The Biggest Problem in Conservation: Taxonomy

One of the interesting unspoken secrets of the conservation world is that taxonomists are in charge.  More specifically, what taxonomists consider interesting enough to name as a species or a subspecies determines what can be protected.  After all, it is the Endangered Species Act.  But what if the taxonomists can't agree on what a species is?

This excellent short article in the Atlantic provides examples form hawthorn trees, which, depending on who you talk to, are either in decline and in need of conservation, or so widely distributed and common that it would be like trying to preserve Kentucky Bluegrass.

"A few years ago, conservation groups were gearing up to assign the [balsam-mountain hawthorn] tree the rarest rank a species can receive, which would imply an urgent necessity to conserve it. But [a botanist] decided it was probably a hybrid of two other hawthorns. He still believed the tree should be protected, but instantly, the species went from critically rare to nonexistent, from a conservation point of view."

"A prominent evolutionary biologist, wrote in 1976,  that perhaps no true hawthorn species exist at all—that they make up a sort of genetic continuum that doesn’t allow for coherent species classification."

"[another] botanist... told me the biggest threat to the trees is not land-use changes but botanists themselves, who are unwilling to meet the taxonomic challenge. If no one takes on the task of categorizing hawthorns, then no conservation group can take any measures to save them."

"Now whatever solution [the botanists] come to will determine what we try to save."

"Trying to define the undefinable": are taxonomists too focused on species?

A recent article in the New Yorker includes a good overview of why identifying species can be problematic:  

"You Name It: Carl Linnaeus and the effort to label all of life" by Kathryn Schulz, August 21, 2023 

Extended quote from article:

"What Linnaeus sought to do was organize nature according to its fundamental, intrinsic divisions--to carve it at the joints, in Plato's famous formulation.  But what he actually did, for the most part, was impose artificial categories on the natural world for the convenience of scientists.

This is not a retroactive assessment; Linnaeus himself knew full well the limitations of his classification method.  To achieve a system completely in accordance with nature was, he wrote, "the first and last wish of botanists."  But the more closely you looked at her bounty the more difficult that prospect became--so, in the meantime, "artificial systems are absolutely necessary."

In philosophy, this tension between intrinsic and imposed categories takes the form of a debate between nominalism and realism.  Realists believe that nature is full of real and discrete categories, from 'amphibian" to "zinc," and that the job of the scientist is to discern them accurately.  Nominalists believe that nature lacks clearly defined categories, and that we simply impose those distinctions upon it--creating, as it were, the illusion of joints where none really exist.  

This is not just the position of post-truth relativists.  "I look at the term 'species' as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other": that is Charles Darwin, in the second  chapter of "On the Origin of Species."  That book, of course, trumpeted to the world a very large problem with the entire notion of a species.  According to evolutionary theory, species are constantly changing--emerging, diverging, going extinct.

The very concept of a species is in radical flux, too, with more than twenty competing definitions in circulation.  Choosing a definition is not just a matter of what goes in the dictionary under "species"; which one you use will determine how you divide up nature, such that a group of creatures that would be regarded as a species by one standard might not merit the label by another.  

All this confusion comes, as Darwin wrote, "from trying to define the undefinable."  Yet committed realists continue to promulgate more and more definitions, in the belief that one of them will map perfectly onto some intrinsic and stable feature of nature.  Darwin called that idea "laughable," a word that captures the impossibility but not the gravity of arbitrarily imposing categories on living beings.

In These Cheatgrass-Infested Hills

Matthew Miller, The Nature Conservancy writer/editor, has written a beautiful article about coming to grips with beautiful yet non-native landscapes.

In my opinion, there are too many conservationists lost in a dream of pure "native" nature, unable to see the flawed-but-still-beautiful world around them.  I empathize with his struggle to learn to love degraded places, even the hard-to-love places that are infested with cheatgrass.  

