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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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I used to think it would wear off—the rush I feel each time I return to Santa Barbara, Calif., where I have lived for 14 years. But it has only grown. The excitement clearly stems in part from the beautiful natural setting: the Santa Ynez Mountains spilling into the Pacific Ocean, waters teaming with whales and wildlife, beautiful beaches and the Channel Islands just offshore. But the rush also comes from being part of the vibrant community so closely tied to these coastal and ocean resources. Fishermen haul up local white sea bass, motorboats of all sorts dart into and out of a bustling harbor, and beachgoers and surfers dot the coastline most of the day. Quite simply, Santa Barbara feels healthy.
"Healthy" is a curious word to use when describing a place, however. It means different things to different people. To many, a natural place can only be healthy if it is pristine, with no sign of human impact. Must a healthy ocean really be devoid of people? In the past I might have said yes. But I have come to realize—and public policy and conservation organizations around the world are rapidly converging on this same view—that people are now fundamentally integrated into every ecosystem on Earth. As such, nature not only includes people but also must address the needs of those people.
This perspective is quite controversial, in part because it represents a radical departure from the goal that has driven ocean and land conservation efforts for centuries—to protect or return nature to a pristine state. In the 21st century, an era that many are calling the Anthropocene, that goal is impossible, and even counterproductive. Humankind has so dramatically altered the planet that it is difficult to even know what pristine looks like, let alone try to achieve it globally or even regionally. For conservation and management to be successful, we need to change our relationship with nature, from trying to lock it away to using and enjoying it in a practical but necessarily sustainable way. We must reconcile purely conservation-focused goals with the many other values people have for nature.
Practical, not idealistic
For me, this shift in perspective grew out of a project I led over the last few years to develop the Ocean Health Index. The index explicitly addresses the needs of both nature and people when assessing the "health" of the oceans adjacent to 171 countries and territories. It is measured along 10 widely held goals for healthy, productive coasts and seas. Each goal is assessed for how it is doing today compared with a clearly defined value for where we would like to be as well as how it is likely to be doing in the near future. Each goal is rated as a percentage of its optimal value. Each country's overall score is then the average of its 10 goal scores, and it rewards sustainable behavior now and in the future.
From a practical point of view this formulation makes sense. It focuses on the diversity of values people hold for coasts and oceans. But for people witnessing the rapid decline of the environment in their own backyards, in their country and around the globe—and who are struggling against that tide to protect what remains—such a practical view can be quite disturbing.
I say this from experience. The researchers who developed and rolled out the index—from a cross section of disciplines and institutions, including the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis where I work—came face to face with this controversy. We got push-back from the general public, from other scientists who peer-reviewed our research and even from within our own research team. When we first met, many on our team assumed we were going to develop an index of "pristine-ness," and they struggled to make the mental shift to a human-centric view of health. One researcher even quit when the project committed to defining ocean health by the benefits provided to people. During the peer-review process one of our papers was rejected because it was not conservation-focused enough. For another paper we battled for months with scientific reviewers about whether benefits to people should really be bundled with an assessment of the condition of an ecosystem itself. And as we rolled out the global results to public and scientific audiences, we heard complaints that we had set reference points too high or too low for particular goals, creating bias for or against human use of the ocean.
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8 Comments
Add CommentIt sounds like you are trying to address too many issues with one standard. It seems like you are trying to rate sustainability, ecosystem health and human impact all with one index. You can't. They are different. The solution is simple, use separate metrics. Ultimately the lands being rated likely require different metrics anyway. If you are rating fishing grounds, what does it matter what the human impact is? You know it is going to be huge compared to a wildlife preserve. You rate it on sustainability. The same with national parks, they are not going to be pristine. They are open to the public. But are they healthy? Can species within the park maintain their populations or is the human impact so great that populations decline. In regards to wildlife preserves, places that humans are not allowed to enter, such as mangroves or coral reefs to protect fish nurseries you need to look at human impact and minimizing that as much as possible to maximize the return from these scarce resources. I know that it is easier if you can rate everything by slapping a happy or sad face on it but if the use cases are different than use a different standard.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I say this from experience...."..wow. Talk about ego.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou know all this from experience. I've been a geologist for 35 years and my experience is that I don't know a tenth of even the niche of science that I study.
