These controversies highlight the challenges conservationists face in the modern age. Just 40 years ago there were half as many people on the planet as there are today; until recently conservation could in theory focus on protecting large swaths of land or sea. Now such efforts are exceedingly difficult, except in the remotest of places, because they would simply displace people—increasing pressure on other locations—or they would deny access to resources needed to sustain communities. To be feasible, conservation has to let go of the ideal of "nature untouched by humans" and embrace an approach that focuses on sustainable use and management of nature.
Controversy also arose from a simple but important semantic issue. Many people have said they accept the index as useful and appropriate for conservation and management, but they vehemently object to the use of the word "health" to describe such a practical outcome. If it were simply called something else, all would be resolved.
There are at least two problems with acquiescing to this request: First, the idea of a healthy ecosystem or healthy ocean is widely used in the policy, public and scientific domains to describe places in which humans are sustainably interacting with nature. We wanted the index to speak to those audiences and serve those needs. More importantly, though, we felt that, fundamentally, health is the right word to describe what management should be aiming to achieve. This philosophy is already gaining traction on land, where the sustainable delivery of nature's benefits to people (termed "ecosystem services") now underlies the approach used by the three largest global conservation organizations (the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International). The philosophy is also being explored and adopted by resource management agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Addressing the cognitive dissonance
The word health is of course more commonly used to describe the condition of the human body and mind, and this association is what seems to cause cognitive dissonance for people when the word is applied to an ecosystem. A healthy person is free of diseases, has good blood pressure, is not overweight and so on. These universal measures of health describe a system free of any negative impact. Yet many other subjective measures of health depend on who you are and what you most care about. A marathon runner will not feel healthy if her body mass index (a measure of fat to muscle ratio) is at average, medically healthy levels, whereas a typical person may be completely happy with the same value. People with different body types will feel healthy at different average weights, and people with different genetic backgrounds may have different standing pulse rates. A glass of red wine can promote health for many but be devastating for an alcoholic. Research published this year even found that up to 10 percent of people are less healthy when they exercise.
In the same way, one ocean community may highly value (or depend on) sustainable commercial fisheries and a thriving coastal economy, whereas another community will care more about keeping ocean waters clean and protecting biodiversity. Although all of the 10 index goals need to be met for a country’s ocean to be healthy—they are the universal measures of ecosystem health—the relative importance of each goal may vary from place to place. We cannot force people to care more about protecting coastal habitats or biodiversity than extracting more fish, for example. These value differences are subjective, real and necessary constraints that must be addressed for sustainable conservation and management of coasts and oceans. In some cases, neighboring countries that share waters may have different goals that could affect one another, but each nation can only manage for what its people want and would have to go to the negotiating table to find compromises if conflicts with neighbors arise.
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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.