Do you enjoy the surprise of experimenting with ingredients and sitting down to eat a new meal? Do you like to take photos, or paint and draw? Do you get moments of pleasure from harvesting a tenderly-nurtured fruit garden or a seeing a flower bloom on your window sill? Do you have those moments when your mind comes up with an idea that inspires you–and then find the same idea emanating from the thoughts of other people as well. How exciting is that?
Don’t you take the greatest pleasure in your own creative endeavours? Think about how little of what you know, and the things that you do that are in your nature and fulfilling, is from reading science books.
Writing my book and discovering how animals behave has made me rethink the role of science in conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More, because it’s made me rethink our role as animals in nature. I believe we’ve lost track of our personal creativity and got ourselves into a pattern of overthinking solutions to the world’s problems, which may be damaging our state of mind and leaving us more vulnerable to failure.
“As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galápagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: “Maybe I’m just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything”. She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.”
–Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
Animals like us are ‘do-ers’ and experimenters. I was watching footage of Killer Whales in Patagonia on the new Disney+ Secrets of the Whales film last night and how youngsters observe, watch and practice to learn the technique of beaching themselves to catch seals. Outsiders are inspired by the chase and try it themselves but lack local knowledge. There are only a dozen whales in the world that know how to hunt this way and if Killer Whales formed a society like ours and decided to tell everyone that their way was the best way, it wouldn’t work.
Though, isn’t that what a lot of science has become to us: a way of trying to justify a unifying approach to everything? Isn’t this the antithesis of how nature works? And so much research seems dependent on centralised funding, creating power autocracies that take away the source of local creativity and influence.
It’s not healthy. There is a reason why such centralised power structures don’t exist anywhere in nature. It’s because they always fail. They are an evolutionary dead-end.
What happens when conservationists are forced to follow cookie-cutter rules and procedures where the widespread application of their results may not be fit-for-purpose? Evidence-based conservation, like evidence-based medicine, uses scientific discovery to inform decisions by local people (like your doctor) who have knowledge of underlying conditions that are specific to you. Your doctor doesn’t prescribe a drug for you, until they are sure it won’t kill you another way–an allergy to penicillin is one obvious example. The choice to use different COVID vaccines for different vulnerability groups is another.
It seems to me that the worst thing science can ever do, is take away people’s creativity, because we don’t learn from science, we learn from art and entertainment, from contemplation and discussion. That’s the expression of our culture that transfers local knowledge, builds population resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More and enables compatibility of lifestyles with the environment we have created for ourselves.
I’m beginning to think that this disempowerment is what has led to a crisis of confidence and mental health issues with the term eco-anxiety being increasingly used to describe a symptom of helplessness about our planet’s future. It disproportionately affects friends of mine who spend their lives working with wildlife and while it’s easy to accuse such people of negativity (we’re constantly told that staying positive is a better way to think) what if the solution is more systemic?
What if, rather than delaying action while we wait decades for research to catch up with our intuition, or fund radical ideas to geo-engineer entire landscapes, we instead empowered local people with their own chance to protect where they live?
Would it hurt to give people the chance to come up with their own creative concepts and ideas and then pay scientists resources to support those initiatives?
Overall, I think conservation science has lost its creativity or at least, much of it has been taken away. At the same time, science has become so voluminous that we overthink almost every aspect of decision-making. Our published scientific discourse doubles every nine years and adorns itself with endless ecological studies compartmentalising research into smaller and smaller fragments, with little purpose for practical conservation. As far back as 1965, de Solla Price said of about 35,000 journals, that much of the content is background noise and without strategy.
Yet we see some of the most extraordinary conservation gains happening when private land-owners, community and scientists roll up their sleeves and work together to experiment with new ideas, unencumbered by top-down control.
If you’re looking for a way to make a difference, I would recommend finding a local group that is properly-empowered to do good and get involved in the practical side of their work. Within just a few years you’re likely to see more gains than you’ll get from any institutionalised policy and this is starting to happen all over the world, with breath-taking results.
Spotlight
21st century conservation: A vision of collaboration across landscapes “Saving nature is a human enterprise. We need the social infrastructure to support creative, community-based problem solving” Read more.
