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THE FUTURE OF THE WILD

THE FUTURE

OF THE WILD

Radical Conservation for a Crowded World

JONATHAN S. ADAMS

beacon press, boston

beacon press

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 2006 by Jonathan S. Adams

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper

ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design by Patricia Duque Campos

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adams, Jonathan S.

The future of the wild : radical conservation for a crowded world / Jonathan S. Adams.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8070-8537-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Conservation biology. 2. Ecosystem management—Citizen participation. 3. Nature

conservation—North America. I. Title.

QH75.A345 2006

333.95
16—dc22 2005007688

For Susan, Madeleine, and Joseph

For Mom

CONTENTS

introduction ix

part i

THINKING BIG

chapter 1

A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS 3

chapter 2

DO BIG THINGS RUN THE WORLD? 23

chapter 3

SAVE SOME OF EVERYTHING 46

part ii

SCIENCE AND COMMUNITY

chapter 4

CONSERVATION IN EXURBIA:

FLORIDA AND CALIFORNIA 71

chapter 5

APPOINTMENT IN SONORA 88

chapter 6

THE NATIVE HOME OF HOPE 108

chapter 7

SAVE ENOUGH TO LAST:

FLORIDA AND THE EVERGLADES 141

part iii

YELLOWSTONE AND THE BEST HOPE OF EARTH

chapter 8

BLIND MEN AND ELEPHANTS 175

chapter 9

GUARDING THE GOLDEN GOOSE 207

conclusion 229

a c knowledgments 234

notes 236

index 257

introduction

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee;

and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:

Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee:

and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.

job 12:7

Imagine the North American wilderness as the explorers Lewis and Clark

saw it: forests thick with chestnut trees in the East, prairies teeming with

bison and rivers overflowing with salmon in the West. Now picture the

continent today: superhighways link colossal cities, suburbs stretch farther

and farther into the countryside, industrial farmland goes on for miles,

and a few patches of greenery and a national park or two break up the

monotony.

Those two images don’t fit together: the frontier closed, the wilderness

disappeared, and there is no going back. Yet, across North America and

indeed around the world, conservation scientists, activists, and communi￾ties have begun crafting visions for conserving and restoring wild creatures

and wildlands over larger areas than ever before, raising the hope for a far

bolder and more lasting kind of conservation than we have ever seen.

Such visions smack of particularly naive optimism. Several centuries

of farming, logging, mining, dam building, and rapid population growth

smashed the wilderness into thousands of shards, a few of them large but

most of them tiny and increasingly isolated. Even with national and global

commitments to putting the pieces back together (although no such con￾sensus exists today and none seems near), the task would seem impossible.

Not only would we need to halt the current march of humanity across the

landscape, we would need to reverse it.

That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. The young science of con￾servation biology has matured to the point that it now helps us understand

how nature works across miles and miles of land and water. That under￾standing can guide eƒorts to save wild species across their native habitats

rather than as doomed and decaying museum pieces, and enable human



communities to become again part of the landscape rather than simply

abusers of it. Beginning in the early 1980s, biologists, ecologists, and pio￾neers in conservation biology started redrawing the boundaries of their

ideas about how the world works. They moved up the scale from individual

animals to populations to natural communities to broad landscapes to re￾gions to continents. Government agencies, scientists, activists, and human

communities around the world increasingly recognize that the environ￾ment does not end at the last tra~c signal in town, or at the county line,

or even at the border post. Eƒective conservation demands a far broader

perspective.

The stories in this book together form the outlines of a new narrative for

conservation. The usual narratives revolve around heroic individual eƒorts

to protect special places, or around communities coming together to de￾fend a treasured lifestyle and in the process conserving their environment.

The first narrative is older, but in its current form often involves scientists

in leading roles. The second narrative usually leaves science out altogether,

or involves it only at the margins. The new conservation, as seen in this

book, brings those two narrative threads together.

A new vision for conservation means deciding where to put new parks

and other protected areas, worrying about the habitat in between those re￾serves—for humans and nonhumans alike—and wrestling with the ideas

emerging from conservation biology, with mouth-filling terms like popu￾lation viability, landscape connectivity, and disturbance regimes. This is

heady stuƒ for scientists and land managers alike, as it suggests new ways

to think about and carry out conservation.

