Conservation Biology: Preventing Further Loss

"The stuff of evolution, genetic diversity, is being drastically reduced. The survival pack of this green earth, the age-old information which was held in store against fire, flood, drought, earthquake, hurricane, ice age and more subtle environmental change is being destroyed in the name of progress. The subsistence fields, waste places, wilderness, National Parks and Nature Reserves of the world thus take on a new and vital role. They can no longer be regarded as anachronisms in the 20th century to be swept away by short-term grant aid and megabuck development. Each one is a part of a genetic storehouse, a unique investment of immense value to the future." - David Bellamy ["Bellamy's New World", p. 183]

Who was the first North American conservationist? Perhaps some prehistoric hunter/philosopher who recognized that humans were eating up various species of large mammals and urged, in vain, limits on the killing of giant sloths and mastodons. In recorded history we believe that native North Americans lived in a steady state with nature, but that early settlers in New England began "resource" extraction such that "mast trees" soon had to be protected as property of the King of England. Ecoshifters often raise the ecocentrism of "indigenous" peoples in contrast to the practices of Western affluence. This tendency ignores the fate of the Anasazi, of Easter Island, and of the many times and places in Eurasia that native populations have outrun and destroyed ecosystems to the point of running out of food, fuel, and housing. Perhaps all human cultures expand their populations in "good times" while adversely impacting their support systems so that they cannot withstand "bad times" like cooling climate or drought. Although all species may do this, humans are the first in the known universe that can discuss the whole process and what to do about it.

In 1864, the first famous American conservationist, George Perkins Marsh, described in "Man and Nature" the effects of introduction of exotic species of plants and animals, the extinction of species, the effect of forests on reducing erosion, floods, and landslides, and much more. He describes the unpredictability of human modifications of ecosystems, ending the book with

"Our inability to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes in any general view of the relations between man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. The collection of phenomena must precede the analysis of them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and reaction between humanity and the material world around it, is another step toward the determination of the great question, whether man is of nature or above her."

For the 150 years since Marsh wrote, debate continued on what constituted appropriate human use of land. Anthropocentrism ruled. Land was to be USED by humans to produce wood, water, wildlife, recreation, housing, farms, or cities. Land that was not so used was variously called "waste land", "derelict land", abandoned land", "empty lot", "vacant lot", "non-timber forest" (by foresters), or "rough stony ground" (by soil scientists). Few people valued such land even though it supported millions of other species.

The term "conservation biology" apparently was first used in the 1970s to describe the integration of ecological science with conservation. Edward Grumbine calls conservation biology "the science of scarcity and diversity". This chapter covers various predecessors and current thinking in conservation biology, and includes sections on pollution control, conservation versus preservation, protection, gene pool preservation, endangered species (including charismatic megafauna), exotic invasives, biodiversity, fragmentation, restoration, ecosystem management, and evolution.

Pollution Control

There is no need to belabor the many successes of environmentalism in protecting humans from pollution. Here is a partial list of achievements in emission reduction:

• Septic and sewage input to water bodies is greatly reduced.
• Chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides are no longer used in the U.S.
• We recognize the problems of asbestos, PCBs, and mercury.
• Lead has been removed from gasoline.
• Emission of chlorofluorocarbons that destroy atmospheric ozone is reduced.
• Motor vehicles have air pollution reduction mechanisms.
• Power plant emissions of SO2, one cause of acid rain, are greatly reduced.
• We comprehend leaching of fertilizer from agricultural land to water bodies.
• Agricultural practices prevent catastrophic erosion by wind and water.
• Forest management generally controls erosion and sediment production.

On the other hand, Jeffrey St. Clair, in "Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me" documents the difficulty of maintaing these political achievements and how far we still have to go to eliminate pollution completely.

We rely on natural systems to absorb and process pollutants, though sometimes we discover belatedly that this does not always work. Disposal of sewage effluent and sludge on forest land has had mixed reviews, because heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and cadmium may accumulate to the point of being toxic to the system. Many artificial organic molecules do not break down in nature, notably DDT and other chlorinated pesticides, and toxic chemicals like PVC and PCB. The second principle of The Natural Step (see the Sustainability chapter), "substances produced by society can not systematically increase in the biosphere", gets violated routinely.

