Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, has an article in Science that builds on an idea which biologist Dan Janzen outlined several years ago in a Long Now talk entitled “It’s All Gardening.” Janzen’s talk centered on the unusefulness of the concept of wilderness as geography free of human influence and argued for more effective conservation through active management and citizen involvement. The Science paper is almost a year old, but was new to me.
Kareiva et al. drive for more sophisticated understanding of the tradeoffs we make in this management process, e.g., by choosing one set of ecosystem services (in the form of land use) over another, in “Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare.” [PDF]
There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people. Instead, ours is a world of nature domesticated, albeit to varying degrees, from national parks to high-rise megalopolises. Facing this reality should change the scientific focus of environmental science. Instead of recounting doom-and-gloom statistics, it would be more fruitful to consider the domestication of nature as the selection of certain desirable ecosystem attributes, such as increased food production, with consequent alteration to other ecosystem attributes that may not be desirable. Under this paradigm, our challenge is to understand and thoughtfully manage the tradeoffs among ecosystem services that result from the inescapable domestication of nature.
The video of Janzen’s talk is ironically enough not preserved on the Long Now site in full, but is available on Google Video. Audio of the talk is here. It’s truly a great talk, and Janzen here introduces an idea that could revolutionize conservation in the 21st century — the idea of a handheld DNA barcode-driven species identification tool.
