Conservation (15/12/2008)

Some thoughts from 2008

Conservation is the natural response to seeing the monumental changes that mankind has caused to the planet. That we risk losing the natural world has become a very real concern epitomised by the plight of whales and giant pandas. Despite its apparent simplicity it is a very complex idea and I wish to sketch an outline of a rarer view here.

Naive conservation views the interests of Mankind and Nature against one another. Land is either preserved for wild habitat or it is dug up and built upon for man's use. In America this view is taken to its extreme in the concept of Wilderness and untouched Nature. Writers like Henry Thoreau romanticised a view of Nature as a mystical unknown world separate from mankind. Such a view of Nature leaves it extremely vulnerable to rampant human endeavour.

By contrast Nature can be seen as something which is embodied by Man. We are the products of evolution - the handy apes. We have biological bodies and an ecology which relates us as much as any animal to our environment which we both depend upon and shape. We are Nature. Such a view is much more realistic and it avoids the irreconcilable divisions of the previous view.

Conservation is not about conserving Nature then, but rather about harmonising mankind with his environment. It is obvious to any city dweller that we are far from cut off from Nature in the city. There are foxes in London that snoop around bins on cold winter nights by St Pauls. There are peregrin falcons in Trafalgar. Large parks host tree, flowers, insects and birds. If we have a microscope of course we can never escape the protozoans that form in puddles everywhere and anywhere.

Isolating regions of landscape as pristine wilderness it seems to me is a very limited concept of conservation. What is far more important is to integrate our lives, our cities, our farms and our transport with natural concerns. Building forest corridors through cities, leaving rivers over-ground, providing animal crossing points under roads, cutting the grass in parks in a rotation that leaves part of it wild for a year are just a few easily introduced measures that would harmonise the use of land between humans and other creatures.

Much of the natural world already depends upon human activity. Britain was once completely forested in climax oak woodland but the cutting of this down in the neolithic period and the introduction of farming hugely increased the biodiversity of the island. Chalk grasslands are one of the rare and complex communities that have been created and are managed by mankind. This is a good example of the essential symbiosis that could exist between mankind and the rest of the worlds ecology.

An important aspect of this view is the removal of mankind from a leading role in conservation. Nature is an ongoing event that mankind is just a small part of. The future of nature is assured, that of mankind like any species is not so secure. Improving our ecology is a conservation measure as much about preserving nature as it is about preserving man. The two are intimately linked and doing one ensures the other. What is unrealistic is the idea that man will prosper with or without nature as though man really were a world and a law unto himself. This is the previous idea of wilderness.

Conservation then is not just an arbitrary policy decision. Instead it is a fundamental question about man and his environment. Every aspect of mankind's activity from farming, to transport, to cities requires ecology as a broad ethical and scientific framework intergrating the near and the far and placing man sustainably and sensitively within his world. That is the view of conservation here.

updated: 15/12/2008, 20:02:10