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2014 | Buch

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Keeping the Wild

Against the Domestication of Earth

herausgegeben von: Dr. George Wuerthner, Assoc.Prof Eileen Crist, Tom Butler

Verlag: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Über dieses Buch

Is it time to embrace the so-called “Anthropocene”—the age of human dominion—and to abandon tried-and-true conservation tools such as parks and wilderness areas? Is the future of Earth to be fully domesticated, an engineered global garden managed by technocrats to serve humanity? The schism between advocates of rewilding and those who accept and even celebrate a “post-wild” world is arguably the hottest intellectual battle in contemporary conservation.

In Keeping the Wild, a group of prominent scientists, writers, and conservation activists responds to the Anthropocene-boosters who claim that wild nature is no more (or in any case not much worth caring about), that human-caused extinction is acceptable, and that “novel ecosystems” are an adequate replacement for natural landscapes. With rhetorical fists swinging, the book’s contributors argue that these “new environmentalists” embody the hubris of the managerial mindset and offer a conservation strategy that will fail to protect life in all its buzzing, blossoming diversity.

With essays from Eileen Crist, David Ehrenfeld, Dave Foreman, Lisi Krall, Harvey Locke, Curt Meine, Kathleen Dean Moore, Michael Soulé, Terry Tempest Williams and other leading thinkers, Keeping the Wild provides an introduction to this important debate, a critique of the Anthropocene boosters’ attack on traditional conservation, and unapologetic advocacy for wild nature.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Clashing Worldviews

Frontmatter

Rise of the Neo-greens

Abstract

I HAVE BEEN (AND STILL AM) someone rather often quaintly known as a “green activist” for around twenty years now: for a lot longer than some people, and for a lot less time than many others. I sometimes like to say that the green movement was born in the same year as me—1972, the year in which the fabled Limits to Growth report was published by the Club of Rome—and this is near enough to the truth to be a jumping-off point for a narrative.

Paul Kingsnorth

The Conceptual Assassination of Wilderness

Abstract

THE TIDES OF CHANGE are always harder to recognize when we ourselves are swept along in the same direction as everything around us. Specifically, as the tide of industrialism lays waste to the natural order, a complementary process occurs among those of us who inhabit the more affluent areas of the world, molding us toward an anxious individualism and generating an “empty self” that yearns to compensate for the loss of wildness and cultural meaning through consumerism and immersion in the distractions provided by the media.¹ Wildlife documentaries, TV travelogues, and colorful calendar images of nature reinforce the comforting illusion that the wild world continues to flourish; and the entire ideological system of industrialism suspends us within a sort of manufactured alternative reality, so that children can now grow up with almost no experience of wild nature. Thus the wider context of wilderness loss is a parallel ebbing of those human qualities that value, express, and resonate with wildness. In this essay I focus on the ways industrialized modes of thought have undermined our ability to recognize the degradation of wilderness and wildness throughout the world.

David W. Kidner

Ptolemaic Environmentalism

Abstract

THE ANCIENT GREEK WORD oecumene came into broad circulation in the Hellenistic era to refer to the inhabited world. It was a world that stretched from the Mediterranean basin to India, and from the Caucasus mountains to the Arabian Peninsula, encompassing diverse peoples and cultures connected via trade routes and empire building, alliances and conquests. By “the inhabited world,” oecumene of course meant the world inhabited by people. What the concept implied by exclusion, by what it passed over in silence, is that nonhumans do not inhabit. Only people are inhabitants, while animals, plants, and the natural communities they create merely exist in certain places—until they are forced to make way for, or be converted to serve, the oecumene.

Eileen Crist

With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies

Abstract

THE HUMAN FOOTPRINT is growing at the expense of other species and the integrity of ecosystems.¹ What poet-of-the-wild Gary Snyder called the “Growth-Monster”² remains not just unchecked but embraced, in theory and practice, by virtually all human societies.³ There is nothing new in this situation—it has been accelerating for several millennia and especially for the last few hundred years; nor is there anything new in the arguments made by those who justify it.⁴ Although the expression of self-righteous greed is rarer and sounds extreme amidst the claims of business and political leaders that biodiversity is important, human behavior—judged by its consequences— has not changed much: We take more and more, and we continue to squander a heritage that we can never replace. Each loss of species brought about by humans diminishes not only the Earth community but all who remain.

David Johns

What’s So New about the “New Conservation”?

Abstract

WE ARE BEING OFFERED a new story about human beings and the rest of nature. It goes something like this . . .

Curt Meine

Conservation in No-Man’s-Land

Abstract

OUR MAIN PURPOSE in this essay is to invite the concerned community of conservationists, from a variety of disciplines, to address the questions of conservation and of environmental ethics in a new way, and as frankly as possible. In our view, the crisis of biodiversity, conservation, sustainability, and any number of iconic environmentalist concerns must be radically reconsidered. Our sense is that after all the struggles against the environmental crisis—well-meaning struggles, that have employed the best science, thinking, and activism available—we are in a kind of trench warfare that can produce at best temporary and unstable “victories,” many of which seem even to have backfired.

