Within discussions of environmental issues, there are two broad approaches one can take. On one hand there are those who argue that the goal should be the creation and preservation of wilderness free of human influence. This view can be broadly construed as "preservation."
The other major strain favor using human management to ensure that the natural systems maintain the state they enjoyed prior to human involvement. That approach is generally referred to as "conservation."
The differences are instructive. The historic tallgrass prairie was maintained by fire across the broad center of North America. Fires raged across thousands of acres, spurred by lightning strikes (and by native peoples) every few years. These regular burns, like the one photographed by Kansan Jim Richardson for this month's National Geographic (above), destroyed tree and shrub seedlings before they grew thick enough bark to fend off a fire, and before they shaded and poisoned native plants. The prairie's natural rhythm was defined by these fires.
Clearly, such uncontrolled fires are inconsistent with human habitation. As fires were suppressed, trees and shrubs invaded. In 1945, the University of Kansas decided to protect some land for use in research and teaching. They bought a farm north of town, and imposed a deed on the land forbidding artificial manipulation: perfect preservation. You can't kill the animals and you can't set fires.
That farm, which was bare land in 1945, is now a forest. Before it was farm, that area was prairie – a small patch of native prairie still exists across the road. By keeping the land free of human influence, the farm didn't return to prairie, it became a forest.
The plot of native prairie is burned regularly by KU. Next to it are four other plots of land, farmland until the 1970s. On one, the university does nothing. On another, they mow regularly, on the third they allow grazing, and the fourth they burn. When we take classes out to those plots, the only one without any shrubs is the burned site. Even with regular mowing, little cedar shoots pop up. Those shrubs have toxic chemicals, so the grazed site has gigantic junipers growing on it, and the unmanaged site is a thicket.
To protect the prairie, it's necessary for humans to intervene. The fire Jim Richardson photographed was not a naturally occurring blaze, it was set by trained professionals with supervision by a fire department. The fire was contained to a plot of land through careful planning, and the judicious application of meteorology. Without that intervention, it wouldn't be prairie.
It took a long time to learn that we need to let natural fires burn in some forests, and that controlled burns are necessary in other places where natural fire is too rare or too dangerous to rely on. Humans have changed the environment by fragmenting landscapes, by extinguishing fires, and by removing species from their habitats. Protecting those lands does not mean taking our hands off, it means making careful decisions about the right way to manage the land. Preservation winds up destroying wild places. Conservation may make them less wild, but it means they stay around.
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Excellent point, but why is prairie considered more valuable than forest?
Yeah; surely we need more forests in order to fight global warming?
Prairies actually sequester a lot of carbon also.
I don't think it's a matter of which is more valuable--each has benefits, each has biological communities adapted to that setting. The problem with small "wilderness" areas is that the normal processes may not all be able to operate--fires, migrations, refugia, and, of course, evolution.
Josh, I'd want to press you on this distinction, and, for the sake of a brief reply, just on this issue: "To protect the prairie, it's necessary for humans to intervene."
That is, if we want to maintain the prairie in its current identity of prairie-ness, we should do prescribed burns. But that doesn't really resolve the issue that generally underlies such debates about what to do in nature, which is more about what value the prairie has to us humans, what kind of prairie we have in mind, and whether or not we humans should be dictating these things. That can't be addressed only as a preservation-conservation binary. Prairie's, as you note, will go to forest if we don't do anything. Whether or not that's the same as "destroying wild places" is a different debate. I don't think it's so easy to claim that a lost prairie is a destroyed wild place. It's a different wild place.
As well, though I agree with the general point that preservation is not the end all and be all, to say "Protecting those lands does not mean taking our hands off, it means making careful decisions about the right way to manage the land" opens up a far more complex can of worms about what any of those ethically contentious and historically shifting terms means ("the right way," "manage," "protecting," etc.). We can look to the high school version clash of preservation v. conservation (and thus greatly simplified as such) as that between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. Pinchot, conservationist to beat all and founder of the Forest Service, was pro-management. Muir was not. Preservation doesn't mean "destroying wild places." It suggests instead that what we call "wild" is a matter not subject only to human management. We make a value choice about what "destroying" means, what "wild" means, and how we define "place."
I agree that management of wild places is a complex problem. My view is that through anything from fire suppression to predator extirpation and even air and water pollution, we have influenced pretty much any given habitat. Management decisions that replicate ecosystem functions which our actions altered seem to me to be conserving wilderness, while the decision not to replicate those functions is still a management decision.
Saying that we aren't taking an action now doesn't negate the intentional or unintentional changes we already made.
On last Sunday evening, KCPT ran a one hour program (produced in Iowa) on the tall grass prairie; it was astonishing. As noted above, forest v. prairie isn't a better v. worse kinda thing; but it's accurate to say that the prairie contributed to the development and preservation of what is now one of the richest farming regions in the world. In the course of one human lifetime--roughly 1840 to 1900--man totally changed, and nearly eliminated, an ecosystem that ran from Texas into Canada, and Colorado to Illinois. With a corresponding loss of soil, water reserves, biodiversity and on. They also talked about a number of efforts, several in Ks., to create agricultural models that mimic the tall grass prairie systems, with some success. A show well worth catching if it comes around again.
Thanks for the follow-up. I appreciate your points. A lot of this hinges on which kind of environmental ethic to foreground, and a lot of that, for me, depends on understanding these issues in deeper historical context, which I take it is similar to your view too, based on your comments.
I agree that the real argument here is ethical. The mere fact that we can make these choices seems to me to impose a substantial moral obligation on us to make wise and cautious choices.
regardless, preservation is out, right?
Preservation and conservation are two very different subsets of environmentalism. Too many people don't really recognize the difference between the two. Visit our blog to learn about some of the differences why conservational approaches have outpaced preservation in most situations:
http://4-2morrow.blogspot.com/2012/05/conservation-or-preservation.html
Preserving natural fire conditions is the way to go.
Good point about "why is prairie more valuable than forest?". Also good point about forest being more helpful in countering global warming. The so-called hands-off approach here (preservation) isn't really. Human actions have permanently negated the concept of preservation in this instance by destroying the natural system by doing something as little as reducing the prairie area, reducing instance of fire, chain reaction with developing trees poisoning grass etc... Should just leave it to develop into the suitable wilderness for which conditions dictate at this point in time. Otherwise it is not a wilderness, it is something humans have made or maintained - a garden.