Biodiversity: Integrating Conservation and Production: Case Studies from Australian Farms, Forests and Fisheries

By Tony Norton

Australia’s experience in community-based environmental repair is unique in the world, with no shortage of analysis by bureaucrats, academics and environmentalists. This collection of 17 case studies gives a view from ground level. It includes heroic accounts of families who changed their way of farming and their relationship to the land so significantly they found they could stop hand-feeding stock during a drought and see the bush coming back. It describes the experience with ‘bush tenders’, which were oversubscribed, as farmers competed with each other for stewardship payments to manage their grazing lands for endangered ground-nesting birds as well as beef and wool. And it tells of a group of wheat growers who plant patches of grassland for beneficial insects that save them tens of thousands of dollars a year in pesticide bills.

The case studies arose from a meeting of 250 farmers, foresters and fishers from all Australian states, who met in Launceston as guests of the community group Tamar Natural Resource Management to reflect on the question: ‘Is it possible to be good environmental managers and prosper in our businesses?’ As well as tales of environmental hope, there are also messages about the limits of duty of care, the need to share the costs of achieving society’s expectations, and the possibility of learning from unlikely places. Biodiversity: Integrating Conservation and Production includes the seven ‘Tamar Principles’, distilled by the delegates from the meeting for those on the front line.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Sep 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9780643098664

Book preview

CONSERVATION AND

PRODUCTION

art

1

Science, ethics and emotion in the

politics of biodiversity

Pete Hay

We are living, right now, through the sixth mass extermination of species in the history of planet Earth. From the perspective of deep time, this is the clear and unmistakably most salient fact about the times in which we live. And yet, in the league table of issues as measured by what preoccupies the organs of mass media, or what exercises politicians and voters at elections, it is clear that the fact of mass species extinction is somewhere in the middle of the pack. This chapter sets forth reasons why so many do not see mass extinction as the defining – the very signature – fact and issue of our times. It also discusses why the issue merits an overwhelming policy priority from governments. This will take us on a Cook’s Tour of recent philosophical reconsiderations of humankind’s relationship to other life forms, and of the tension between a science-driven emphasis on biodiversity and the emotional bias of ‘ordinary’ people towards the fate of ‘charismatic’ species. The evidence suggests that even as species disappear at a possible rate of 17 per hour, a revolutionary reconstruction of our obligations towards non-human forms of life is gathering pace.

There used to be a car sticker popular in Hobart, one of a plethora of motorised slogans countering what many Tasmanians consider to be the menace of the green ‘contagion’. Most stickers reveal more about the minds that devised them than anything else, but the sticker I have in mind hit the nail right on the head. It read something like this: ‘Everything you own, wear, use and eat has been cut down or dug from the ground’. This is absolutely true. Nothing in the artefactual world is spun from thin air – all our clothing, all our toys and tools, all our food, the very walls that shelter us from the elements, began as something alive that had its life terminated, or something inert and (usually) underground that has been dug up, refined and adapted to human use. Nothing can change this. If we are not going to interfere in the processes of nature – if we do not cut down and dig up – we are destined to return to a short and brutal life in the caves, a life of browsing subsistence, a life devoid of art, thought, security and anything other than the most rudimentary of society. For the very great majority of us, ditching culture and civilisation is emphatically not an option. So we must harvest, we must mine, we must process, we must deploy technologies of distribution and exchange.

Here is another reality. There are some ideologically driven sceptics (such as Julian Simon of the University of Maryland), but those who actually do the science estimate that extinctions are occurring in the range of 17 000 species per year (Edward Wilson’s mathematically derived 1988 estimate; Wilson 1988) to a mind-boggling estimate of an annual loss of 150 000 species (Diamond 1992). Richard Leakey (with Roger Lewin) argues that even if we take a lower figure in this range, e.g. 30 000 species per year, that is an extinction rate 120 000 times higher than the ‘normal’ or ‘background’ extinction rate, which the fossil record establishes at ‘an average of one every four years’ (Leakey & Lewin 1996). The problem is largely one of habitat loss. By the mid-1990s, 80 000 square miles of forest were falling each year (40–50% higher than a mere decade previously), with the result that only about 10% of the original tropical forest cover is still in place. By 2050 that will be reduced to a ‘tiny remnant’ (Leakey & Lewin 1996). If these trends continue, they conclude, the world stands to lose something like 50% of all species.

