Steve Packard, "Restoring Oak Ecosystems"
(Reply to Katz & Mendelson and defense of restoration at Cap Sauers)
- Old ideas of nature need to reject (146)
- These ideas are deeply embedded in culture, are inadequate, have not worked
in practice, and conflict with current science and nature conservation
practice
- One: Nature best defined as animals/plants w/o people ("nonhuman
nature")
- Two: Biodiversity thrives if leave nature alone (e.g., the preservationist
paradigm)
- PACKARD'S NEW CONCEPTION OF NATURE
- One: Nature as rich, ancient, diverse communities of long evolved species
("historical biodiversity")
- This is what needs to be protected on nature preserves
- Problems? Deserts not nature as relatively biologically poor? What
about abiotic nature? Glaciers not nature? What about
biotechnological creation of biodiversity?
- Two: Biodiversity on a human-dominated planet depends on human
restoration (stewardship/involvement)
- Necessity of management theme (like Jared Diamond's view)
- Though the greatest threat to global biodiversity is people-cause
habitat destruction (i.e., human influence), in nature preserves, human
disturbance is not the greatest threat, but rather processes that were once
considered natural (e.g., exotics, imbalance of predator/prey, lack of
fire)
- Natural areas are being destroyed by processes that people have
caused (unnatural processes) where the agents are nonhumans
- Protecting biodiversity/nature in nature reserves requires human
involvement
- Scars of saw, herbicide, fire--though perhaps aesthetically
unpleasant--are signs that the healing has begun
- Temporary necessity of intensive care measures
- Loss of people from an ecosystem in which they played an essential
role is as destructive to the ecosystem as loss of a key predator
- E.g., Native Americans use of fire, current hunters?
- But humans acting naturally are not supposed to disrupt
essential processes of ecosystem on his view….
- FOR PACKARD, PEOPLE CAN BE PART OF NATURE
- People are part of nature as long as they don't degrade it
- People's activity on nature is natural as long as their impact is not so
great/rapid that they destroy essential processes
- E.g., cause species extinction
- People can play a constructive and important role in this new concept of
nature
- When people restore nature (even using bulldozers, saws, chemicals)
it is still nature/natural
- Restorationists aren't creating artifactual landscapes any more than
Native Americans did when they managed the land
- Natives played important role in prairie ecosystems for 1000s
of years, hunting, gathering, burning
- They were as much a part of nature as the beaver and the
buffalo
- So too with modern restorationists
- Packard's notion of people (restorationists) as parents of nature
- It's an honor to be among the first to have a nurturing relationship
with wild nature...If we are dependent on nature, what's so terrible
about nature being dependent on us too. We can help nature maintain
its health...And, at least for prairies, savannas, and oak woodlands of
Illinois we have to help those areas or they'll be lost...In some ways
nature was our parents and now we're its parents. Now it depends on
us. We don't want to depend on anyone and we don't want anyone to
depend on us. As we mature, however, most of us come to realize that
this attitude is ultimately pretty boring and empty." Steve Packard,
1990
- "Like a good parent, we humans need to protect an unsteady being
from certain insults to its health and help some life go forward on its
own and in the process it becomes more truly itself" 163, 164
- Holmes Rolston's reply:
- The parent-child analogy is misleading. Parents cease to operate as
parents when they are dependent on us. Though, owing to the
inevitable decline of individuals, parents will become dependent on
their children, we do not want to cultivate those dependencies. Our
parents are failing when these are required. Nature is not some
failing parent that now needs to become dependent on us. Holmes
Rolston, Conserving Natural Value, p. 201