Why are the greenies going brown?
By Professor Bob Scholes
Ecologists, myself included, love nothing more than to be in places unsullied by grubby human fingerprints. But when an Victorian-era evangelist was asked why he hung around the seamier side of London, he replied “because that is where the sinners are”! The pressing environmental problems of the world will not be solved if environmental scientists consider themselves too pure to get down and dirty.
There is a risk, of course, of being co-opted into an agenda which pays lip-service to sustainability. In my experience, this risk is real but manageable if you are alert to it. My opinion is that the risk of being compromised is acceptable when compared to the certainty of the undesirable outcomes which follow if experts fail to engage with the problem. It is basic human psychology that approaching such an engagement from a pious and judgmental standpoint is unlikely to gain trust and cooperation. In particular, we need to be in collaborative rather than confrontational engagement with two sets of stakeholders: those who are responsible for doing damage – knowingly or not – and those whose job it is to regulate their activities.
Traditional ecology is thought of as being ‘green’. The ecology of industrial and mining sites, cities and farmlands is thought of as being ’brown’. The fundamental principles of ‘brown ecology’ are exactly the same as those of ‘green ecology’, so the distinction is somewhat artificial: the same ecological processes of resource acquisition, niche limits, competition and mutualism, element cycling et cetera are in operation, and the same intellectual rigour is required. There is no reason why an individual or institution can’t do both types of work. It is a false and dangerous view that ecosystems are just the ones where there is no human impact, and the landscapes and seascapes which support our livelihoods are something else; a sacrificial wasteland perhaps. The reality is that less than one quarter of the global land surface is ‘wild’ in any meaningful sense; most of that is in marginal habitats such as extreme deserts, high mountains or the frozen poles.
The fundamentalist view of much of the nature conservation establishment, in which the world is divided into ‘protected’ and ‘sacrificed’ areas, and species into ‘endangered’ and ‘no concern’ (or worse still, into ‘iconic’ and taken for granted, is a recipe for failure – not only for the protection of nature, but also for the maintenance of a habitable planet for humans. Protected areas are just one element of the necessary strategy, and in the contemporary world are unlikely to amount to more than 10% of the land surface and perhaps 20% of the oceans. The really important interventions occur on the remainder, often using work-a-day-species and transformed landscapes. The critical questions are: How do we modify what we as humans do in pursuit of our needs and desires, in such a way that ecological processes essential for our wellbeing and those of other species, are able to function as effectively as possible? How do we restore those functions when they are impaired? These are brown ecology questions.
Imagine dragging yourself to the doctor, feeling awful. When you get there the receptionist turns you away, saying “Sorry, the doctor only treats healthy patients!"