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
Скачать книгу
Nevertheless, the word “ecology” was not coined until 1869. Scientific societies of ecology and ecology journals followed in the early 1900s, and ecology soon proved useful in developing a scientific basis for forestry and other areas of natural resource management. However, ecology did not move into the public eye until the advent of environmentalism. As the environmental movement spawned new government agencies, advocacy groups, and consulting firms, universities educated large numbers of young ecologists to fill these organizations. Schools at all levels began informing students about the relationships between organisms and their environment. Consequently, there are now many professional ecologists and other experts who focus on the science of solving environmental problems, and many more people who are activists and call themselves ecologists out of concern for these issues.

Photo depicts a view of a landscape.

      (James P. Gibbs, author)

      The Romantic‐Transcendental Preservation Ethic became the basis for political action, most notably in the hands of John Muir (1838–1914), the writer and naturalist who founded the Sierra Club. Muir believed that communion with nature brings people closer to God (thereby providing a “transcendent” experience) and that visiting ancient forests and alpine meadows for this purpose is morally superior to using them to cut timber or graze livestock. In other words, nature is a temple that is sullied when people exploit it. Obviously, such an ethic puts a high premium on establishing parks to preserve nature.

      Although there was a profound gap between Muir’s and Pinchot's ethics, they both espoused an anthropocentric (people‐centered) view of nature. They both wrote of nature's utility — its instrumental value in the terminology of philosophers. One promoted nature as a source of spiritual enlightenment, the other as a source of commodities, but neither claimed that nature had intrinsic value, value independent of its usefulness.

      With the emergence of the science of ecology and the writings of Aldo Leopold (1886–1948) – known as the founder of wildlife conservation as a professional discipline and, ironically, a man who began his career eradicating predators but ended it as a strong advocate of wilderness – one finds a utilitarian perspective of species being questioned:

      Ecology is a new fusion point for all the sciences. The emergence of ecology has placed the economic biologist in a peculiar dilemma: with one hand he points out the accumulated findings of his search for utility or lack of utility in this or that species; with the other he lifts the veil from a biota so complex, so conditioned by interwoven cooperations and competitions, that no man can say where utility begins or ends.

      (Leopold 1939)

      Leopold was explaining that because nature is an integrated system with transcendent properties and functions beyond a mere collection of the species that comprise it, each species is important as a component of the whole and thus has instrumental value because of its role in an ecosystem. This was the key idea that spawned the Evolutionary‐Ecological Land Ethic. It took Leopold’s ethical vision beyond the choice of either preserving nature as inviolate or efficiently developing it. Muir wrote of the equality of species in religious terms; Leopold expressed equality in ecological terms. Pinchot (1947) stressed the dichotomy between people and nature (“there are just two things on this material earth – people and natural resources”); Leopold thought of people as citizen‐members of the biotic system. Leopold’s ideas gave people the right to use and manage nature and the responsibility of doing so in a manner that recognized the intrinsic value of other species and whole ecosystems. Indeed, he contended that the very tools that had been so frequently used to destroy the environment (namely the axe and the plow) could also be creatively applied to heal it, especially if guided by science.

      In the conclusion to his essay, Callicott (1990) asks some provocative questions. If people are valid members of the biotic community as Leopold asserts, why do we turn to landscapes without people (at least without industrial era people) to set benchmarks for what is natural? If beavers and reef‐building corals can shape landscapes in positive ways, why can’t people? Can people improve natural ecosystems? Can they promote and generate biological diversity? These are not simple issues, and we will return to them frequently in this book because this dynamic, often difficult, interface between people and nature is the crux of conservation and conservation biology.

      So where does conservation biology fit among these larger issues? Conservation biology is the applied science of maintaining the Earth’s biological diversity. A simpler, more obvious definition – biology as applied to conservation issues – would be misleading because conservation biology is both less and more than this. It is narrower than this definition because there are many biological aspects of conservation, such as biological research on how to grow timber faster, improve water quality, or graze more livestock, that are only tangentially related to conservation biology. On the other hand, it reaches far beyond biology into disciplines such as philosophy, economics, and sociology that are concerned with the social environment in which we practice conservation, the reasons we are motivated to maintain biodiversity, and disciplines