Environmental Engineering Reference
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of Life Sciences. Worst of all, conservationists often actively encourage their conversion to agricultural
plantations, in a misguided attempt to protect other forests from conversion.
The Washington, DC-based World Resources Institute is among those groups supporting a billion-
dollar Indonesian government plan to save “pristine” old-growth rain forests by encouraging palm-oil
producers to take over “degraded” forest land. But Laurance says that a lot of the ninety million acres
of Indonesia that has been designated as “degraded”—an area larger than Germany—could be almost
as rich in species as the old-growth forests. “Preventing degraded forests from being converted to oil
palm should be a priority of policy-makers and conservationists,” says Edwards. But it isn't. By elev-
ating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature and disregarding the rest—the new
wild—conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss.
From the day Henry Gleason's ideas about species being individualistic took hold, the expectation had to
be that novel ecosystems would become an increasingly important part of nature. If ecosystems are not
“super-organisms” or grand associations of species drawn inevitably to a particular “climax,” then they
can assemble anywhere, however species like, and in whatever form works. They have no preordained
template. No guest list. The spread of novel ecosystems, apparently functioning perfectly successfully,
is of itself strong evidence that Gleason was right. As enthusiast Richard Hobbs of the University of
Western Australia puts it, novel ecosystems are “the new ecological world order” and “in some cases
provide the only habitat available for species of conservation concern.”
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Even Charles Elton, the founder half a century ago of the science of alien species, recognized that
the pristine world, the old wild, was gone. He was mournful rather than fearful. “The wilderness is in
retreat,” he wrote at the end of his topic. “The balance of nature does not exist and perhaps never has ex-
isted. . . . We must grow accustomed to the idea that its plants and animal populations will have changed
their composition and their intricate structure and relationships.” In California, he noted, Asian red scale
insects widely lived in groves of citrus trees from Southeast Asia, and they did especially well where
Argentine ants ate their natural enemies. All were aliens but had made themselves at home conducting
a productive relationship in a foreign land. We should, he said, embrace that diversity. Conservation
“should mean the keeping or putting in the landscape [of] the greatest possible ecological variety. I see
no reason why the reconstitution of communities . . . should not include a careful selection of exotic
aliens.
What was once thought of as pristine is mostly far from virgin. But, equally, much that has been
written off as messed-up nature still has great conservation value. Conventional conservation, said the
late Stephen M. Meyer, MIT political scientist, operates “on the grossly mistaken belief that we can halt
ongoing extinctions, [which] fuels our preoccupation with saving relics and ghosts.” What conservation-
ists should really be doing, he said, is “turning our attention to the new assemblages of organisms that
are emerging” as a result of our activities.
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Slowly this is happening. Puerto Rico is far from unique. Many other islands—once thought of as
casebook studies in the dangers posed by aliens—are now becoming the crucibles for understanding the
value of alien species in novel ecosystems. Mauritius, a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean settled by
Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century, still contains almost 90 percent of its 765 recorded native plant
species, while another 730 introduced species have become naturalized. We may mourn the loss from
the island of its giant fruit-eating animals, the flightless dodo, tortoises, and giant lizards. All were driv-
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