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"One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it."
"In the face of these realities, 21st century conservation is changing. Conservationists have taken steps to become more "people friendly" and to attend more seriously to working landscapes. Conservation will likely continue to create parks and wilderness areas, but that will be just one part of the field's larger goals. The bigger questions for 21st century conservation regard what we will do with the rest of it -- the working landscapes, the urban ecosystems, the fisheries and tree plantations, the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures, and the growing expanses of marginal agricultural lands and second growth forests that, as agriculture and forestry become more productive and intensive, are already returning to something that may not be wilderness, but is of conservation value, nonetheless.
In answering these questions, conservation cannot promise a return to pristine, prehuman landscapes. Humankind has already profoundly transformed the planet and will continue to do so.6 What conservation could promise instead is a new vision of a planet in which nature -- forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems -- exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes. For this to happen, conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness -- ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science -- and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision."
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But ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever. Some ecologists suggest that if a single species is lost, a whole ecosystem will be in danger of collapse, and that if too much biodiversity is lost, spaceship Earth will start to come apart. Everything, from the expansion of agriculture to rainforest destruction to changing waterways, has been painted as a threat to the delicate inner-workings of our planetary ecosystem.
The fragility trope dates back, at least, to Rachel Carson, who wrote plaintively in Silent Spring of the delicate web of life and warned that perturbing the intricate balance of nature could have disastrous consequences.22 Al Gore made a similar argument in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance.23 And the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned darkly that, while the expansion of agriculture and other forms of development have been overwhelmingly positive for the world's poor, ecosystem degradation was simultaneously putting systems in jeopardy of collapse.24
The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse. Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem. In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function. The American chestnut, once a dominant tree in eastern North America, has been extinguished by a foreign disease, yet the forest ecosystem is surprisingly unaffected. The passenger pigeon, once so abundant that its flocks darkened the sky, went extinct, along with countless other species from the Steller's sea cow to the dodo, with no catastrophic or even measurable effects.
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Conservation's binaries -- growth or nature, prosperity or biodiversity -- have marginalized it in a world that will soon add at least two billion more people. In the developing world, efforts to constrain growth and protect forests from agriculture are unfair, if not unethical, when directed at the 2.5 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day and the one billion who are chronically hungry. By pitting people against nature, conservationists actually create an atmosphere in which people see nature as the enemy. If people don't believe conservation is in their own best interests, then it will never be a societal priority. Conservation must demonstrate how the fates of nature and of people are deeply intertwined -- and then offer new strategies for promoting the health and prosperity of both.
"Here’s another round in what has become a heated, but ultimately productive, conversation on strategies for sustaining the planet’s biological integrity as humanity’s influence builds. Critics of Peter Kareiva, the lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, had the floor in the last post and now Kareiva reacts:"
"There are times in history when right and wrong are sufficiently divergent that no ambiguity remains between them. This is such a moment. Recent decades have witnessed a de facto coup against the democratic structures of the world, and the wholesale capture and sabotage of the entire public regulatory apparatus. "
Interesting appeal to activist impulses.
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Left fuming, impassioned or just plain-inspired by a story of eco-injustice? Eager to do something about it? Something a little more substantial than firing off a comment into the tweet-o-sphere - or a throwing a few dollars at the charity of choice? Then may be it is time to join the army!
The army of of eco-citizen scientists, that is - volunteers who are increasingly making a real difference at the front-line of ecological research. Earthwatch - the research charity that broke ground on the idea of getting the publics hands dirty, in the service of ecology - has just finished hosting a session promoting the value of 'citizen science', to a gathering of ecologists in Spain.
"Creating a sustainable economy--having enough to be happy without cheating the future--won't be easy. But The Economics of Enough starts a profoundly important conversation about how we can begin--and the first steps we need to take."
in list: Books Noted
When even scholars wanting to do the right thing and hand off their work to a responsible party cannot find anywhere to go, when enabling digital communication and the preservation of its results is an altruistic act in libraries instead of the bedrock of our mission, when worthy digital projects die because we in libraries do not notice and reach out to them, when we ourselves can't see our way clear to sustaining digital materials… we have a serious systemic problem.
profile of Will Allen from Growing Power farm in Milwaukee, WI
Together, computerized writing environments (e.g., physical spaces, hardware, software, and networks) and the humans who use and support such technologies comprise complex ecologies of interaction. As with any ecology, a human-computer techno-ecological system needs to be planned, fostered, designed, sustained, and assessed to create a vinbrant culture of support at the individual, programmatic, institutional, and even national and international level. Local and larger infrastructures of composing are critical to digital writing practices and processes. In academia, specifically, all writing is increasingly computer-mediated; all writing is digital.
Unfortunately, at far too many institutions, it is difficult to sustain ecologies of digital writing. How then to best plan, foster, design, sustain, and assess the complex ecologies framing the study and practice of digital writing that we do (or hope to do) as teachers, scholars, learners, and writers?
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