Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
12
The Conservation Prison
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Inversnaid
I learnt my ecology in the tropics. I studied the subject as part of my
degree, then applied it, to a small extent, when I worked for a couple
of years at the BBC's natural history unit. But it was not until I left my
own country, first for West Papua, then Brazil, then East Africa, that I
began fully to appreciate this marvellous science. Only when I lived
among ecosystems which retained many of their trophic levels, their
diversity and dynamism, did I begin to understand how the natural
world might work.
In the Amazon I fell in with a group of scientists working at the
frontiers of the discipline, and shared the excitement of some of their
discoveries. Their work was beginning to transform our comprehen-
sion of the living planet. The lesson I learnt repeatedly, in all three
regions, was that much of the diversity and complexity of nature
could be sustained only if levels of disturbance were low. Major intru-
sions, such as clearing trees and raising cattle, quickly simplified the
ecosystem. This seems so obvious that it should scarcely need stating.
Coming home, it took me a while to notice something odd. Here,
many conservationists appear to believe the opposite: that the diver-
sity, integrity and 'health' of the natural world depend upon human
intervention, often intense intervention, which they describe as
Search WWH ::
Custom Search