An Alternative Point of View

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Conservation Biology, Pages 1466–1473Volume 15, No. 5, October 2001

Navigating the Socioecological Landscape

Linking Social and Ecological Sys-tems: Management Practices andSocial Mechanisms for BuildingResilience.

Berkes, F., and C. Folke,editors. 2000. Cambridge UniversityPress, New York. 475 pp. (459

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xvi). $80.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0–521–59140–6. $31.95 (paperback). ISBN0–521–78562–6.

Because conservation biologists havebecome more cognizant of the factthat the fate of our natural resourcesdepends not only on the resilienceof the resources, but equally on thesystem whereby they are managed,it was with some anticipation that Iread Berkes and Folke’s edited volume.While articulating the link between so-cial and ecological systems is a much-needed step in conservation, one thatprovides a clearer map of the conser-vation landscape, actually navigating inthat landscape is something different.Recognition of relations between so-cial and ecological systems should notcome at the expense of a proper un-derstanding of the individual systemsthemselves. Such a synthesis is indeedthe challenge of this book.

This edited volume is the result ofa project on linking social and eco-logical systems that stemmed from alarger research program on propertyrights and the performance of natu-ral ecosystems, initiated in 1993 bythe Beijer Institute of Ecological Eco-nomics of the Royal Swedish Acad-emy of Sciences. The aim of

LinkingSocial and Ecological Systems: Man-agement Practices and Social Mech-anisms for Building Resilience

is toexemplify the need for recognizingand acting upon the intimate link be-tween social and ecological systems,particularly as they relate to issues ofenvironmental management and sus-tainable development. The book works

off the premise that social and ecologi-cal systems should be treated as com-ponents of a single system, in whichchanges in one component feed backinto and cause adaptive change in theother component. This contrasts withmore conventional analyses that treatthe social and ecological systems asseparate.

The volume is composed of 16 chap-ters organized into four parts, pre-ceded by an introductory chapter thatoutlines the format of the book. Theeditors’ primary objective is “to inves-tigate how the management of se-lected ecosystems can be improvedby learning from a variety of manage-ment systems and their dynamics”(p. 3). To this end, they use the case-study approach, with each case studyaddressing (1) how management prac-tices suited for dealing with dynamicecosystems emerged from local socialsystems, based on local knowledge,and (2) what social mechanisms laybehind these management practices.The case studies are detailed and di-verse, including both historical andcontemporary examples from theAmericas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.Each case study follows a similar for-mat of identifying characteristics ofthe ecosystem, people, technology,local knowledge, and property-rightsinstitutions that form the socioeco-logical linkages of the study system.The editors do an impressive job ofbringing together experts from a rangeof fields, including zoology, ocean-ography, anthropology, human ecol-ogy, ecological economics, and agri-cultural economics, to explore theconnection between social and eco-logical systems across various ecosys-tems, such as northern coastal, arid/semi-arid and temperate lands; moun-tain, temperate, and tropical forests;and subarctic systems.

Each of the book’s four parts ex-plores a slightly different aspect ofsocioecological system linkages. In“Learning from Locally Devised Sys-tems,” case studies of India’s sacredgroves, Icelandic fishers, and land-usesystems in central Sweden illustratethe variation in utility of local and tradi-tional resource-management systems.In “Emergence of Resource Manage-ment Adaptations,” cases from sub-arctic Canadian Amerindians, mixed-culture societies in rural Brazil, agro-ecosystems of the Nigerian rainfor-est, and Maine’s soft-shell clam fish-ery shift focus to the adaptive natureof traditional and neotraditional sys-tems of management and how thesesystems exemplify the dynamic na-ture of socioecological systems. In“Success and Failure in Regional Sys-tems,” case studies centering on Mex-ico’s forest ecosystems, pastoralistherding in Sahelian Africa, traditionalsystems of resource management inthe Himalayas, and Newfoundland’scod fishery are used to emphasize theembedded nature of the social sys-tems that manage resource use and ar-ticulate how local and traditional sys-tems of management are not isolatedfrom regional and national political in-fluences. “Designing New Approachesto Management” steps away from casestudies and synthesizes the lessonslearned in the previous 11 chapters.The concluding chapter provides a

list of seven general principles that canbe used to shape adaptive resource-management strategies.

