Faulkner and conservation
I’m on a plane from National Airport to Chattanooga, along with probably half the ecologists of the District of Columbia. We’re on our way to the Society for Conservation Biology meeting, where scientists who study the natural world get together to share our results. There is a cruel irony that we’re flying to a meeting about saving what’s left of wild nature, given that the plane is now spewing out loads of carbon dioxide and worsening global warming. Still, these meetings are enormously important for the exchange of ideas that flows more freely during a face-to-face interaction. Perhaps more important, these meetings give us hope.
William Faulker once famously said, at the height of the cold war, “I decline to accept the end of man.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote, and perhaps Faulkner’s whole speech captures some of the hope that drives conservation biologists to keep working. “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” This sentence describes a fear that all conservationists have, that something worthwhile in the world is being lost as we develop. A (perhaps naïve) hope permeates these meetings that something can be done. While many conservation battles are lost, every year we win a few. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” In a conference that is occasionally pessimistic, I always try to keep Faulkner’s hope alive.
