Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Wildlife especially likes the empty human settlements, which provide a host of unusual and valuable
hidey-holes. “Abandoned buildings attracted many species of wild animals that use them to rest and
bring up their young,” says a report from the radiation ecological reserve.
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Badgers burrow in cellars,
barns, and under the concrete slabs of roads. Wild boars rest in sheds. Roe deer, foxes, and pine martens
feed in the overgrown gardens. Elk meet in the abandoned villages. Owls and kestrels nest in empty
buildings. The reserve has the country's largest lynx population. Bears have arrived.
Chernobyl is not quite alone in its radioactivity. Testing sites for nuclear bombs have suffered much
more. Half a century ago, the waters of the Bikini Atoll in the northern Pacific were boiled by twenty-
three US nuclear weapons tests over twelve years. The fifteen-megaton Bravo test destroyed three is-
lands, irradiated the ocean, and blasted millions of tons of coral, sediment, and marine life into the air.
Yet today two-thirds of the atoll's former coral species are back, along with some newcomers.
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Nobody
in their right mind would want more such places, but their ecological survival still tells us something
important about nature's powers of recovery—something that should help the world undo some of the
environmental devastation of the twentieth century.
Conservationists need to take a hard look at themselves and their priorities. They must learn from Puerto
Rico and Chernobyl, the Tilbury ash heap, the Bikini Atoll, the feral streets of Chicago, and the wider
world of novel ecosystems. Nature no longer congregates only where we expect to find it, in the coun-
tryside or in “pristine” habitats. It is increasingly eschewing formally protected areas and heading for
the badlands. Nature doesn't care about conservationists' artificial divide between urban and rural or
between native and alien species. If conservationists are going to make the most of the opportunities in
the twenty-first century to help nature's recovery, they must put aside their old certainties and ditch their
obsessions with lost causes, discredited theories, and mythical pristine ecosystems.
One of the few conservationists I have met who is willing to make the change is Peter Kareiva, chief
scientist of the Nature Conservancy in the United States, the world's largest and richest environmental
organization. Ironically, his members are among those nature enthusiasts who are most wedded to the
old ecology—the most reluctant, as Kareiva puts it, “to shed the old paradigms.” TNC's slogan used to
be “Saving the last great places on Earth.” But Kareiva rejects the whole idea. “Conservation's continu-
ing focus upon preserving islands of [old] ecosystems in the age of the Anthropocene is both anachron-
istic and counterproductive,” he argued in a polemic for the California-based Breakthrough Institute.
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There are hard choices to be made. Conservationists often suggest that protecting each last individual
native species is somehow essential to maintaining the “ecological services” that nature provides for
us—services such as carbon storage and maintaining the chemistry of the oceans; protecting watersheds
and maintaining river flows; pollinating plants and dispersing seeds; maintaining soils and preventing
runaway erosion. But that argument is a romantic illusion. Those services are best done by the species
on hand that do it best. In much of the world that increasingly means nature's pesky, pushy invaders.
Conservationists have “grossly overstated the fragility of nature, arguing that once an ecosystem is
altered, it is gone forever,” Kareiva says.
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The trouble is that the data simply do not support the idea.
Conservation scientists spend too little time investigating how ecosystems change when invaders come
in or humans disrupt their operation. A narrow pursuit of evidence of “harm,” driven by invasion biolo-
gists, has blinkered researchers. And so has their pervasive belief that stability is the norm and change
somehow abnormal. Neither is true. Nature is rarely in a steady state. It is the dynamics that matter, and
for too long researchers have denied this.
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