Each part of the book provides animpressive amount of information,with each chapter offering a wealthof supporting references. But is as awhole that the utility of this book isrealized. The editors have set con-ventional Western resource-manage-ment practices against more commu-

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Conservation BiologyVolume 15, No. 5, October 2001

nity-oriented non-Western practices;they argue not so much that West-ern practices are inadequate but thatnon-Western practices do not get fairconsideration. By illustrating that com-munity-oriented resource-managementpractices, grounded in strong social in-stitutions and norms of behavior, cansustainably maintain natural resources,the authors argue that a society’s cul-tural capital—its “. . .means and adapta-tions to deal with the natural environ-ment” (p. 13)—should be “integratedinto management practices via adap-tive-management regimes that recog-nize the dynamic, resilient nature ofsocial-ecological systems.” This adap-tive- management regime is diametri-cally opposed to conventional resourcemanagement, which is driven by west-ern reductionist science (“science ofparts,” p. 347) and is inappropriate in“a world of uncertainty and surprise”(p. 339).

Although it is clear that socialand ecological systems are intimatelylinked, I raise a point of caution witha primary tenet of the book. The so-cieties used as templates for success-ful adaptive management often sharethe characteristics of homogeneouscomposition, small size, limited mar-ket activity, and primitive technolo-gies. It is potentially these factors, notan innate conservation ethic, that haveled to sustainable management and by-product conservation. As any or all ofthese characteristics shift, the sustain-ability of the management systemmay collapse. In the final chapter, theauthors caution that “. . . for the so-cial-ecological system to persist, theintegrity of the locally adapted sys-tems in which the practices and mech-anisms are embedded needs to be pro-tected” (p. 416), yet how this is to beaccomplished is unclear.

It can be argued that the treatmentof the social and ecological as a sin-gle dynamic system may dilute thestrength of arguments better made hadsystems been examined separately. De-spite any argument against its thesis,however, this book will find a wideaudience across diverse fields becauseof the interdisciplinary nature of the

problems addressed, and it will bewell placed on the bookshelves of stu-dents, academics, and practitionersalike. For conservation to progress inthe twenty-first century, in which bothbiodiversity protection and sustain-able natural-resource use are desiredoutcomes of management actions, suc-cessful conservation practice must in-clude an intimate knowledge of studysystems, the integration of theory andpractice in an applied framework,and the communication of ideas acrossscientific, political, and ideologicalboundaries. This book, by outliningan interdisciplinary treatment of thehuman dimension as an integrative ele-ment of systems management, offers aconsiderable advance in this direction.

Christopher M. Holmes

Ecology Graduate Group, Department of An-thropology, University of California, Davis, CA95616, U.S.A., email [email protected]

Conservation through Confiscation

Indian Country, God’s Country:Native Americans and the Na-tional Parks.

Burnham, P. 2000. Is-land Press, Washington, D.C. 383pp. $27.50. ISBN 1–55963–667–X.

The old debate about the relation-ship between nature and culture hasinfluenced the aims and methods ofprotected-area management world-wide. Although most environmental-ists agree that large “people-free” ar-eas should be set aside, many parksstill largely overlap indigenous terri-tories, especially in some tropical coun-tries. The preservation-versus-conserva-tion debate is not over, and, nourishedwith the perspectives of the social sci-ences, has spread over larger culturallycontrolled wildlands. Unfortunately,many analyses seem to lack a his-torical perspective. One of the fewavailable studies that addresses thisissue is the recently published

IndianCountry, God’s Country

by PhillipBurnham.

In this well-produced book, the au-thor has introduced into the heart ofthe debate the voices of some ofthose who happen to live in severalof the areas integrated into the U.S.national park system. Burnham hasused the regular tools of histori-ographers, including written and re-corded interviews. The first sectionof the book includes four chaptersfull of information gathered from re-markably diverse sources, includingthe nearly lost archives of the innerAmerican West. The author presentsthe evolution of federal public poli-cies on national park conservation inthe context of dominant attitudes to-ward the frontier, focusing on Na-tive American conflicts over parks ina set of selected territories of theAmerican West. The second part ofthe book includes two chapters writ-ten “In the Name of the Elders” whichare based on Burnham’s tape record-ings, through which he rescued thetestimonies of a few of the survivors’descendents. The book is comple-mented with 14 photographs depict-ing past and current Native Americanand park scenes and nine maps lo-cating the parks and Native Ameri-can territories, which are especiallyuseful for the reader unfamiliar withthe western United States. Chapternotes and indices add to the read-ability of the book and the useful-ness of the document as a scholarlyreference.