Claudio Campagna, Daniel Guevara

The “New Conservation”

Abstract

RECENTLY MY WIFE AND I spied on some female endangered leatherback sea turtles depositing their Ping-Pong-ball-sized eggs at Trinidad’s Grande Riviére, on the famous “turtle beach” where the river enters the Atlantic.

Michael Soulé

Against Domestication

Frontmatter

The Fable of Managed Earth

Abstract

HUMAN CIVILIZATION can thrive only in a healthy natural world. For at least two centuries, environmentalists, conservationists, and ecologists—greens—have, to their everlasting credit, made this point, showing that technology, for all its genius, will not last if it stands alone, damaging the natural world and disregarding the essential place of nature in our lives. Techno-optimism is a deeply flawed worldview—not only morally and ethically but also technologically. Yet in the midst of planetary-scale destruction, technology remains seductive; even some greens now proclaim the coming of a gardened planet, in which all nature is tamed, preserved, and managed for its own good by enlightened, sophisticated humans.¹ But these “neo-greens,” or “ecological modernists” as some call them, are doomed to disappointment: The gardened planet is only a virtual image; it will never happen in the real world.

David Ehrenfeld

Conservation in the Anthropocene

Abstract

IT HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE to remark that humans are now the dominant environmental force on the Earth. The indications are strong and diverse. They range from paleontologists reaching a consensus that humans contributed to megafaunal extinctions on at least two continents, North America and Australia;¹ recognition that formerly intact marine ecosystems have changed enormously;² suggestions that climate has changed sufficiently that no ecosystem is immune from alterations in species composition;³ remarks that pollution is widespread even in Antarctica;⁴ and arguments that human predation on mammals is pernicious and the principal driver of changes in phenotypic traits of exploited species in many areas.⁵ Some scientists use geographic data to show that human activities affect almost every terrestrial system (e.g., the human footprint⁶). Indeed, the current epoch is now being referred to as “the Anthropocene,”⁷ which has led geologists to formally debate stratigraphic evidence for this new phenomenon and to argue over not if but when it began.⁸ With the catchword Anthropocene in ascendancy, one might easily come away with the impression that nowhere on Earth is natural, in one of the word’s specific meanings of ecosystems being untouched by humans,⁹ and indeed it is common to hear the phrase “humans have altered everything.”

Tim Caro, Jack Darwin, Tavis Forrester, Cynthia Ledoux-Bloom, Caitlin Wells

The Myth of the Humanized Pre-Columbian Landscape

Abstract

GEOGRAPHER WILLIAM M. DENEVAN of the University of Wisconsin is a leading researcher of what he calls “The Pristine Myth.” He claims that “the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large.”¹ Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus echo this assessment: “Scientific findings indicate that virtually every part of the globe, from the boreal forests to the humid tropics, has been inhabited, modified, or managed throughout our human past.”² J. Baird Callicott similarly claims that “the wilderness idea is woefully ethnocentric. It ignores the historic presence and effects on practically all the world’s ecosystems of aboriginal peoples.”³

Dave Foreman

The Future of Conservation: An Australian Perspective

Abstract

GEOLOGICALLY, AUSTRALIA IS a continent comprising mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and neighboring islands. Australia, the nation state of the mainland and Tasmania (plus some small islands), has a surface area of around 7.7 million square kilometers (roughly 84 percent that of the United States). Biologically, Australia is a megadiverse nation continent, replete with an abundance of unique species, ecosystems, and human cultures. Since the Australian continent broke free from Antarctica around 60 million years ago, much of Australia’s terrestrial biota has been evolving largely in geographical isolation, with the exception of a few rodent species who migrated during the Pliocene (between 2 and 5 million years ago) and the dingo (Canis lupus dingo, a top predator)—a wild dog that turned up about four thousand years ago. Humans arrived some fifty thousand years ago; and European colonization (and with it the modern era), in 1778.

Brendan Mackey

Expanding Parks, Reducing Human Numbers, and Preserving All the Wild Nature We Can: A Superior Alternative to Embracing the Anthropocene Era

Abstract

RECENTLY, THE CLAIM has been made that Earth has entered a new geological era. The Holocene has ended and the Anthropocene has begun, in which humans have become an important geochemical force, and perhaps the dominant ecological force on the planet. Moreover, conservationists are advised to embrace the Anthropocene era, in which humanity not only dominates, but rightfully dominates, the biosphere.

