and other German thinkers to Spinoza. It has recently been taken up in bio-communism (see "Twenty-First Century Species-Being" by Nick Dyer-Witheford).

What is missing is an appreciation for the spiritual aspect of Marx’s thought, which is especially apparent when discussing man in nature:

That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.—ibid.

It is scientistic hubris that is the primary culprit in the environmental disaster. Science has made itself the slave of the political and economic system, providing the means to exploit, demean and devalue the whole biosphere. The entire ideology of biology is nothing more than an exaltation of greed, competition and death. The theory of evolution robs the life-forms of their distinctiveness, dissolving them into universal flux and thus making them expendable. We need to reaffirm the distinct essence of the life-forms, the Gattungswesen. Marx contra Darwin!
posted by No Robots at 8:59 AM on October 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

W.R.T. the FPP, I took my first trip to Houghton, Michigan and the Keweenaw Peninsula in August. Previously I had been up to the falls and White Fish point on the east side of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Safely, I like the East Side more. I had always heard about mining activity in the north, but having been through the mining areas in person now, previously great beliefs of a pristine north are shattered. I mean, yeah, you have some certainly rustic areas. But the fact that heavy mining took place there not too long ago makes me pause and think about the implications, and they aren't good.

Promoting the idea that giving up on wilderness is a useful strategy seems more or less like seducing the guard to let petroleum companies frack the shale here in Michigan more than they already have.

Here's to promoting concentrated (re)development so we all don't have to go far for much and so we can use less fuel, less resources, etc. and maintain a standard of living that's adequate.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:28 AM on October 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm saying the theological position underpinning Wilderness is counterproductive. It leads - has already led - to militarized park guards keeping out desperate hungry people from their own land.

Man is the only animal that cultivates food for himself while denying it to other species (other than, say, bees) . It violates evolutionarily-stable strategies of competition. The fairest thing we can do is to make sure there are areas where we don't violate these most basic rules of biological competition, and the only way to do this is through wilderness-- quite literally defined as the absence of mankind.

If you really have to militarize an area to do that-- so be it I say, because more often than not what you see is scenes like in Africa, where humans put new land under cultivation and yet act so surprised to the point of taking up arms when elephants begin storming through their new fields. Why are these pesky elephants trying to stop these poor starving people? Because the elephants were actually there first, and really, why shouldn't they storm through there?

At a pond near my house is a sign that says "DO NOT FEED THE DUCKS." It goes on to explain that feeding the ducks will contribute to the destruction of the pond's ecosystem via increased waste. That doesn't bother me. It bothers me that we are the species who use the most resources, who generate the most waste, and yet we don't extend to ourselves the same courtesy sign: "DO NOT FEED THE HUMANS."
posted by Perko at 11:23 AM on October 15, 2014

The wild needs to be policed in order to prevent illegal human activity. We need to have comprehensive monitoring of the wild with cameras everywhere, and the power to intervene where necessary. This is a great role for scientists and science technicians. It is the wild, but it is a watched wild.
posted by No Robots at 12:22 PM on October 15, 2014

I can't decide whether that is more of a straw man or slippery slope fallacy portraying the consequences of delineating a wilderness region and ensuring its pristineness. Suffice to say it has characteristics of both.
posted by Perko at 12:41 PM on October 15, 2014

The whole article is a bit jejune, but at least it's addressing important questions with some passion.
posted by No Robots at 12:44 PM on October 15, 2014

Jejune or not, I'd like to have this discussion in the context of the WWF report dialetheia liked to above. If, for many ecosystems, we've lost 50% of many wildlife populations, we are making zero progress in stemming the destruction of natural areas across the planet. Meanwhile, we're also no closer to stopping the spread of vast landscapes of overpopulation and poverty, war and colonialism. These are issues we could prioritize, some improvement of which would presumably reduce the pressure on ecosystems.

