Environmental Engineering Reference
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By its own measures, conservation is failing, Kareiva says. Many protected areas, in which con-
servationists have invested so much, are about as true to nature as Disneyland. From the Serengeti to
Yellowstone, and from the Amazon jungle to Siberia's Pleistocene Park, these are managed ecosystems.
Conservation cannot promise a return to pristine, pre-human landscapes. It needs to “jettison idealised
notions of nature, parks and wilderness—ideas that have never been supported by good conservation
science—and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.”
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As an article in
New Scientist
magazine in May 2013 argued, conventional conservation has focused
“on two goals: saving threatened species and restoring Earth to how it used to be. Both are doomed. The
first misses the point, and the second is impossible. . . . The concept of natural has outlived its usefulness
in conservation.” Ecosystems, it said, are not worth preserving “in aspic, or rewinding to some romantic,
pristine past.”
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I would add one more thing. The more damage that humans do to nature—through climate change,
pollution, and grabbing land for intensive agriculture and plantation forestry—the more important alien
species and novel ecosystems will be to ensuring nature's survival. Aliens are rapidly changing from be-
ing part of the problem to part of the solution. And in a world where supposedly pristine habitats require
constant micromanagement to keep them going, where they are increasingly like theme parks for con-
servation scientists, the truly wild lies elsewhere. It is in the unmanaged badlands and novel ecosystems.
The bits of nature we don't cosset and pamper. The new wild.
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