So, 10 years ago Michael Soulé published this inspiring and important essay about Conservationism. Few years ago it has, unfortunately, disappeared from the web. Let’s bring it back to the surface.
Its reading is warmly encouraged.
(important parts (for JND) are highlighted, underlined, etc. in the PDF file)
Michael Soulé - © Daniel Press
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Foreword by Tompkins Conservation (Douglas Tompkins ?)(few years ago) :
Becoming an effective activist requires understanding complex sets of issues in depth, and in a full context. We believe that developing and refining one’s worldview—how one understands the root causes of the current, global ecosocial crisis—creates the foundation for more specific, strategic work to ameliorate the problems facing nature and people. When we come across thought-provoking essays, blog posts, poems, etc, we will post them here in hopes of getting more people to read, debate, and take action.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
April 22, 2013
The Faith-based, Trickle-down Model of Conservation 4.0
Michael Soulé
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.
He will end by destroying the earth.
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Wildness.
Recently my wife and I spied on endangered female Leatherback Turtles depositing their ping-pong ball-size eggs at Grande Rivière, Trinidad, a famous “turtle beach” where a river enters the Atlantic.
During our first night at Grand Rivière the skies gushed for hours, previewing the rainy season. By morning, the swollen river had cut a new channel through the beach where many female Leatherbacks had already nested. Hundreds of turtle eggs were being washed into the ocean or consumed by dogs and Black Vultures. We felt compelled to collect the doomed eggs and re-bury as many as possible in new “nests” at a safe distance from the river and the ocean’s waves. So for an hour we gathered turtle eggs from the sand and reburied them in safety.
That incident was like a coda for a piece that began forty years earlier during a sabbatical in Australia. During a research break on Heron Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef, my family and I watched hatchling Green Turtles poke through the sand and awkwardly scramble to the water through a obstacle course of ravenous gulls. Some didn’t make it, but witnessing their indomitable will to live deepened my fascination with the universal struggle, elan vital – that drive to thrive and to leave behind some genetic or cultural flotsam—a legacy of genes or memes.
Granted, that our “rescue” of a few hundred turtle eggs is evolutionarily meaningless. Nonetheless, emotions usually trump rationality, even in science where pride and status are the rewards. So I readily confess that rescuing the eggs of an endangered turtle was thrilling, even knowing that for millions of years the jelly-fish-eating Leatherbacks had survived untold numbers of calamities, including major marine extinctions, without humanity’s help.
The French used to ask “What difference will it make in 400 years?” Few human projects leave tracks. Nowadays, however, with everything speeding up, even ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ is more than most people will get, unless you are Bill Clinton. The global speedup affects everything from the pace of elections, how fast we walk, happiness metrics, stock trades and the rate of species extinction—which is expected to grow by a factor of 10,000 compared to its pre-agricultural baseline rate.
The shrinkage of time scales is partly due to population growth. In addition, earth-scalping technologies like mountain top removal, damn construction, and forest clearing for cows are exponentially expanding humanity’s ecological footprint.[1] Cultural and environmental changes that once took centuries now take only decades. Time is contracting while ecological entropy expands, and wild places, like human languages and cultures, are blinking out much faster than they can be rescued.[2]
No wonder conservationists are accused of sending messages filled with “doom and gloom.” Conservation biologists are certain that providing enough shelter, food, water, and smart phones for three or four billions more humans by the end of century means wildness will only survive in highly secure parks, most of them in already industrialized nations. Assuming that commerce and growth carry on as usual, virtually all wild rivers soon will be dammed, tropical forests will be replaced by commercial plantations, marine fish stocks will continue to be depleted, oceans will be increasingly acidified, and deserts will be “improved” with desalinated sea water, wind farms, and solar collectors. The greatest blow of all, climate change, will likely extinguish most remnants of biodiversity and cripple civilization, but the subject remains taboo owing to successful lobbying by powerful vested interests. [3]
The So-Called “New Conservation.”