Forests, and all other green plant covers, absorb carbon dioxide, combine it with water in photosynthesis, store the organic molecules produced as wood and leaves, and emit oxygen as waste. Much has been made of the capability of forests to absorb the pollutant carbon dioxide, though the Energy chapter describes how this has been over-hyped. Regrowing forests can only store the amount of carbon that was released from them at the time they were cut or burned.

Forests (and all green vegetation) have also been over-hyped as necessary to provide us with oxygen to breath. Although it took photosynthesis over a billion years to produce the oxygen in our atmosphere, current photosynthesis is not needed to maintain this oxygen. Wallace Broecker [1970. Man's oxygen reserves. Science 168:1537] showed that if photosynthesis stopped today we would run out of food long before we even noticed reduced atmospheric oxygen.

Nitric and sulfuric acids are emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning. The constituent nitrate, sulfate, and hydrogen ions fall onto all of Earth's surface, including forests, as acid rain and snow. The nitrate is quickly converted into organic nitrogen by soil organisms, and becomes part of the internal nitrogen cycling of the system. The nitrate input thus acts as a fertilizer in forests, most of which are chronically nitrogen-poor. However, after a sufficient amount of nitrate has been added the system will become saturated and any additional nitrogen will move into streams and lakes. All the sulfate on the other hand, moves downward through the soil and eventually reaches streams. Neither the sulfate nor the nitrate are problems in the forest soil, but the hydrogen ions that they bring in with them (the acid component) cause havoc. The concentration of hydrogen ions is sufficient to displace ions of calcium, magnesium, and potassium from the organic and mineral particles that hold them in the soil as nutrients. These ions then move with nitrate and sulfate into the soil water and downward with the water into streams, reducing the amount of nutrients in the soil. Calcium, magnesium, potassium, and nitrogen additions to water bodies cause eutrophication. The direct addition of hydrogen ions to water bodies by precipitation causes acidification and loss of biological activity. The problem of acid rain has generated government efforts to limit sulfur emissions from power plants and nitrate emissions from automobiles, but the problem has been only partially eliminated. Clearly the capacity of forests to clean up future acid rain is limited.

Conservation Versus Preservation

Government giveaway of vast lands in western North America and wide-spread destructive logging in both east and west created movements for change in the late nineteenth century. "Preservationists" induced Congress to create the National Park Service, with its congressionally-proclaimed National Parks and its presidentially-proclaimed National Monuments, and "conservationists" induced Congress to create the U.S. Forest Service with its congressionally-proclaimed National Forests. The difference concerned the uses to be made of the designated areas. National Parks and Monuments were and are established to protect scenic beauty for human enjoyment and recreation. National Forests were established to be managed for wood production, flood protection, water supply, grazing, wildlife production, and human recreation. Debates over which was more important, about the details involved in the principles, and over where and how much, have raged ever since. More or less by default, remaining federally-owned lands became managed by a third agency, the Bureau of Land Management. Other important federal land-management agencies include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Defense, including the Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, making a hodgepodge of political confusion and red tape. Similar actions at the state level generally produced state parks, state forests, and state fish and game lands, each run by a different state agency.

In "Wars in the Woods", Samuel Hays documents the conflicts over land management among the various agencies at both federal and state level. I have covered some of this conflict under "Myths of Sustained Yield and Multiple Use" in the Sustainability chapter. His "Wars" between commodity forestry, as practiced by professional foresters, and ecological forestry, as promoted by scientists, can be seen as a continuation of the conflict between conservation and preservation, between multiple objectives and single objectives, and even between anthropocentric and ecocentric world-views. The new ecosystem approach is gaining ground, but slowly. Under the second Bush administration, the U.S. Forest Service has given only lip service to "ecosystem management", which just seems to be a euphemism for business as usual.

According to Hays, ecological forestry de-emphasizes wood production in favor of :

• diversity of plants, wildlife, species, habitat,
• watershed protection,
• restoration of fire where natural/appropriate,
• preservation of old growth,
• restoration of charismatic megafauna,
• reduction of human threats from logging, dams, motorized recreation, development, and
• reduction of road systems.

David Rothenberg points out that "National Parks are for people, not for animals, plants, or the spirit of the wild. A national park means traffic, overuse, extensive tourist facilities, too much publicity" ["Quiet Preservation: Don't Make It a National Park", Wild Earth, Summer 2000, p.57]. Designated wilderness areas also become a recreational destination for hikers, backpackers, and climbers. The purpose of the Wilderness Act of 1962 is "to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness". The purpose is not to protect ecosystems and their non-human life-forms, but to protect human enjoyment of the wild. The criteria that qualify an area for designation have been endlessly debated, especially in legislatures and courts. The opposition to wilderness claims that there is too much already, but the total area of designated wilderness in the lower 48 United States (49 million acres) is only three times the total area of pavement (16 million acres)!