Does this matter? Conservation biologists have always assumed that it does, and much of the burgeoning corpus of scientific literature in this area begins from this starting-point, assuming it to be self-evident and beyond a need for defending. The literature of popular science is another matter; here, spirited explanations of the need to maintain biodiversity are much more easily located. For example, in his widely read 2005 book, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive, Jared Diamond notes that it is one thing to argue for the future of embattled species that are large and charismatic but much more difficult to generate a critical mass of support for the defence of species that fall below the radar of public regard. He articulates an archetypal response: ‘Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?’ He answers the rhetorical question thus:

This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing for us free with services that can be very expensive, and in some cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves. Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane.

Here is the same argument, put by Edward O. Wilson in his popular 1998 book, Consilience:

Why do we need so many species anyway … especially since the majority are bugs, weeds and fungi? It is easy to dismiss the creepy-crawlies of the world, forgetting that less than a century ago … native birds and mammals around the world were treated with the same callous indifference. Now the value of the little things in the natural world has become compellingly clear. Recent experimental studies on whole ecosystems support what ecologists have long suspected: The more species that live in an ecosystem, the higher its productivity and the greater its ability to withstand drought and other kinds of environmental stress. Since we depend on functioning ecosystems to cleanse our water, enrich our soil, and create the very air we breathe, biodiversity is clearly not something to discard carelessly.

Wilson then argues, more prosaically, that the medicinal properties of wild species remain largely untapped, with ‘probably fewer than 1%’ having been investigated for their medical potential. What folly to thoughtlessly consign to extinction species that might yield a future boon to humankind. He then observes that the only way to protect species is to maintain the integrity of the ecosystems that house them.

These passages from two of the world’s best-known science popularisers give the argument of environmental services, in Wilson’s case with an add-on. The argument runs that we know so little about how the components of the web of life fit together that we risk system-destabilising perturbations if we keep eliminating web-of-life components. It states that there is a point, somewhere along the line of biological impoverishment, at which such system-destabilising perturbation becomes a certainty, with Homo sapiens itself a possible and even likely casualty. The case from science has a poetic or quasi-spiritual counterpart – the observation that when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon it sets in motion a chain of interconnection that can bring on an avalanche in central Asia. This is the first law of ecology, as formulated by Barry Commoner in 1972: ‘Everything is connected to everything else’.

But it is not as straightforward as this. Even within conservation biology’s scientific literature there is an undercurrent of apostasy – a contention that not all species within an ecosystem are essential to that ecosystem’s healthy functioning, that some could be dispensed with without any prospect of systemic perturbation whatever, that it is simply fatuous to maintain that when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon an avalanche might result in central Asia. These dissenting positions have recently been pulled together by a PhD student, Ben Ridder (Ridder 2007). He presents the case that, by installing the preservation of biodiversity as the touchstone of conservation policy and natural area management, scientists, managers and bureaucrats are not protecting what people value most about the natural world. The argument from ecosystem services is particularly suspect, Ridder argues, and he flirts at the rim of the claim that scientists may deliberately overstate the provision-of-ecosystem-services case for biodiversity in order to obscure more personal agendas. The ‘scientisation’ of conservation reduces the marvellous cacophony of nature to a managerial paradigm in which the autonomy of natural process is denied, yet, Ridder maintains, it is precisely that untamable inhuman independence, existing as a counterpoint to the humanly contrived cultural world in which we are immersed, that is the quality we most value in the natural world and the source of the impulse to defend it (see also Hettinger 2005).