Is there hope? Yes, if you believe the copious chatter coming from a group of environmentalists associated with the conservative Breakthrough Institute and Santa Clara University and The Nature Conservancy. Calling themselves the ‘new conservationists,’ they wish to divert monies donated to protect nature to projects that would benefit the economic wellbeing of workers. Their vision is described in detail at the end of this essay. In the meantime, most conservationists are depressed to the point of despair as the final curtain descends on the most majestic creatures that survived the Pleistocene massacres of the megafauna coincident with arrival of the first humans.the latest of which are elephants, whose valuable ivory fetches goodly sums in China.
That said, I’m also hopeful. My faith springs from an attitude I call ‘possibilism.’ No condition or state in the cosmos is permanent and change is inevitable. Surprises occur, and it remains possible that impermanence will produce a pleasant surprise for nature. Sure, possibilism is a delicate reed, but it is my only solace.
One problem with the emotion of hope, however, is its cunning companion, denial. Both hope and denial are evident in the “new conservation.” The “new conservationists,” including the chief scientist at TNC, decry the doleful whining of conservationists and biologists about the loss of wildness and biological diversity while predicting, hopefully, a future of economic well-being for rural and poor communities that partner with for economic development with large corporations like those represented on TNC’s board, including Goldman Sachs & Co., Lexmark International, Google Capital Group Companies, General Atlantic, Alibaba Group, Eagle River Inc., Meritage Capital, Blackstone Group, Applied Materials, Duke Energy, The Bridgespan Group, Inc., AP Capital Holdings Inc., Hewlett Packard, and Shirley Young Associates, LLC.
Perhaps not coincidentally, TNC is the financial behemoth in the constellation of conservation NGOs. It’s annual budget approaches $1,000,000,000 in good economic times. In Comparison, the budget of Conservation International in 2011 was about $123,000,000 and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, US (WWF-US) was about $182,000,000 in 2011, and the Wildlife Conservation Society budget was about $200,000,000 in 2010.
The “denial” element of their sanguine strategy is the absence of evidence that this top-down, for-profit strategy will work when it is brought to scale.
The supporters of the “new conservation” promise that an engineered, people-friendly ‘garden world’ will thrive in the hypothetical new geological era—the Anthropocene, literally the Age of Man. These new, corporate-sponsored environmentalists cheerfully predict that investors and companies will flock to create jobs for the poor in profitable enterprises such as mining, oil drilling, logging, water capture, and agriculture, while creating “gardens” to save some beneficial elements of wild nature at the same time.
The “new conservation” is now being promoted by Wall Street and some neoliberal think tanks.
But before I elaborate on this emerging campaign, it would be helpful to place it in a broader moral and social context, one that recognizes the existence of a set of movements devoted to the affirmation of life in general, not just human life.
Caring About life.
How people define “saving life,” “caring for life,” or “saving the world” is all over the map. In 1989 I discovered to my dismay that 95 percent of my students in the Environmental Studies department at UC Santa Cruz interpreted “saving the world” to mean kindness directed at under-privileged sections of humanity, whereas I meant saving all of nature with the emphasis on wild creatures. I was depressed for a week.
A similar compartmentalization is obvious among many of my friends in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado where my unscientific observations reveal that people here care about living beings roughly in this order of life forms: friends and family, large dogs, horses, small dogs, cows, elk, hay, peaches, tomatoes, cherries, sweet corn, zucchini, honey bees, cats, on down to mushrooms and other useful creatures.
What about major, compassion-based movements dedicated to the protection of different life forms? I classify such life-affirming movements into three groups. The biggest of these is humanitarianism, a great umbrella of diverse crusades that share the goal of boosting human wellbeing. The next largest movement, based on amounts of money donated, is animalism; it’s mission is the protection of domesticated animals and other kept creatures that people maintain for companionship, for food, for entertainment (such as in zoos), for research, and for doing work such as plowing, hunting, hauling, dog and horse racing, and so on.[4]
I’ve already alluded to the third movement, conservationism; it emphasizes relatively wild, free ecological communities including their native animals and plants. Before I briefly describe humanitarianism and conservationism, I think you need to know about the relative popularity of these movements.