Thinking more broadly about conservation also requires addressing

head-on a fundamental issue facing science and society: What is the

proper scale for conservation, and is there only one? The glib answer is

conservationists need to be concerned with all of the countless scales in na￾ture. True enough, and an indication of the scope of the problem, but in

reality that is no answer at all. The very notion of scale leads to confusion,

even among ecologists, and has spawned countless books and articles. For

now, su~ce it to say that scale refers to the physical dimensions of things

or processes; it is something you can measure. So talk of the scale of a leaf

or a landscape makes no sense. How big is a leaf ? Some leaves are as big as

your thumbnail; others are as long as your arm. The landscape for a bear

 introduction

covers many square miles; for a beetle it may extend just a few square feet.

Scale also refers to the scale of observation: Over what area and what time

period do we observe, say, wildfires or changes in a population of animals?1

Scientists understand just the outlines of how nature functions across

just a handful of scales, to say nothing of all possible scales. In order to

simplify enormously complex problems, for decades ecologists focused on

scales they could reproduce in the laboratory or study easily in the field.

Most studies have had a physical dimension of less than about ten yards,

convenient for experimental manipulation but hardly relevant to species

even as small as a mouse.2

Ecologists are not alone in their discomfort in dealing with questions of

scale. Economists are far worse: the vast majority of economists never even

bother to ask the question of the proper scale of the economy relative to

the environment. In standard economic theory the economy can simply

grow forever, the second law of thermodynamics be damned. As economist

Kenneth Boulding once said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth

can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”3

Determining the proper scale for conservation requires that we rethink

some of the fundamental notions of ecology. The most pervasive traces its

roots to the ancient idea of nature as balanced and self-regulating, chang￾ing in an orderly progression, grasslands becoming forests in an inexorable

process known as ecological succession. Trust in such order and stability

allows us to carry out conservation in small, predictable places, and lies at

the heart of most natural resource laws and the very notion of private

property.4

To the detriment of many a well-laid conservation plan, however,

nature provides only the illusion of stability. Ecologists three decades ago

began to see natural disturbances like fires, floods, and hurricanes as es￾sential to the persistence of life, rather than simply instruments of ecolog￾ical ruin. This led to the understanding that nature reserves must be large

enough to accommodate such disturbances. Of the countless examples,

none paints a clearer picture than an eƒort to protect and restore old￾growth forest in the eastern United States. The Cathedral Pines preserve

in Connecticut contained about twenty-five acres of old-growth pine, one

of the last examples of that type of forest in the region. In 1989, tornadoes

wiped out nearly the entire stand. Had the tornadoes hit an old-growth

introduction 

forest measuring hundreds of thousands of acres, they would have opened

up small sections of forest to new growth. Instead, they brought havoc.

In ecology, quite literally the only constant is change.5 Before people

began farming or otherwise transforming huge areas of land, human-scale

landscapes consisted of patches of forests, meadows, flood plains, grass￾lands, and so on. The patches would slide about in response to floods and

fires like a kaleidoscope, or what ecologists call a shifting mosaic, but over

a large area and a long period of time the amount of each type of habitat

would remain more or less the same.

Parks and reserves need to be large enough to absorb the blows from

a once-in-a-century fire or flood, or at least be part of a landscape that

would allow them to recover from such an event. Parks that are simply tiny

refuges tucked into a landscape otherwise completely converted to inten￾sive human use will not long survive.

The constancy of change carries enormous implications for both con￾servation and the laws that support it. You cannot just draw lines around

relatively small areas you deem important for ecological or any other rea￾sons and assume all is well. The fundamental unpredictability of nature

also means that no technocratic elite can lay claim to perfect knowledge.

Science must inform decisions about how we should, or should not, use

Earth’s lands and waters, but those decisions will rest not on science but on

the values of individuals and their communities. That opens the door, for

good and ill, to broad and diverse human communities and all the fallible

institutions we have created to govern ourselves.

thinking big

The first section of this book, “Thinking Big,” provides a historical and

conceptual context for conservation and introduces some of the language

of conservation science. The examples here and in the rest of the book,

from the desert southwest to the Maine woods, from the Everglades to

Yellowstone, illustrate how a broader perspective on conservation can

shape the future. The examples do not form a comprehensive picture or a

scientifically drawn sample. They come largely from the United States, not

because Americans have a corner on the best conservation science or prac￾tice but because the eƒorts here have matured enough to oƒer some tangi￾ble lessons. The issues these examples raise, however, have implications far

beyond the boundaries of the United States.

