CONSERVATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. Read a summary of this article here. By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline. We continue to lose forests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There are so few wild tigers and apes that they will be lost forever if current trends continue. Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we're saving. Ironically, conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning one of its hardest fought battles -- the fight to create parks, game preserves, and wilderness areas.
But while conservation has historically been locally driven -- focused on saving specific places such as Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon, or on managing very limited ecological systems like watersheds and forests -- its more recent ambitions have become almost fantastical. In the face of these realities, 21st century conservation is changing. 1. In many parts of the world, parks have become anathema to conservation. 2. Failed Metaphors and A New Environmentalism for the 21st Century.
Peter Kareiva, an Inconvenient Environmentalist. Peter Kareiva: Conservation in the Real World. As chief scientist of one of the most highly respected conservation organizations, The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva is surprisingly radical. "Look," he says, "we're in nature. The deal is how to work with it and how to help it work for us. The better we are at ensuring that people get nature's benefits, the better we'll be at doing conservation. " Through his insistence on "evidence-based conservation," he finds most ecosystems far less fragile than people think and none that can be protected as pristine, because pristine doesn't exist any more.
His focus is on working the human/nature interface for maximum benefit to both. Kareiva is co-founder of the Natural Capital Project---allying with Stanford University and the World Wildlife Fund to measure the economic value of ecosystems---and co-author of the textbook, Conservation Science: Balancing the Needs of People and Nature. Environmentalism for THIS Century Green influence has been dwindling ever since. --Stewart Brand.