A Metric Caring
Donations It surprises many to learn that about 98 percent of charitable donations in the US target socially beneficial, humanitarian non-profits and foundations that support causes like religions (35 percent), education, human services, health, arts, and cultural institutions, international affairs, etc.[5] Many humanitarian charities work hard to fight diseases like malaria, cancer, addiction, obesity and heart disease, and other humanitarian NGOs battle injustice and poverty, issues that may seem more tangible to the average citizen than Earth’s unraveling ecological fabric.
The good news is that the vast majority of people and foundations are life-affirming in some sense. However, most donating households and foundations in the US are strongly biased toward the pro-people movement, including environmentalism and the welfare of kept animals. The bad news that only a sliver is left for the wilder set of creatures and places.
A catchall category called “Environment” gets about two percent of charitable donations, including donations benefitting animalism as well as humanitarian causes such as clean air and water. Conservation’s share of the funding pie is puny. Less than one percent is given to a hodge-podge of charities supporting open space, outdoor recreation, hunting, fishing, national parks, endangered species, wilderness protection, ecological restoration, wildlife corridors, and habitat protection. I estimate that wild nature and biodiversity conservation, including protection of vulnerable species, gets about ½ of one percent of American charitable giving. Financially, conservationism is the runt of the pro-life family of movements.
Humanitarianism.
Our species quickly achieved near absolute global domination of the biosphere in the last ten or twelve thousand years. The catalyst for this unprecedented ascendency appears to be a linked series of cognitive breakthroughs that occurred between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, beginning with language and artisanal innovation, evolution of language, and cooperation within and between clans. These changes eventually led to the emergence of hyper-sociality, religion, planning, art, dance, language, agriculture, leading to city-states, capitalism, and institutionalized warfare. [6]
In the last few hundred years, humanitarianism—the promotion of human welfare—has propagated widely in many societies. Originally the province of the church, this movement has diffused into secular institutions, particularly in Europe and North America. It has benefitted the arts, and sometimes and in some places, has reduced human violence, expanded the spheres of freedom and justice, raised standards of living, and greatly improved the human condition overall. Even cynics must admit that humans are without peer in many cognitive and behavioral realms. Compassion is one of these realms, and the moral impulse to care about the wellbeing of others—at least some others—can ennoble individuals and institutions.
Today, humanitarianism comprises thousands of specialized causes and campaigns and is by far the biggest and wealthiest of the three pro-life movements. But humans are not angels, and the ideal of a universal, loving humanity is still beyond our reach. Inter-group aversion and hostility are ubiquitous. Chauvinism obviously (“groupism”) constricts and distorts humanitarianism. Racism, fanaticism, and religious fundamentalism are major obstacles to a messianic reunion of humanity.
Generally, every group or “ism” assumes that its ways—its ideologies and policies—are the most beneficial and true. Thus liberals, fascists, capitalists, socialists, atheists, religious fundamentalists, pacifists and terrorists descend into out-group aversion.
Take me for instance. As an educated, intellectual nature lover and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, I am dead certain (but unjudgmental) that deniers of both anthropogenic climate change and the extinction crisis are morbidly ignorant. I think that oil exploration will kill most life in the Arctic Ocean and that the planet will be virtually unlivable for people and the majority of large animals by the end of this century. My neighbor across the street is coal miner and a Mormon. His bumper sticker states “EarthFirst, We’’ll Mine the Other Planets Later.” My stickers say “Got Science?” and “Public Lands Protect America the Beautiful.” When we meet in the street we smile and don’t mention our bumper stickers.
We are all humanitarians to a degree, but so do we all have preferences, biases, inconsistent beliefs, stuff we hate, ideologies we cling to and those we despise. On a recent bike ride I saw a squashed, 8-inch turtle barely alive in the middle of the road—it had been run over. I stopped, got off my bike, and carried the dying turtle to the curb. Then I noticed the people in a parked car looking and laughing at me.
