Stalking the Emerging Climate: Three Paradigms
19/05/09 19:30
When I was kid in
east Texas, my father would take me hunting — deer,
ducks, doves, squirrels, frogs. Whatever was in
season and was legal. I was never an enthusiastic
hunter, but I did enjoy being out in the woods,
fields, and marshes with my father, and being close
to wild things was very moving, which was one of
the reasons I occasionally missed my shots on
purpose. I particularly liked the “hunting” part of
hunting: finding an animal, learning about it, and
seeing it in situ. I know these skills helped me
shift from being a natural historian to a
professional ecologist and conservation biologist.
And now I don’t hunt “for” animals, in the sense of
pursuing them. I hunt for them, in the sense of
someone who is seeking to help them — as their
proxy. As a concerned friend, and no longer as a
predator.
This week, I’ve been revising a set of recommendations about how to manage water resources in a way that is climate-sustainable for humans as well as aquatic and terrestrial species. The process of thinking through these issues reminds me very much of the hunting I did as a child: seeking a moving target — stalking an elusive animal over rough terrain, my vision obscured. Trying to comprehend my prey.
As someone who works on climate adaptation, this type of hunting has become the new state of conservation and sustainable development today. For more than a century, we’ve assumed that conservation and development were about restoring past conditions to damaged ecosystems and places. Or we focused on “preserving” intact regions we viewed as ecologically special (or that had significant livelihoods, such as artisanal fishing), trying to limit future damage, such as from invasive species.
We’ve learned in recent decades that the shifting climate presents a serious threat to these two approaches. “Restoration” for a hurt ecosystem doesn’t make a lot of sense if you can’t also restore its old climate at the same time, since climate plays a profound structuring role for most species, ecosystems, and human livelihoods. And if preservation means limiting damage, how do we discern between the potentially good climate-preemptive invasions by species that are shifting their ranges as a result of climate change and potentially negative invasions by species that are not responding to shifts in climate? Sometimes these distinctions are clear, but other times… not so much.
Both paradigms view ecosystems as static and stable. We can now see clearly that they never were. But no one a century ago could have predicted that we would soon be experiencing geological-scale climate impacts on the timeframe of a human lifetime. What was once a reasonable approximation no longer works.
The new climate is the quarry to track now — the elusive beast we are trying to apprehend through monitoring systems and hydro-ecological models so we can understand how to help facilitate change and reduce negative impacts from a shifting climate. Developing new tools and techniques is critical in this process.
But perhaps even more critical is a new way of thinking about conservation and development that focuses on the changes we can manage to control and those we can’t — a paradigm that can distinguish between when we should facilitate or resist climate-driven shifts. We can’t alter when warm temperatures arrive in winter and the onset of spring or the frequency of droughts. But we buffer places and species to some degree from very fast rates of change. Give them more space to move around. Help cities and farmers use water resources more efficiently. Ultimately, we need to think carefully about the kinds of ecosystem change we can manage to influence and those we must simply become accustomed to.
These shifts in thinking and approach are challenging and not yet clear as a methodology. But in a major improvement to my childhood, they involve wearing a lot less camouflage.