A particularly hot wilderness issue involves roads. The U.S. Forest Service maintains about 400,000 miles of roads, more than any other single road agency in the country. Those opposed to wilderness have argued that wilderness must be free of ANY signs of human impact, especially any abandoned roads, so only "roadless areas" can be candidates for wilderness. Congress now finds it acceptable to allow former roads as long as they have been "put to sleep", or restored to semi-natural conditions. To truly protect naturalness, wilderness areas should be minimally surrounded or penetrated by roads in order to reduce access by both exotic invasive species (see below) and humans (for backpacking, hiking, backcountry skiing, fishing, hunting, and off-road vehicles).

What kind of management should or should not be done in designated wilderness? Despite its sound, "wilderness management" is not an oxymoron, because wilderness is an anthropocentric term that is not the same as "wild". A number of human uses are allowed in wilderness, including:

• "primitive" recreation, including horses and motorized vehicles in many areas,
• hunting and fishing,
• resource extraction by mining and drilling, and
• grazing, which is practiced on 35% of U.S. designated wilderness.

Wilderness designation has been the primary focus of protection efforts involving National Forest land, but other methods are being proposed and used for protection of other federal, state, and private lands. "Biosphere reserves" can be created by many different agencies, including those designated by the UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere program. UNESCO Biosphere Reserves "innovate and demonstrate approaches to conservation and sustainable development" and are "living laboratories for people and nature". In my own Gulf of Maine bioregion, RESTORE: The North Woods proposes that a significant part of northern Maine be made into a National Park to protect it from timber harvest and private development.

On the private level, various state and national non-profit groups have long been buying and protecting land in the form of "sanctuaries", primarily to protect wildlife. Often these sanctuaries were created without much regard for the larger ecosystem in which they are embedded. As a result, many sanctuaries are protected patches in the midst of developed or unprotected areas, and serve more as parks for human recreation than as true wildlife preserves. Desire to protect land from development for housing, recreation, commerce, or industry can be based on aesthetics, on agricultural or timber value, or on an ecocentric world-view. In the past decade or so, conservation easements have become the favored method for protecting forest, agricultural, and grazing land.

A conservation easement carries the legal weight of a title deed. The landowner can donate or sell a permanent easement to a government agency or private organization, often with favorable effects on income and estate taxes. The easement document spells out in great detail exactly the purposes for which the land may still be used and what uses are henceforth legally prohibited. The easement holder is responsible for ensuring that the legal restrictions are followed. Each easement transaction uniquely depends on the landowner's family situation, desires, and need for money, the proposed easement holder's purposes and capabilities, need for surveys and evaluation, and sources of funding. These often make the easement process complicated and lengthy. Nevertheless, conservation easements are widely used for properties ranging from just a few to many thousands of acres. According to the Land Trust Alliance, 1600 land trusts in the United States hold conservation easements protecting 36 million acres of land.

Gene Pool Preservation

Quite recently, human society has become aware of the rapid rate at which humans are causing extinction of other species. Because we humans do not know how to create a gene, and may never know, each loss of a species or subspecies means Earth has lost all the genes that are unique to that species or subspecies, and that species and those genes can NEVER be recreated. In particular there is great concern about loss of genetic diversity (that is, loss of specific genes) within domestic species of plants and animals.

Worldwide, only a few species of cereal grains (maize, rice, wheat, barley, and sorghum) provide most of the food energy for humans. Since the Green Revolution of the 1970s, commercial agriculture uses only a few varieties of each of these grains. The thousands of other varieties that farmers have developed for their local soil and weather environments are declining in use and are disappearing. This is a serious problem of globalization, so serious that "gene banks" have been established to store seed from varieties of plants that are becoming extinct. Only time will tell whether seed preservation is successful and useful; there is some doubt. On the animal side, preserving genes is more difficult than saving seeds. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy works to preserve domestic animal breeds that are no longer in favor. For large wild animal species close to extinction, zoos have been a primary means of saving a species, with a few notable successes. California Condors became extinct in the wild, but have now been reintroduced to their original habitats from birds bred in zoos. The Mauritius Kestrel and Tennaserim Green Peafowl are other examples (see the Wikipedia entry "Captive Breeding"). Pere David's deer existed for many years only in zoos, but has been reintroduced to the wild in China.