 introduction

We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in conservation. With few excep￾tions, science has played only a minor role in the conservation drama, usu￾ally yielding the stage to politics, aesthetics, and economics. Governments

and individuals have set aside grand or symbolic lands, like Yellowstone or

the Grand Canyon, or lands that had little economic use, like the parks of

the Mountain West, brimming with rocks and snow. Scientific considera￾tions remained secondary in these decisions because scientists had not yet

formulated the central questions: How much land does a puma or a spot￾ted owl really need? How do natural processes like fires and floods deter￾mine the kinds of plants and animals that live on a certain piece of land?

By formulating such questions, scientists essentially began to draw a

few tentative lines on a blueprint; finding and applying the answers has

proven to be like building the house without all the tools and with no clear

end in mind. Ecologists generally thought too small and conservationists

looked in the wrong places—inside the parks rather than beyond their bor￾ders as well, to the broader landscapes in which the parks are embedded.

The answers to key questions thus remain elusive. Traditional conserva￾tion skills, like wildlife management, and even the more recent scientific

specialties, like landscape ecology, will not su~ce by themselves. Conser￾vation must come to grips with the human communities that surround

parks as well as the more distant communities that value parks and wild￾lands as refuges or simply as visions of wilderness that they may never see.

Conservation has traditionally overlooked, intentionally or otherwise, the

needs and values of those communities. Hence a protected area becomes a

line in the sand, a challenge and an invitation to conflict.

Creating parks and other sorts of reserves is an essential but desperate

action, based on the idea that we can by force of law ensure that what hap￾pens on one side of that line in the sand diƒers fundamentally from what

happens on the other. In almost all cases, however, the line reflects human

convenience rather than ecological necessity, and the boundary will be

wholly illusory for every creature except humans, though often for humans

as well. The line remains a necessity, because for now we have no choice

but to draw it and make a stand. But conservation does not have the troops

to defend the parks if people decide not to value them. The sooner we

reach the point where we no longer need to draw bright lines, or need to

draw them only as a matter of administrative convenience, the more of

Earth’s diversity we will be able to save.

introduction 

Conservation cannot succeed if it remains largely a war against human￾ity. Conservation need not take on the challenge of solving all the world’s

ills, from poverty to injustice, but it cannot be ignorant of those ills nor be

seen as an obstacle to their resolution. The ecological wounds that humans

have inflicted, particularly but not exclusively the loss of species and their

habitats, are all too evident and familiar. Yet reciting the litany of losses

and decrying people as the cause—justifiable as that may often be—will

no longer su~ce. Conservation cannot just be the art of saying no, not

here.

Conservation must oƒer a sense of the possible, and a reason for hope.

Hope comes, paradoxically, from thinking big. We cannot save the earth

one species at a time, if for no other reason than we know nothing about

the vast majority of species with which we share our planet. The idea that

we can save the northern spotted owl—in the early 1990s, among the most

symbolically loaded creatures on Earth—or any other species by focusing

exclusively on that species has no basis in science. Even proceeding one

park at a time won’t work in the long run, as nearly every park is simply too

small by itself to maintain all of its plants and animals. We need to con￾sider both the park and its surroundings; as Jora Young, a senior scientist

with The Nature Conservancy, puts it, “Our job is to stand on the borders

of our parks and look out.”6

Once you take this perspective, the size of the challenge becomes clear.

The following chapters explore some of the work that organizations such

as World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, The Wild￾lands Project, and particularly The Nature Conservancy are doing to en￾sure the survival of wild species. While this is not a book about The

Nature Conservancy, my employer, that organization—one of the richest,

least controversial, and for many years the most complacent in the United

States—now finds itself at the center of a promising but highly uncertain

movement, one that melds a commitment to the people who husband their

land with the best thinking in conservation science. The outcome of that

fraught process may be the last best hope for the earth and all its creatures.

Each of those organizations, and conservation more generally, often fo￾cuses on the traditional and still vital conservation task of setting aside

land. Many current eƒorts, however, break new ground, combining in￾creasingly sophisticated science with a deeper appreciation of the rights

and responsibilities of the communities that live and work near the areas

 introduction