Nature's Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management
By Stephen Budiansky
Phoenix Giants, 1996. 296 pp., $24.95
Reviewed by Dot Tumney
Budiansky's target is the semi-religious status of the balance of nature concept (idol of the well-fed ambience seeker) and the impediment it places in the way of maintaining humanity in a diverse biosphere.
Humans are the dominant species, and all aspects of the existing ecology have a human input. Budiansky is especially scathing of the notion that you can fence off an area smaller than half a continent and expect it to be naturally sustaining. A detailed history of Yellowstone National Park provides a case study.
Diversity of species and even future generations of thousand-year-old trees require disturbances. Bulldozing is quick destruction; an entire population of single age plants is a slow one. Forestry needs to be a patchwork arrangement. Animals require plants of all sizes and ages, most animals survive major disruptions, lots of plants need disturbances to reproduce. (Grading flat and concreting over are not, in this context, "disturbance" or "disruption".)
In spite of the title of the opus, Budiansky isn't kidding himself that nature management is "purely" scientific. There are large amounts of politics, sociology, history, agricultural methods and economics as well. There are many tools to be employed and no universal prescriptions. Even doing things for personal profit has its uses.
Edward O. Wilson's species-area relation has no real management application, being an empirical formula with a rough application to isolated islands. Biodiversity and extinction rates behave with less mathematical precision in situations of pockets and overlaps on continents. The formula won't deal with non-random distribution. Thus its only real suggestion is "save everything". Um. Oh. Back to wringing hands.
The population fetishists get short shrift as well. The probability of quarantining all the currently non-industrialised areas is, practically speaking, nil. Proceeding from the likely dynamic rather than mourning the lack of cooperation of the whole world and its dog in the "stop everything here" scenario gives readers a sense that something useful is achievable without resorting to miracles or mysticism.
The problems of the snobbish concept of valuing only the "original" and preventing it being devalued (especially by those "less enlightened" who can't really appreciate it), combined with the habitual attachment to the familiar and the marketability of saving the furry individual, all call for consideration when trying to cope with either the wider or the longer term view. Fortunately there is also a good list of further reading to give all these sparks something to kindle.
Under the heading "Reinventing the Wild", restoration is discussed. Restoration in itself is a word in need of rehabilitation. Like all modern folks, I associate it with the PR merchants attached to the profit-mad polluter. Budiansky concludes his description of the processes of restorations with the following: "The act of restoration brings us face to face with the stuff ecosystems are made of. A doctor does not lose his capacity for humanity or love or his ability to admire beauty by the fact of his having dissected a corpse; but neither is he likely to become a Christian Scientist as a result of the experience. To the extent that restoration efforts make us realise that restoration is 'never done', that is only a virtue: Restoration may be the means to reacquaint us with our responsibilities to the natural world, responsibilities that in the name of aesthetics or religion or even 'ecology' we have tried so hard to renounce."
Just as restoration has been liberated from meaning cheap imitation, so Budiansky manages to convince readers that guilt is neither equivalent to caring nor useful for anything outside of marketing strategies for "green" products. The business as usual lobby prefers impotence to guilt, so Budiansky also addresses the "it's too big I can't" phenomenon.
There are crumbs of comfort for the incurable exploiter, but only by stretching the specific examples; there is none in any of the conclusions. What I like best is the practical approach. It prompts positive consideration of the steps beyond preventing clear-felling of everything in sight. Management is more than conserving and preserving (both words commonly used for preventing decay in the already dead). As the video reviewers say, it's one for collecting. n