I happen to despise despoilers of nature (with compassion of course). If you live long enough, you will discover that most of the wild places you loved as a young person have been peopled to death. The woods, the streams, the shores and even the national parks are being quickly defunded and degraded, even in California, the richest state in the richest nation. I grew up in San Diego County and witnessed its destruction. In 1936 the population was 270,000; in 2010 it was 3. 1 million and growing. As a teenager I roamed its network of canyons, its Borrego desert, its Palomar and Cuyamaca mountains and its nearby, pristine Pacific shores. I harvested abalone and lobsters in tide pools, carrying my bounty home in a gunnysack. Now pollution, pathogens from sewage, and people have polluted the coasts; what still lives isn’t safe to eat. It is hard for me not to judge real estate developers as a group.
My disgust at the actions of ‘rape & run’ developers as a group is an example of a universal trait of highly social animals—groupishness—allegiance within groups and animus between them. The anthropological literature on “ethnocentrism” is enormous and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt declares groupishness generates conflict more often than it nurtures peace and love.[7] People simply prefer to “hang” with those who look, think and worship like they do. Naturalists and conservationists are just as groupish as those who detest their values. [8]
The groupish impulse is one of many great challenges to humanitarianism. Groupishness reflects our primate origins, but the relative youth of Homo sapiens may explain its virulence. Humanity is thought to be the most recent large mammal to evolve—having appeared only about 150,000 years ago. This immaturity, I think, is why we seem unable to behave like grownups. It may be why we cannot stop the population explosion, arrest the extinction of most species, and prevent the termination of civilization by climate change.
Our clannish and clownish nature also contribute to an “us-against-them” aversion to life forms that challenge our hegemony, including creatures, such as wolves, prairie dogs and mosquitoes. A related bias is “resourcism,” the notion that nature has little value except as a human resource and that non-resource creatures have no value or “purpose.” (It always astounds me when people ask the pre-Darwinian question “what good are cobras, chiggers, cockroaches” for example?” (But what can one expect in a country in which nearly half the people believe that the Bible is literally true.) Our impulse to dominate and control nature reflects this resource/non-resource dualism—one of the darker hairs on the underbelly of humanitarianism.
E. O. Wilson believes that humanity is a biological outlier and the epitome of primate sociality, a “eusocial,” species like ants, bees, wasps and naked mole rats. It is true that the social organization of human beings is extraordinarily complex. On the other hand, human sociality is two-edged. The volatile mixture of evolutionary immaturity and super-sociality might also explain why our species is also “eu-competitive.” Eu-competitiveness spawns scads of mutually antagonistic groups and movements. Today, for example, those urging timely responses to climate change are stalemated by business-funded climate change deniers who lobby for governmental procrastination and effectively abort initiatives that could save civilization. Naturally, both sides of the climate debate don the mantle of humanitarianism. Stalemate is as good as it gets.
We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate.
Edward Abbey, “Down the River” [9]
Conservationism.
The mission of conservationism is three-fold: first, protecting earth’s extraordinary, autochthonous diversity of wild plants and animals; second, ensuring the perpetuation of the 3.5 billion year saga of biological evolution and speciation, and third, ensuring opportunities for people, now and in the future, to benefit spiritually and physically from wildness and the diversity of wild beings. The values associated with wildness were most clearly elucidated in the deep ecological writings of Arne Naess as popularized by Bill Devall and George Sessions.[10]
Most people, including the majority of environmental professionals, continue to conflate environmentalism with conservationism. This is understandable but unfortunate. Dave Foreman has clarified the distinction between these two movements [11] Foreman notes that the goals of environmentalism are anthropocentric, aiming to improve the health and welfare of people, while conservationism, at its core, is biocentric or ecocentric but often humanitarian in its recreational and spiritual manifestations.
Many environmentalists simply assume that biological diversity is meant for human consumption, exploitation and recreation. Theirs is a world of resources and hoped for wealth. [12]
In stark contrast, the goal of conservationism is other-centric. It stresses the intrinsic (for itself) value of non-human biological beings and aims to protect earth’s five million or so kinds of surviving creatures for their own sake.
