Bridging the Conservation Divide

Photograph by Carolyn Drake  Panos
Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Panos

Early last month, two prominent biologists wrote a comment in the journal Nature in which they addressed one of their field’s central questions: Should we conserve nature for nature’s sake, or for our own? Recent debate over that question, they wrote, had become so vitriolic that it was “stifling productive discourse, inhibiting funding and halting progress.” Noting that many of the loudest voices belonged to men, the authors of the article—Heather Tallis, the lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy, and Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and a former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—called for the development of a “unified and diverse conservation ethic,” one that would welcome a wide range of philosophies and do away with “gender and cultural bias.” The same week, Emma Marris, the author of the book “Rambunctious Garden,” and Greg Aplet, the senior science director for the Wilderness Society, made a similar appeal in an opinion piece in the Times. “No matter which reason motivates you most, working together and using a diversity of approaches is far better than inaction or squabbling,” they wrote.

The squabbling—the most recent phase of it, at least—began more than two years ago, when Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, and Michelle Marvier, an environmental-studies professor at Santa Clara University, in California, published a paper titled “What Is Conservation Science?” It reëxamined an influential 1985 article by the biologist Michael Soulé, which had defined conservation biology as a “crisis-driven discipline” dedicated to safeguarding biodiversity regardless of its value to humans. Kareiva and Marvier argued that now, more than a quarter century after its founding, the field needed a framework that took human welfare into account. “We do not wish to undermine the ethical motivations for conservation action,” they wrote. “We argue that nature also merits conservation for very practical and more self-centered reasons concerning what nature and healthy ecosystems provide to humanity.”

Some in the conservation community welcomed these arguments, and understood them as an acknowledgement of the need to expand the conservation agenda, especially as climate change threatens the effectiveness of traditional nature reserves. But the tone of the paper was blunt. “Some realism is in order,” Kareiva and Marvier concluded. “Given the magnitude of human impacts and change, conservation cannot look only to the past. Instead, it must be about choosing a future for people and nature.”

Soulé, who is now seventy-eight, did not take kindly to these statements, which he perceived as an attempt not simply to expand the conservation mission but to transform it. With the global population expected to reach nine billion by 2050, he said, the “human-friendly vision” proposed by Kareiva and Marvier left little room for biodiversity.

Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation ecology at Duke, read the paper and the ideas that it embodied as dismissive. “It’s a very clear attempt to denigrate what’s gone before them in conservation,” he told me. Both Soulé and Pimm seem infuriated by Kareiva’s close relationship with Mark Tercek, the president of the Nature Conservancy, whose pro-business initiatives were described by D. T. Max in an article published in the magazine, in May. Though Pimm agrees in principle with Kareiva and Marvier’s proposition that conservationists ought to engage with industry, he said that they and the Nature Conservancy have gone too far. In this month’s issue of Biological Conservation, in a review of the book “Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth,” Pimm’s emotions got the better of him. “TNC and its corporate sponsors … need to hear the voices of experienced conservation professionals, not prostituting messages designed to greenwash industrial business-as-usual,” he wrote. In what may prove the rhetorical nadir of the entire debate, Pimm referred to a line from the Julie Christie movie “Darling”: “I don’t take whores in taxis.” (Following an outcry on Twitter, the editors of Biological Conservation acknowledged the review’s “inappropriate language.” Pimm, for his part, told me that he is “totally unrepentant.”)

Philosophical differences between groups that can roughly be labelled preservationists and utilitarians go back at least to the early twentieth century, when John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, clashed over the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite National Park. (“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches,” Muir wrote. Pinchot, who maintained that the project’s benefits to the citizens of San Francisco outweighed “the delight of the few men and women who would yearly go into” the valley, won the fight.) In many cases, however, conservationists have campaigned successfully on behalf of both nature and humanity, using utilitarian and preservationist arguments to protect tens of thousands of acres of wilderness, save species from extinction, and clean up polluted neighborhoods and waterways.

Soulé and his colleagues are right that the interests of nature and people do in many cases conflict, and that the trade-offs are becoming more painful as our population increases; Kareiva and Marvier are correct in pointing out that future conservation successes depend on finding ways to benefit both. As usual, preservationists will remind utilitarians to say no, and utilitarians will remind preservationists to say yes. Perhaps that’s why every sally in the present argument has had the same subtext: You need us, and don’t forget it.

Tallis and Lubchenco, who recently joined the Nature Conservancy’s board of directors, have won substantial support in their call for comity: a petition associated with their Nature comment has so far received more than nine hundred signatures, including those of Kareiva and Soulé. But Soulé, leery of the petition’s association with the Conservancy, now says that he regrets participating. “We have to confront things that are harmful to the persistence of wild species,” he told me. “There are reasons that we can’t always be nice.”

Soulé’s retreat, though perhaps frustrating to his colleagues, isn’t especially surprising. It seems that conservationists can find reason for dissent even when the proposition is to agree to disagree. More than three decades ago, the American author Edward Abbey warned against such factionalism in the movement. Abbey, who was more provocative than Kareiva and at least as passionately a preservationist as Soulé—his novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” about a group of eco-saboteurs, inspired many of today’s radical environmentalists—suggested that the solution was for conservationists to stop bickering and get back to protecting vulnerable places. “I am weary of the old and tiresome and banal question ‘Why save the wilderness?’ ” Abbey wrote in 1979. “The important and difficult question is ‘How? How save the wilderness?’ ”