My other question is why is it so difficult to build a workable Law of the Sea to protect ecosystems and endangered species? It's completely short-sighted to stand by and watch a few countries fish out the last members of fish species that represent biological capital for the future, all for a relatively small profit. I realize that any regulation goes against free-market ideology, and god knows we wouldn't want the UN to get any actual power, but WTF?
posted by sneebler at 11:50 AM on October 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well, like I said, we need to modify our entire approach to biology. We need a spiritualized biology to replace the physicalist version we have now.
posted by No Robots at 12:08 PM on October 16, 2014

"Man is the only animal that cultivates food for himself while denying it to other species (other than, say, bees) . "

o_0 Lions and hyenas don't all gather for a Sunday brunch.
posted by klangklangston at 2:51 PM on October 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm a biologist by some definition, but I'm not sure what you mean by "spiritualized biology." What I think you might be after here is the field of conservation biology, which is a "crisis discipline" created specifically to address the biodiversity and extinction crisis.

This is a pdf of arguably the most foundational paper in the conservation bio (Soule 1985) if you're intereested; it goes into a lot more detail about what they mean by crisis discipline and what questions conservation bio is intended to address. The gist is that conservation biologists are to biology as surgeons are to anatomy: they are applied multidisciplinary scientists responding to specific threats with the best science and practices available to them. One of the field's major goals is to diagnose the causes of population declines and extinctions so that we can better prevent or reverse declines; we know that habitat loss is driving a great deal of this, but are there specific habitats for specific life history stages that we could focus on to maximize the chances of survival for that species? How likely is it that a given species will go extinct if we make x, y, and z changes to their ecosystem? That sort of question is what conservation bio is supposed to address.

While conservation bio has been great at identifying ways to help certain species deal with the changes we've caused, diagnose the chain of causes leading to population declines, and rehabilitate some landscapes through ecological restoration, it has not succeeded in preventing ecological destruction. There would probably be substantial disagreement within the discipline as to whether that is even an appropriate or realistic role for them; conservation biologists can tell us what will happen if we destroy an ecosystem but they aren't in a position to stop anyone from destroying it because they aren't the ones making those decisions.

I don't think we need to modify our entire approach to biology or ecology, we just need to start actually listening to the biologists and ecologists working on these problems. Policymakers might listen to researchers in a cursory way, but if they continue to place no explicit value on biodiversity, conservation biologists can spend all day telling them about all the harm their policies are causing and it won't make a whit of difference. To extend the medical metaphor, a doctor can talk until he's blue in the face about all the health problems smoking will cause, but the smoker is still the one who has to make the ultimate decision to quit - the doctor can't do it for him.

To speak more personally, I get a little frustrated when people expect scientists to pull double-duty as spiritual advisors or journalists or policy wonks. I can make argument after argument about why people should value biodiversity and wild landscapes, or how our way of life impacts our planet in myriad harmful ways, but nobody's asking biologists for advice on how to change capitalist society, and the scope of the change that would be required to mitigate most of the harm we're doing is so incredibly broad that expecting biologists to do the heavy lifting seems a bit misguided.

I guess the ultimate question is whether we believe that it's scientists' responsibility to make us care about the consequences of our actions. I would argue that it isn't; they can try to predict and explain those consequences, but ultimately we still need to decide that those consequences matter to us as a society and then value them accordingly.
posted by dialetheia at 3:21 PM on October 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

Thank you very much for your thoughtful response, dialetheia. I am indeed very grateful for all the conservation work that gets done by biologists. And I appreciate that biologists cannot be expected to undertake double-duty as agents of cultural change. But that agency must still be done by someone. And biologists need to understand that they work under a cultural agency that determines their work. Biology is simply too important to be left to biologists.
posted by No Robots at 8:37 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

o_0 Lions and hyenas don't all gather for a Sunday brunch.

They don't cultivate their zebras though, do they? They instead adhere to natural (and non cultural) laws of competition and fitness. Please read again and reconsider the meaning of my statement.
posted by Perko at 7:42 PM on October 19, 2014

Even though that limits the construction to practically a deepity, it's still not true. The damsel fish and yeti crab both deny others the fruits of their cultivation.
posted by klangklangston at 8:57 PM on October 19, 2014 [1 favorite]