LettersSource: BioScience, Vol. 49, No. 9 (September 1999), pp. 687-688Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/bisi.1999.49.9.687 .

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Letters

CONSERVING WILDERNESS AREAS

Sahotra Sarkar is right to argue that "biodiversity conservation cannot be identical with wilderness preserva- tion" but wrong to argue that they are largely "divergent goals" ("Wil- derness preservation and biodiversity conservation-keeping divergent goals distinct," BioScience 49: 405- 412). Preserving parks and wilder- ness areas-big landscapes that re- main largely unmanaged and unmodified by human beings-is one key to preserving biodiversity. Wild areas generally preserve greater num- bers of native species than areas managed for agriculture or forestry. And large protected areas are more likely than smaller ones to preserve full complements of species in the face of the chance extinction of indi- vidual populations. Although tradi- tional economic activities by small numbers of indigenes may coexist with the preservation of much biodi- versity, modern resource extraction or permanent, large-scale settlement typically does not.

Furthermore, wilderness is itself a part of biodiversity and not just a means to preserve it. As Sarkar writes, conservation biologists standardly define biodiversity to include "di- versity at all levels of biological or- ganization, from alleles, to popula- tions, to species, to communities, to ecosystems" (p. 405). But if bio- diversity includes biological commu- nities and ecosystems, then their disappearance or "development" into something essentially different consti- tutes a loss of biodiversity. Biological communities whose history and con- tinued existence are largely indepen- dent of human manipulation remain important-although endangered- components of world biodiversity. Their continued transformation into managed resource production units

is as grave a loss as the accompany- ing species extinctions.

Sarkar suggests that "biodiversity conservation can avoid contentious political issues while simultaneously promoting long-term conservation by maintaining independence and dis- tance from wilderness preservation" (p. 410). On the contrary, it will be just as hard to preserve species in managed forests or indigenous extrac- tive reserves as it would be in national parks or wilderness areas. Harder, in fact, because more people will have a direct claim to resources needed by native plants and animals, and more human activities will have to be moni- tored and meshed with biodiversity protection. The hope that jettisoning elitist, "Eurocentric" ideals of wilder- ness preservation will foster a happy union of human and nonhuman in- terests is comforting but implausible.

Human beings must use, manage, and displace some wild nature to survive and prosper. However, in the process, biological diversity is diminished. For this reason, modern humans need to set aside areas that are not managed for our purposes but are reserved for nature's pur- poses (and purposelessness).

PHILIP CAFARO Department of Philosophy Southwest State University

Marshall, MN 56258

WARREN PLATTS Department of Philosophy Colorado State University

Fort Collins, CO 80523

RICHARD PRIMACK Department of Biology

Boston University Boston, MA 02215

Response from Sarkar:

Cafaro et al.'s comments have no logical, little sociological, and negli- gible biological merit. According to

the US Wilderness Act of 1964, which is the source of the concept of wil- derness that is used by both advo- cates and critics of wilderness pres- ervation as a method of biodiversity conservation, a wilderness is "recog- nized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untram- meled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain" (as reprinted in Callicott and Nelson 1998, p. 121). To deny that such habitats are always necessary to maintain biodiversity is not to suggest that rich habitats be replaced by planta- tion monoculture for agriculture or forestry. Rather, it is to suggest only that conserving biodiversity does not necessarily require the exclusion of all human habitation and use.

Cafaro et al.'s conflation of these two distinct positions is a logical error that vitiates the point that they were presumably trying to make, namely, that wildernesses sometimes conserve biodiversity better than many forms of human use. Neither I, nor any other biodiversity conserva- tionist, so far as I know, denies the last point. What we do deny is that the advocacy of wilderness preserva- tion is an adequate strategy for biodiversity conservation in many cases, including, most notably, the tropical habitats that are biologi- cally the richest in the world.

Turning to sociological issues, if habitats targeted by wilderness ad- vocates already contain human in- habitants, then their (usually forc- ible) removal is a certain recipe for ecological disaster in the long run.

