Climate change leaving threatened species behind
January 29th, 2008 by Jim JustThe approach of governments and environmentalists to conservation and species preservation over the past 100 years has been to set aside patches of more-or-less protected habitat.
But when you confine a small set of animals to a tiny patch of forest or other habitat, they can’t move when their patch starts to degrade. And with global warming and climate change, we’re threatened with global and systemic degradation, over a period of time which is an eyeblink compared to the geological time over which species evolved. Our piecemeal approach is looking increasingly futile.
As John Hawks puts it in a recent blog post:
“[M]uch of the activity of conservationists is mere triage – trying to stabilize threatened populations. It doesn’t help that the natural world can be as unstable as the human world. Species have adapted to natural instability, but being penned in by humans is entirely new.”
UPDATE: A bit of serendipity – I see that today’s (1/29/08) NY Times has an article raising exactly the same point:
“Conservation organizations that work to preserve biologically rich landscapes are confronting a painful realization: In an era of climate change, many of their efforts may be insufficient or beside the point.”
The article reveals that mainstream conservation organizations such as The Nature Conservancy don’t yet get it – that the strategy of saving bits and pieces of the environment was wrong-headed from the get-go. Trying to save little bits of the world while sacrificing the rest has proved a catastrophic failure.