Tag Archives: Personal

“People in this world today crave something
real, and our society is lacking that and they could come to
Yellowstone and see real nature unfolding in front of their eyes
with this very unique personality of a wolf and they loved her.
They thought it was great,” said biologist Douglas Smith in
December on a NPR program. Smith was mourning the death of the
famous female alpha
wolf 832F of the Lamar Canyon pack that had been legally killed
by a hunter outside of the park. I, too, was thrilled when I got to
watch members of that particular wolf pack wandering the landscape
of Lamar Valley.
Smith’s claim that people “crave something real” gets at the
heart of PERC’s recent Lone Mountain Forum, “Reconciling Economics
and Ecology.” Smith is asserting that wolves wandering the
landscape of Yellowstone Park are more real than… what exactly?
When it comes to nature and landscapes, what is real and what is
fake? And what is the “real nature” that Smith believes people are
craving?
Nature as a Social Construct
The ;Oxford Dictionary ;defines nature as “the
phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants,
animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the
earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.” In
his ;Metaphysics, ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle
observed, “Of things that come to be, some come to be by nature,
some by art.” Regarding those objects produced by “art,” which
Aristotle called “makings,” he asserted, “All makings proceed
either from art or from a faculty or from thought.” In contrast,
according to Aristotle, natural entities have internal spontaneous
sources of movement, whereas artificial objects are created by
activity outside themselves.
Another oft-heard word in connection with nature and landscapes
is pristine, which connotes an Edenic state of being “not spoiled,
corrupted, or polluted.” The ;Merriam-Webster
Dictionary ;defines it as “belonging to the earliest
period or state.” The idea is that an earlier state of nature,
before humanity came along and ruined it, was somehow superior, and
perhaps, to use Smith’s concept, even more “real.”
In her book, ;Rambunctious
Garden, conference participant Emma ;Marris explains,
“For many conservationists, restoration to a pre-human ;or a
pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature.
For ;others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we
must fix it. Baselines thus typically don’t act as a
scientific ;before ;to compare with
an ;after. They become the ;good, the
goal, the one correct state.”
Marris opened her session, “Can Ecology Guide Policy?,” by
observing that the science of ecology is telling us that ecosystems
are dynamic, not stable. Thanks to climate change (glacial advances
and melting) and anthropogenic alterations there are no ecosystems
that have the same set of players they had even 12,000 years
ago.
Nature Unbalanced
The dynamism of ecosystems has not always been recognized by
ecologists. However, science has now resolved the great early 20th
century debate between “balance of nature” ecologist Frederic
Clements and ecosystem dynamist Henry Gleason in favor of Gleason.
Clements believed that ecosystems developed through a deterministic
and orderly sequence of serial stages until they reached a stable
climax that, once achieved, was perfectly balanced unless
disturbed. For Clements, each participant in the climax ecosystem
fitted tightly into niches as a result of coevolving together.
Gleason countered that ecosystems were assembled by chance
depending on what species got there first and were successful in
competing with other species as they arrived. For most of the 20th
century, most ecologists adopted Clements’s balance of nature
views. At the conference, biologist
Daniel Botkin noted in passing that most ecologists still
instinctively believe in the balance of nature. Scientific
evidence, however, shows that Gleason was far more right than
Clements—ecosystems are largely assembled by chance. For example,
northern temperate forests are composed ;of an assemblage of
species that mixed together as they raced northward out of various
refugia as the glaciers retreated.
Instead of trying to force landscapes and ecosystems back toward
earlier and notionally more Edenic states, Marris proposed that the
right question is “What do we want for the future?” ;She
suggested that since future generations will be richer than ours
they might be able to afford and want more natural space. In
addition, when thinking about modifying a piece of land, Marris
suggested that a person should ask herself, what do you want this
piece of land to be in 20 years, ;200 years? At the conference
table, a lot of the conversation about who gets to decide about the
futures of landscapes turned on the pronouns, “we” and “you” in
Marris’s two questions.
Who Decides?
Just who “we” is can be problematic. Marris prefers what she
believes to be a more democratic process in which stakeholders get
to decide how landscapes should be managed and used. Thomas Bray, a
former PERC board member, suggested that people who prefer an
ecosystem to remain relatively undisturbed could buy a conservation
easement. Marris rejected this proposal, saying, “we’re broke.”
As a counterpoint to Marris’s implication that stakeholder
democracy is a better and fairer way to decide the future of
landscapes, George Mason University Law professor Henry Butler
asserted that, in fact, the “we” more often than not turns out to
be wealthy environmentalists who prefer to federalize environmental
decisions because they don’t trust local people. Given their
greater access to distant bureaucratic decision-makers,
environmentalists often succeed in imposing the costs of pursuing
their aesthetic landscape preferences on poor people.
PERC’s Terry Anderson neatly summarized the central dilemma of
the conference when he asked, “Do humans impose costs on nature or
just on ;other humans? Can we think of nature in any other way
than imposing costs on other people?” For example, the return of
wolves certainly imposed costs on local ranchers and hunters in the
form of predated livestock and game animals like elk.
Since there is no goal or end state toward which any particular
ecosystem is heading, who is to say that landscapes and ecosystems
modified by human activities are somehow inferior, sick even, and
in need of healing? In his
2001 ;BioScience ;article, “Values,
Policy, and Ecosystem Health,” Robert Lackey, a fisheries
biologist at Oregon State University, pointed out that “ecosystems
have no preferences about their states.” How do we know whether or
not an acre of land would “prefer” to be a swamp or a cornfield? As
Lackey notes, either of them could be considered “healthy”
depending on what human preferences are being implemented. “To a
conservationist interested mainly in biodiversity, we have degraded
nature, but to an agronomist, we have altered ;wild land to
make it better serve humans,” noted the Nature Conservancy’s Peter
Kareiva and his colleagues in their
2007 ;Science ;article, “Domesticated
Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human
Welfare.”
Who Manages?
PERC fellow Daniel Benjamin made the salient point that for all
landscapes and ecosystems “management is not the issue. The issue
is who will do the management? Everything is managed.” The fact of
the matter is that in an Aristotelian sense nature moves less and
less spontaneously. Instead, landscapes and ecosystems are shaped
by human preferences and efforts and increasingly take on the
character of Aristotle’s “makings.”
The Yellowstone wolves are a case in point. Wolves in the park
were managed into local extinction by bureaucratic fiat (stand-ins
for the omnipotent “we”) in 1926 when park rangers deliberately
killed the last two known wolf pups. Wolves were managed back into
existence in the park when “we” decided they should be deliberately
reintroduced in 1995. We may be saddened to hear of the death of
wolf 832F, but her presence on the landscape was the product of
human preferences, not a consequence of unprompted nature. And so
was her removal from it.
Even if one grants the doubtful premise that humanity was
sometime in the past separate from nature, the reality is that we
no longer are. All landscapes ;and ecosystems have been shaped
in accordance with human preferences. Scientific insights derived
from ecology will certainly help us better manage ecosystems. But
the central question remains: What institutions are best for
balancing our conflicting desires and goals when it comes to the
various realities we each may crave? However ecosystems will be
managed, Yellowstone and all other landscapes are and will
increasingly be artificial constructions created by human minds.
That is as real as it gets.
Readers can go to PERC Reports here
to read about other aspects of the Reconciling Economics and
Ecology Conference including articles by Rational Optimist
author Matt Ridley and biologist Daniel Botkin.
Disclosure: I want to thank PERC for inviting me to
participate in the Reconciling Economics and Ecology conference and
for paying my travel expenses. … Read More