Such an acknowledgement can lead to a dramatic shift in management philosophies to anti-management, in which notions prevail of allowing the untrammelled wild to unfold as it will, free from well-intentioned managerial engineering of biological processes in the name of ensuring the continued existence of threatened species. I anticipate that, at this conference, the appropriateness of management for biodiversity imperatives will be taken as given, not subject to critical scrutiny. In an angry book entitled The abstract wild (1996), philosopher-adventurer Jack Turner lampoons the papers presented at a conference not dissimilar to this. For Turner, we are the enemy, the people who manipulate nature in such a way that the wild principle he seeks to defend becomes irreparably compromised. He thumps the table and demands that there be:

no conservation strategies, no designer wilderness, no roads, no trails, no satellite surveillance, no overflights with helicopters, no radio collars, no measuring devices, no photographs, no GPS data, no databases stuffed with the location of every draba of the summit of Mt Moran, no guidebooks, no topographical maps. Let whatever habitat we can preserve go back to its own self-order as much as possible.

Not everyone takes such an uncompromising position but, as Ridder shows, there is now a substantial debate in some quarters over the question of intervention (as mandated by the biodiversity paradigm) or non-interventionism (as mandated by the rewilding paradigm). Ridder provides the best overview of this debate that has reached my attention (Ridder 2007), and I recommend it to all who work for biodiversity imperatives. Ridder’s sympathies reside firmly within the anti-management or ‘wild principle’ camp (for other examples of the anti-management perspective see Chew & Laubichler 2003; Glover 2000; Gobster 2000; Katz 1997; Sagoff 2005; Taylor 2005; Willers 1999).

I think my former student’s attack on the priority accorded biodiversity in conservation science and natural area management is misconceived in several key respects, but I do agree that the scientific case for biodiversity as embodied in the ‘ecosystem services’ argument does miss the core reason for humankind’s attraction to the natural world and concern for the fate of its component parts, and that this accordingly contributes to a lack of fulfilled potential when it comes to the mobilisation of public sentiment in the cause of nature conservation.

I have noted that we are living through the sixth mass extermination of species in the history of planet Earth, and that this is the most salient fact about the times in which we live. And yet the fact of mass species extinction is somewhere in the middle of the pack in the public perception of importance. Here, I think, Ridder is right – the concept ‘biodiversity’ is part of the problem. It is simply the case that most people will not be moved in their innermost being in response to an abstraction – and the concept ‘biodiversity’ is an abstraction. What does move people is contemplation of the fate of particular forms of life – usually large, often endearing to human aesthetic taste, or perhaps attracting human sympathy because they are humanesque in some significant respect. Such a response is philosophically dubious, for reasons that I do not have time to go into here, and as we have seen it is scientifically ill-informed as well. Though this may chagrin Diamond and Wilson, it is a fact that creepies and crawlies don’t inspire a desire in John and Janet Citizen to engage in public action to secure their future. Not that this should matter too much in practice, because the action necessary to preserve large charismatic species – the preservation of habitat – will also serve the interests of micro-life.

I am not speaking personally here. Personally I can find all the activist motivation I need from cogitation upon threats to ‘biodiversity’ in the abstract. That is the point of the dramatic claim that the current deluge of species extinction constitutes ‘the clear and unmistakably most salient fact about the times in which we live’. I emphatically do not want ‘biodiversity’ displaced as the touchstone in conservation biology and the management regimes that attend upon its findings. But I argue that it is necessary to acknowledge the emotional deficit that this involves when it comes to engaging the public, and it seems to me that there is no inevitable contradiction. Indeed, in the popular science literature it is possible to find adjunct reasons for valuing biodiversity presented alongside the case of ecosystem services. Leakey and Lewin (1996) append an ‘aesthetic’ case for the maintenance of biodiversity:

If a rich diversity of species succors the human psyche in important ways, then the loss of species reduces us in some ineffable way … Humans evolved within a world of nature, and an appreciation of, and need for, nature are real and ineradicable components of the human psyche. We risk eroding the human soul if we allow the erosion of the richness of the world of nature around us.