Much concern about gene pool preservation arises from potential uses for humanity and thus is anthropocentric. Efforts to prevent a charismatic species from becoming extinct also seem anthropocentric. Ecocentrists raise issues of loss of thousands of species, many of which we have not even identified yet. From all viewpoints, wouldn't protection of ecosystems with all of their species and continued natural evolution be preferable to seed banks and zoos?

Endangered Species

Many charismatic species are the top-level predators in their ecosystem. These are the species that humanity has worked hard to eliminate because of perceived, and rarely real, threats to livestock and to human children. Consequently their ranges have been severely reduced. Ecocentric thinking motivates many efforts to restore these species to their original ranges. The timber wolf of North America is a prime example, spawning various organizations such as the Maine Wolf Coalition and the Timber Wolf Alliance. Major conflicts exist between those who see high-level predators as indicative of and necessary to well-functioning ecosystems and those who manage livestock to provide meat for humans. George Wuerthner summarizes the difficulties in "Wolf Restoration a Success?" in the "Cowfree" section of the Range Biome web site.

As opposed to charismatic species, species that are USEFUL to humanity can also generate concern when they become endangered by over-consumption. Many species of fish fall into this category; a whole industry may die because a species becomes rare. In the Gulf of Maine bioregion the Atlantic cod is a prime example. Until artificial taxol was developed, the Pacific Yew of the northwestern U.S. was threatened by use of its bark to make the cancer drug taxol. Are we willing to destroy another species in order to lengthen the lives of some humans? On the other hand, a single charismatic species can be sufficient to protect a whole ecosystem, as with the Spotted Owl in northwestern U.S. old-growth forests. Government-imposed limitations on over-harvest of useful species or government protection of a charismatic species always draws the "jobs" argument -- "these limits will put X number of people out of work -- often with little recognition that continued "business as usual" will eventually put them out of work also.

In contrast to the somewhat anthropocentric preservation of charismatic species, the term "biodiversity" expresses an ecocentric approach. Its original scientific meaning is a quantitative measure of the number of different species found in an area. Ecologically, more species and thus greater biodiversity means a healthier ecosystem, which is more resistant to change and more resilient in recovering from damage. (This does not apply to fragmented areas, see the section on "Fragmentation" below.) In general, loss of species, and thus decreasing diversity, means something is going wrong with ecosystem function. E. O. Wilson has developed an international reputation for calling attention to the problems of loss of biodiversity and species extinction at global scale. Although it is difficult to estimate the rate at which Earth's species are going extinct (partly because we don't even know what species there are), everyone agrees that the rate is high, probably between 20,000 and 2 million in the past 100 years. This extinction rate has probably never been exceeded in past history, even by such cataclysmic global events as the meteorite strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Biodiversity expresses an ecocentric sense that species should be protected and preserved for their own intrinsic value, not just for human usefulness or awe.

In "Green Space, Green Time" Connie Barlow discusses a framework for determining what species and ecosystems should have highest priority for protection. Clearly money, effort, and time are not available to deal with all endangered species and systems. Her criteria are:

• living fossils -- species that have played a major role in the "pageant of life", such as coelacanth, nautilus, and gingko,
• imperiled lineages -- species that are only distantly related to any other species, such as giant panda, hoatzin, and the rift lake cichlids of Africa,
• unique adaptations -- species that have evolved special characteristics, such as the Komodo dragon and the Venus flytrap,
• elaborate mutualistic relationships - species with unique behavioral characteristics, such as orchid-wasp pollination pairings and migrating monarch butterflies,
• hot-spots of biodiversity - locations where evolution is likely to be proceeding rapidly, such as Hawaii and parts of Mexico
• keystone species -- species that are indicative of ecosystem health, like the wolves mentioned above,
• endangered species -- species or subspecies threatened with extinction locally, regionally, or globally
• photosynthetically important areas -- landscapes and seascapes, such as forests, coastal wetlands, and plankton-rich areas of ocean, and
• unique function -- species or genera that contribute to ecosystem function in important ways, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and ocean coccolithophores, which generate dimethyl sulfide required for marine cloud formation.