Overall the book is fine, a profuselydocumented piece of environmentalhistory in which the author system-atically unveils the roots of what to-day would be called a human-rightsissue: the fate of Native American pop-ulations in relation to the develop-ment of national parks. It is so abun-dantly documented that the readermay even become tangled among themany

petite histoires

on which thecentral argument is built; for exam-ple, national parks were created in theUnited States to preserve the “Ameri-can experience [p.19] of the closingfrontier as seen through the eyes ofthe conquerors, not of the subdued.”Burnham presents history from the

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losers’ perspective and vindicates Na-tive Americans as the neglected or“invisible historical players” (p. 148)of the official versions of the earlierperiod of this part of the United States,where the “Indian past is usually hon-ored at the expense of Indian coun-try” (p. 48). As he points out, con-servation philosophers such as JohnMuir were, at that time, exalting thevalues of a pristine nature, which infact was a nature that developed af-ter the demographic collapse of theNative American populations. Onlyby their demise could God returnto reign over the celebrated, magnif-icent country. As unexpected as itmay appear today, few so directlyas Burnham have questioned exactlywhose God we have been talkingabout. Now we know it was the Godof the conquerors, not indigenousdeities.

Burnham also touches on one ofthe most sensitive questions aboutthe early environmentalists: the pure-ness of their conservation endeavors.We have been taught that nationalparks were established “in the nameof the people.” Burnham points outthat, in contrast, members of theearly conservation movement were“recruited from the ranks of those[who] embodied the very spirit ofwinning the west” (p. 25). More spe-cifically, the early American conserva-tion movement emerged from nationalpark officers and federal bureaucratsworking alongside railroad barons andentrepreneurs, to whom are often at-tributed not-so-noble interests. “Thetime for big business–big conservationwas right” (p. 91), assured a park rep-resentative of that time. Both businessand conservation interests are por-trayed in the book as having workedfor the single enterprise of closingthe frontier. At least this was how itappeared to the indigenous peoples:“national park officials never liked theidea that we were here” or “the vil-lage isn’t noted on the official parkmap” (chapter 3).

Philip Burnham does not hide hismotivation for writing the book.While he was a school teacher on a

Native American reservation, he con-fronted one of the country’s highestpoverty levels coexisting with incred-ible natural wealth. He argues thatpoverty, deprivation, and cultural ex-tinction are not just side effects ofthis most enlightened policy, but also(although not necessarily intentional)an integral part of it. Burnham showspride and shame to be two sides ofthe same coin. Furthermore, having in-formed the collective American mem-ory, he also vindicates the famous Gla-cier, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, andBadlands parks and the lesser-knownNative America peoples such as Black-feet, Havasupai, Hualapai, Ute, Ogala,Timbisha, Anasazi, Salissh-kootenai,and Lakota. The conflict between ab-origines and parks, nurtured by his-tory, is portrayed not just as a conser-vation cost-efficiency issue, but as anethical debate to which Burnham hascontributed substantially.

Although the historical scope ofBurnham’s work is restricted to theparks and Indian lands of the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries,the concern that motivates it is uni-versal. I have personally witnessedthe same ancient and sad visages ofpeople near conservation areas fromQueensland to Colombia. All overthe globe it is the same: too often lo-cal peoples consider conservationinseparable from confiscation. Thisview of history is not accepted uni-versally. Terborgh (2000), for exam-ple, referring to land-tenure regimesin the United States, states that “an-other few percent is communal landover which sovereignty has been

ceded

(emphasis added) by treaty toindigenous tribes” (p. 189). Againstthis kind of understanding Burnhamstrives to establish that conservationpolicies did not simply follow geno-cide but helped implement it throughconquest, treaty, right of discovery, orpurchasee—in brief, land confiscation.Burnham thus weighs into the mostsensitive aspect of the current conser-vation debate, its ethical dimension(or the lack thereof), which ulti-mately determines its potential uni-versal character.

While reading this book I had thefeeling that the universality of theso-called “emerging American con-servation ethic” decreased as the cul-tural frontier closed, as indigenousvalues were reduced to smuggled Na-tive American art commodities, andas Native Americans themselves weredying. An alternative view is that ourown ethnocentrism is what has be-come universal and, as such, has in-fluenced our conservation paradigms.A new look at Leopold’s frequentlyquoted land ethic may give us a clue asto the deeper choice at stake “Whenwe see the land as a community towhich we belong. . . .” The key ofthe matter may not be so much themany-times vindicated “land,” but towhom this “we” refers.

Burnham’s book is not just a retro-spective moral judgment or a requiemfor aboriginal cultures. Most peopleagree that national parks, at least inthe United States, were the best pos-sible invention when natural and cul-tural frontiers were inevitably disap-pearing altogether. Conversely, theethical argument the author developsis a forward-looking one that standsacross time. It is now evident thatthe official conservation paradigm stillneeds to evolve before it can claimuniversal status. For this it will al-ways be worthwhile to listen to theplethora of untold human stories thatrelate to conservation practices, suchas the ones Burnham has rescued fromobscurity.

