REFECTIONS ON CONSERVATION, PART I: WHY CONSERVE?
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Cŏn-sērve', v. “to keep in a safe or sound state; to save, to preserve from loss, decay, waste, or injury; to defend from violation.” -Webster's Dictionary
At a recent public meeting, I was accused of caring more about tortoises than people. It wasn't the first time I'd had such charges leveled against me; in fact, it's the rare argument against conservation that leaves this rhetorical barb in the quiver. Of course, if it came down to an actual choice between the lives of tortoises and people (rather than between tortoises and the further enriching of a handful of fat-cats), I'd have to side with my own species. But the real fallacy of this accusation is that at its core, conservation is a practice based in self-interest.
Our sustenance-culture forebears engaged personally each day with the resources they consumed. To them, the conservation of nature was basic common sense. Those cultures that consumed resources faster than they could replenish themselves simply died out. It was a folly analogous to outspending our own weekly paychecks. In today's industrial world, most of us consume resources gathered from far away lands, and gauging the sustainability of their harvest is difficult. Still, by the Nineteenth Century, as the global population passed one billion, the alarming decline of the of the Northern Hemisphere's forests alerted visionaries like Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh to the need for a new conservation philosophy. This philosophy was informed by two assumptions: first, the undeniable fact that Humans, as facets of ecological systems, are dependent on those systems, and have a vested interest in their remaining healthy and operational, and that Humans have an intrinsic need—call it spiritual, biological or psychological—for nature. The ecologist Edward O. Wilson called it “biophilia.”
Since the days of Marsh and Thoreau, the Human population has expanded exponentially, more than doubling during my own lifetime, stressing the biological systems that ultimately support us all. In addition to increasing resource consumption, population growth exacerbates the non-consumptive displacement and stress caused by human activities, elevating innocuous enterprises to ecologically devastating ones. Adding to this is the increasing per capita rate of consumption, which is harder to assess. It's probably best measured with the closely related indicators of standard of living and economic growth, which are usually expressed with the soft metric of currency, but its rise over time has, if anything, exceeded that of population.
Next up in the series: Conservation vs. Management
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upper: DESERT TORTOISES (2008) acrylic 20" x 30"
center: Graph from Wikimedia, adapted by CPBvK
lower: BIOPHILIA--WESTERN LOWLAND GORILLA & CRESTED CHAMELEON (2001) acrylic 20" x 15"