The Science and Non-Science of Conservation Biology

New Zealand Journal of Ecology (1997) 21(2): 117-120 ©New Zealand Ecological Society the heat of the battle tends to obscure, rather than to illuminate. What do we wish to conserve, and why? A simple answer is that we want to reduce, or eliminate the impacts of human beings over at least part of the globe, to conserve remnants of what is ‘natural’. Implicit, and sometimes explicit in these wishes is the assumption that there exists some pristine, Garden-of-Eden-like state for all ecosystems, from which they have been disturbed by human actions. But there never was a Garden of Eden that we should strive to save or recreate. Ecosystems change continuously at all time-scales, and the further we go back in time , the more different they become. Deciding what we want to conserve is not, therefore, a scientific question, because there is no bench-mark virgin state that we can refer back to. We may find this uncomfortable, but it is also true. Indeed recognising it may help to sharpen conservation objectives in a world made even more difficult by the looming threat of humaninduced global climate change. Conservation biology is not a cosy, academic game. What we do matters, and the scale of the problem is daunting. Over the last few hundred years, human beings have steadily increased the rate of species’ extinction, by perhaps 2 or 3 orders of magnitude above ‘background’ rates. Looking ahead, and by a variety of calculations, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that extinction rates over the next 100 years will be at least 4 orders of magnitude faster than background rates in the fossil record (Lawton and May, 1995). Such rates of extinction may be unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. Conservation science stands at the sharp end of this global mayhem, and offers some hope that the destruction will be less than it might otherwise be. Conservation action without good science to underpin it is like alchemy, or faith healing. Both sometimes produce desirable results, but you have no idea why, and mostly they don’t. And yet there is a fundamental, and frequently unrecognised dilemma at the heart of conservation efforts, which JOHN H. LAWTON