This is a timely book, especiallywhen we perceive how the con-servation discourse risks being self-circumscribed by north-based viewsabout other peoples’ lives and terri-tories. A short time ago Colchester(2000) reminded us that the “conser-vation scientist should no longer as-pire to be managers of other peo-ples’ lands, but rather aim to be advisersto indigenous peoples to help securetheir futures.” If we agree, then know-ing history may prevent us from be-ing doomed to repeat it. This aware-ness is especially important in regionswhere the cultural frontier has not yetbeen closed and where cultural and

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biological megadiversity still largelyoverlap. There are places where at-tempts at transplanting the people-free park model have caused culturaldisruption. If blindly enforced, thepolicy serves to undermine opportu-nities for stewardship over larger, cul-turally controlled territories (Schwartz-man et al. 2000 ).

Conservation policies of the latenineteenth and twentieth centuriessought to rescue vanishing nature assomething outside itself. Burnhamdoes not blame past policymakers forhaving failed to perceive that indige-nous people were worthy of respect.But we should be blamed if we donot acknowledge that today, beforefull globalization, there are still otherperspectives worth considering. Hu-mans are subjects of ancient culturalecosystems to whom cultural and bi-ological conservation is still a singleaim. David Western (1997) succinctlydepicts the choice: “What is truly atstake is the loss of our ability to co-exist among ourselves, much less withother species. With the disappearanceof the Massai, the Bushmen, and Pyg-mies, we have made space for na-ture but lost the intimacy of livingwith it. When you have lived amongpeople who live with nature, it ishard to accept that coexistence isdead.” It is thus a matter of saving auseful, sacred, and cultural nature,as seen from the eyes of the ones yetto be conquered. Coexistence at thedawn of the twenty-first century willrequire that conservation policies andcultural agendas coexist in real-worldcommunities and mutually benefit oneanother. The sad truth is that conser-vationists might be failing to achievelasting mutual benefits, despite thenice evolution of our internal dis-course. If this is the case, what willremain after the holistic ventures is akind of status quo, in which conser-vationists will favor conservation, so-cioenvironmentalists will favor com-munities, and anthropologists and“new agers” will favor culture. It re-mains to be seen whether there isa place for coexistence in the realworld. Burnham’s book nourishes this

dream, even though it is not a uni-versal one.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to A. Putney, C. Romero,and J. Putz, who kindly provided valu-able comments on the final draft ofthis review.

Germán I. Andrade

A.A. 101447, Bogotá, Colombia, email [email protected]

Literature Cited

Colchester, M. 2000. Self-determination or en-vironmental determinism for indigenouspeoples in tropical forest conservation.Conservation Biology

14:

1365–1367.Schwartzman, S., A. Moreira, and D. Nepstadt.

2000. Rethinking tropical forest conserva-tion: perils in parks. Conservation Biology

14:

1351–1357.Terborgh, J. 1999. Requiem for nature. Island

Press, Washington, D.C.Terborgh, J. 2000. The fate of tropical forests:

a matter of stewardship. Conservation Bi-ology

14:

1358–1361.Western, D. 1997. In the dust of Kilimanjaro.

Island Press, Washington, D.C.

An Alternative Point of View

Common Lands, Common Peo-ple: the Origins of Conservationin Northern New England.

Judd,R. W. 1997. Harvard University Press,Cambridge, MA. 335 pp. $18.95.ISBN 0–674–00416–7.

In this intriguing conservation his-tory, Richard Judd argues that, ratherthan arising in the wilderness Westfrom progressive or scientific, elitistroots, the conservation movement inAmerica had its roots among commonfarmers and fishers of nineteenth-century New England. It developed asthese common folk were grapplingwith threats to their deeply heldbeliefs in democratic access to andcommon stewardship of natural re-sources. Relying heavily on primarysources, including agricultural jour-

nals, local news reports, legislativerecords, and commission reports, Judddevelops a series of case studies to de-tail the common people’s attempts toprotect and preserve their familiarlandscapes and resources in the faceof social and institutional changes.Selected etchings, historical photo-graphs, and maps are used effectivelyto illustrate points in the text. In thiscontext, he includes Massachusettsalong with New Hampshire, Vermont,and Maine in northern New Englandwith the reasonable argument thatthese states all share strong, historicaland political connections as well assimilar landscapes, forests, and coast-lines.

