In reporting on a topic it is usually a good idea to take more than one crack at it.
About a year and a half ago writer Paul Voosen got under the nerves of a lot of conservationists – you know who your are, Nature Conservancy.
- Energy and Environment Daily Greenwire: Myth-busting scientist pushes greens past reliance on 'horror stories' ; A profile of ecologist Peter Kareiva. one that received further accolade and write-up by Andy Revkin in his Dot Earth blog.
Its theme was that while human development and land use do screw up a lot of ecosystems in forests and other wildlands, endangering species or even extinguishing them altogether, about 80 percent of the time nature and people co-exist pretty well even when sharing the same piece of non-urban land. Which is to say, modern environmentalism's conservation wing has run aground and marginalized itself in part by drastically exaggerating human impact on global biodiversity. It reserves its reverence for wildlands not trodden by humankind to the extent of fetish, to the extent of actively disliking the sight of people with much of anything beyond bincoculars in their hands anywhere near a supposedly wild place.
Voosen has since left E&E's Greenwire. This week for his current employer Voosen is out with a profile of another ecologist, Gretchen Daily. He calls it the "unofficial sequel" to last year's story in Greenwire. :
- Chronicle of Higher Education: Who Is Conservation For? ;
- *BAD LINK FIXED on above story. Sorry for confusion/cp
The two stories are largely complementary, but the new one has a welcome and powerful fresh element, a philosophical whip saw. About halfway through the reader may be nodding along in agreement – it is a relief to think yes maybe conservation biology really has gone overboard in its effort to put walls around natural places that are permeable only to a restricted few hikers who pack all the trash back out. We and natural can get along just fine! Developers are not all that bad, nothing that a little light regulation can't control. Ecosystems become centers of a service to humanity – that is, their preservation ought be pursued as a matter of practical self-interest. Some call this new, more humanitarian field conservation science.
Then the tale darkens just a bit. Voosen gives one of today's grand, old fashioned ecologists full rein to lash back. That would be Michael Soulé, UC Santa Cruz emeritus, who rolls into the tale like Jeremiah preaching the old time religion, warning of new, false gods. Soulé is a man with passions reminiscent of John Muir's. He takes furious battle exception to Daily's and Kareiva's effort at reform and their beliefs – ones that appear to be more consonant with those of Muir's own foe Gifford Pinchot (who, don't we all know, was US Forest Service boss more than a century ago and regarded national forests mainly as plantations for timber).
The piece thus achieves a balance via ambivalence of message. It heralds not so much a revolution in conservationist philosophy as another round in a recurrent struggle. It closes on a hopeful but mostly melancholy and blurred, which is to say realistic, note: The reader and writer alike look upon an unidentified couple standing on a dock in the busy little tourist and logging town of Port Alberni at the end of a fjord in the middle of British Columbia's beautiful part-wild but well-populated Vancouver Island. They gaze at looming Mount Arrowsmith. What does that tableau mean? Why are those people there? What brought them? That is for the reader to guess.
For more of Voosen's writings – he is quite good at the science, enviro and conservation beat – check his website. One piece that should be particularly interesting to writers, tradecraft wise, is:
- C.H.E. Percolator Blog: When a Scientific Metaphor Becomes a Burden ;
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