"Domesticating Nature" — How vs. Why

In his comments on our "Domesticating Nature" post of August 17, 2007 (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/domesticating-nature-nyt-commentary.html)
Allen states that we have no choice but to be managers of everything. According to him, we should recognize this so that, at least, we don't manage "blindly". By that, I take Allen to mean "behaving with a blind eye to the consequences for the planet, for us, and perhaps even (thinking of Aristotle's comments on yesterday's post) how our activities reflect on our character and ability to live well". He justifies his suggestion for "conscious" management with a vision of the "inevitable".

Allen doesn't say what, exactly, is inevitable. Is he resigned to humans extending their direct influence to the remaining 17% of land (as of 1995)? Perhaps so. But it seem more likely that he is resigned to an irresistible and unstoppable human urge (as Kareiva, et. al. put it in their Science paper) to alter species and ecosystems to become "more useful" to us. A kind of unstoppable itch. That is what "domestication" is. Given that, Allen may be suggesting that, so long as we're in the business of domesticating the planet, we just need to make decisions that are better — more reasoned and more balanced — than the disastrous ones that we've made in the past.

But the problem is not that we've made horrible management decisions in the past and now we have to make better, more enlightened ones — perhaps ones engendered by better attitudes towards our environment. The problem is with the project of domestication itself. As Kareiva, et. al. suggest, the project is one in which we enumerate all the ecosystem services, then prioritize them or perhaps run a Benefit-Cost Analysis to select the ones that we really want to promote, them "impose" some management regime that selectively promotes these services.

To focus on the "management style" is to remove the focus from where it belongs — on the project itself.

For example, in the past, we didn't realize that our agricultural practices — which in the 35 years before 1998, increased N fertilization 7-fold, P fertilization 3.5-fold, a 1.7-fold increase in irrigated cropland — would lead to an enormous eutrophication of freshwater and marine ecosystems, which in turn led to the loss of native species, the invasion of alien species, simplifying shifts in food chains, and impairment of fisheries. And we didn't know that tropospheric redistribution of N and agricultural intensification would also eutrophy many terrestrial ecosystems, leading to the loss of N-efficient plants, the loss of critical soil nutrients such as Ca and K, and release greater amounts of N₂O — the most potent of the common greenhouse gases. (See, for example, Vitousek, P.M, Aber, J.D., Howarth, R.W., Likens, G.E., Matson, P.A., Schindler, D.W., Schlesinger, W.H., and Tilman , D.G., "Human Alteration of the Global Nitrogen Cycle: Sources and Consequences", Ecological Applications, 7:3 (1997), pp. 737-750, http://www.esajournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&issn=1051-0761&volume=007&issue=03&page=0737&ct=1. Also, Tilman, D., "Global environmental impacts of agricultural expansion: The need for sustainable and efficient practices", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 96 (1999), pp. 5995-6000, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/96/11/5995.)

Is the idea that, in the 21st century, we finally have come to know how to take all these factors into account? With modern ecology — as opposed to the flimsy and limited knowledge we had in the 1970's, 80's, and 90's — will we be able to select and promote just the right set of ecological characteristics that (this time) provide a comfortable, "humanized", and more comfortable home, literally custom made by us for us humans? Will we never again overlook some balance, some vulnerability, some interaction, some self-correcting feedback loop, some redundancy that's vital for an ecosystem's survival in infrequently encountered but inevitable times of stress? Will we never again have to read a paper by a group of world-renowned ecologists who have figured out, after the fact, why our management regime ended in disaster?

As in many matters, the key to a solution is asking the right question. We can ask with Kareiva, et. al., "How shall we manage our earth domestication project?" Admittedly, there may be better and worse ways to do this. As Allen suggests, perhaps a bit more humility would be better. But I take Klinkenborg's NYT commentary to suggest that, to focus on this question is to ignore the vital questions concerning our attitudes and behaviors towards our environment. Those questions don't ask how we should dominate our environment, but rather if we should. They don't ask us to consider whether we might live better by reigning in our intrusions and limiting our management as much as possible to the places that we have already seriously compromised. Perhaps, we would do even better to consider a retreat from our current, almost total domination.

After yesterday's interview, Aristotle said that he would like to ask, "Might we not flourish best by fundamentally caring for our home planet — not as the end result of a necessarily limited and self-serving project born from our limited imagination — but as the spectacularly, surprisingly, and dumbfoundingly complex place that, without any help from us, engendered and sustained our species — a species that now, with along with many others, make it home?"