The book is divided into four mainsections. The first, “Foundations,” de-scribes the pioneering settlement ofthe northeastern frontier in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth cen-turies, which depended largely onexploitation of the abundant naturalresources of the region. Judd seesthis initial exploitation as being fol-lowed by an attempt to create a prop-erly ordered cultural landscape con-taining a balance of farm and nature.The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s GreatPond Ordinance of 1641, which estab-lished open access to bodies of freshwater 10 acres or more in size, andearly land divisions within colonialtowns reflect a collective commitmentto equitable allocation of commonresources and the priority of com-munity welfare over private resourcerights. These attitudes persisted andgradually evolved through this eraas farm and forage subsistence wasgradually supplanted by more pro-gressive farming practices. The riseof commercial resource users furtherstrained these traditions. This sectionconcludes with a discussion of ef-forts to restock the region’s alreadydepleted inland fisheries and an ex-amination of the ensuing legal dis-putes over access rights to these re-plenished resources.

The second section, “CommonLands,” begins with an examinationof the farm reform movement. Juddviews these farmers, struggling in an

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often marginal landscape and in theface of major economic and environ-mental changes to create a morallyordained, efficiently used landscape,as the foundation for Pinchot’s utili-tarian conservation ideas. In fact, heviews these farmers as the first prac-tical foresters, working to improvethe productivity and appearance oftheir woodlots. At the same time,larger logging operations and their re-sulting environmental problems werecausing major concerns throughoutthe East. These concerns led to theestablishment of state Forestry Com-missions in the late 1880s. The sec-ond section concludes with an ex-amination of the rise of the Romanticstrain of landscape appreciation inurban areas, its merger with agrarianland stewardship, and the fight forthe creation of the White MountainNational Forest. This New Hampshirecase is contrasted with the situationin Maine, where substantially differentland-ownership, population, and de-velopment patterns and political struc-tures produced a dramatically differ-ent approach to forest conservation.

Section three, “Common Waters,”highlights the many conflicts thatarose as social and economic changesimpinged on the traditional culture oflocal and regional fisheries. Dammingrivers and streams for industrial powerin conjunction with increasingly effi-cient commercial fishing downstreamor in the bays virtually eliminatedmany local fisheries. Opposing viewsof agrarian labor or industrial capital asthe source of economic value fueledmuch of the ensuing political debate.Inability to resolve these conflicts atthe local level led to the creation ofthe New England state Fisheries Com-missions in the 1860s. Judd reviewsthe attempts of these commissions,the first government agencies specifi-cally devoted to resource conserva-tion, to restore migratory river fish-eries. Despite considerable scientificunderstanding, these attempts werelargely unsuccessful for political rea-sons. Judd then traces a gradual shiftin the commissions’ activities awayfrom large rivers and food supplies to-

ward smaller, upper-watershed streamsand recreational fishing, setting thestage for modern, progressive con-servation efforts.

The final section, “Rural Tradi-tions in the Progressive Era,” followsthis shift from rural proponents ofconservation based on utilitarian viewsof land use to urban proponents ofconservation based on Romantic rec-reational ideals and the accompany-ing shift from local to remote controlof resources. Judd sees this changedriven initially by rising urbanism anda resulting increase in tourism in theserural, often economically depressedareas. The resulting conflicts pittedrecreational fly fishers against subsis-tence bait fishers, encouraged outsiderecreational hunters by establishingclosed seasons, and emphasized classantagonisms. Still, Judd argues, theconservation movement in northernNew England at the start of the twenti-eth century was not so neatly split asit seemed at the national level be-tween aesthetic preservationists andutilitarian conservationists. Finally,Judd details parallel conflicts be-tween locals and outsiders in coastalfisheries, as native part-time fisherswere confronted with competitionfrom commercial fishers for a declin-ing resource. In this instance, sciencerather than Romantic ideals deter-mined a progressive conservation pro-gram, but traditional cultures stronglyinfluenced policy largely because thelocal people were accustomed to ademocratic economic structure, werepolitically active, and were still able toinfluence regional policy.

A difficulty with the book, albeit arelatively minor one, is that the casestudies, organized by topic, are notsequential and seem somewhat dis-jointed. Although Judd lays out histhesis and approach clearly in the in-troduction, it can be difficult to keepin mind the overall sequence of de-velopments.

Whether or not one agrees withJudd that the national conservationmovement began in these New En-gland villages, his description of thecommon people’s responses to threats

to their common resources posed bysocial and economic change is compel-ling and shows “commitment amongcommon people to protect and pre-serve a familiar landscape” (p. 266).As an ecologist attempting to inter-pret the current landscapes and envi-ronmental processes in New England,I am ever more aware that it is impos-sible to understand the present or toplan for the future without a thor-ough understanding of the past. I es-pecially recommend this book to sci-entists and biology students becauseit documents through very readablecase studies the critical roles of his-tory and politics in shaping our inter-action with the environment. As Juddpoints out “it is important to remem-ber that environmental thought re-ceives its power less from scientificor legal accuracy than from the wayit resonates with popular social im-pulses” (pp. 11–12). Effective conser-vation depends on recognition of theseintricate connections between natureand culture, between natural commu-nities and human communities.

John O’Keefe

Fisher Museum of Forestry, Harvard Forest, Har-vard University, Petersham, MA 01366-0068, U.S.A.,email [email protected]

Taming Henry

No Man’s Garden: Thoreau and aNew Vision for Civilization andNature.

Botkin, D. 2000. Island Press,Washington, D.C. 300 pp. $24.95.ISBN 1–55963–465–0.

Daniel Botkin believes that many en-vironmentalists take too negative aview of the human presence in na-ture. In his new book, he asks read-ers to consider the positive possibili-ties of cities rather than writing themoff as cancers on the biosphere, toappreciate semiwild areas close tohome, and to recognize the waysconscientious foresters and ecologi-cal restorationists can manage na-ture to enhance biodiversity. His dis-

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cussion of these issues ranges widely,from Mono Lake to the Maine Woods.Botkin seeks to place these reflec-tions within an overall environmentalphilosophy, writing in his introduc-tion that his “purpose is to help ad-just our approach to living withinnature and to integrating civilizationand nature, in the hope that both canprosper and persist.” And he enlists en-vironmentalism’s patron saint in thisproject, weaving quotes from and anec-dotes about Henry Thoreau throughoutthe book.

At first glance, the hermit of Waldenmight seem an unlikely ally for Bot-kin’s project. Yet as Botkin points out,Thoreau valued both nature and cul-ture. At Walden Pond he had Homer byhis bedside—in the original Greek—and enjoyed frequent visits fromleading writers and thinkers. Further-more, Thoreau was able learn a tre-mendous amount about nature andform a strong personal and spiritualattachment to it in the relativelypopulous and tamed environment ofa Boston suburb.

So, Botkin’s positive message isplausible and his vehicle for convey-ing it clever and potentially insight-ful. Still, despite making scattered in-teresting points, the book fails in itslarger aims, for three main reasons.First, Botkin tends to set up strawmen to attack, so as to make his ownpositions seem more reasonable. Sec-ond, his discussions of practical con-servation issues often set up falsedichotomies, misrepresent opposingviews, and fail to specify clearly hisown solutions to hard conservationproblems. Third, he simplifies anddistorts Thoreau’s views, thus avoid-ing the searching discussion of fun-damental issues his book promisesand Thoreau’s books delivered.

An example of the first kind of fail-ure is Botkin’s caricature of the phi-losophy of deep ecology. Deep ecol-ogists, we are told, “reject civilization”(p. 36) and believe “that peoplemust be placed at the bottom of themoral order” (p. 241). Deep ecolo-gists support “the suppression of in-dividualism and democracy” (p. 40)

and think “that it is wrong for peo-ple to modify and adjust the environ-ment” anywhere, anytime (p. 227).Who believes any of this? Certainlynot Arne Naess, whom Botkin invokesas some sort of bogey man, rather thana careful and rigorous philosopherworking toward what Botkin claimsshould be our main goal: developinga philosophy that combines the bestof culture and nature. Botkin mighthave given us an honest interpreta-tion of Naess’s philosophy and spec-ified his differences with him pointby point. But deep ecologists aremore valuable to him as straw men,appearing at various points withfoolish, indefensible views so thatwhatever view Botkin is presentingwill seem more plausible.

A similar failure to directly engageopposing views is shown in Botkin’sdiscussion of practical conservationissues. A good example is his treat-ment of the proposal of the environ-mental group RESTORE for a 3.2million–acre Maine Woods NationalPark (pp. 161–173). Botkin clearlydislikes the idea of such a park, buthe doesn’t say why. He neglects todiscuss the poor forestry practicesand development pressures that arefragmenting and harming Maine’sforests, despite the fact that the parkproposal makes sense only as a re-sponse to these pressures. He fails topropose his own alternative to thestatus quo—an unacceptable failurefor a conservation biologist. When itcomes to discussing the justificationfor the proposed park, Botkin rejectsthe view that we should preserve spe-cies and ecosystems simply for theirown sake or “intrinsic value,” but heprovides no clear discussion of thiscentral issue. He seems to believe thatwe can advocate nature preserva-tion either for anthropocentric orbiocentric reasons, but not both. Thisis clearly a false dichotomy: from Yose-mite and Yellowstone onwards, na-tional park supporters have givenboth. Botkin claims that RESTOREshould advocate protection of wildlands for their aesthetic, spiritual, orother benefits to humans, rather