L etters to BioScience should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief,

BioScience, 1444 Eye St., NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit letters for length or clarity without notifying the author. Letters are pub- lished as space becomes available.

September 1999 687

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This outcome is perhaps best illus- trated by India's Project Tiger, which was once touted as an exemplary case of successful conservation be- cause it allegedly increased tiger populations throughout that coun- try. By now this project has come to be recognized as an abysmal failure: Disgruntled villagers who have no stake in the wildernesses (designated as national parks) from which they were removed have collaborated with poachers to decimate tiger popula- tions. Many similar examples exist. Cafaro et al.'s argument may have had some relevance if genuine wil- dernesses abounding in biological di- versity were commonplace. In fact, they are vanishingly rare. What wil- derness advocates attempt to do is to remove human inhabitants from their homes to create the wildernesses that they so admire. (Leaving aside pru- dential questions, these attempts also raise serious ethical and legal con- cerns, although in the interest of brevity I will not discuss those con- cerns.) In sharp contrast to wilder- ness preservation, efforts such as Daniel Janzen's successful program of biocultural restoration in north- western Costa Rica, which included local use of habitat and involvement in conservation decisions (Janzen 1988), provide a much more plau- sible (and ethically justifiable) strat- egy of biodiversity conservation than anything so far conjured up by wil- derness preservationists.

Turning to biological issues, Ca- faro et al.'s claims range from the true but unsurprising (larger habi- tats are less prone to stochastic ex- tinctions than smaller ones), to the

quixotic ("wilderness is itself a part of biodiversity"), to the downright false (human activity necessarily de- creases biodiversity). Undisturbed habitats allow ecological succession to take place. This process routinely involves competitive exclusion that ultimately leads to simplified climax communities. Disturbance may well prevent the extinction of some spe- cies that would otherwise be selected against during succession. This idea lies at the core of the fairly plausible intermediate disturbance model for the latitudinal diversity/richness gra- dient (Kricher 1997).

Disturbance may arise from a va- riety of sources, including human intervention. In my article I gave the well-documented example of the Keoladeo National Park in India, where human activity was critical in preventing competitive exclusion of many grass species on which bird diversity depended. The Serengeti habitat provides another such ex- ample (Collett 1987), and there are many more. It is probably not acci- dental that the highest recorded plant and bird species richnesses are in anthropogenically disturbed habitats in the Peruvian Amazon basin (Kricher 1997). Similarly, across the world, it is also probably not acci- dental that New Guinea, with per- haps equally high biodiversity, has been more densely populated than any other similar rainforest habitat in the world (Flannery 1998).

To conclude, conservation biolo- gists need to recognize and model how human activity helps maintain biodiversity in many contexts and not just how it may be harmful to

biodiversity. Above all, we need to understand and model traditional tech- nologies in their own cultural con- texts. It is high time that wilderness preservationists face the facts of eco- logical field work instead of indulg- ing in yet another bout of ideological advocacy.

SAHOTRA SARKAR Department of Philosophy

University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1180

References cited Callicott JB, Nelson MP, eds. 1998. The Great

New Wilderness Debate. Athens (GA): Uni- versity of Georgia Press.

Collett D. 1987. Pastoralists and wildlife: Im- age and reality in Kenya Maasailand. Pages 129-148 in Anderson D, Grove R, eds. Conservation in Africa: People, Policies, and Practice. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.

Flannery T. 1998. Throwim Way Leg. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Janzen DH. 1988. Tropical ecological and biocultural restoration. Science 239: 243- 244.

Kricher J. 1997. A Neotropical Companion. 2nd ed. Princeton (NJ): Princeton Univer- sity Press.

Correction: In the article by Philip M. Lintilhac ("Toward a theory of cellularity-Speculations on the na- ture of the living cell," BioScience 49: 59-68), Figure 9 was printed upside down. Correctly printed re- prints are available from the au- thor at the Department of Botany and Agricultural Biochemistry, University of Vermont, Burling- ton, VT 05405-0086; e-mail plintilh@zoo.uvm.edu. BioScience regrets the error.

688 BioScience Vol. 49 No. 9

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