Successes and failures in biological and environmental conservation

Usually, when the media talk about environmental conservation and endangered species, the news they give is almost always negative: Everything is going very badly; there are ever more species at risk of extinction; human activities are corrupting the environment; our planet is in danger of becoming a wasteland incompatible with life… Actually, when we say the highlighted phrase, we are using the trope called synecdoche in the form called macrocosm, that is naming the whole by the part, because it is not the planet that is in danger, but us, human beings, along with many other living beings.

I have just read a book published in 2012, written by Andrew Balmford and entitled Wild hope: on the front lines of conservation success, which tries to emphasize the opposite: not all the news is negative; lately there have been a few successes in the conservation of animal species in danger of extinction, or of environments endangered by human voracity. His analysis of these cases points to shortcomings in environmental conservation processes led by politicians, which sometimes achieve exactly the opposite of what they intended, as I indicated in this blog in a post published almost six years ago, entitled The ecological ignorance of ecologists.

Let us look at a few cases among those studied by Balmford:

• 

  Leuconotopicus borealis
  a threatened species

  In the United States, a well-intentioned but incompetent government enacted the U.S. Endangered Species Act, a regulation that in theory was intended to safeguard endangered animal species, but in fact achieved the opposite effect. The regulation specified that the number of individuals of each protected species on any land owned by private persons must be counted, and that the owners were responsible for maintaining that number. Otherwise, they would run the risk of paying heavy fines. In addition, if that number were to increase in the future, the number of individuals they must maintain under threat of fine would also increase.

The result was that landowners whose land did not contain protected species fought hard to prevent them from entering, and those who already had protected species tried to prevent their numbers from increasing. The problem was solved by adding a Safe Harbor clause according to which landowners who signed up to the community project known by that name would only be responsible for the initial number of individuals of protected species, but not for possible future increases. This eliminated the disincentive for behaviors that would lead to the success of the desired objective: the increase in the number of individuals of protected species.

• A paradigmatic case of environmental protection was offered in Australia by Alcoa, a multinational giant specialized in the production of aluminum, which decided to do more for environmental protection than was required by Australian laws and regulations. Bauxite mining was carried out in open-air quarries that had to be opened on land occupied by Australian forests where numerous endangered plants and animals lived. Alcoa decided that every area of ​​forest destroyed by mining operations should be restored exactly as it was at the beginning, once the extraction operations were finished. To do this, the company organized a seed bank of all the species existing in each plot, with which it was possible to restore the distribution of plant life. A parallel, more complex craft made it possible to restore the animal population. This effort earned the company the Golden Gecko award and its inclusion in the UN Environmental Honor List. These awards have greatly increased the company’s prestige, which has led other companies to imitate its action.
• Fishing procedures have become abusive in recent times. Drift nets, up to 20 km long, have been banned by the UN since 1992, because they were capable of destroying entire marine ecosystems. Circular purse seines, up to one km long and 200 m deep, are capable of surrounding schools of tuna or mackerel, and destroy entire populations. Bottom trawls, the size of a football field, destroy the seabed and all the animals that live on it. In many of these operations, the number of deaths among unwanted animals exceeds the number of desired catches, while vast depopulated areas are then very difficult to recover.

To combat this situation, which could lead to the end of commercial fishing in a few decades due to lack of catches, and to the disappearance of fish from our supermarkets and fishmongers, an international consortium (Marine Stewardship Council, MSC) has been created, which provides certificates to fishing companies that use non-abusive fishing gear (such as tuna fishing with a rod and line) that ensure the permanence of a high percentage of the animals, allowing them to reproduce and recover. These certificates not only ensure that fishing procedures are correct and sustainable, and that they do not produce collateral damage to other species, but they also guarantee the cleanliness of the food chain, ensuring that the fish in question has not been mixed with other prey obtained in a less appropriate manner.

Fish with the MSC certificate (the blue seal, shown above) should be preferred by all consumers, especially those of us who are concerned about the indiscriminate destruction of our planet’s resources.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca