Myth-busting scientist pushes greens past reliance on ‘horror stories’, from Greenwire

At home in differential equations and fieldwork, Kareiva illustrates his more theoretical side during a talk on the population dynamics of turtles at Santa Clara. Photo courtesy of Lauridsen/TNC.

This was circulating around at work today…
From E&E News here..
This is enough to give you a flavor.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Peter Kareiva had come to answer for his truths.

Settling at the head of a long table ringed by young researchers new to the policy world, Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization, cracked open a beer. After a long day mentoring at the group’s headquarters, an eight-story box nestled in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he was ready for some sparring.

The scientists had read Kareiva’s recent essay, which takes environmentalists to task. The data couldn’t bear out their piety, he wrote. Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.

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Inducted last year into the National Academy of Sciences, Kareiva continues to teach part-time at Santa Clara University. Photo by Dave Lauridsen. Courtesy of the Nature Conservancy (TNC).

Many around the table were unconvinced. Some were disturbed.

How could this be coming from the Nature Conservancy?

“We love the horror story,” Kareiva said. He was dressed in New Balance running shoes, a purple sweater and rumpled tan trousers. “We just love it. The environmental movement has loved it. That, I think, is … [a] strategy failure. And it’s actually not supported by science.”

This is not some vague hypothesis, he added to murmurs. He’s seen it in the data.

“The message [has been that] humans degrade and destroy and really crucify the natural environment, and woe is me,” he said. “The reality is humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environment — and 80 percent of the time it recovers pretty well, and 20 percent of the time it doesn’t.”

One of the visitors, Lisa Hayward, an ecologist working on invasive-species policy at the U.S. Geological Survey, spoke up. How can that be so? “I feel that does not represent the consensus of the ecological community,” she said.

“I’m certain that it doesn’t represent the consensus of the ecological community,” Kareiva shot back, with a smile and flash in his eyes. A circle of nervous laughter swayed around the room. “I’m absolutely certain of that! Wait two years.”

Kareiva has never feared following the data, or dragging others with him. Already a respected ecologist, for the past decade he has shoved the Nature Conservancy toward a new environmentalism. The old ways aren’t working. Inch by inch, for better or worse, conservation must, he says, enter the Anthropocene Epoch — the Age of Man.

For most of the conservancy’s history, the old way meant one thing: buying and protecting land from human development, through any means necessary. “Saving the Last Great Places on Earth,” the old Nature Conservancy motto went. And it worked. Backed by wealthy donors and corporate deals, the conservancy has long been one of the largest landowners in the United States. Worldwide, it has protected more than 119 million acres.

But not all of its trends point up.

The average age of a conservancy member is 65. The average age of a new member is 62. Each year, those numbers creep upward. Only 5 percent of the group’s 1 million members are younger than 40. Among the “conservation minded” — basically, Americans who have tried recycling — only 8 percent recognize the group. Inspiration doesn’t cut it anymore. Love of nature is receding. The ’60s aren’t coming back.

It’s a problem confronting all large conservation groups, including the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Quietly, these massive funds — nicknamed the BINGOs, for “big nongovernmental organizations” — have utterly revamped their missions, trumpeting conservation for the good it does people, rather than the other way around. “Biodiversity” is out; “clean air” is in.

“In fact, if anything, this is becoming the new orthodoxy,” said Steve McCormick, the Nature Conservancy’s former president. “It’s widespread. Conservation International changed its mission, and it’s one that Peter Kareiva could have crafted.”

For these groups, it’s a matter of survival. But for ecologists like Kareiva, it’s science.

The conservation ethic that has driven these groups — the protection of pristine wild lands and charismatic species into perpetuity — has unraveled at both ends. American Indians dramatically altered the environment for thousands of years, paleontologists have found; even before then, climate shifts followed the planet’s wobbles. And in the future, no land will be spared man’s touch, thanks to human-induced global warming.

The desire to return to a steady-state baseline, before European settlement or human influence, will never work, these scientists say. Many species won’t be saved; some that are saved will not thrive, lingering in a managed existence like the California condor. There is no return to Eden. Population will rise. Triage is coming.

“Conservation is at a crossroads,” said John Wiens, who served with Kareiva as a lead scientist at the conservancy for several years before joining the nonprofit PRBO Conservation Science. “That’s where we are. And we’re likely to be there for some time.”

Kareiva was not the first to see the crossroads. But unlike those of many writers and scientists, his message has come from the inside. And there is every reason to suspect the movement will push back, said Stewart Brand, the environmentalist best known as the editor of Whole Earth Catalog.

“To be the first going somewhat public with this kind of critique from [inside] an organization framework, it’s not only pioneering and important, but brave,” Brand said. “He’s a guy who’s risking his job.”

Here are the last paragraphs:

Ecosystem services are no panacea, though, said Wiens, the former conservancy scientist. It’s a recipe that can easily miss the nonmonetary values of the environment. And it won’t necessarily help managers make the hard choices on what species to save. How will this triage be decided? There are no tools, no paradigm, that can do that yet.

“We don’t have, right now, the framework to think through those cost-benefit calculations,” Wiens said. “And I think that’s partly because people have been avoiding this notion of triage.”

For now, at conservation and ecology conferences, many young scientists speak exactly like Kareiva, said Marvier, his former postdoc. These are the future conservation managers and agency leaders. A generational dynamic is being played out. Kareiva’s team seems to be winning. Team Biodiversity may soon leave the court.

Back at the conservancy’s headquarters, meeting with the young scientists, Kareiva had finished his beer, an India pale ale from Heavy Seas-branded Loose Cannon. It was a good talk. There would be many more like it. Move conservation into working landscapes like farms, he had said. Value nature’s services. Let go of the ideal. And bring in a base beyond affluent, educated whites. Let Thoreau go.

“Broaden the constituency to those loggers,” he said.

The whole article is interesting and you can sign up for a free trial of Greenwire here.
Here is a link to Kareiva’s paper. I think we may have posted it here before, but not sure.

Green Mountain Lookout Revisited, But Not For Long

Last July, we blogged about a lawsuit filed against the Forest Service challenging its reconstruction of the Green Mountain lookout within Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness.

A week ago, federal district judge John Coughenour ordered the Forest Service to remove the lookout. It wasn’t a particularly close call either: “The Forest Service erred egregiously by not conducting the required necessity analysis before embarking on such an aggressive course of action,” the judge wrote regarding the Forest Service’s decision “to fully disassemble the lookout, transport the pieces off-site by helicopter, construct a new foundation on site, fly new and restored lookout pieces back in to the site, and reassemble the lookout.”

The judge was unpersuaded that the National Historic Preservation Act was relevant, even though the lookout is on the national registry. He concluded the NHPA imposes procedural, not substantive, duties on the Forest Service and, thus, could not trump the Wilderness Act’s substantive preservation mandate.

However, he did find that “historical use” is a valid management goal under the Wilderness Act. Continuing the line of reasoning first adopted in FSEEE’s High Sierra Hikers case, he faulted the Forest Service for failing to assess whether maintaining the lookout in the wilderness and using helicopters to do so, were necessary to realize the lookout’s historical virtues. For example, he pointed to other historic lookouts that had been preserved by removing them from the wilderness and rebuilding them at ranger stations as visitor interpretative facilities.

Blight of the White-Tailed Deer

Some have asked for more Eastern stories on this blog.. here’s the link.

Forest Buffet: Blight of the White-Tailed Deer
Monday, April 2, 2012 at 9:24AM
ecoRI News

By MEREDITH HAAS/ecoRI News contributor

White-tailed deer are prevalent in Rhode Island.NORTH KINGSTOWN — East Coast forests are literally being eaten away, according to Thomas Rawinski of the USDA Forest Service. “I’m convinced that deer are the single greatest threat to eastern forests,” he said during his March 29 presentation at a Rhode Island History Survey conference entitled “Trends in Human-Wildlife Interaction” that was held at the Quonset ‘O’ Club.

Deer impair a forest’s ability to regenerate by attacking native species and consuming everything in sight, he said, noting that we’re seeing major shifts ecologically as deer have overwhelmed and drastically changed the landscape and culturally by how society views nature and its role within it.

“Rhode Island forests were much different 25 years ago,” Rawinski said. “I love deer, but I hate what people have allowed them to do to Rhode Island forests.”

The crux of the problem, he said, is that deer increase the economic and esthetic benefits, but also cause more harm because there are so adaptable and such a prolific prey species. “They’re adaptable and can live amongst us,” Rawinski said. “They’ve beguiled us with beauty and grace.”

White-tailed deer are selective eaters when there is an abundance of food, but as their population increases their diet shifts to low-preference species and increases impact on plants such as viburnum, pink lady slippers, wild sarsaparilla and American beech. As a result of their voracious appetite, diversity in plant species is lost and impairs a forest from regenerating.

It’s a human-caused problem that revolves around the predator control issue, Rawinski said. “We tried to gentrify nature and exclude unsavory characters,” he said, noting that hunters and other predators are seen as unsavory characters. “Nature has its own rules and deer come back with a vengeance when land is used for passive recreation.”

Rawinski’s goal is to get people concerned before there is a problem. “It’s a ticking time bomb,” he said. “People become concerned once the population as already exploded.”

The white-tailed deer population (pdf) becomes a problem when the environment is changed in a way that interferes with how it should function, causing an increase in disease and an increased risk to public health. In 2004, there were an estimated 15,800 white-tailed deer in Rhode Island, and their population is still rising, according to the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM).