The Back Forty

The recovery of bison in North America is often described as a wildlife success story.  From the last remaining animals saved from the slaughter of the late nineteenth century, there are now about a half million animals spread across the continent.  Most of these animals, though, are semi-domesticated, with varying degrees of cattle genes as a result of past cross-breeding efforts.  Only a few free-ranging herds exist, such as those in Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park and in Yellowstone National Park.  Even in Yellowstone, however, the bison effectively are not allowed to leave the park due to fears about disease transmission between bison and livestock.

Coming back to the range?

While the bison is demographically abundant, the species remains mostly functionally extinct across its original range, which ran from Alaska to Sonora and Oregon to the Appalachians.  An essay in the April, 2008, edition of Conservation Biology, authored by 28 biologists, conservationists, and local landholders and Native American leaders, provides a bold and ambitious vision for restoring the bison to ecosystems across the continent.  The essay, titled ‘The Ecological Future of the North American Bison: Conceiving Long-term, Large-scale Conservation of Wildlife’, is an output of a collaborative process facilitated by the Wildlife Conservation Society.  Read the rest of this entry »

As touched upon in post earlier in the week on deforestation trends- and possible countermeasures- in the Amazon, a great deal of hope for tropical forest conservation is being vested in new payments for environmental services (PES) strategies.  Using nascent international markets for carbon sequestration, which in some cases can be bundled with biodiversity and community development values, these market-based strategies hold great promise for creating real economic incentives for maintaining tropical forests. 

A recent paper in the on-line journal Ecology and Society, however, provides a bit of a reality check for proponents of PES, and highlights some of the practical barriers that these strategies will have to overcome.  The paper, aptly titled ‘When Donors Get Cold Feet: the Community Conservation Concession in Setulang (Kalimantan, Indonesia) that Never Happened’, describes the failure to implement a novel PES pilot initiative in one of Borneo’s more intact community forests. 

Setulang village, in the Malinau River watershed, possesses about 5,000 hectares of locally protected primary forest, which the village has struggled to protect in the face of incursions from commercial logging operations based in surrounding villages. Recognizing the community’s commitment to conserving their forest as well as some of the challenges they faced and the probability that the temptation to allow commercial logging will rise in the near future, a several outsiders, led by staff from the Centre for International Forestry Research, approached the village with a PES proposal. 

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“Action to conserve biodiversity, particularly through the creation of protected areas, is inherently political.” So begins a recent paper by Professor William Adams of the University of Cambridge and Jon Hutton of the World Conservation Monitoring Center, that was published in the journal Conservation & Society. The paper, titled ‘People, parks, and poverty: political ecology and biodiversity conservation,’ provides a useful synthetic overview of conservation’s underlying political elements and dynamics.

Adams is one of the leading historians of the international conservation movement, and the paper provides a concise background of how cultural ideas about nature and wilderness shaped the initial creation of parks and game reserves in places like colonial Africa. The authors also review the social impacts- both positive and negative- of protected areas on local communities and indigenous people, and the resurgence of advocates for ‘hard parks’ that seek to exclude human influences during the past decade or so. The paper concludes by summarizing six overarching themes in conservation’s contemporary political ecology, including the growing influence of international conservation organizations, neo-liberal ideas about economic development, and both external and internal self-criticism shaping conservation ideas today. Read the rest of this entry »

Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Brian Walker and David Salt. Island Press (2006).

“Whenever we pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” noted John Muir over a century ago, in one of the earlier recorded observations on the inherent complexity of life on earth. As human knowledge has accumulated and the complexity, not only of ecological systems’ biophysical components but of their social, cultural, and institutional dimensions as well, it has become increasingly apparent that our way of organizing knowledge along disciplinary boundaries- particularly the relatively hard boundary between social and natural sciences- greatly limits our understanding of the world.During the past twenty years, an ambitious group of scientists called the Resilience Alliance has emerged to try and develop a truly integrative framework for thinking about complex systems, which they tellingly refer to as ‘social ecological systems’ in recognition of the counterproductive nature of treating human and biophysical components separately. As the group’s work has grown and expanded, they have developed a web site and blog, a thick edited volume describing their ideas called Panarchy (Island Press, 2002), and an on-line scientific journal titled Ecology and Society.

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