Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [12]
Which God and which Creation should we be for, knowing that, contrary to Dr. Frankenstein, we cannot suddenly stop being involved and “go home?” Incarnated we are, incarnated we will be. In spite of a centuries-old misdirected metaphor, we should, without any blasphemy, reverse the Scripture and exclaim: “What good is it for a man to gain his soul yet forfeit the whole world?” /
ENDNOTES
1 Polidori, John, et al. 1819. The Vampyre: A Tale. Printed for Sherwood, Neely, and Jones.
2 Shelley, Mary W., 1823. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. Printed for G. and W.B. Whittaker.
3 Ibid.
4 This is also the theme of: Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis or the Love of Technology. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
5 Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
6 Nordaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
7 Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par dela nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.
8 Sadeleer, Nicolas de, 2006. Implementing the Precautionary Principle: Approaches from Nordic Countries and the EU. Earthscan Publ. Ltd.
9 Hermitte, Marie-Angele. 1996. Le Sang Et Le Droit. Essai Sur La Transfusion Sanguine. Paris: Le Seuil.
10 Descartes, Rene. 1637. Discourse on Method in Discourse on Method and Related Writings. Translated by Desmond M. Clark. 1999. Part 6, 44. New York: Penguin.
CONSERVATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Beyond Solitude and Fragility
Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier
By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.1 We continue to lose forests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.2 There are so few wild tigers and apes that they will be lost forever if current trends continue.3 Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we’re saving.
Ironically, conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning one of its hardest fought battles — the fight to create parks, game preserves, and wilderness areas. Even as we are losing species and wild places at an accelerating rate, the worldwide number of protected areas has risen dramatically, from under 10,000 in 1950 to over 100,000 by 2009.4 Around the world, nations have set aside beautiful, biodiverse areas where human development is restricted. By some estimates, 13 percent of the world’s land mass is protected, an area larger than all of South America.5
But while conservation has historically been locally driven — focused on saving specific places such as Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon, or on managing very limited ecological systems like watersheds and forests — its more recent ambitions have become almost fantastical. For example, is halting deforestation in the Amazon, an area nearly the size of the continental United States, feasible? Is it even necessary? Putting a boundary around Yosemite Valley is not the same as attempting to do so around the Amazon. Just as the United States was dammed, logged, and crisscrossed by roads, it is likely that much of the Amazon will be as well.
Only with the rapid transformation of the developing world — from rural or pastoral cultures to urban and industrial nations — and the unmistakable domestication of our planet that has resulted has the paradox at the heart of contemporary conservation become apparent. We may protect places of particular beauty or those places with large numbers of species, but even as we do, the pace of destruction will likely continue to accelerate. Whether or not the developing world sets aside a large percentage of its landscapes as parks or wilderness over the next hundred years, what is clear is that those protected areas will remain islands of “pristine nature” in a sea of profound human transformations to the landscape through logging, agriculture,