Is conservation hopeless?

Is conservation hopeless? I do not mean “will conservation efforts ultimately fail?” but “do conservation biologists perform their work without hope that it will make a difference?” A recent article in Bioscience (Volume 60, pages 626-630) argues that yes, researchers in conservation all too often function with a pessimistic outlook. The article points out that “A society that is habituated to the urgency of environmental destruction by a constant stream of dire messages from scientists and the media will require bigger and bigger hits of catastrophe to be spurred to action, and ultimately will give up hope that anything can be done.”

This notion of too much doom and gloom has been presented before, but this paper also suggests concrete solutions. I thought the most striking was the suggestion that conservation-oriented journals request that submitted articles possess, in addition to the usual concluding section on management implications, a section on hope. This section would focus on how the study offers hope for a better future.

Another interesting aspect of the paper was the implicit assumption that researchers studying conservation-related issues should be advocates for change. Some would argue that researchers should remain as objective as possible to avoid potential bias in their work. Many elements of science are inherently subjective, but it is not a settled matter that conservation biologists are advocates – that is worthy of debate as well.

On a different note, I recently got out pheasant hunting in Minnesota – beautiful autumn! – and snow has started to fly in Laramie. Ski season is not too far away.

READING

Swaisgood, Sheppard. 2010. The culture of conservation biologists: show me the hope! Bioscience 60:626-630.

Modern history of polar bear conservation

Dag Vongraven, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, recently published a guest editorial in the journal Polar Research (2009, 28:323-326). It provides a concise rundown of events that led to today's administrative bodies responsible for managing and conserving the world's 19 populations of polar bears. It's a neat read if you are curious how data is gathered and shared, and how management decisions are coordinated, for this circumpolar, international species.

Doubt and ignorance in science

I have heard several people characterize graduate school as: the farther along one progresses in education, the more apparent one’s ignorance becomes. And, generally, I agree – as I learn about the mechanisms behind a particular natural phenomenon, I end up thinking about all the other phenomena and mechanisms of which I am totally unfamiliar.

But it is not just a matter of how much of the world you have been exposed to; I think also that as a scientist progresses, he or she absorbs the notion that it is best to doubt something unless faced with strong evidence to the contrary, preferably experimental. This doesn’t sound radical, but I think it is – the list of assumptions I make about how the natural world works is actually quite long, and the list of phenomena for which I have encountered mechanistic explanations supported by clear, experimental evidence, is really short.

Claude Bernard uses pages and pages to discuss this notion and although he was focused on human medicine, I think the implied principle in his phrase “True science teaches us to doubt, and, in ignorance, to refrain” applies to all science.

The phrase is from An introduction to the study of experimental medicine. Like I said, in this book he is taking a long time (at least according to my 21st-century attention span) to discuss the role of doubt in science, the importance of experimentation, and the critical need to humble oneself in front of nature. In short, he seems to be saying “Get over yourself – nature is complicated so don’t pretend to know it all.”

It seems kind of strange to emphasize that point. It is a point well-taken, as I described above, but today it does not seem necessary to tell scientists that they can’t make up data or tweak it to fit their hypotheses (sure, that does happen, but it is widely understood to be wholly unethical and condemnable). Perhaps it is that in Bernard’s day – the book was published in 1865 – the risk was not an unethical bending of data to fit a preconception, but a mindset that frequently put human wisdom as the pinnacle of truth, rather than clear reasoning supported by strong evidence.