I'm lying. But here I am blogging on Shifting Baselines. Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the world by eradicating invasive species. How do I reconcile shooting 160,000 goats from a helicopter in the Galapagos Islands and treating horses in North America as a native species - as North America's prodigal son? History.
Reintroducing megafauna and killing things from helicopters tend to raise eyebrows (and occasionally piss people off). They also tend to be great topics to kick off discussions on stuff we often ignore, spiraling into wonderfully heated discussions with beers flying across the room. Shifting Baselines is the ideal place to continue such dialogues and diatribes. Jeremy Jackson and Daniel Pauly are part of a small coterie who have been pondering ecological history for decades. They are in good company on tierra firma, led by luminaries like Paul Martin, Daniel Janzen, and Paul Shepard. Randy Olson has taken up the grand challenge of taking ecological history to the masses. Without doing so, all our work is largely just another annoying, albeit amusing, ivory-tower exercise. It is in that spirit, I join Jennifer here at ScienceBlogs. My contributions will often drag Shifting Baselines up on the beach - adding a component that explores our ecological amnesia on land.
Why I am joining Shifting Baselines? Believe me, it's not for the beer money (which I could use). Rather, I believe society's view of nature and wilderness fundamentally relies on its knowledge of ecological history. Society today is largely ignorant when it comes to ecological history (How many species of elephants used to roam North America? See below by paleo-artist extraordinaire Carl Buell for a visual). From those views and histories come relationships, morals, and votes.
In the next few decades, we will either save or lose a large percentage of the world's biodiversity. Given the history of the human-biodiversity relationship over the last fifty thousand years, this will be a momentous challenge. To put it gently, we've never treaded lightly on this earth. Our relationship with biodiversity is defined by our deep history, which elucidates our tendencies and capabilities. Our conservation strategies must take this history into account to be most effective. If true, it follows that we must learn, discuss, and argue about our ecological histories. We must integrate those histories with economic and aesthetic incentives for environmental conservation. Given the large stakes, we need to act swiftly--at home and in the halls of our policy-makers. Like it or not, we are now gardeners of biodiversity in our backyards and beyond. And we rely heavily on this continuum of gardens, from weeds and watermelons to wilderness. To paraphrase ecologist Daniel Janzen, we are beasts born of interaction with biodiversity, and to strip us of that complexity is to render us "colorblind, deaf, and tasteless." For hundreds of years now, each generation has left its descendants a world less full. Fewer ecosystem services, less history, less biodiversity, and less wonder. And fewer elephants - eleven species in North America. Every year, we are losing a little more of our senses. Mounting evidence suggests this is a very, very bad thing.
History grounds our values on nature and biodiversity. It is my hope that Jennifer and I can contribute just a little to the growing groundswell of opinion that we want to live with more, not less, biodiversity, nature, and wildlands. And, of course, I plan on having load of fun (and throwing a few beers) on here while trying to do so.
Environment
Life Science
Comments
Welcome Josh, but don't go throwing all the beer around, you still owe me one or two.
Posted by: CarlBuell | March 3, 2008 5:41 AM
Welcome Josh. It is terrific to have you involved with Shifting Baselines and a terrestrial complement is long overdue. SB is of course what books like 1491 are all about, not to mention the rewilding of North America. We see the same disconnects in all the dialog about tropical forest conservation we see for the oceans, and all comes back to knowing what was the baseline and how to act upon that knowledge.
Posted by: Jeremy Jackson | March 3, 2008 8:38 AM
I'm so excited we're SciBlings Josh! You're an ideal compliment to Jennifer and Shifting Baselines--already one of my favorite blogs--will be even better with you on board!
Welcome to the blogosphere...
Posted by: Sheril R. Kirshenbaum | March 3, 2008 9:27 AM
Josh - I just had to endure an "I TOLD YOU SO" session from my good friend and colleague Jeremy Jackson, who reminded me that for several years he's been saying the one thing Shifting Baselines really needs is a terrestrial component. Suffice it to say he's thrilled at your joining, as we all are. So, WELCOME!