than for their intrinsic value. Yet evena cursory glance at the group’s litera-ture and website (www. restore.org)shows that such appeals are centralto their arguments for the park. Hereagain, Botkin could have learned some-thing, or at least clarified his own po-sition, by paying attention to what thepeople he criticized actually said.

Perhaps the book’s greatest fail-ure, however, is its treatment of Tho-reau. “Rather than seeing species orecosystems as important in themselves,Thoreau saw nature as important tohuman creativity, civilization, and cul-ture” (p. 44), Botkin writes, perpet-uating his implausible, exclusive di-chotomy. He follows this with theastonishing assertion that “I foundlittle if any discussion in his writingsof an intrinsic value of nature inde-pendent of the ability of human beingsto benefit from it” (p. 54). The betterpart of two chapters of

Walden

aregiven over to arguing for such intrinsicvalue and to exploring the resultingethical demands on us. In the chapteron “Higher Laws,” Thoreau arguesfor vegetarianism and against hunt-ing, based on the moral considerabil-ity of individual sentient animals. Andin the chapter on “The Bean-Field,”he considers what part of an intrinsi-cally valuable wild landscape he hasa right to appropriate for his ownuse. Every one of Thoreau’s books,and most of his natural history essays,assert the intrinsic value of nature andthe need for human restraint in its use.

It is true that Thoreau also talksabout the knowledge, sense of his-tory, spiritual connection, and en-riched aesthetic experience that con-tact with wild nature provides topeople. But these are additional rea-sons to preserve wilderness, exploreit responsibly, and use it sparingly.Thoreau’s recognition of these an-thropocentric values does not meanthat our interests should always trumpthe interests of other species or thatwe should manage all parts of the land-scape according to our own needs anddesires. He explicitly and repeatedlyrejects these positions; they are Bot-kin’s, not Thoreau’s.

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Botkin also denies that Thoreauvalued wilderness, mostly on the ba-sis of his famous description of adifficult excursion climbing MountKatahdin in 1846. This leaves uswondering why Thoreau returnedtwice more for extended wildernesstrips to Maine or made dozens ofmountain climbs throughout NewEngland and New York in the follow-ing years. Botkin asserts that Thoreauadmired the timber cruisers workingthe forest near Katahdin and felt “astrong desire to participate in its log-ging and use” (p. 117). This is con-tradicted by numerous passages, suchas the following from Thoreau’s book

The Maine Woods

(1996: 158–159):

Is it the lumberman then who isthe friend and lover of thepine—stands nearest to it andunderstands its nature best? . . .No, it is the poet who lovesthem as his own shadow in theair, and lets them stand . . . Thepine is no more lumber thanman is, and to be made intoboards and houses is no moreits true and highest use thanthe truest use of a man is to becut down and made into ma-nure. There is a higher law af-fecting our relation to pines aswell as to men. A pine cutdown, a dead pine, is no more apine than a dead human carcassis a man. . . . Every creature isbetter alive than dead, men andmoose and pine-trees, and hewho understands it aright willrather preserve its life than de-stroy it.

This love for wild nature and will-ingness to rein in human economicactivities to preserve it is the corner-stone of Thoreau’s environmentalethic. It should be the cornerstoneof ours as well. It is his love for wil-derness and his appreciation of thethreats facing it that prompt Tho-reau, a few pages later in

The MaineWoods

(p. 205), to propose a systemof “national preserves . . . in whichthe bear and panther, and someeven of the hunter race, may still ex-ist, and not be civilized off the faceof the earth.” In Maine, Thoreausays, such a preserve would protectthe full complement of native spe-cies and keep the land wild. For“these are not the artificial forests of

an English king—a royal preservemerely. Here prevail no forest laws,but those of nature” (p. 105).

Botkin is right: we need an environ-mental ethic that celebrates humanculture and wild nature and makes alegitimate place for both. We needsustainable forestry and healthy cit-ies and ecological restoration of de-graded lands. But we also need to reinin the excessive human appropriationof the biosphere and our desire tocontrol the entire landscape; we needto set aside more wilderness. To makethis possible, we need an ethic that in-sists we consume less. The real HenryThoreau has a lot to say about whatsuch an ethic demands of us and whatit offers in return.

Philip Cafaro

Department of Philosophy, Colorado State Uni-versity, Fort Collins, CO 80523, U.S.A., [email protected]

Literature Cited

Thoreau, H. D. 1996. The Maine Woods. Bookof the Month Club, New York.

Making a Big Difference

The Tipping Point: How LittleThings Can Make a Big Difference.

Gladwell, M. 2000. Little, Brown andCompany, Boston, MA. 279 pp.$24.95. ISBN 0–316–31696–2.

Conservation Biology

frequently pub-lishes essays and letters that admon-ish academic training in conserva-tion for failing to teach us what wereally need to know to make conser-vation work. Recommendations arecommonly voiced for improved inter-disciplinary education and for moreon-the-ground involvement in man-agement and policy making. This isall well and good, but it still smacksof a sterile academic approach—a mat-ter of curriculum reform. An equallyvaluable solution to the irrelevance ofso much academic conservation mightbe to encourage a wide reading ofbooks that discuss effective, manage-

ment strategies and team building.Such topics might seem far removedfrom metapopulation models and pop-ulation viability analysis, but successfulconservation depends on much morethan science alone. A remarkable newbook of this ilk is “

The Tipping Point

:

How Little Things Can Make a BigDifference

,” by Malcolm Gladwell.Gladwell, who was formerly a businessand science writer for the

WashingtonPost

, is now a staff writer at

The NewYorker.

His thesis is that individualscan make a huge difference, but thatit requires a special concordance ofseveral circumstances. Because somany readers of this journal want tomake a difference, they would ben-efit greatly by reading Gladwell’s book.I found that it helped me to under-stand why some conservation initia-tives I have been involved with suc-ceed whereas others fail.

Gladwell uses the spread of an epi-demic as a metaphor for how chang-ing attitudes and ideas move througha population. To launch an “epidemicof change,” three types of people areneeded: those who know a lot (“ma-vens”), those who are extremely wellconnected (“connectors”), and thosewho are persuasive (“salespersons”).But even having the right combina-tion of people does not guarantee thatchange will happen. Obviously, theidea itself has to have merit—whatGladwell calls the “stickiness” of anidea. Lastly, the context in which thechange or new idea is presented mustbe right. This fun-to-read book is filledwith examples that turn this mes-sage into a compelling way of lookingat the world. For instance, we learnhow, by using beauticians as “connec-tors,” a community of African-Ameri-can women in San Diego was cata-lyzed to pay more attention to the riskof breast cancer and seek mammo-grams. We are told about the “magicnumber of 150” as a limit to the sizeof groups that allows sharing of in-formation and clear division of re-sponsibilities without the burdenof oppressive hierarchies. Anecdotesdescribing connectors, mavens, andsalespeople will prompt any reader

Book Reviews

1473


of this book to start thinking of theirprofessional colleagues in a new light.

Gladwell’s numerous tales aboutthe importance of context are partic-ularly compelling (and disturbing).In an experiment involving seminari-ans and two treatments—having anappointment for which the subjectswere late versus having just discussedthe parable of the good Samaritan—we learn how crucial context was towhether or not an individual in needgot assistance from the seminarians.Of course, we learn a great deal aboutthe infamous “sham prison” in thebasement of Stanford University’s psy-chology department and how contextaltered human behavior. A remark-able experiment examining the con-

text dependence of cheating amongthousands of schoolchildren is alsosummarized. Such studies might seemremote from conservation, but theirmessage is indispensable. Conserva-tion requires changing the behaviorof individuals, societies, and govern-ments. One will never succeed inpromoting change without a sense ofthe message’s context.

We so often think of conservationas a scientific discipline, and certainlyscience should play a major role inconservation practice. But to imple-ment conservation, we build teams ofpeople—ideally of connectors, ma-vens, and salespeople—and we insti-gate change by delivering compelling(“sticky”) messages in a fruitful con-

text. The platitudes put forth byGladwell are, in hindsight, a bit obvi-ous, but the details of the examplesare eloquent and insightful. Many ofthe stories told by Gladwell will makeyou revisit your own world in a newway. Gladwell has written a wonder-fully optimistic book that I recom-mend to all conservation biologists.Modest attention to the message ofthis book will help us accomplish con-servation in a way no amount of cur-riculum reform could ever achieve.

Peter M. Kareiva

NWFSC, Division of Conservation Biology, 2725Montlake Boulevard East, Seattle, WA 98112,U.S.A., email [email protected]

An Alternative Point of View

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Transcript of An Alternative Point of View