Beloved Beasts authored by acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the conservation movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. Lindsey Renick Mayer, Director of Media Relations for Re-wild recently interviewed the author and EBNW Desk reproduces its excerpt here:
Beloved Beasts author Michelle Nijhuis says, “When I became a journalist and began to write about conservation and climate change, I started to think it would be useful to tell the story of the modern conservation movement. People have, of course, been practicing conservation on local and regional scales for millennia, but the movement to protect species on a global scale didn’t really get started until the late 1800s, when North Americans and Europeans finally realised that it was possible for humans to drive even very abundant species extinct.”
“That movement, for better and worse, is still central to the effort to protect life on earth, and I wanted to write as honestly as I could about the people who shaped it—about their successes and failures, their insights and oversights, and the development of their ideas over time,” she says.
“One of the most important conservationists who most conservationists have never heard of is Elinor Ostrom (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009).
She spent her career disproving the “tragedy of the commons”—the assumption that when people share access to a resource, they will inevitably consume that resource until it’s gone. She found that on the contrary, many societies throughout the world have developed ways of conserving shared pastures, forests, and fisheries, and that some of these cooperative systems have survived for hundreds of years.
“Aldo Leopold,(an American conservationist), wrote that “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
Conservationists are more alert than most of us to the damage humans have done to other species, and their experience often teaches them to expect more of the same. But I think conservationists can find a great deal of hope in the history of the conservation movement.
“Parks and reserves are important to conservation, but we can’t draw hard boundaries around every ecologically valuable habitat—not only is that impractical, but parks and reserves have a long history of excluding people from the habitats they depend on for survival, and some of those exclusions have had terrible consequences. International conservation organizations need to secure and defend the people’s rights who are successfully managing their local habitats to find more ways of enabling humans to live sustainably alongside other species.
“If the short-term burdens of protecting local species can be reduced, and the long-term benefits of conservation can be more equitably shared, conservation can start to become what it should be: an everyday practice, for everyone.”
PS: For more details, you can contact: https://www.rewild.org/news/q-and-a-with-author-michelle-nijhuis