From Tony Kendle, University of Reading
The assertion that conservation must not become “gardening” is a view so
commonly voiced by conservationists that they seem to be in denial of a possible truth
(4 September, p 46).
Nature conservation, at least in Britain, is
dependent on a range of management inputs such as clearing, grazing, burning and
control of invasive species, which are nearly all designed to compensate for the
disappearance of traditional land uses that provided habitats for species now in
decline. The only difference between this and gardening is that we can cut
vegetation and disturb the ground to encourage seed germination, but we cannot
actually plant that seed.
Traditional conservation philosophy is firmly based on the separation of
human agency from every other process. Ecosystems are “natural” if they are not
affected by any human disturbance, at best “semi-natural” if we have made any
impact on them. A species is native if it arrives by itself, exotic if we carry
it. This sense that nature is other than human seems meaningful to us. But if
you accept the premise that this environmental detachment can translate into a
disregard for nature, then conservation policy makers could be reinforcing the
problems they are trying to combat.
With the bottom dropping out of the world’s biodiversity, it must seem
strange to some countries to see naturalists in Britain debating which sorts of
positive interventions we allow ourselves and which we do not. A rationale that
denies positive human intervention to counterbalance the negative leaves us with
a bleak image of the future. “Gardening” nature could be redefined, therefore,
as stewardship. If we lose some abstract essence because of our presence in the
ecosystem, then it is time to get over that loss because it has already
happened.