Posted by: Randy Olson | March 3, 2008 9:45 AM
Be careful blaming "Jennifer" - that was the code name of the operation whereby Howard Hughes put his ship "Glomar Explorer" in service of the US military to try and recover a sunken Soviet submarine (try saying that quickly six times in a row!) a few decades ago. You never know who's spying on your blogs!
Posted by: Ian | March 3, 2008 9:47 AM
Hey! Good to hear from you Josh...I'm not yet convinced that things without gills are worth worrying about but I have been moving 'upstream' some lately: Just heard some great oral history work on old-time lamprey fishing ('eels') done with some of the Oregon Native American tribes. There's some SB data in there somewhere, and the 'eels' are unquestionably hurting (and likely to be listed soon too). Lemme know if you want details. Cheers, Pete
Posted by: Pete Nelson | March 3, 2008 10:18 AM
welcome josh. i'm excited to have you on board; i'm a believer in re-wilding ;-)
Posted by: razib | March 3, 2008 11:55 AM
Welcome Josh. I'm a teetotaller so I'm not impressed by the beer money but I am pleased this blog will now cover the whole Earth. Later we'll be able to blog about the future planets that will be discovered and trashed. There, at least the baselines will be well known. In this future, I will contribute more positive thoughts.
Posted by: Daniel Pauly | March 3, 2008 1:20 PM
Given how much space and food elephants need, why wouldn't we try re-establishing species like buffalo on the limited wild lands remaining instead of introducing species vaguely similar to ones that roamed the land during a different climatic period?
Posted by: Caledonian | March 3, 2008 4:57 PM
I'm a long-time enthusiast for the concept of re-wilding and the use of megafauna proxies, and look forward to reading more of your well reasoned thoughts. Many times I've looked out over the deserts of the Basin and Range and Mojanve desert and let my imagination envision the system the way was and thinking that a few elephants would be a perfect keystone species, not to mention cheetahs and a rollicking stampede of pronghorns rushing to the smell of virga. I listened to your interview on NPR science friday a while back (a couple of times) and was a little disappointed for a number of reasons, none having to do with your ideas, but with Ira's hosting (it really gets on my nerves), and the brevity of it all which allows for little but a superficial treatment and examination. Would love to know of other appearances in other venues such as CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" or "As We Know It" and considering the popularity of shows about mammoth and other megafauna on cable outlets like History and Science, it would seem a natural platform for an expanded presentation with a lot more bells and whistles. It's hard to make people understand what they're missing unless it catches their attention and imagination. More buzz is a good thing. I'll drink to that. Cheers...or "bottoms up"!
Posted by: doug l | March 3, 2008 5:39 PM
Welcome to The Family!
Posted by: Coturnix | March 3, 2008 8:08 PM
The cool thing about rewilding is/was that it is an idea about how to make things better rather than just endlessly refine the obituary of nature on the land or in the oceans.Not only that, it's not a puritan strategy since, for people who are not vegetarians, who is to say that rewilding wouldn't offer a new diversity of food for you know who. So, given all that, what are the hot new ideas for the oceans and fisheries besides MPAs and everything we are not supposed to do? We need ideas about what we can do to make things better and still enjoy the oceans in as many of the ways as possible that people enjoyed them before. I don't think we will get there without outside the box ideas like rewilding.
Posted by: Jeremy Jackson | March 3, 2008 9:25 PM
A belated thanks to all for the warm welcome. I've been distracted for a day or so with coffee-filled laptops and twirling toyota trucks (see above at Banner a la Buell). I am excited about interacting with all of you and others on SB. And I am looking forward to discussing positive, pro-active conservation ideas, those that involve rewilding and others. I have a few marine ideas up my sleeve Jeremy (e.g., Bycatch Neutral Fisheries), that hopefully one day we can discuss in person. Meanwhile, there will be plenty to write about here that should challenge our baseline beliefs.
Posted by: Josh Donlan | March 6, 2008 7:50 AM