From the Long Now List:
Kareiva began by recalling the environmental
"golden decade" of 1965-75, set in motion by
the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession
Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean
Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act---
which passed the Senate unanimously.
Green influence has been dwindling ever
since. A series of polls in the US asked how
many agreed with the statement, "Most
environmentalists are extremists, not
reasonable people." In 1996, 32% agreed.
In 2004, 43% agreed. Now it's over 50% who
think environmentalists are unreasonable.
Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing,
ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature
---current college freshman have less than a
tenth of the childhood experience of nature as
previous generations. And there's a demographic
shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a
minority in California and soon to be a minority in
the whole country. Asked to describe a typical
environmentalist, current grade school students
say it's a girl, white, with money, preachy about
recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend.
In general, environmentalist have earned the
reputation of being "misanthropic, anti-technology,
anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive
pastoralists."
Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation
was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature
is described as "fragile!"---rivers, forests, the whole
planet. It's manifestly untrue. America's eastern
forest lost two of its most dominant species---the
american chestnut and the passenger pigeon---and
never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an
H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National
Geographic sent a research team there recently, they
found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused
dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries
than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate
most of the 5 million barrels of oil.
The problem with the fragility illusion is that it
encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room
for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to "fortress
conservation"---the idea that the only way to protect
"fragile" ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda,
when a national park was established to protect
biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the
area. After a change in government, those families
returned in anger. To make sure they were never
forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife.
In the 1980s, Kareiva was a witness in Seattle for
protecting old growth forest (and spotted owls). At
the courtroom loggers carried signs reading: "You
care about owls more than my children." That jarred him.
When genetically engineered crops (GMOs) came
along, environmentalists responded with "knee-jerk
anti-technology religiosity," Kareiva said. How to
feed the world was not a consideration. Lessening
the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural
systems was not a consideration. Instead, the
usual apocalyptic fears were deployed in the usual
terms: EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE DEAD
TOMORROW! When Kareiva was working on protecting
salmon, he saw the same kind of language employed
in a 1999 New York Times full-page ad about dams
in the Snake River: TIMELINE TO EXTINCTION! He
knew it wasn't true. Salmon are a weedy species, and
the re-engineered dams were letting the fish through.
The Nature Conservancy---where Kareiva is chief
scientist working with the organization's 600 scientists,
4,000 staff, and one million members in 37 countries---
promotes a realistic approach to conservation. Instead
of demonizing corporations, they collaborate actively
with them. They've decided to do the same with farmers,
starting an agriculture initiative within the Conservancy.
For the growing cities they emphasize the economic
value of conservation in terms of valuable clean water
and air. They started a program taking inner-city kids
out to their field conservation projects not to play but
to work on research and restoration. An astonishing
30% of those kids go on to major in science.
Kareiva sees conservation in this century as a profoundly
social, cooperative undertaking that has to include
everyone. New social networking tools can be in the
thick of it. For instance, people could use their smartphones
to photograph (and geotag, timestamp, and broadcast) the
northernmost occurrence of bird species, and the aggregate
data could be graphed in real time, showing the increasing
effects of global warming on the natural world. When everyone
makes science like that, everyone owns it. They've invested.
--Stewart Brand
Kareiva began by recalling the environmental
"golden decade" of 1965-75, set in motion by
the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession
Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean
Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act---
which passed the Senate unanimously.
Green influence has been dwindling ever
since. A series of polls in the US asked how
many agreed with the statement, "Most
environmentalists are extremists, not
reasonable people." In 1996, 32% agreed.
In 2004, 43% agreed. Now it's over 50% who
think environmentalists are unreasonable.
Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing,
ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature
---current college freshman have less than a
tenth of the childhood experience of nature as
previous generations. And there's a demographic
shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a
minority in California and soon to be a minority in
the whole country. Asked to describe a typical
environmentalist, current grade school students
say it's a girl, white, with money, preachy about
recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend.
In general, environmentalist have earned the
reputation of being "misanthropic, anti-technology,
anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive
pastoralists."
Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation
was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature
is described as "fragile!"---rivers, forests, the whole
planet. It's manifestly untrue. America's eastern
forest lost two of its most dominant species---the
american chestnut and the passenger pigeon---and
never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an
H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National
Geographic sent a research team there recently, they
found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused
dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries
than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate
most of the 5 million barrels of oil.
The problem with the fragility illusion is that it
encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room
for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to "fortress
conservation"---the idea that the only way to protect
"fragile" ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda,
when a national park was established to protect
biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the
area. After a change in government, those families
returned in anger. To make sure they were never
forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife.
In the 1980s, Kareiva was a witness in Seattle for
protecting old growth forest (and spotted owls). At
the courtroom loggers carried signs reading: "You
care about owls more than my children." That jarred him.
When genetically engineered crops (GMOs) came
along, environmentalists responded with "knee-jerk
anti-technology religiosity," Kareiva said. How to
feed the world was not a consideration. Lessening
the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural
systems was not a consideration. Instead, the
usual apocalyptic fears were deployed in the usual
terms: EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE DEAD
TOMORROW! When Kareiva was working on protecting
salmon, he saw the same kind of language employed
in a 1999 New York Times full-page ad about dams
in the Snake River: TIMELINE TO EXTINCTION! He
knew it wasn't true. Salmon are a weedy species, and
the re-engineered dams were letting the fish through.
The Nature Conservancy---where Kareiva is chief
scientist working with the organization's 600 scientists,
4,000 staff, and one million members in 37 countries---
promotes a realistic approach to conservation. Instead
of demonizing corporations, they collaborate actively
with them. They've decided to do the same with farmers,
starting an agriculture initiative within the Conservancy.
For the growing cities they emphasize the economic
value of conservation in terms of valuable clean water
and air. They started a program taking inner-city kids
out to their field conservation projects not to play but
to work on research and restoration. An astonishing
30% of those kids go on to major in science.
Kareiva sees conservation in this century as a profoundly
social, cooperative undertaking that has to include
everyone. New social networking tools can be in the
thick of it. For instance, people could use their smartphones
to photograph (and geotag, timestamp, and broadcast) the
northernmost occurrence of bird species, and the aggregate
data could be graphed in real time, showing the increasing
effects of global warming on the natural world. When everyone
makes science like that, everyone owns it. They've invested.
--Stewart Brand