Trying to widen our circle of appreciation to include even nasty invasives helps us appreciate the natural in the unnatural: the native pollinators that use invasive wildflowers, the native birds that nest in invasive trees. 

To quote Princess Mononoke, our task now is "to see with eyes unclouded by hate."

Scientific Statements Made by a Climate Change Skeptic

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal concludes that "Climate Science Is Not Settled", contrary to activists' and scientists' claims that there is no longer even a debate.

The article, written by Steven Koonin, includes a number of interesting statements and is worth a read in its entirety. Unfortunately, responses to the article have not addressed many of his factual claims, so I wanted to list a few of them here.

Please feel free to comment or link to research that addresses or refutes these statements:

1) "For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences."

2) "But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available."

3) "Although the Earth's average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity."

4) "Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century."

5) "[these model discrepancies] are not "minor" issues to be "cleaned up" by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections."

Expanding Ethics to Include Animals?

Source.

Tonight is another night in a hotel room somewhere in a small town in New Mexico, bordered by train tracks and highway. I hear calves lulling in the trailer parked back of my bathroom window, and I can hear the train long after it is gone, singing on tracks miles up the mountain.




The sun sinks low over green hills and high cumulus clouds tilt and light on fire and everything tumbles into purple ashes until the stars come out. The cows say moo over and over again. There are ten each in the upper and lower half trailer lined with hay; they look innocent in a manger scene.




In the ecologist literature (article by David Barash) I read that we are all one, that every atom in me was once in other creatures, and every action I take affects everything else. Of course, we all know this from interacting with other humans, but the key to understanding our current culture is that we don't (yet) interact with rain like we do with a human.




We listen to weather forecasts of the rain's behavior, what experts think it might do. No one does that for other people. We know other people are too complex for 3-dimensional weekend forecasts. Or, take earthquakes. Great beyond comparison to a human body, but in scale of effect like a governor or a president or a war, maybe. Sure its possible to speculate about their arrival, but when they do arrive only their presence matters. Or cherry blossom season, when everyone goes outside to say hello to mother nature, a homecoming parade for a season and a life-force, back after a long sojourn to more southern climes. The Navajo consider it extremely rude to not greet the rising sun. Would you ignore your own grandmother?




"If we see individuals, we don't see that they are only intersections of an infinite tapestry of connections. So ecologists do not speak of the bear or the forest, but the bear-forest ecosystem."

Happy 50-Year Birthday, Wilderness!

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, and one of the best celebrations, or obituaries, was just written in Orion Magazine by Jordan Fisher Smith.

In the article, he lays out the fundamental contradiction inherent in the Wilderness Act:  that wilderness lands should be managed so as to preserve their natural character, while at the same time remaining untrammeled and uncontrolled for human uses.  But at Smith points out, using examples from endangered species preserveration, carnivore reintroduction, and invasive species control, wilderness areas cannot remain "natural" in the face of omnipresent anthropogenic changes.

So managers are forced to make tough decisions to maintain the biotic integrity of the land at the price of intervening in the land where "man is a visitor, and does not remain", or allowing massive changes to snowball out of control while sitting on their hands.  The real choices are hard enough, but the temptation to meddle is even tougher.

I very much appreciate the comment of T. R. Shankar Raman

If the idea of leaving wilderness alone is outdated, so is the idea that there is some hard boundary between the wilderness and the rest of the world ‘outside’. To use this idea to justify highly intrusive gardening of wilderness reserves distracts from a more vital need of fostering positive change in human land use and behaviour outside. It is more crucial to buffer harmful impacts to wilderness areas by greatly expanding the space for conservation outward into surrounding countryside and city. That, too, can ease the disturbance footprint, allowing wilderness areas to recover along their own trajectory with less and less intervention, until land and life are free, which ultimately, is what ‘wild’ really means. And it is in bringing down that boundary, looking outward from the wilderness, that we will perhaps find the way to rewild ourselves.