What will conservation biology look like in this new centruy? Daniel Janzen may know. I missed his Long Now lecture, but this essay is a nice overview of his ideas on why we need to look at all ecological work, now, as gardening:
"Why can't the wild tropical species be left "out in the wild" to fend for themselves? Because the wild is at humanity's mercy. Humanity now owns life on Earth. It plans the world, albeit with an unintended here and an uninformed there. Until the Pleistocene, not more than a few thousandths of 1 percent of the Earth's surface was ours. Today it all is. If we place those species anywhere other than in a human safe zone, they will continue in their downward spiral as grist in the human mill, just as they have for the past 10,000 years. ...
"We eat wild biodiversity, and we do all we can to help our chromosomal extensions eat that which we cannot eat. A bean plant is a green machine that grows directly out of our chromosomes, sitting where wild biodiversity once was, another mouth for sun and minerals.
"However, gardens are forever. Gardens are mushrooms on horse manure and cats under the kitchen table. Gardens are beehives and cows, and 16 varieties of rice growing in one rainforest clearing. Gardens are hydroponic tomatoes and vats of whisky-spewing yeast. Kids do it, agroindustry does it, grandparents do it, astronauts do it, and Pleistocene Rhinelanders did it. And we will all still be doing it 10,000 years from now. The garden is a somewhat unruly extension of the human genome.
"So, how do we hide 235,000 species in the garden? By recognizing and relabeling wildland nature as a garden per se, having nearly all the traits that we have long bestowed on a gardencare, planning, investment, zoning, insurance, fine-tuning, research, and premeditated harvest. And this leads to the question of absorption of humanity's omnipresent footprints.
"Part of the problem is in the name. Stop labeling the wild as the wild. There are simply many varieties of gardens. There is no footprint-free world. Every block of the world's wildlands is already severely impacted. Not only are they internally impacted through macroevents such as the megafaunal extinctions and selective extraction of old-growth timber, but the very frameworks of their existenceglobal warming, acid rain, drained wetlands, green revolutions, wildland shrinkage, introduced pests, and many more-are set by Homo sapiens. The question is not whether we must manage nature, but rather how shall we manage it-by accident, haphazardly, or with the calculated goal of its survival forever?"
It's not easy, when many of us who care about the natural world have been raised to venerate wild places, to reimagine the world as a garden. But, as Janzen says, the alternative may be simply to pretend innocence and practice ignorance.
