Conservation at a Crossroads
Lecture slides
Thursday January 4, 2013
"Wilderness is a dark and dismal place where
all manner of wild beasts dash about uncooked."
Development of the Conservation
Movement
• 1872: World’s First
National ParkYellowstone
• Late 1800’s: increased
interest in wilderness
recreation
• Debate between
conservationists and
preservationists
Conservationists
– Proper use of nature
Preservationists
– Protection of nature from use
Conservation vs. Preservation
1859-1919
1838 – 1914
Rachel Carson
Silent Spring published 1962
Cuyahoga River, near Cleveland, Ohio 1969
Golden Era of EV Legislation
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Wilderness Act - 1964
National Environmental Policy Act- NEPA 1969
Clean Air Act- 1970
Clean Water Act- 1972
Endangered Species Act - 1973
1990: Owls vs. Jobs
2000: The Anthropocene
MA: 2005
2005: Death of Environmentalism
“Modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing
with the world’s most serious ecological crisis.”
What are the objectives of conservation?
Where do we target future investments?
“We should preserve every scrap of
biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use
it and come to understand what it means to
humanity.”
E.O. Wilson
“New conservation should seek to enhance those natural
systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the
poor. Instead of trying to restore remote iconic landscapes to
pre-European conditions, conservation will measure its
achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including
city dwellers. Nature could be a garden — not a carefully
manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness
amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and
urban life.”
Peter Kareiva
First order vs. Second order environmental
problems
Questions of Conservation Today
• What is “nature”?
• How should it be valued or protected?
• How do we balance needs of humans and the
natural world?
• What metrics do we use to guide decisionmaking?
• How do we allocate limited resources and
address tradeoffs?
• What does success look like?
Defining Goals:
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Protect the rights of other species
Protect charismatic megafauna
Slow the rate of extinctions
Protect genetic diversity
Define and defend biodiversity
Maximize ecosystem services
Protect the spiritual and aesthetic experience of
nature
– From Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris