IM Interview: Will Climate Change End Wilderness?

The scoop: There is less and less "wilderness" left on our human-dominated planet. And if development and agriculture weren't making things tough enough for wildlife, global warming is. In his recently published book, professor Tony Barnosky of the University of California at Berkeley digs into the problem and points to some revolutionary solutions. Here's our conversation ...

larryo: Hello. I'm ready when you are. Sorry again for the delays and mistakes on my end. I appreciate your patience.

barnosky: I'm here. Any time you're ready. Tony

larryo: Great! I enjoyed reading your blog and you have a book coming out too. Is that right?

barnosky: Thanks. The book came out in March. It's called Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming, and is published by Island Press.

larryo: What's the central idea and how does it relate to your research?

barnosky: Heatstroke has a two-part message. The first is that nature has a new problem because global warming. The problem is that climate is warming too much, too fast, for nature to keep up in the ways she has been adapted to do. The second message is that in view of that, we are going to have to introduce some new tools into the arsenal of conservation biology, unless we want to see nature as we know it disappear.

larryo: New tools. What would those be? Genetic engineering??? Helping trees relocate to the correct climes?

barnosky: The new tools can be summarized in three words: keep, connect, and create.

'Keep' simply means that we make sure that the natural areas we already have protected on earth remain protected, and that we keep on with some successful strategies already underway.

'Connect' means connect as many habitats as we can with habitat corridors, already a strategy of conservation biology, but with the new twist that mapping out those corridors has to take into account that climate change will be happening both within the nature reserves and within the corridors, so that the climate a species needs today may not be there tomorrow.

'Create' is the new twist, because by that I mean create a new concept of what we are trying to protect, a concept that recognizes that something different is required to save each of the three faces of nature: ecosystem services, biodiversity, and a feeling of wilderness. Today we have a one-stop shopping approach--preserve a big enough tract of land, and we preserve all three of those. In the future, with climate change pulling the climatic rug out from under nature reserves, what we will need to do to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services will become just the opposite of what we need to do to preserve a feeling of wilderness.

The tension is between heavy human management of species to save ecosystem services and biodiversity, and the hands-off approach needed to save the feeling of wilderness.

larryo: Sounds straight forward enough. Who are the players in the midst of all that tension? ...And how far behind are biologists and the general public in understanding the situation?

barnosky: The tension arises because many species we want to save now exist in natural areas that in effect are surrounded by hard 'fences', in the sense that no suitable habitat exists outside the natural area. In the past, when climate changed, species had the chance to simply move to a climatically suitable zone as climate was changing. Now, even if they could move fast enough to keep up with the changing climate zones induced by global warming, they can't, because no suitable habitat connects where they are with where they will need to be.

So scientists and others have been discussing something called 'assisted migration' for species in caught in such binds. Basically, put them in a car or truck and move them someplace that might be climatically more suitable. The problem with that of course is that any time we've artificially moved species before, it has had some unexpected results.

But the alternative might be to watch many species go extinct.

And, the more we manage where species are, the more we turn everywhere into a big zoo, and with that wilderness as we know it disappears.

The solution I present is to start thinking about two separate-but-equal kinds of nature reserves. 'Species reserves' would be the places we actively move species between to preserve biodiversity. 'Wildlands reserves' would not allow assisted migration--their purpose would be to watch how Mother Nature handles this time of change without our intervention, and to preserve places where the interactions between other species were not strictly controlled by humans, that is, that feeling of wilderness.

larryo: So in some places we let nature take its course, others we do whatever we can to preserve species. I'm guessing we're bound to see more of the latter, since it costs less, is that right? Regarding the big zoo, are we already heading in that direction? How close to that are we now?

barnosky: I think biologists are just now becoming aware of the situation ... these are issues that are starting to be discussed at scientific workshops and in the scientific literature.

The general public is not yet thinking much about this. There are other global warming issues that tend to get more press--sea level rise, melting glaciers, and so on. But, this is clearly one of the biggest issues we have to worry about, inasmuch as the intimate relationship between climate and what species can exist where means that Earth's entire ecology will be changing dramatically, in ways that could detrimentally affect all the aspects of nature that people have long found necessary.

Actually, I'd guess it costs less to let nature take its course. The problem with doing that everywhere is that it means we are bound to lose many species from global warming, which we can't really afford to do given that those losses will be thrown on top of the extinction perils we already recognize.

larryo: I imagine it's a hard pill to swallow for many conservation biologists. Also a bit of a paradigm shift for some, perhaps. Sort of sounds like the "End of Nature" in a sense. Are you seeing any strong resistance to your ideas?

barnosky: The unwritten paradigm for conservation biology has been to keep nature in the state it was when European settlers first found it, at least in the USA. Also, climate has been viewed as a constant.

So yes, this is a bit of a shift, because the new paradigm I'm proposing is that nature, especially the wilderness aspect of nature, and now the climate on which nature depends, is a moving target. Recognizing that means that there are three separate things we have to worry about preserving (the three I mentioned earlier, ecosystem services, biodiversity, feeling of wilderness), not just one, and there are conflicts between the three.

So far, scientific audiences have been receptive, though I would have to say I don't think all these things have been fully discussed or worked out yet. The devil will certainly be in the details. Which places should be species reserves, and which wildland preserves? Which species are candidates for assisted migration, which are not?

As for the "End of Nature", as I said, it's a moving target, not a fixed point. The key thing about nature as far as I'm concerned is that there are places where the species are interacting in an ecosystem that was not mostly engineered by humans--those are the 'wild places'. The thing to remember is that those places are going to change dramatically in the next century, and the species and interactions in them will be in a large part different when our grown-up kids visit them than they are today (because their climate will be different). That doesn't mean that nature will have disappeared. Nature will only disappear if we don't have places where those natural interactions no longer exist.

larryo: I think our time is up. Thanks very much. I think my cellphone is dying....I'll be back in touch soon, and this should be up by Monday. Thanks again.

barnosky: No problem, thanks for the opportunity, let me know if you need anything else. Tony

Article posted June 8, 2009.

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