An aesthetic appreciation of nature is not precisely the same as a valuation of nature for its independence from human will and agency, as argued by Ridder. I am not greatly concerned about this. In both instances – and there will be more – the wellspring for the strongly positive evaluation is emotional rather than rational. For most policy-makers and for many scientists (Leakey and Lewin are clearly not among them) emotional response is not a valid ground for legitimacy or for informing policy. I view such a prejudice as utter folly, especially when it comes to the crucial matter of securing desirable biodiversity outcomes. Most of the opinions we hold, including opinions on policy options and decisions taken at crucial points during the scientific process, do not stem from the reasoning brain but from the affective ‘feeling’ brain. Only then do we set about finding scientific evidence or a reasoned case in logic for the position that an instantaneous snap of what we wrongly call ‘intuition’ has already assured us is right or valid.¹ Charles Birch, a most eminent scientist, argues that the human brain spends far more time and energy on processing feelings than on analytical activities, and maintains that ‘our feelings are the most important aspect of our life. ² When there is no feeling life has lost its value’ (Birch 1995). Quite right. There needs to be room for the emotional response alongside the science of biodiversity, for the potentially powerful policy informant of the fellow-feeling that humans often have for the rest of life – what Wilson has called ‘biophilia’ (Wilson 1984) and what I have elsewhere described as the ‘ecological impulse’ (Hay 2002).

I stress that this needs to take place alongside the case from science. I emphatically do not want to displace science from the debate. I merely want it enriched with other perspectives, even though this will involve some thoroughly unscientific argument, for example in defence of the preservation of particular species rather than species in general, or of particular individual animals (and trees) and not even necessarily the individual animals (and trees) that scientists would wish to maintain. An example of the last came in the form of a press interview with an eminent sociologist (who is also something of a media celebrity), in which the interviewee expressed strong opposition to the eradication of feral animals in the name of environmentalist imperatives (Paine 2007). The media interview occurred in the context of an upcoming conference on the theme of animals and society. I think this is quite salutary. I do not expect the same axiomatic belief in the validity of a biodiversity imperatives-sourced interventionist paradigm of conservation management that is likely to pervade this conference to be much in evidence at the Animals and Society conference. Possibly the most intractable policy faultline opened up by the management-for-biodiversity versus anti-management for rewilding schism concerns questions of animal welfare, in which the categorisations of ‘feral’ and ‘native’ are challenged, with the rewilding camp favouring the welfare of individual animals currently alive and able to experience pain (and having clear interests that can go well or badly and that thereby merit respect) whatever their status when measured by the imperatives of preserving biodiversity. ³ There will be some slippage between the imperatives of science and the less predictable claims from values-based contributions, and this slippage might be fractious and of no small import. But my sympathies are clear. We are currently witnessing a biological impoverishment not seen since ‘the end of the Mesozoic Era 65 million years ago’ (Wilson 1998), and the knowledge that we are causing this to be so, and that we know we are causing it to be so, simply should not be borne. Science? The value-laden realm of the emotions? The policy slippage notwithstanding, I do not believe it much matters: whatever is needed to put an end to the treadmill of extinction warrants deployment.

Not everyone feels this same emotional wrench when presented with the fact that we are living through the planet’s sixth great extinction and that, for the first time, we are its cause. Why is this so? Why is the ecological or biophiliac impulse so unevenly felt? I will provide three reasons, which are not exhaustive.