But we can over-parse things, including our attitudes. I venture into wild places—from the hillside behind my house to national parks—for personal enrichment and enjoyment. I rejoice when seeing a bear cub climbing an aspen tree for the fun of it, a lizard basking on rocks in a desert arroyo for the warmth of it, or hatchling turtles making a “beeline” for the sea for the safety of it. Incidentally, I have similar, positive feelings when watching our cat snooze in front of the wood stove. But you and I are large—big enough to contain all life-affirming impulses and emotions, including humanitarianism, animalism, and conservationism.
Recently while watching my grandchildren play at a lake in the Elk Mountains in Colorado, I was aware of two conflicting emotions—the pride of grandparent-hood versus considerable chagrin about how much more at ease they are when playing indoors with their parent’s iPads. I wondered if I would ever see them become confident and skilled sojourners of the wild? The supporters of both conservationism and humanitarian environmentalism agree on one thing: the inexorable growth in human numbers and the expansion of civilization is accelerating the conversion of wild nature to amenities, commodities and derelict landscapes. And perhaps the “singularity,” when human feelings are replaced by silicon-based algorithms, is not so many decades in the future and no one will care.
Environmentalists are good at inventing miraculous fixes, such as payment for ecosystem services and sustainable development. Sadly, even the US with all its resources and public lands (40% of the land base in the West) lacks the will and heart to provide a safety net for vulnerable, threatened and endangered species, including wolves, grizzlies, sage grouse, amphibians, native fishes, songbirds, and so on. I used to believe that federal agency land managers could overcome political and bureaucratic interference and do what was right for nature. I used to believe that a new administration would not always cave in to vested interests and political exigencies, including today’s drill-and-frack mania, at a time of huge gas surpluses.
Today, the conservationists who still assume that wild creatures and wilderness have intrinsic value doubt that they will ever to able to arrest, let alone slow the extinction of species, globally.[13] The obstacles are widely understood.
Fewer youngsters are exposed to nature during their formative years; even children who can spend time outside are seduced by the power of electronic, digital gadgets.
Conservationism is just as fragmented as the other pro-life movements, and internecine squabbles between groups are common, particularly when donations dry up during times of economic stress.
The diversity and surplus of conservation organizations is confusing to the public.
Conservation “wins” are becoming rare, and bad news for nature is depressingly ubiquitous, exacerbated in the last 12 years in the US by a coal train of anti-conservation policies and legislation from both Republican and Democratic administrations and from Congress, virtually all of which favor extractive industries.
Conservationism, like humanitarianism, has its darker attributes and suicidal impulses. One is the tendency to judge and attack other groups before sincerely seeking ways to cooperate. Another is that grassroots organizing has nearly vanished, which may account for dissipating citizen awareness of environmental and conservation campaigns. Exceptions, however, occur. My small community—the North Fork Valley of the Gunnison River on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies—has twice succeeded in blocking attempts of the Bureau of Land Management to lease adjacent public lands for gas drilling—the kind of development that has devastated so many communities in the western states.
The “New Conservation.”
A powerful but chimeric movement is rapidly gaining recognition and supporters. Its goal is to replace the biodiversity-based model of traditional conservation with campaigns emphasizing human economic progress. Christened the “new conservation,” it promotes economic development, poverty alleviation, and corporate partnerships. Its proponents justify its conservation payoffs on the grounds that helping disadvantaged people, blue collar workers and others to achieve a higher standard of living will kindle their public sympathy and affection for wild creatures. Because its goal is to supplant the biodiversity-based model of traditional conservation with something entirely different, namely a human-centered (economic growth-based) “green” or humanitarian movement, it is certainly not conservation.
Institutional allies and supporters of the new environmentalism include the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, TNC’s Board of Directors, and social justice advocates Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of The Breakthrough Institute.[14] The latter write—in the style of the Enlightenment—that “We must open our eyes to the joy and excitement experienced by the newly prosperous and increasingly free [persons]. We must create a world where every human can not only realize her material needs, but also her higher needs.”