Humanity has altered or destroyed vast areas of Earth's marine, fresh-water, and terrestrial ecosystems in the name of increased productivity for human use. HUMANS NOW CONSUME 30 to 50% OF ALL THE BIOMASS ENERGY PRODUCED BY WORLDWIDE PHOTOSYNTHESIS EACH YEAR. We use it for food, fuel, housing, wood and paper products, and feed for domestic animals. It took Earth five billion years to learn how to do photosynthesis as efficiently as possible for a given climate and soil while maintaining sustainable ecosystems. Humans, always thinking they can do better than nature, have greatly modified terrestrial ecosystems through agriculture, grazing, and forestry, and have overharvested species in aquatic systems. In reality our knowledge is superficial. We don't know the long-term consequences of extinction of a large and unknown number of species and the near elimination of many ecosystems, such as the tall-grass prairie of North America. We don't know, and may never know, how to artificially reproduce photosynthesis. Species and ecosystem extinction represents genocide on a massive scale, and is likely to become worse as growing human population drives our consumption of photosynthetic products even higher.

Exotic Invasives

I want neither to minimize the importance of exotic invasives, nor to lengthily debate what to do about them. "Letting nature take its course" is appealing to a deep ecologist like me who respects all life. But so many systems have been so seriously disturbed by exotics that restoration ecologists have to work very hard at controlling them. Humans need to try to fix what we have damaged and in some places this may mean a concerted effort to remove an exotic species. This issue merges into the larger issue discussed below under "Restoration Ecology".

Fragmentation

Standish/Gorham ME from TerraServer orthophotos

Fragmented areas have lots of "edge", known technically as "ecotones", which are the boundaries between ecosystems. Although species diversity increases where there is lots of edge or lots of variation in stages of succession, such diversity does not make an edge more stable than a large undisturbed ecosystem. Many of the additional species are likely to be exotics, meaning they do not belong in the original ecosystem. Exotics can overwhelm native species. Some of the additional species are pests that develop better in disturbed areas. For example, cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and out-compete the other nestlings, thrive on edges. Other adverse effects include domestic animals such as cats and dogs, and altered microclimate. Roads are a major cause of fragmentation, both because they are movement barriers for some species and because they produce "road-kill". Conservation biologists have developed methods such as overpasses and underpasses that allow wildlife to cross roads safely.

Conservation biology emphasizes a need to defragment landscapes as well as preventing further fragmentation. In my bioregion, the southern Gulf of Maine, fragmentation was maximized by farming and logging in the 19th century and has been partially reduced more recently due to farm abandonment. New England in 1830 was 85% cleared land, but has recovered so that now it is 85% forest land. Undoubtedly this is why such species as beaver, moose, and black bear have recently become much more abundant. Efforts to protect large remaining blocks and to consolidate or connect separate blocks will be discussed below under "Ecosystem Management".

On the other hand, farm consolidation is a form of defragmentation that may not have a favorable natural purpose. In England it involves destroying hedgerows between small fields to make larger ones, thus destroying the unique hedgerow ecosystem that has developed over centuries. In the western United States, vast agricultural monocultures are ecologically simple and cannot be considered improvements over smaller, more varied farms.

Restoration Ecology

• a polarity between restoration and preservation,
• a polarity between to intervene and not to intervene, and
• a polarity between stability and change.

Ecosystems must respond frequently to naturally-induced slow or rapid changes. Succession rarely marches stolidly from "pioneer species" to a stable "climax" after major disturbance. Most ecosystems are now recognized to be in a "shifting mosaic" steady state, in which minor disturbances to different areas of the system occur frequently, so the system as a whole is always in some form of recovery. Disturbance is now seen as normal rather than as abnormally rare. Insect outbreaks, disease, fire, wind, ice, volcanism, drought, and landslide occur over various space and time scales. Unfortunately, many of these instabilities have been used as justification for further human destabilization. "Salvage" logging of pest-damaged forests supposedly reduces the potential for fire, but often is an excuse to cut where cutting had previously been restricted. Wildlife management openings are created to supposedly "mimic nature" when their real purpose is to provide hunters with game. Such practices in normally-functioning systems should not be confused with restoration.