Philip Cafaro

Green Postmodernism and the Attempted Highjacking of Conservation

Abstract

CONSERVATIONISTS ARE ACCUSTOMED to having a clear foe—the exploiters who would use up this beautiful world and then move on to use up the next planet. The exploiters are hubristic and interested only in what they can exploit for personal gain. Their core philosophy was captured succinctly by Robert Bidinotto: “Nature indeed provides beautiful settings for the work of man. But unseen and unappreciated the environment is meaningless. It is but an empty frame, in which we and our works are the picture. From that perspective, environmentalism means sacrificing the picture to spare the frame.”¹

Harvey Locke

Why the Working Landscape Isn’t Working

Abstract

WORDS INFLUENCE HOW we think about issues. We use euphemisms to hide or modify the perception of what might otherwise produce negative reactions to more honest terminology. Saying “collateral damage,” for example, sounds more innocuous than announcing civilian deaths of non-combative women, men, and children. “Coercive interrogation,” to provide another example of alternative language, became a convenient phrase for the Bush Administration, when it had stated unequivocally that “this government does not torture people.” In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Peace waged war.

George Wuerthner

Valuing Naturalness in the “Anthropocene”: Now More than Ever

Abstract

RECENTLY THERE HAS BEEN some serious hype about entering “the age of man.” Popularized by a leading proponent of geoengineering the planet in response to climate change,¹ “the Anthropocene” has boosters among environmental scientists, historians, and philosophers, as well as the press. While a useful way to dramatize the human impact on the planet, the concept is deeply insidious. Most importantly, it threatens the key environmental values of “naturalness” (by which I mean the degree to which nature is not influenced by humans) and respect for nature. This essay is a critical assessment of the Anthropocene notion, arguing not only that it seriously exaggerates human influence on nature but also that it draws inappropriate metaphysical, moral, and environmental policy conclusions about humanity’s role on the planet. Despite our dramatic impact on Earth, significant naturalness remains, and the ever-increasing human influence makes valuing the natural more, not less, important in environmental thought and policy.

Ned Hettinger

The Value of the Wild

Frontmatter

Wild World

Abstract

MY PURPOSE IS TO PERSUADE YOU that wilderness is a moral resource. Human cultures have seen an extraordinary intellectual revolution in recent centuries that has transformed their view of wilderness from a liability to an asset. That transformation has largely been promoted by anthropocentric arguments emphasizing the value of wilderness to civilization.

Roderick Frazier Nash

Living Beauty

Abstract

IN HIS ESSAY, “Goose Music,” Aldo Leopold admits to having “congenital hunting fever,” and that, coupled with the fact that he has three sons to train in its virtues, keeps him shivering in his jacket at daybreak, fingers so frozen that the geese have nothing to fear from his aim. It’s not clear how many shots he fires, but they are all wide of their mark. The hour is early and the cold is intense, and Leopold has just missed what he describes as a “big gander.”

Sandra Lubarsky

Wilderness: What and Why?

Abstract

A FEW YEARS AGO, I led a group through the wilds of northern Alaska’s Brooks Range during the early autumn caribou migration. I think that if I had twenty lifetimes I’d never again experience anything quite so primeval, so simple and rudimentary, and so utterly, uncompromisingly wild. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this beheld my eye above all else. Maybe that trek—in one of the ultimate terrestrial wildernesses remaining on Earth—is my personal yardstick, my personal quintessence of what constitutes real wilderness among a lifetime of wilderness experience. The tundra was a rainbow of autumn pelage. Fresh snow engulfed the peaks and periodically the valleys, too. Animals were everywhere, thousands of them, moving across valleys, through passes, over divides, atop ridges. Wolves chased caribou. A grizzly on a carcass temporarily blocked our route through a narrow pass. It was a week I’ll never forget, a week in an ancient world that elsewhere is rapidly being engulfed by the frightening nature-deficit technophilia of the twenty-first century.

Howie Wolke

Resistance

Abstract

THERE WAS A TIME when Wyoming was infinite and wild. That was before the exponential growth curves began to shoot upward in the inevitable flight that took much of Wyoming with it. Wyoming’s elevation and aridity were not sufficient sentinels to ward off energy development and its architecture of despair. Man-camps and half-abandoned trailer parks. Cities of gas wells lighting up the night sky. Ancient migration paths interrupted. Dust and ozone and water that ignites. Halliburton trucks endlessly pacing up and down the once-empty roads. Wyoming has become a restive place. Its legacy of deep time now in drawdown to provide the raw material of our civilization’s experiment with domestication: endless economic growth. There seems no limit, as yet, to the demand for coal, oil, and gas.

Lisi Krall

An Open Letter to Major John Wesley Powell

Abstract

4 July 2013

Terry Tempest Williams

Backmatter

Titel: Keeping the Wild
herausgegeben von: Dr. George Wuerthner
Assoc.Prof Eileen Crist
Tom Butler
Verlag: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-61091-559-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-59726-448-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-559-5