Motherhood statements and ideals are not science. It's speculation. You can't go putting all these arbitrary ratings on eleusive variables that are themselves arbitrarily measured. Speculation built on speculation.
Lets at least celebrate the fact that people are beginning to realize the fallacy of ecosystems without human impact Cronin pointed this out in his work ""Changes in the Land" 20 years ago. The myth of wildness will serve as a poor model for dealing with our crowded planet. Clearly we can take steps to minimize the damage of the most destructive impacts but humans have been terraforming the planet since the beginning of our species and will continue to do so and that is not all bad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSounds like they're trying to set it up so that human impact on Earth can be considered justifiable homicide.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat we humans basically lack is humility and reverence for our source of life - which is Nature, in it's pure form, providing water, seeds, plants, and animal meats for us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are currently faced with rapidly changing environmental conditions, which, btw, were predicted by the indigenous people whose lands we have (and continue to) swallowed up in our race to dominate Nature. We were warned, but the urge for fame and especially fortune, appears to supersede all such considerations. Add the nowadays short national attention span to that and what to you get...
... a new set of scientists that try to fit our mis-behavior into something that's natural and excusable. No thanks. Nice try, but I don't think this paper will make us feel well and fuzzy.
It's our own species' lack of humility, starting with our Western outlook that Nature was to be shaped and dominated by us. That was a big mistake. We lost sight that we are only a part of nature, not it's bosses. Then there came the resulting materialism, and it's ever-increasing greed. Just look around the world: international mega-corporations are now busy buying up the lands (or battling with their inhabitants) for our last global water and mineral resources that can produce any profits for them in the next decade. They follow the golden cow, to the detriment of all of us and the earth itself. She is showing us that we will have hell to pay for this abuse.
You are correct. They have been trying to justify grooming the entire Species Planet now for decades. Scientist are sometime the easiest people to be fooled by resource harvesters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore pushers of the "new" ecology? Shame!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBiology is the study of life. Conservationists conserve. What do conservation biologist conserve? Good question! The so-called "new" school conservationists such as B. S. Halpern say that the world is done and it might as well be dead. They say humans must be part of the solution when, in fact, humans are messing up the system already.
If we really have to turn the henhouse over to the fox, then there is no hope. (The henhouse = the natural world and the fox = humans.) Halpern says there is no hope without humans, but without hope and understanding in and of the natural world's abilities the Species Planet is doomed. In short, do not listen to the expeditious and practical "new" ecologists. They say the glass is half empty; we say the glass is half full.
The Evolution Planet cannot maintain itself under human grooming. We must return many acres to the sole control of natural forces and processes or the Species Planet is indeed doomed.
A human influential scale is indeed needed to assess the human interference and damage to the natural landscape and seascape; that is true. However, using that scale to justify more human management is shameful.
Interesting. His human activity scale for oceans sounds remarkably like the NLATS (natural landscape abutter threat scale) which rates human intrusion into the forest.
I read this article with great interest. I am a biologist for an Indian Tribe on the west coast of the US that has a very long history of harvesting and using resources from local intertidal areas. Recently, there has been a mandate to set aside some of these marine areas for protection by banning various types of harvest. When I raised the scientific and ecological concept that humans have been a top predator in this system since time immemorial and it would be more unnatural than natural to stop that predation, I was met with blank stares from the ecologists that were designing the network of proposed marine reserves. The idea that humans (all of us, not just indigenous) are part of something, and in some cases are as necessary as wolves in Yellowstone for ecosystems to be "natural" has not sunk in. Native Americans here actively managed salmon harvest, intertidal gathering, and landscape (through burning). Yet, the western ideal wilderness goal is "untrammelled by man" (e.g. Wilderness Act).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, the Tribe here was told that they would no longer be able to harvest in areas that nearly a 10,000 year record of being harvested so that these areas and the animals would be protected. Needless to say, this has people pretty upset. I note that areas in other parts of the world (Mediterranean, South Africa) have over 100,000 years of continuous marine harvest.
The idea that human management is a recently developed western idea is flat out wrong; the Tribe I work for has been "managing" things through cultural practices, ceremonies, social taboos, etc. since time immemorial.
The points I make above in no way justify the degradation or overexploitation of any ecosystem, it is simply to say that humans are a legitimate part of the functioning of ecosystems throughout the world. "Natural" includes humans, and to say otherwise ignores indigenous peoples and their practices around the world.