Category Archives: Conservation Biology

The Ancient Cedars Trail in British Columbia

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Whistler, British Columbia, is one of the famous ski hills in North America. Just north of the town of Whistler, above Green Lake, is a 4.5 km logging road that leads to the Ancient Cedars Trail, a 5 km round trip to see an old growth stand of several hectares of western red cedars (Thuja plicata). The red cedars are enormous, perhaps 700-1000 years old, and well worth seeing. But what disturbed me as I walked this trail is that this type of old growth forest with its rich diversity of tree species is what much of the forested world of coastal British Columbia and south-eastern Alaska used to look like, and I wonder what are we leaving in this part of the world for our great-grandchildren.

Trees are dollar bills in another form, and so the forestry industry thrives. But this is mostly crown land, not private land, and what do we the public get for this continual ravaging of the landscape? A strong economy to be sure, but is it sustainable? Forestry is sustainable if it allows ecosystem renewal at a time scale that is relevant to a human lifespan. Is modern forestry in British Columbia sustainable? We are told continually that it is.

Perhaps the paradigm is that we should log everything that can be converted into dollars, leaving a few hectares for the ancient cedars to remain. Then once we have logged up to the Arctic Ocean, we can come back south and start again. But will a logged forest ever recover as part of a forest ecosystem? And if it does will it take 300, 500, or 1000 years? If it takes that long, forestry is a mining operation, and from the point of view of our grandchildren the forests are destroyed not renewed.

The key issue for an ecologist is whether the forest ecosystem ever recovers after logging. It certainly does for some species but it is highly probable that other species are lost to the ecosystem. Part of this is because the forests that replace old growth are too often tree monocultures designed for optimum yield rather than for biodiversity maximization. So I think we should be more questioning when we are told an industry like forestry is operating sustainably. If it is sustainable, why are we logging old growth forests? If it is sustainable why are we logging 25° and 30° slopes? And what do we mean when we say that we are developing a forest harvesting plan when the time to recovery from logging is 200-300+ years? That is perhaps 3-4 generations of humans, more than we would like to tell our children. At a time when biodiversity conservation is being seen as more and more important, we are rushing ahead with logging old growth, hoping to get the dollars out before we find out that it was a mistake in management.

In the end we need to ask over and over again – what are we leaving for our grandchildren? And if you go walking in the coastal forests of western North America you need to look and then ask yourself what “sustainability” means, and whether the landscape is being managed sustainably. Perhaps many of our old growth forests in Canada are too important to be left to the management of the forest industry.

The New Conservation?

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In a recent book “Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene” edited by Mihael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (Breakthrough Institute, 2011) Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michel Le Marvier present a vision for conservation in a paper: “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond solitude and fragility” that bears some analysis. It is available on the Breakthrough Institute website. It is a rather misleading vision, like many visions, partly correct, partly wildly inaccurate, and partly tilting at dragons that do not exist.

In general any subject that ranges out from science into policy starts to walk on thin ice when opinions masquerade as scientific information. A few quotes can give you the flavor of this article. “By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline”. A strong statement but how has anyone decided that conservation is failing? If the evidence is that biodiversity in some groups and some places is being lost, then any ecologist can agree. If conservation is failing, then we might expect some guidance of how to prevent this failure.

The next quote grabs the issue directly: “Conservation cannot promise a return to pristine, prehuman landscapes. Humankind has already profoundly transformed the planet and will continue to do so.” I know quite a few conservation biologists and I can not think of one who would disagree with this statement. There could be some who are promising a return to pristine landscapes, but they must be rare, as are those that still think the earth is flat. So here is Straw Man # 1. (This is not sexist by the way, no female conservation biologist would make such a silly Straw Person.) So let us proceed by agreeing that we cannot go back to pristine nature, and humans are indeed having a large effect on the Earth.

Now we are getting into the center of the proposal with this quote: “But conservation will be controversial as long as it remains so narrowly focused on the creation of parks and protected areas, and insists, often unfairly, that local people cannot be trusted to care for their land.” Alas this is hardly what most conservation biology focuses on. So we might call this Straw Man # 2. The goal of most conservation is to protect biodiversity in all its forms, in parks, in nature reserves, in agricultural fields, in forest woodlots, and in cities. I cannot comment on situations in which local people are adversely affected by conservation activities. In the few cases I know the local people are happy to cooperate in conservation programs, but I can imagine there are conflicts I am not acquainted with. So can we agree that conservation is NOT narrowly focused on parks? Parks and reserves are part of the conservation picture but far from all of it.

The reason conservation biologists have adopted this narrow agenda is captured in the next quotation: “But ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever. Some ecologists suggest that if a single species is lost, a whole ecosystem will be in danger of collapse, and that if too much biodiversity is lost, spaceship Earth will start to come apart.” Now I have to start looking under the carpet to find such an ecologist. Really this is quite silly, and an insult to current ecological knowledge. As a reductio ad absurdum this is a prize quotation and we can call it Straw Man # 3. I have no doubt that we could find someone on earth who would say this, but that is hardly evidence that ecologists agree on such nonsense. That it is nonsense of course is no argument that one can keep removing species from ecosystems with no consequences whatsoever.

We now come back to a more modest quote: “The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse. Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem. In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function.” Since no ecologist supports the thesis of the previous paragraph, we can certainly agree with this quotation, so perhaps we are back on track.

The next quote however puts us back into the perceived picture: “Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances…. Even that classic symbol of fragility — the polar bear, seemingly stranded on a melting ice block — may have a good chance of surviving global warming if the changing environment continues to increase the populations and northern ranges of harbor seals and harp seals.” Alas we are back to serious nonsense again. The literature on restoration ecology is one long litany of rejections of the idea of resilient recovery from human disturbance. It simply does not occur except perhaps on a time scale that is geological. And polar bear biologists do not think they will go extinct at least in the next 100 years that we can project. So here is STRAW MAN # 4 (or perhaps straw bear?).

We are now led to the final conclusion: “If there is no wilderness, if nature is resilient rather than fragile, and if people are actually part of nature and not the original sinners who caused our banishment from Eden, what should be the new vision for conservation? Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor. Instead of trying to restore remote iconic landscapes to pre-European conditions, conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers… Conservation is slowly turning toward these directions but far too slowly and with insufficient commitment to make them the conservation work of the 21st century. The problem lies in our reluctance, and the reluctance of many of conservation’s wealthy supporters, to shed the old paradigms.”

If the first two premises in this last quotation are highly questionable, and the third is and has been agreed by all conservation biologists for many years, how do we get to the conclusions given the questionable premises? While it sounds exciting to shed the old paradigms, we have to be careful rather to take the valid points from all our approaches, and try to correct the failings of conservation science. As in much of ecological science, the truism that “the devil is in the details” applies with much force to conservation issues, and there is no one path to glory.