Conservation engineers and conservation prophets
There’s a battle going on for the soul of conservation biology, and my loyalties are divided. One side might be called the engineers. Conservation planning started in a fairly ad hoc fashion, with land being protected mostly for aesthetic reasons. By the 1980s, however, conservation biology had stepped in and offered a formal planning process, based in science, which was to make land protection efforts more efficient. This trend toward a management perspective has continued, so that now many (including myself) talk in all seriousness about “ecoinformatics,” the full utilization of reams of data to make conservation decisions. The other side of this battle might be called the prophets. This group got its start in the modern era with Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, which focused (in a somewhat one-sided way) on how population growth poses serious problems for the global environment. This critique has broadened considerably over time, first to the I=PAT equation, which recognized the importance of affluence levels and technology, and finally to the internationally agreed-upon concept of “sustainable development.”
Properly construed (that is, as something more than a modest tinkering with the current system that the engineers might prefer), the program requires to achieve environmental sustainability while eliminating global poverty is extremely ambitious. It would require a conceptual revolution in how the global governance system works. It may well be that the prophets are right in this analysis, and that much more than improved planning is required to achieve a sustainable and just world. Still, such talk scares us engineers. There is widespread fear that if ecology adopts the broad sense of sustainable development as a goal, it will cease to be a pure science but will become something akin to sociology, always at risk of losing its credibility in a political dogfight. And so those of us with divided loyalties between the two camps can do little except watch the battle rage, and hope it is not too bloody…
