- Become a member of the New England Wild Flower Society. (If for no other reason then because it’s free admission for you and your kids or guest at Garden in the Woods.)
- The Society puts out a magazine, Native Plant News. It’s good – one of the few magazines I usually read cover-to-cover.
An excerpt from Elizabeth Farnsworth’s essay, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?, in the Fall/Winter 2014 issue of Native Plant News:
Adherents of “New Conservation,” which is also called Environmental Modernism, understand that simply creating ecological preserves is not sufficient to protect biodiversity on this planet. Proponents acknowledge that with a global population exceeding seven billion people, humans have altered and continue to affect, in some way, almost every location on the globe. They recognize that humans have a need for natural resources. But they also see the natural world as highly resilient, able to withstand all manner of alterations and extinctions. therefore, they pursue conservation strategies that establish partnerships with large corporations and sanction natural resource extraction. Although this seems on the face of it like a reasonable position, New Conservation has stirred considerable controversy among the field’s leading conservation biologists. touched off in 2012 by an article authored by Peter Kareiva (chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy) and colleagues, titled “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” a lively debate continues to rage in the scientific and popular literature. [Ed.: Link added.]
New Conservation erects a straw man by portraying conservation scientists as naïvely focusing on protecting “pristine” wilderness and ignoring the need to work with many stakeholders to demonstrate the economic value of conservation. Adherents of this doctrine quote selectively from early texts by Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorn, Carson, Muir, and Abbey that plaintively decry the destruction of wilderness, and then claim that we continue to cling to unrealistic, idealistic concepts of nature. But although those eloquent writings spurred the nascent environmental movement, they are no longer the primary arguments used by today’s conservationists to justify land and species protection. Conservation scientists on the ground grapple daily with the hard realpolitik of a burgeoning human population, political destabilization, and economic inequality, and struggle to balance human needs and limitations with the fundamental imperative to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecosystem function.
New Conservationists posit that current conservation strategies have failed at protecting biodiversity because they disregard two facts: 1) nature is highly resilient, not fragile; and 2) appealing to human interests is central to ensuring enduring land and species protection. in fact, these ideas are not new. Conservation organizations have long realized both that humans are an essential part of nature and the conservation equation, and that, given world enough and time to recover from anthropogenic stress (and with some help from restoration efforts), degraded landscapes can provide functional habitats and supply important ecosystem services to humans and other organisms….
New Conservationists seem to discount the fact that today’s massive perturbations indeed diminish ecosystem function and are contributing to the sixth major extinction event on earth. New Conservationists believe that if nature continues to exist, in any form, after a disturbance, such disruption is not a cause for alarm. Newly formed “no-analog” communities that are obviously depauperate in species richness are cause for concern, however, not celebration….
New Conservation emphasizes placing a monetary value on wildlife. Such an exercise can certainly strengthen arguments about the tangible values of biodiversity to humans. Economists have continually refined their assessments of the value of the earth’s ecosystem services; current estimates place that value at $125 trillion. A problem with this approach, however, is that it forces a comparison between commodities with easily quantified, short-term value and assets whose value can’t be as simply calculated. Although some studies have established clear short-term benefits of wild places to people – stress relief, improved health, and income from ecotourism – many benefits are inherently long-term and extremely difficult to quantify. New Conservation does not distinguish between short-term and long-term value. Nor does it consider opportunity costs: for instance, that the degradation of forests may prevent later discovery of the true value of particular plants. the market focuses on a short-term horizon: in business models,a 3-year impact is standard and 25 years is an eon. Such brief timeframes are fundamentally incompatible with conservation work.
The main problem with New Conservation is that it takes an almost exclusively human-centered approach to conservation, with a belief that people have a right to appropriate as much of the planet’s resources as they need. if certain biological resources provide value to humans, then we should conserve them. if they do not, then extinction of those species is implicitly considered an acceptable outcome; after all, in some form, nature will survive. However, if short-term development results in destruction of the land base, it may obviate the opportunity for long-term poverty alleviation. Conservation of biodiverse landscapes is prerequisite to fostering long-term prosperity.
Perhaps it is more comfortable to believe that we can have it both ways – short-term low costs and economic gain for humans without permanent harm to ecosystems. New Conservationists boast that their theories are novel and steeped in optimism.
Long-time conservation biologists have replied that these exhortations simply repackage old ideas in tough new language and distract from the pressing work at hand. Ultimately, both “sides” need to recognize that we cannot decouple the long term from the short term, whether considering Nature’s resilience or the imperative to alleviate poverty. We all recognize that truly integrative, innovative, and cross-cultural methods are urgently needed to conserve the earth’s biota and effectively restore degraded habitats while improving the human condition. those of us who work in conservation (new or old) are in this fight together, knowing that the health of our landscapes is fundamental to the survival of all of earth’s inhabitants, human and non-human alike.
My only criticism of her essay is that I wish she had come down harder on attempts to put a monetary value on undeveloped land and the Earth’s ecosystem in general. Otherwise I think it’s excellent.
(In the same issue “Ask How Your Garden Grows: Cloning, Biodiversity, and the Nursery Trade” by Mark Richardson is also excellent.)
Related: From Emma Harris and Greg Aplet’s op-ed, How to Mend the Conservation Divide:
A schism has recently divided those who love nature.
“New conservationists” have been shaking up the field, proposing new approaches that break old taboos — moving species to new ranges in advance of climate change, intervening in designated wilderness areas, using nonnative species as functional stand-ins for those that have become extinct, and embracing novel ecosystems that spring up in humanized landscapes.
Some “old conservationists” have reacted angrily to this, preferring to keep the focus on protecting wilderness and performing classical restoration that keeps ecosystems as they were hundreds of years ago. Editorials, essays and books have been lobbed back and forth, feathers have been ruffled and conservation groups and government officials have felt pressure from both sides.
The truth is, despite the disagreements, both groups love nature and want to protect it. These seemingly competing alternatives are really complementary parts of the smartest strategy: We should try everything.