Compensatory mitigation, or wetlands trading, allows creation of artificial wetlands elsewhere to replace natural wetlands destroyed by development such as highways,, shopping centers, airports, housing developments, and golf courses. The problem is that such mitigation usually does not work. Construction of artificial wetlands has demonstrated over and over again that we cannot restore/reproduce the original state of an ecosystem. The artificial replacement may be wet and even weedy and may support mallards and Canada Geese, but it won't work the same as the ecosystem it replaced. Humans may never be able to create the complexity of the thousands of species involved in a natural living system. Inexperience, lack of knowledge, lack of desire, lack of monitoring, and lack of significant penalties all contribute to low success rates of compensatory mitigation.

When a system is so severely damaged by humans that it is incapable of recovering on its own, there is much debate about what to do. How active should restoration be? What can it accomplish? What can it not accomplish? Current thinking tends toward a three-step approach:

1. designate as protected,
2. restore in various ways,
3. then keep hands off and let nature take over.

Trees for Life represents one geographic extreme of this approach. They seek to restore the original Caledonian (Scots Pine) Forest of the Scottish Highlands. Here are their Principles of Ecological Restoration.

1. "Mimic nature wherever possible
2. Work outwards from areas of strength, where the ecosystem is closest to its natural condition
3. Pay particular attention to 'keystone' species
4. Utilize pioneer species and natural succession to facilitate the restoration process
5. Re-create ecological niches where they have been lost
6. Re-establish ecological linkages
7. Control and/or remove introduced species
8. Remove or mitigate the limiting factors which prevent restoration from taking place naturally
9. Let nature do most of the work
10. Love has a beneficial effect on all life"

Restoration ecology needs to deal with the question "What are we trying to restore to?" Many New England bird species arrived here in response to clearing for agriculture and we are now concerned about their "decline" as farmland reverts to forest. Many people oppose efforts by RESTORE: The North Woods to bring back our large carnivores like wolves and mountain lions. Some people advocate bringing modern versions of extinct Pleistocene mammals, such as camels, cheetahs, and elephants, back to the North American Great Plains. Then there are the dilemmas of how to control/remove exotics from wilderness where human impact is supposed to be minimal, and how to reduce fuel levels in the western United States where even-aged management and prevention of all fires has created ecosystems that burn very easily.

Rapid anthropogenic climate change will have many effects on ecosystem structure and function, but specific predictions are difficult. In the north temperate zone we expect to see tree species dying in the southern part of their range from drought or from competition with species that are favored by warmer climate or by increased insect and disease attack. Change in forest composition will affect all other species in the system from understory plants through all animals and microorganisms. A mean temperature change of over 1°F has already produced documented range shifts; the predicted change of 6°F or more is the equivalent of moving 200 or more miles farther south (roughly from Boston MA to Baltimore MD). There is little point in trying to restore a species composition into an area where it will not be able to exist in 100 years. Apparently all we can do is try to restore naturalness and biodiversity, then leave nature to do as well as it can.

Ecosystem Management

1. artificial systems, such as farms, characterized by single use and high inputs of fertilizer, water, and energy,
2. semi-natural systems, such as forests, characterized by multiple resource extraction, and
3. natural systems, characterized by protection and preservation as "wilderness".

Where private land is involved, the "you can't tell me what to do with MY land" attitude needs to be overcome. Our culture perceives ownership of private land as an indicator of wealth and achievement. The Wise Use Movement) promotes private property rights in the face of perceived environmentalist efforts to eliminate them. Such private rights are believed to include not only ownership of land but also of everything under, over, and on it, including hunting and fishing rights, plant collecting rights, mining rights, and water rights. In reality, government (community) has always had the right to say what can and cannot be done on land. Land (in North America at least) was granted by the "state", and can be taken away by the "state". Government sets various restrictions on land uses and has separated mining and water rights from other property rights for over 100 years. Some ecoshifters argue against the concept of private ownership, preferring the attitude of indigenous peoples who treat land and water as "commons" belonging to the whole society. A less radical position asserts that education about ecosystem protection and its purposes will take the individual rights argument out of private ownership.

Larry Walker's Range Biome web site describes the issue of special use permits for grazing rights of private individuals or corporations on public lands in the U.S. Political pressure from permittees and their supporters in the Wise Use Movement allows continued over-grazing, even in federally-protected Wilderness.

