Fundamentals of Conservation Biology. Malcolm L. Hunter, Jr.
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1.1 The roots of conservation can probably be found among the earliest Homo sapiens such as the people who painted this mural in the Lascaux cave in France.
(Thipjang/Shutterstock)
Leaping forward, history records many examples of conservation throughout the ages and across cultures. For example, the biblical story of Noah's ark remains a popular metaphor for conservation, and the Bible also codifies the first‐known game conservation law:
If you come on a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long. (Deuteronomy 22:6–7)
(In other words: don't kill mother birds.)
A far broader law was promulgated by Asoka, emperor of India 274–232 BCE:
Twenty‐six years after my coronation I declared that the following animals were not to be killed: parrots, mynahs, … wild geese, … cranes, bats, queen ants, terrapins, … tortoises, and porcupines, squirrels, twelve‐antler deer, … rhinoceroses, … and quadrupeds which are not useful or edible…. Forests must not be burned.
Many laws focused on regulating rather than prohibiting the exploitation of species. For example, Middle Eastern pharaohs issued waterfowl hunting licenses, and night hunting was banned in the city‐states of ancient Greece (Alison 1981). Early regulations emphasized trees and birds, mammals, and fish caught for food, but all species and whole ecosystems benefitted from the popularity of declaring preserves. Starting at least 3000 years ago with Ikhnaton, king of Egypt, and continuing with the royalty of Assyria, China, India, and Europe, as well as with the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Aztecs, and Incas, history has recorded many decrees setting aside land to protect its flora and fauna (Alison 1981).
Conservation was an issue during the period when European states were colonizing the rest of the world because colonization often led to disruption of traditional systems of natural resource use and rapid overexploitation. Freedom from European game laws was a significant stimulus to colonization, and hunting was a major preoccupation of the colonizing class. Imagine how attractive the promise of abundant, freely available game would seem to people who feared for their lives whenever their appetite for meat led them to poach one of the king's deer. This phenomenon was particularly true on some small, tropical islands such as Mauritius and Tobago, and continental Africa (Grove 1992 , 1995 ; Prendergast and Adams 2003).
Of course game species did not fare well under the onslaught of hungry colonists and soon regulations had to be enacted. For example, as early as 1639 it was illegal to kill deer between May 1 and November 1 in parts of Rhode Island (Trefethen 1964) and the Cape Colony in southern Africa had game laws by 1822 (MacKenzie 1988). This basic pattern – human populations growing, developing new technology for using natural resources, leaving crowded places and colonizing new lands, disrupting and displacing native peoples and their long‐standing practices in these colonized areas, and then responding to overexploitation and expanding population with an array of ever more restrictive regulations – has been repeated across the globe and continues to this day.
With increasing human impacts, the abuse of resources other than trees and large animals also began to be recognized, albeit slowly, for species that lack obvious economic value such as most invertebrates, small plants, amphibians, and reptiles. Aldo Leopold (1949) called for saving every species with his well‐known admonition, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the idea of “endangered species” (so imperiled that they were about to disappear from the face of the Earth forever) became a major issue for conservationists. During this period many nations passed laws (e.g. the United States Endangered Species Act) to form an umbrella under which all animal and plant species threatened with extinction could, in theory, benefit from conservation intervention. In practice, however, plants and smaller animals still are not given equal treatment, and other components of biodiversity such as microorganisms, genes, and ecosystems are usually not explicitly under the umbrella at all.
This brings us to the point of departure for conservation biology and this book, but first let us briefly return to preservation, environmentalism, and ecology to see how they mesh with the larger history of conservation.
Preservation
The roots of preservation are probably almost as ancient as the origins of spirituality. When religious leaders began to set rules for society, some species were protected as totems and some places like certain mountains were recognized as sacred and thus decreed off‐limits or visited only on religious occasions (Fig. 1.2). Moving ahead many millennia, the establishment in 1872 of Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park, is often identified as the beginning of governmental policy codifying the value of preservation. Here were nearly 10,000 square kilometers of evidence that society valued the landscape’s sacredness; that its aesthetic qualities (particularly striking geological features like geysers and hot springs) justified removing some natural resources from the path of economic development. The national park movement has developed throughout the world and has been modified in many ways. Some preserves are off‐limits even to visitors, such as the many zapovedniks (strictly protected areas) of Russia, while some parks, especially in Europe and India, maintain traditional cultural practices such as historic livestock grazing regimes. Nevertheless, the underlying value system remains largely intact. This same preservationist value system has also curtailed the exploitation of some species, such as various kinds of whales and songbirds, in many places. Obviously, species that are on the brink of extinction are slated for preservation, but others are simply species for which preservation has been deemed preferable to utilization. Many countries, for example, have banned the harvesting of all songbirds even though some species could be harvested in a sustainable manner.
Figure 1.2 Mount Fuji [top] has been a sacred mountain for the Buddhists and Shintoists of Japan for many centuries. (Tofoli.douglas/Flickr/Public domain) For the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, totem poles [bottom] often depict species that represent family identity and history, and have a sacred role in their culture.
(Bernard Spragg/Flickr/CC0)
Environmentalism
The first environmentalists were probably citizens of our earliest cities, more than 2000 years ago, who demanded sewers and chimneys to mitigate the impact of water and air pollution, respectively. For example, the Cloaca Maxima (which literally means “greatest sewer”) was built in Rome around 600 BCE. The industrial revolution accelerated urbanization and brought its own problems such as coal burning and factory discharges into water bodies. Environmental issues became much more high profile after publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 treatise on pesticides, Silent Spring, and a global environmental movement finally coalesced at the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm in 1972. This event marked the beginning of an era of considerable effort toward environmental protection at the global, national, and local levels with many organizations created, laws passed, and treaties ratified.
Ecology
The elements of modern ecology can be traced to Hippocrates, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers, but it was probably Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) who first articulated truly sophisticated ecological ideas, for example