From the pages of Nature Conservancy magazine, a conservationist redefines the role of our national parks.
In his new book, The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded World, Nature Conservancy biologist Jonathan Adams offers an inspiring vision for conservation in the 21st century.
The following essay, adapted from his book, explains why parks and protected areas are the cornerstones of conservation -- and why we must now look beyond their borders.
Imagine the North American Wilderness as the explorers Lewis and Clark saw it: forests thick with chestnut trees in the East, prairies teeming with bison and rivers overflowing with salmon in the West. Now picture the continent today: Superhighways link colossal cities, suburbs stretch farther and farther into the countryside, industrial farmland goes on for miles, and a few patches of greenery and a national park or two break up the monotony.
Those two images don't fit together: the frontier closed, the wilderness disappeared, and there is no going back. Yet, across North America and indeed around the world, conservation scientists, activists and communities have begun crafting visions for conserving and restoring wild creatures and wildlands over larger areas than ever before, raising the hope for a far bolder and more lasting kind of conservation than we have ever seen.
Such visions smack of particularly naive optimism. Several centuries of farming, logging, mining, dam building and rapid population growth smashed the wilderness into thousands of shards, a few of them large but most of them tiny and increasingly isolated. Even with national and global commitments to putting the pieces back together (although no such consensus exists today and none seems near), the task would seem impossible. Not only would we need to halt the current march of humanity across the landscape, we would need to reverse it.
That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. The young science of conservation biology has matured to the point that it now helps us understand how nature works across miles and miles of land and water. That understanding can guide efforts to save wild species across their native habitats rather than as doomed and decaying museum pieces, and enable human communities to become again part of the landscape rather than simply abusers of it. Beginning in the early 1980s, biologists, ecologists and pioneers in conservation biology started redrawing the boundaries of their ideas about how the world works. They moved up the scale from individual animals to populations to natural communities to broad landscapes to regions to continents. Government agencies, scientists, activists and human communities around the world increasingly recognize that the environment does not end at the last traffic signal in town, or at the county line or even at the border post. Effective conservation demands a far broader perspective.
A new vision for conservation means deciding where to put new parks and other protected areas, worrying about the habitat in between those reserves -- for humans and nonhumans alike -- and wrestling with the ideas emerging from conservation biology, with mouth-filling terms like population viability, landscape connectivity, and disturbance regimes. This is heady stuff for scientists and land managers alike, as it suggests new ways to think about and carry out conservation.
We are now in the midst of a dramatic shift in conservation. With few exceptions, science has played only a minor role in the conservation drama, usually yielding the stage to politics, aesthetics and economics. Governments and individuals have set aside grand or symbolic lands, like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, or lands that had little economic use, like the parks of the Mountain West, brimming with rocks and snow. Scientific considerations remained secondary in these decisions because scientists had not yet formulated the central questions: How much land does a puma or a spotted owl really need? How do natural processes like fires and floods determine the kinds of plants and animals that live on a certain piece of land?
By formulating such questions, scientists essentially began to draw a few tentative lines on a blueprint; finding and applying the answers has proven to be like building the house without all the tools and with no clear end in mind. Ecologists generally thought too small, and conservationists looked in the wrong places -- inside the parks rather than beyond their borders as well, to the broader landscapes in which the parks are embedded. The answers to key questions thus remain elusive. Traditional conservation skills, like wildlife management, and even the more recent scientific specialties, like landscape ecology, will not suffice by themselves. Conservation must come to grips with the human communities that surround parks, as well as the more distant communities that value parks and wildlands as refuges or simply as visions of wilderness that they may never see. Conservation has traditionally overlooked, intentionally or otherwise, the needs and values of those communities. Hence a protected area becomes a line in the sand, a challenge and an invitation to conflict.
Creating parks and other sorts of reserves is an essential but desperate action, based on the idea that we can by force of law ensure that what happens on one side of that line in the sand differs fundamentally from what happens on the other. In almost all cases, however, the line reflects human convenience rather than ecological necessity, and the boundary will be wholly illusory for every creature except humans, though often for humans as well. The line remains a necessity, because for now we have no choice but to draw it and make a stand. But conservation does not have the troops to defend the parks if people decide not to value them. The sooner we reach the point where we no longer need to draw bright lines, or need to draw them only as a matter of administrative convenience, the more of Earth's diversity we will be able to save.
Conservation cannot succeed if it remains largely a war against humanity. Conservation need not take on the challenge of solving all the world's ills, from poverty to injustice, but it cannot be ignorant of those ills nor be seen as an obstacle to their resolution. The ecological wounds that humans have inflicted, particularly but not exclusively the loss of species and their habitats, are all too evident and familiar. Yet reciting the litany of losses and decrying people as the cause -- justifiable as that may often be -- will no longer suffice. Conservation cannot just be the art of saying no, not here.
Conservation must offer a sense of the possible, and a reason for hope. Hope comes, paradoxically, from thinking big. We cannot save the Earth one species at a time, if for no other reason than we know nothing about the vast majority of species with which we share our planet. The idea that we can save the northern spotted owl -- in the early 1990s, among the most symbolically loaded creatures on Earth -- or any other species by focusing exclusively on that species has no basis in science. Even proceeding one park at a time won't work in the long run, as nearly every park is simply too small by itself to maintain all of its plants and animals. We need to consider both the park and its surroundings; as Jora Young, a senior scientist with The Nature Conservancy, puts it, "Our job is to stand on the borders of our parks and look out."
Once you take this perspective, the size of the challenge becomes clear. The Nature Conservancy now finds itself at the center of a promising but highly uncertain movement, one that melds a commitment to the people who husband their land with the best thinking in conservation science. The outcome of that fraught process may be the last best hope for the Earth and all its creatures.
While we need to do more, success lies within reach. We certainly do not know everything about how the world works and never will, but we know enough to make a start, if we are wise enough to learn from our mistakes. Neither the amount of land necessary nor the costs of managing it are out of the question; we just need to make a choice about what we value most.
Remember that Earth Day is on April 22 -- are you ready? Share your personal message of hope for the future of our planet, send a free Earth Day e-card to your friends and family, and volunteer for local Earth Day events and activities near you.
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