The Romance of Conservation
06/04/08 10:42
A lot of people have a romantic vision of the life of a conservation biologist, certainly for those who do fieldwork in exotic places. Perhaps I still share this vision, at least occasionally. But one reader of the first three entries here called and said, Your site is very depressing. I assume he meant it wasn’t romantic and charming.
He’s right, of course. Even by the root of the term, “conservation” is about a stopping loss, an attempt to keep from losing too much and about holding on to some notion of what’s “left” in a place -- an attempt to keep a place from passing from threatened to a state of crisis, or from a crisis to something even worse.
He’s right, of course. Even by the root of the term, “conservation” is about a stopping loss, an attempt to keep from losing too much and about holding on to some notion of what’s “left” in a place -- an attempt to keep a place from passing from threatened to a state of crisis, or from a crisis to something even worse.
In February, I met an ornithologist in Hawaii who – with evident pain and passion – told me about the challenges she felt she faced in her work trying to save the few remaining native bird species in the islands. Her job is very difficult, very stressful, the odds are long, and the prospects of even limited success over coming decades are, at best mixed. Some bird populations were so small that she could recognize individuals, grieving her particularly when she would find one she knew dead. The reality of working in conservation is that you can occasionally win small battles, but wars are rarely won. And often only with heavily footnoted victories.
In North America, much of the emphasis in conservation has been on individual species – the Bald eagle, for instance. However, conservation focused on a single species may mean a loss of resources for whole communities of species or for special types or habitat. Or that effort, research, and funding is pressed away from species that are more threatened but less charming, lack a backbone, are too small, or don’t photograph well. But most people don’t think about these other species and become very upset when priorities shift away from this big charismatic species. Should we give up on polar bears (ecologically doomed) or Attwater’s prairie chickens (less than 40 individuals) or the Yangtze dolphin? Of course we should. There is no return on investment for these species. But abandoning hope is terribly upsetting. Take the almost certain acknowledgement that the Ivory-billed woodpecker is, most truly, lost and gone. That hope won out over science, even among scientists.
I can remember vividly calling friends the morning that the ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered and crying, thinking of the stories elderly relatives and friends had told me as a boy about these incredible birds. And feeling some measure of redemption that we hadn’t lost everything we thought we had.
I think most people who work in conservation are faced with a serious contradiction between enjoying the experience of being outside and seeing wild, living things, and knowing how much loss we’ve experienced and how much more we face in the near future. Of course, the latter is what motivates us. And the former is what recharges us, at least a little. The experience of the work of conservation is often about living with the knowledge of eventual loss. Hope in conservation is measured across several generations – a desire that in 100 or 300 years we will have more than we fear we will.
I suspect that many physicians feel something similar when confronted with the same set of health issues over and over. Many difficult health problems for instance are quite preventable – most type II diabetes, many heart issues, even the loss of teeth. And I’ve met one or two physicians who responded to that experience of reaching people too late by wanting to shift from clinical or hospital work (work on individuals) to something like public policy or outreach work (working on groups). Would you rather treat patients with AIDS, or would you rather prevent the spread of HIV? On the one hand, you might find a certain level of satisfaction in helping many individuals in their experience of pain and disease (and dis-ease). You see the effects of your knowledge very directly and quickly. On the other, you might be able to reach enough people with time to stop the spread of the condition completely. In medicine, the two approaches are often not reconcilable, and rarely does one person try to perform both levels of medicine.
I met a woman who spent her work-week in a nonprofit trying to help the homeless in a large southern U.S. city – mostly men, often psychologically and psychically damaged. Unable to hold down a job, stay away from addictive drugs, or maintain healthy relationships. She spent her weekends driving to another city, hours away, volunteering in another non-profit that worked with homeless children. She had such difficulty reaching the adult men, felt such visible pain in the difficulty of this work, that she had to also work on trying to prevent more such people. I feel like I can reach these kids, she told me.
The dominant species paradigm in North American conservation is not unlike trying to treat individual patients or to change the behaviors of adults who are persistently homeless. From a climate change perspective, that approach makes very little sense, and it probably doesn’t make much sense for the majority of threats that conservation biologists confront. There are simply too many species that are threatened, and humans – even very clever ones – are simply not smart enough to design comprehensive strategies to help all of them. This means asking what is a good return on our conservation dollar. By targeting a single species, you are quite likely leaving out some other and probably very important taxa. This is not romantic, or easy, or even really comforting. It’s triage in a war zone.
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