One reason is the radical separation from nature that characterises much of life today. Most of us live in large amorphous cities where our only contact with other forms of life might be to pass a dog on the street, to acknowledge the occasional bird on a tree in the park or to view nature vicariously through the medium of a wildlife doco on television. We experience the tragedy of the sixth great age of species extinction only in the abstract, as statistics buried in a small and apparently unimportant article on page 7 of the daily paper. With such a profound loss of intimate contact with the living world, it is hard to see how we can expect widespread concern for its fate. We should add our species’ utter infatuation with the unfolding marvels of human ingenuity in the shape of present and emergent technologies. I think (but cannot prove) that our infatuation with tools and gadgets exists in a zero-sum relationship with concern for the fate of other life. I do not mean the contribution those technologies are materially making to species extinction, though this is considerable in many cases. I mean the construction of life-empathising or life-disregarding psychologies. But I hold the point I am making entirely instinctively, and am interested to hear what others might make of this.

My second factor is longer-lived and potentially more intractable. It is a truism that the maintenance of biodiversity requires that the integrity of ecosystems be preserved. Within humanised environments individual species may demonstrate a remarkable degree of adaptation, as Tim Low argued in The new nature (Low 2002), but there can be no doubt that the prime reason we are witnessing the sixth great age of extinction is the unprecedented scale of habitat destruction, without which many species are unable to survive. The trouble is that we westerners may actually be hard-wired for the clearance of non-humanised habitat. As I have written elsewhere:

For pre-industrial peoples the prime question faced daily was that of survival. Wilderness was thought to be hostile, threatening, pervasive and it had to be fought and conquered … the history of civilisation can be seen as a history of escaping from wilderness, of establishing mastery over it to through fire, clearing, cropping, domestication of animals and so on … In folklore and nursery tales … ‘the woods’ is a fearful place. There lurk the trolls and the dark magicians to waylay the chivalrous knight and ensnare the fair maiden, and there is to be found Red Riding Hood’s wolf, and the blood drinkers of Beowulf. In such tales, most of which trace back as far as the Middle Ages, wilderness is portrayed in the worst possible light – dank, cold, unvisited, immensely threatening (Hay 2002).

There may be an innate biophilia (or ecological impulse) within many of us that conduces to concern for the fate of embattled lifeforms, but there is a tenacious reason why such innate sympathy is not universally experienced or why it may not extend beyond a concern for the charismatic species shown in wildlife docos. To put it brutally, such concern flies in the face of the accumulated history of civilisation, a history in which humankind has been at war with the many realms of nature. As the historian Roderick Nash has written of the pervasive mindset on the American frontier: ‘Constant exposure to wilderness gave rise to fear and hatred on the part of those who had to fight it for survival and success. American frontiersmen rarely judged wilderness with criteria other than the utilitarian or spoke of their relation to it in other than a military metaphor’ (Nash 1982).

A third factor, perhaps related to the second, can be sourced to the inherited and deeply ingrained suite of paradigmatic values that underscore European civilisation and that the literature loosely describes as the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In 1967, the theologian Lynn White Jr published an influential paper in which he argued that non-human life is not valued because the Christian creation story maintains that ‘man’ is made in God’s image and thus partakes of God’s radical separation from other forms of life. Only humans have immortal souls, only humans can enter heaven; the rest of living creation is placed at humanity’s disposal, mere resource to dispose of as ‘he’ sees fit. Having made the universe God withdrew from it. ‘He’ is not present in ‘His’ creation, the only import of which is its utility value as human resource. God is wholly other – He can neither be found in nor revealed through Nature. It may even be, as Bill Clinton’s spiritual advisor, Tony Campolo, insists, a sin to accord value in and of itself to the natural world or to other-than-human living entities (Campolo 1992).

This being one of the foundation values of European civilisation, it will come as no surprise to find that western philosophical systems affirm the absence of value in the natural world except insofar as they can be deemed to possess the utility value of human resource. Only humans have interests that ‘count’, in principle, and ethical relations focus on establishing the moral precepts that ought to guide relationships between human beings.

This began to change in the early 1970s, and for the first time in several centuries there was something new in that staid branch of philosophy, Ethics. A series of philosophical positions have been advanced that argue that moral oughts and ought nots do not stop at the human species boundary, but occur within the relationships of life. These philosophies base their ethical revolutions on a variety of rival, even mutually hostile, bedrock principles. These are sentience (a capacity to experience sensations, particularly pleasure and pain); having cell-based life; having a capacity for self-renewal and teleological actualisation towards which a living being continuously strives; and having a cosmically scoped commonality with all that exists, such that ‘one seeks … to allow all entities … the freedom to unfold in their own ways’ (Fox 1992).

The first two of these rival criteria – sentience and having cell-based life – afford moral agency to individual units of life, in the first instance to higher animals and in the second to all living organisms. The relevance of these philosophical views to the maintenance of biodiversity is incidental and may even be antagonistic because, as we have seen, such views can also be deployed to defend the interests and well-being of a ‘feral’ animal whose existence threatens ‘native’ biodiversity. In contrast, the other two rival principles – having a capacity for renewal and having a cosmically scoped commonality with all that exists – can provide such a first-principles defence of biodiversity, because these criteria for according value can be used to endow ecological collectives, such as species or even the entire ecosphere, with moral standing.

I do not intend to elaborate upon any of this. For a non-philosopher it is fiendishly convoluted, much more than I have made it sound here. ⁴ I have to say that, in truth, I find much of this philosophical hair-splitting unsatisfactory, both procedurally and in terms of end results. There has been something of a backlash against the building of elaborate systems of ecological philosophy, and these days there is much more stress upon practical philosophy rather than a philosophy of first principles. So I am going to move on, but there is one remaining question that intrigues. What was it, in the 1970s, that induced this sudden explosion of interest in the development of philosophical principles that sought to bring non-human lifeforms and biological processes into the realm of ethics? What was the trigger?

There is no easy answer, but it is plain that since the 1970s there has been an explosion of interest in and concern for the impact of our actions upon the well-being of other forms of life. Civilisations-long, entrenched antagonism to other-than-human life may not be as hard-wired as I have suggested – it may be, rather, a mere culturally specific prejudice that is approaching the end of its time. We have come a long way since the eminent 19th-century educational reformer and religious prig, Dr Thomas Arnold, could write, shuddering with revulsion, ‘The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare not approach it’(quoted in Strachey 1948); since TE Lawrence, explaining why he refused to ride a horse in the Arabian desert, could observe ‘something hurtful to my pride, disagreeable, rose at the sight of these lower forms of life. Their existence struck a servile reflection upon our human kind: the style in which a God would look on us; and … to lie under an avoidable obligation to them, seemed to me shameful’ (Lawrence 1997). We no longer look upon forests and shudder with apprehension, we no longer think it brave and noble to hunt a tiger. It is true that this revolution in perception is not universal, and it is true that it does not usually extend to the creepies and crawlies that are such a focus of scientific concern for declining biodiversity. It is true that the time-worn view persists, especially around the decision-making tables of industry and government, that non-human life has no status other than resource for human consumption and, if it cannot be rendered in terms of such value, it is thoroughly dispensable.

But this is changing, and it is changing without regard for any revolution in first philosophical principles. Though it would not have been the case 10 years ago, I am willing to wager that there will not be much elaborate philosophising at that imminent conference on Animals and Society. I think this no bad thing, though I wish I could more definitively explain why and how this quiet revolution is taking place. But almost three decades ago, a great Canadian naturalist, John Livingston, analysed all the arguments customarily made for the conservation of wildlife and found all of them inadequate. He was not fazed by this. For Livingston it was emotional identification that connected him to the diversity of existence, what he called a deep complicity ‘in the beauty that is life process’ (Livingston 1981). And that will do for me, too.

And so I have returned to a prominent theme from the earlier part of my talk. And earlier still I made the point that we must have production and we must, somehow, contrive to maintain here with us the species mix with which we have co-evolved. It will be clear that, in so contriving,