Nature Conservancy chief scientist urges conservation movement to ?reframe itself?

Dr. Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, gave a lecture on Tuesday afternoon in which he discussed the modern shift in conservation techniques and advocated for cooperation between conservationists and large businesses. The Nature Conservancy is a conservation organization that works globally to protect ecological areas.

Throughout his talk, Kareiva emphasized that conservation movements should avoid so-called doomsday prophesies about climate change possibly destroying the world. Instead, he suggested, they should adopt a more thoughtful and data-driven approach to nature conservation. He presented a three-tiered strategy for the conservation movement to “reframe itself.”

Kareiva compared big businesses, which possess large social and economic leverage, to the ecological notion of keystone species, which are organisms that play such an important role in the energy flow of their environment that the ecosystem would drastically change if they disappeared.

One kind of keystone species is the sea otter, which, he explained, plays an important role on the West Coast by eating sea urchins. If sea otters disappear and the sea urchin population goes unchecked, their food source, kelp, will become depleted. When the kelp beds disappear as the population of sea urchins grows, the fish in the ecosystem will have no safe place to lay eggs and the fish will begin to die off, he explained.

Big businesses behave similarly, he explained. For example, Walmart has a larger GDP than 100 of the world’s small countries, so its fate determines the lives of its employees and customers in a similar manner.

Kareiva added that, while this kind of power is disturbing on the one hand, “the fact of the matter is, if you can figure out how to work with them in this challenge of environment conservation, you actually have a lot of leverage.”

The next step for conservationists, according to Kareiva, should be to restore habitats to a healthy state after they have been altered by humans, citing the environmental restoration of the Ohio River in Pittsburg, Pa., the reintroduction of large mammal populations to Yellowstone National Park and the green infrastructure built in Seoul since his childhood.

“Nowadays, looking at the impact that we’ve already had, a major component of winning in this case is restoration,” Kareiva said. “And there are lots of success stories.”

The final step for conservation movements is to reconnect people with nature, Kareiva said. He explained that in recent years The Nature Conservancy has begun to focus heavily on conservation education for the general public, such as through a program affiliated with The Nature Conservancy and funded by Toyota to provide high school students with jobs maintaining conserved lands and subsidizing their higher education.

After the lecture, Alex Washburne GS, who is studying at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, said that he liked Kareiva’s emphasis on the importance of preserving wild places for people to visit and his general message of hope for the future of the conservation movement.

“It had an effect on me — his emphasis on saying there is hope. Because if there’s no hope, then why would you work on conservation?" Washburne said. "There is hope. I should work in this because it’s not something I should just throw in the towel for, and, you know, cultivate this inner misanthrope. Putting that positive spin on it really does wonders in terms of motivating people — like myself.”

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During the lecture, Kareiva also emphasized the economic advantage that larger businesses could gain by working with sustainability engineers to minimize their environmental impact, as well as the need for ecologists to make the conservation movement more relevant to the ordinary person by shifting the focus from endangered species in exotic places to issues in Americans’ backyards.

His talk, “How to Save Nature: Overcoming Dogma and Prophecies of Doom in Conservation,” was held in 101 Friend Center and was sponsored by the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.