Overpopulation of recreationists competes with overpopulation of livestock in producing adverse impacts on public lands. If ecocentrism is to develop, many or most of the six billion human population need to know and respect nature. How can we get people into and concerned about the natural world without destroying it? In the U.S. the National Park Service tries to provide comfortable recreational/aesthetic opportunities for all its visitors and so develops hotels and RV campgrounds among other amenities. Consequently the National Parks are being overrun with people. Somehow we need to educate visitors to wild lands, and the managers of them, that people simply cannot bring all the comforts of home to the wild. And we need to spread the load more evenly by encouraging a bioregional and local approach that encourages visiting wild areas near home rather than distant travel (see the Bioregionalism chapter).

Perhaps the most difficult question for land managers asks how much ecosystem productivity can be diverted to human use. What is essential "capital" and what is the periodic useable "interest"? Natural systems were in a relatively stable and relatively steady state before humans came along. As stated earlier, natural systems have maximized their energy conversion efficiency for their given climate and geology. They have a high rate of internal cycling of nutrients, with low and equal inputs and outputs. As long as populations of large animals, including humans, remain low enough, recycling efficiency is maintained by the diversity and complexity of the ecosystem and the system remains sustainable. Since agricultural development in the last 10,000 years, increasing human population has greatly increased withdrawals from natural systems and has thus created input-output imbalance of organic matter and nutrients, with consequent instability and unsustainability. Strictly speaking, I believe the answer to the question about useable interest is "NONE". So humans must learn to return all waste products to the ecosystems from which they came, just as nature does.

The concept of "stewardship" implies continued use by humanity of natural systems, but implies that humans have a duty of care toward the systems that provide products for human use. The concept of stewardship appeals to many Christians because support for human stewardship of nature is easily found in the Bible (see the Ecospirituality chapter). The term is used by organizations promoting sustainable harvest of natural organisms, such as the Forest Stewardship Council, which certifies forest products, and the Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies fisheries. The concept of stewardship appears sufficient for many involved in The Great Turning, but I feel it is still anthropocentric. It allows for humanity being at the top of the pyramid, and implies an ability of humans to "take care of" nature by managing it.

Ecocentric conservation biologists visualize a multi-level type of land management zoning. This approach to ecosystem management has been developed by The Wildlands Project and described through the late great magazine "Wild Earth". The approach envisions "core areas" of designated wild land (formerly called "wilderness", but not necessarily federally-protected wilderness). These core areas would be as free as possible from human interference, leaving wild systems and species to function on their own and unmanaged. As with every other issue in this chapter, there is debate over how much human activity/influence to allow. For instance, should there be backpacking or trails? Around the core areas, there would be "transition areas" (formerly "buffer zones") of light human presence including hunting, fishing, some forms of outdoor recreation, and timber harvest under the rubric of "multiple use management" (see the Sustainability chapter). The third major category includes areas dominated by human activity and needs, that is, human living space. An important fourth category involves "connection corridors" between core areas; these corridors would allow interchange of living species of all sizes and types among core areas. The corridors must function well-enough ecologically and genetically to prevent isolation of species in any core. The Wildlands Project has promoted this approach in many bioregions of North America with some success, though obviously the rate of change is slow. Politically, the multi-level bioregional approach appears more acceptable by all sides than the former two-level national process of designated wilderness versus all other land.

Evolution

Recognition of both the impermanence and current power of humanity makes ecocentrists wary of the potential effects of human-controlled evolution, and sensitive to a right of the non-human world to continue to evolve in its own way, free of human influence. Humanity, after all, has proven itself a far from perfect species. We may be able to think deep thoughts, but we are not able to follow them through with deep actions. Humans seem to have innate propensities for domination, suppression, arrogance, racism, and war. Why then should humanity have a right to control, limit, or eliminate the evolution of other life forms that might sometime evolve into a "better" species than Homo sapiens?

Ecocentrists believe that large areas of natural systems should be set aside to allow evolution to proceed without human disturbance because humans do not have a right to interfere with all of Earth. Michael Vandeman's web site has discussion and many links about why "Wildlife Needs Habitats Off-limits to Humans". I would like to see 50% of the area of all ecosystems protected in wild core areas and connecting corridors (see the end of the Sustainability chapter). I thought that 50% was my own radical desire, but apparently Noss and Cooperrider in "Saving Nature's Legacy" proposed this back in 1994. Clearly 50% is not a goal that can be reached immediately, but it could be achieved in a hundred years if it were coupled with one-child families so that human population would decrease to one billion over the same time period (see the Population chapter).