The leading spokespersons for this form of humanitarianism or social justice are University of Santa Clara faculty Dr. Peter Kareiva, Dr. Michelle Marvier, and the author Emma Marris. Kareiva is a theoretical biologist, ecological modeler and Chief Scientist at TNC. Their manifesto, co-authored by TNC marketer Robert Lalasz, asserts that the mission of conservation ought to be primarily humanitarian, not nature protection: “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor (emphasis added).”[15] In light of its humanitarian agenda and in conformity with Dave Foreman’s distinction between environmentalism (a movement that historically aims to improve human health, mostly by reducing air and water pollution and ensuring food safety) and conservation, it is obvious that the term“new conservation” is a misleading misnomer. [16]
Dr. Kareiva and his colleagues also declare that “nature could be a garden,” and that their new conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers. Underlying this radically humanitarian vision is the belief that nature protection for it own sake is a dysfunctional, anti-human anachronism. In interviews and talks (note 16) Kareiva defames the characters of past conservation champions such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Ed Abbey who are caricatured as hypocrites and misanthropes, but he never refers to contemporary conservation leaders or writers.
Another of their assumptions is that biodiversity conservation is out of touch with the economic realities of ordinary people, even though this is manifestly false. Since its inception, the Society for Conservation Biology has included scores of progressive social scientists among its editors and authors. [17] The “new conservationists” also assert that national parks and protected areas serve only the elite. The fact is that nearly nine out of to US voters say they agree that it is important to protect national parks.[18]
Further they argue that it should be the mission of conservationists to spur economic growth in commercial sectors such as forestry, fossil fuel extraction, and agriculture using patented, genetically modified crops. TNC’s many corporate and business partners, they imply, will help by expeditiously creating jobs and boosting standards of living of working class and indigenous peoples by spurring economic growth in commercial sectors such as forestry, fossil fuel and minerals development, and agricultural intensification using patented, genetically modified crops.
The key assertion of the “new conservation” is a correlation between standard of living and people’s affection for (or tolerance of) wildlife. As incomes grows, they posit, affection for wildlife and nature will also grow. The problem is that evidence for this trickle-down theory is completely lacking. But what a boon it would be for conservation if beneficence really did percolate from prospering human communities to imperiled biological communities. What a godsend for creation if higher standards of living really did increase people’s affection for wild creatures. To date, however, the proponents of this sanguine theory have failed to produce any credible evidence for the notion that economic-development and affluence are ethically and behaviorally transformative. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction, in part because affluence is correlated with per capita ecological footprint. [19] ,[20]
There are other nettlesome issues.
Which life forms will lose and which will win if the economic growth agenda replaces long-term protection in secure protected areas? Will there be a movement to start ranching in National Parks? Will the creation of designated wilderness areas be terminated?
Will the funds to support the TNC-birthed, development-based “new conservation” be skimmed from the dwindling budgets of conservation NGOs and government wildlife agencies?
Is conservation destined to become a zero-sum game, pitting the greed and prosperity of the dominant species against the millions of other life forms? Many conservationists believe that this has already happened.
Is it ethical to convert the shrinking remnants of wild nature into playgrounds and gardens beautified with non-native species, following the prescription of writer Emma Marris? [21]
Will an engineered, garden planet designed to benefit rural and urban communities admit inconvenient, bellicose beasts like lions, elephants, bears, jaguars, wolves, crocodiles and sharks—the keystone species that maintain much of the wild’s biodiversity? [22]
Among the least credible assumptions of the “gardeners” are, first, that the benefits of economic development will trickle down and protect biodiversity; second that children growing up in a garden world will be as adventurous as their forebears; that a leap in humanity’s love for the non-human will occur once per capita consumption passes the threshold of “enough stuff” Personally, I doubt that people will be impressed by a faith-based, trickle-down, data-free economic growth theory of “conservation.” Nor will mainstream, working conservationists ever believe that the extinction crisis could be halted by an increase in per capita consumption.
