Ecological conservation has never been more important than it is right now, but perhaps "conservation" is the wrong term for the movement. To use the word "conservation" implies that something remains to be conserved, that there are still parts of the world that can truly be called Wild, but as Stephen M. Meyer points out in his to-the-point book The End of the Wild we have already lost the fight to save the great wildernesses of this planet. At this point, it's more about damage control;
Since the invention of the first stone tool, humanity has pounded the wild into a shape that fits its needs. Forests are transformed to fields. Swamps are drained. Arid landscapes are irrigated. Mountains are flattened and valleys filled. The bounty of nature in converted into commodities: timber, food, luxuries. Coexisting with nature has always meant taming it - consuming it. As the human population jumped into the billions the rise of human selection as the dominant evolutionary force was inevitable, and so was the end of the wild.
Indeed, "consumer" really is the best term for the vast majority of people in the world today (especially developed nations), taking in immensely more than we ever put back. While we might not explicitly vote for a new landfill or for drilling to go on in the arctic, we vote with our wallets every day and nature has always come up short. Life will go on, surely it will, but we have been selecting out future companions if we known it or not. White-tailed day, pigeons, raccoons, coyotes, phragmites, the zebra mussel, and countless others will continue to thrive and might even provide the basis of future evolution, but these are rather "plain" examples of a larger biodiversity that will be lost. Even if we are to protect species, however, habitats come at more of a premium and rare animals have been squeezed into smaller and smaller fragments of habitats, their death sentence being handed down even if we are unaware when the extinction will actually occur.
Our ecological debt is vast and we add to it every day, and I fear that things will become far worse even if all countries began a perfectly-planned ecological initiative today. Perhaps some charismatic species that are hanging on like the giant panda can be used to save swaths of habitat not choked by human habitation, but we have all but lost what was once truly wild and the continuing existence of a number of species will require our direct intervention if they are to continue at all. We should be doing all we can to be good stewards of our only home, but we cannot bring back the Auk or Tasmanian Tiger, nor can we escape the consequences of our actions up until this date. Still, I fear that unless a great change in outlook sweeps the western world and developing nations, we'll continue to poison our own well and ultimately no one will be left to read the warnings that perhaps came too late. I hope I am wrong, desperately so, but I fear the situation is far more dire than it may appear.
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The late Stephen M. Meyer was my professor of Environmental Politics and Policy at MIT. He was a swell guy.
It's too late the prevent the Sixth Extinction. We can only hope to limit its scope.
And that, only by addressing its root cause: the ecological imbalance that six billion human beings represent.
One of the perks of my job is that I am able to travel to forest fires (and other federal emergencies) around the country. That may sound like a strange perk, but I get to spend two weeks (usually) standing at a road block, patrolling back roads, or (my least favorite) controlling who gets into and out of the fire camp (my jobs are called Security Specialist Level 2 and Security Manager) in mountains, grasslands, canyons, mountains, you name it. It also gives me time to read.
One book I read last summer was 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. He makes a very good argument that the "wilderness" which European explorers "discovered" was actually a very well managed and productive landscape.
While at a fire in Idaho last August and September (the three fires had an active fire area of around 150,000 acres (keep in mind, though, that includes everything from charred toothpicks to unburned islands). I talked with an archaeologist from Washington (he was also a fire militia SEC2) about the book 1491 and he said that it fit in well with what he saw all over the Rocky Mountain west. His theory (which I think has a lot going for it) is that the Native Americans regularly set fires in the early spring (when it is too wet for the fires to get really large) and late fall (when you can count on snow to put the fire out before it gets really large) to clear out the underbrush and make the area more conducive to game animals.
As support for this, I would point to the journals or early explorers and the 49ers heading for California. They write of large trees, open stands, and large meadows which do not exist today. Instead, both wilderness forests and harvested forests have become choked with underbrush (ladder fuels) which feed the modern massive fires (the California chapparal is a different case). We have now, in many areas, gone back to the regular burning of the underbrush and small trees in an attempt to remove the fuels.
My point in this long ramble is that much of what we consider wilderness (especially in the lower 48, central America and even large tracts of the Amozonian rainforest) were not wilderness in our modern sense of the term. They were managed game and (in some cases) tree farms.
This is not to say that we should now say "Screw it, let's harvest everything (a la James Watt)," but (to me, at least) it means that wilderness needs to be managed (not for profitable enterprises such as mining and logging) in order to maintain the balance which was created by the Native Americans in the pre-Columbian milieu. The National Park Service and National Forest Service already do this to an extent in that fires starting naturally in designated wilderness areas are allowed to burn naturally.
Wilderness is a wonderful idea. There are places which are, truly, wilderness. Places which have never been anthorpomorphically managed, but they tend to be in areas which were too poor in resources, or too violent in climate, to support large numbers of humans.
I hope that we, as a species, can learn to live in balance with the natural world. The idea of wilderness, though, may be about 10,000 or more years to late.
Just my humble opinion. Feel free to disagree.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this Billy. S. Meyer's arguments in "The End of the Wild" stroke a cord with me, since I had built up the same impression during my career as an ecologist. However, I don't think that natural resources were that well-managed during pre-columbian times. The journals you refer to may have given the impression that an "ok" balance had been reached by the native inhabitants, but that was mostly due to the relatively low human population numbers per unit area of the continent, rather than to any management methods available. Looking at the local impact of those populations, studies have found that the damage to ecosystems was considerable. Jared Diamond has illustrated this very well in his books, especially "The Third Chimpanzee", where he documents this for communities all over the world. The problem has become so acute now because of the sheer numbers of humans and our tendency to favor short term benefits (me first, right now) over long term ones. The latter seems to me our core problem, and one that seems impossible to eradicate.