Fundamentals of Conservation Biology. Malcolm L. Hunter, Jr.. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Malcolm L. Hunter, Jr.
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Биология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119144175
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1.1 The roots of conservation can probably be found among the earliest Homo sapiens such as the people who painted this mural in the Lascaux cave in France.

      (Thipjang/Shutterstock)

      Leaping forward, history records many examples of conservation throughout the ages and across cultures. For example, the biblical story of Noah's ark remains a popular metaphor for conservation, and the Bible also codifies the first‐known game conservation law:

      If you come on a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long. (Deuteronomy 22:6–7)

      (In other words: don't kill mother birds.)

      A far broader law was promulgated by Asoka, emperor of India 274–232 BCE:

      Twenty‐six years after my coronation I declared that the following animals were not to be killed: parrots, mynahs, … wild geese, … cranes, bats, queen ants, terrapins, … tortoises, and porcupines, squirrels, twelve‐antler deer, … rhinoceroses, … and quadrupeds which are not useful or edible…. Forests must not be burned.

      Many laws focused on regulating rather than prohibiting the exploitation of species. For example, Middle Eastern pharaohs issued waterfowl hunting licenses, and night hunting was banned in the city‐states of ancient Greece (Alison 1981). Early regulations emphasized trees and birds, mammals, and fish caught for food, but all species and whole ecosystems benefitted from the popularity of declaring preserves. Starting at least 3000 years ago with Ikhnaton, king of Egypt, and continuing with the royalty of Assyria, China, India, and Europe, as well as with the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Aztecs, and Incas, history has recorded many decrees setting aside land to protect its flora and fauna (Alison 1981).

      Conservation was an issue during the period when European states were colonizing the rest of the world because colonization often led to disruption of traditional systems of natural resource use and rapid overexploitation. Freedom from European game laws was a significant stimulus to colonization, and hunting was a major preoccupation of the colonizing class. Imagine how attractive the promise of abundant, freely available game would seem to people who feared for their lives whenever their appetite for meat led them to poach one of the king's deer. This phenomenon was particularly true on some small, tropical islands such as Mauritius and Tobago, and continental Africa (Grove 1992 , 1995 ; Prendergast and Adams 2003).

      With increasing human impacts, the abuse of resources other than trees and large animals also began to be recognized, albeit slowly, for species that lack obvious economic value such as most invertebrates, small plants, amphibians, and reptiles. Aldo Leopold (1949) called for saving every species with his well‐known admonition, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the idea of “endangered species” (so imperiled that they were about to disappear from the face of the Earth forever) became a major issue for conservationists. During this period many nations passed laws (e.g. the United States Endangered Species Act) to form an umbrella under which all animal and plant species threatened with extinction could, in theory, benefit from conservation intervention. In practice, however, plants and smaller animals still are not given equal treatment, and other components of biodiversity such as microorganisms, genes, and ecosystems are usually not explicitly under the umbrella at all.

      This brings us to the point of departure for conservation biology and this book, but first let us briefly return to preservation, environmentalism, and ecology to see how they mesh with the larger history of conservation.

      Preservation

      (Bernard Spragg/Flickr/CC0)

      Environmentalism

      The first environmentalists were probably citizens of our earliest cities, more than 2000 years ago, who demanded sewers and chimneys to mitigate the impact of water and air pollution, respectively. For example, the Cloaca Maxima (which literally means “greatest sewer”) was built in Rome around 600 BCE. The industrial revolution accelerated urbanization and brought its own problems such as coal burning and factory discharges into water bodies. Environmental issues became much more high profile after publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 treatise on pesticides, Silent Spring, and a global environmental movement finally coalesced at the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm in 1972. This event marked the beginning of an era of considerable effort toward environmental protection at the global, national, and local levels with many organizations created, laws passed, and treaties ratified.

      Ecology

      The elements of modern ecology can be traced to Hippocrates, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers, but it was probably Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) who first articulated truly sophisticated ecological ideas, for example