Most shocking is the dismissal by the new environmentalists of current ecological science. The best current research is solidly supportive of the connection between species diversity and the stability of ecosystems. It has firmly established that species richness and genetic diversity enhance plant growth, productivity and stability of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, resistance to invasion by weedy species, and agricultural productivity. Furthermore, the research has shown that greater species and genetic diversity reduces transmission rates of disease between species.[23]
Sadly, implementation of the new environmentalism would inevitably exclude the very creatures whose behaviors stabilize and regulate ecological processes and enhance ecological resistance to disturbance, including climate change. [24] Conservationists and citizens alike, therefore, ought be incensed by a preposterous scheme that replaces wild places and national parks with pretty gardens animated with well behaved, convenient animals. Those who promote a Disneyworld should just move there.
Conclusions.
Progress in all three compassion movements over the last century is undeniable. People today are heir to a world with less violence and injustice per capita than in any past era.[25] Thanks to generations of animalists, kept creatures in some parts of the globe suffer less abuse than in the past. And thanks to generations of committed conservationists hundreds of thousands of species have been saved from extinction in secure protected areas, notwithstanding that such projects subsist on about 0.5 percent of charitable giving.[26]
In the meantime, the global speedup has accelerated the frenzied rush for energy and raw materials and is devouring the last remnants of the wild, largely to serve the expanding, affluent, consumer classes in industrialized and developing nations alike. At current rates of deforestation, dam construction, extraction of fossil fuels, land clearing and water withdrawals, many expect that the two major refugia for biological diversity on the globe—the wet, tropical forests of the Amazon and Congo Basin—will be gone by the end of this century.[27]
Thus, the situation for millions of species is worse than dire. So a pro-life person must ask if the sacrifice of so much natural productivity, beauty and diversity is prudent, even if some human communities and stockholders might be enriched for a few years. I believe it is not. We know a few things. One is that evidence is lacking for the proposition that people are kinder to nature when they are more affluent, if only because they consume much more. We also know that the richer nations may protect local forests but at the expense of forests elsewhere where officials are more easily corrupted. A third thing we know is that climate change, probably the greatest threat to civilization, is still denied by the most powerful, wealthiest sectors in society, including some of the supporters of the new conservation.
Finally, we know that the notion of faith-based, trickle-down “conservation” lacks scientific rigor. The naïve and unscientific new environmentalism, if implemented, would accelerate extinction and would be a disaster for civilization, hastening ecological collapse globally while pulling the trigger on thousands of beautiful kinds of plants and animals. The issue is not whether human beings care about life. They do. The central issue is whether the billion-dollar-a year TNC should spend monies donated for nature protection in order to fund a morally suspect and scientifically naïve theory of human economic development.
Conservationists don’t demand that humanitarians stop helping the poor and underprivileged, / but the humanitarian, “new conservationists” demand that nature conservation stop protecting nature for its own sake. What hope is there in the face of all this cumbrous discordance ?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
This essay began with a quote from Albert Schweitzer,
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.
He will end by destroying the earth.
Schweitzer was one of the most compassionate thinker/activists of the 20th century. His moral breadth and tenacity of benevolence may point the way and give us solace. Schweitzer was a humanitarian, theologian, musician, philosopher, physician, medical missionary, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He is still celebrated for his global compassion, including his humanitarian work in Africa, and his dedication to animal rights. As his quote testifies, Schweitzer also bore witness to the devastation of nature.
There is no accounting for what makes a person a humanitarian versus a naturalist or an animalist. But I think it possible that all human beings, like Schweitzer, can learn to manifest a broad, all-of-life compassion encompassing wild things and places, kept creatures and humanity. Schweitzer’s breadth of compassion and generosity of spirit are a standard to which all life-affirming people might aspire.[28] The obstacles are daunting so we must be just as determined as turtle mothers to journey thousands of miles to remote beaches and just as driven as hatchling sea turtles to return the sea.
I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell,
one ecosystem
in diversity,
under the sun,
With joyful interpenetration for all.
Gary Snyder
- - - - - - - - - - - -
[1] Dave Foreman. 2011. Man Swarm. Ravens Eye Press LLC. ISBN -10: 0981658474.
[2] www.culturalsurvival.org/
[3] Bill McKibben. 2012. Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012.
[4] The animalism movement will not be discussed further, here, because domesticated, kept animals were created by people for utilitarian purposes; thus animalism is logically a section of humanitarianism.
[5] www.nps.gov/partnerships/fundraising_individuals_statistics.htm
[6] Gazzaniga, M. 2008. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique. Harper Collins, NY.
[7] Haidt, Jonathan, 2012, The Righteous Mind. Pantheon Books, New York.
[8] Pfaff , 2012 The Neurobiology of Fairnesss
[9] Imhoff, David, (editor). 2010. CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). 2010. Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Earth Aware, San Rafael, California.
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
www.deepecology.org/
Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Bill Devall and George Sessions. 2001. Gibbs Smith
[11] Dave Foreman, Take Back Conservation (Raven’s Eye Press, Durango, CO, 2012)
[12] Critics of conservation including the Breakthrough Institute, its funders, and Santa Clara University faculty Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier claim that traditional wilderness/biodiversityconservation is an impossible and illogical enterprise because there is no pristine nature; therefore the goal of nature protection is futile and oxymoronic. This black and white portrayal of conservation is like believing that because no book is absolutely true, we must burn all libraries. In fact, educated conservationists have not believed in the existence of pristine places or systems since at least the 1970s when DDT found in animal tissues everywhere, including in the milk of human mothers.
[13] The current rate is estimated to be about one thousand times higher than it was prior to the agricultural revolution and the human occupation of Oceania and the Americas. Several authors estimate that about half of existing species will have disappeared by the middle of this century.
[14] T. Nordaus and M. Shellenberger. 2011. From the Editors. Breakthrough Journal , No. 2 (Fall):7-9.
[15] Kareiva, P, Lalasz, R., and Marvier, M. 2011. Conservation in the anthropocene. Breakthrough Journal, No. 2, Fall, 2011. The Kareiva-Marvier humanitarian program is also presented in many interviews, blogs and articles. Among the most useful, I believe, are articles about Kareiva by Paul Voosen in Greenwire, entitled “Conservation: Myth-busting scientist pushes greens past reliance on ‘horror stories,’” (http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2012/04/03/1). Also informative is a YouTube video of a talk by Kareiva (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/peter-kareiva-an-inconvenient-environmentalist/).
[16] Foreman, Dave. 2012. Take Back Conservation. Raven’s Eye Press, Durango, Colorado (www.ravenseyepress.com)
[17] See Letters in BioScience, April 2012/Vol. 63 No. 4,pp 242-243.
[18] http://www.nationalparksstraveler.com/2012/08/polls-shows-vast-majority-voters-believe-federal-government-has-responsibility-safeguard-nati10342
[19] Soulé, M.E. 1995. The Social Siege of Nature. Pp. 137-170 in Reinventing Nature?, Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, M. E. Soulé and G. Lease, eds. Island Press, Washington, D.C.
[20] For example, Oates, J.F. 1999. Myth and Reality in the Rainforest: How Conservation Strategies are Failing in West Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press. No such ethical awakening has occurred among the wealthy in the United States.
[21] Emma Marris, 2011, Rambunctious Garden, Bloombury USA
[22] James A. Estes, et al. 2011, Trophic Downgrading of Plant Earth, Science 333, 301 (2011)
[23] Tilman, D. 2012. Biodiversity & Environmental sustainability amid human domination of global ecosystems. Daedalus, Summer 2012, 102-120
[24] The new environmentalists also neglect to mention the growing support by ecologists for the view that a major driver of extinction is the global disappearance of keystone species, particularly large carnivores; see J.E. Estes, J. Terborgh, J. Berger et al., Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth. Science, 15 July, 2011, Vol. 333 no. 6040 pp. 301-306.
[25] Pinker, Steven, 2011, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Viking, NY, NY.
[26] Incidentally, the Endangered Species Act has been highly successful in rescuing species from the brink; see Dale Goble, J. Michael Scott and Frank Davis. 2006. The Endangered Species Act at Thirity. Vols 1 &2, Island Press. Washington, Covelo, London.
[27] W.F. Laurence et al. Nature 489, 290–294 (13 September 2012) doi:10.1038/nature11318
[28] The phrase “tenacity of benevolence” is from Jean Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
Comentários