A matter of congruence

One of the main issues faced by conservationists in the 21st century is to be more coherent and practice what we preach. Despite the gloom of sustainability and its use at a global scale, most of environmentalists and conservationists are still trying to figure out how to be more sustainable on a daily basis.

A recent article by Giovanni Bearzi, titled When Swordfish Conservation Biologists Eat Swordfish and published in Conservation Biology, tackles this issue. Here we present some fragments of his article to promote reflecton and the exchange of ideas on how conservationists and conservation organizations can be more sustainable.

"In our work as conservation biologists, we often pretend we are the good guys and problems are created by bad guys elsewhere. Is this a fair representation of reality? Does this take into account all the complexities? It would be fair to acknowledge that we, too, contribute to problems. For instance, the fancy laptop on my desk was made in China, perhaps at high environmental and human costs. Once trashed it may end up being burned by minors in Ghana to retrieve its valuable metal components.

We think of ourselves as professionals who are aware of environmental problems and work hard to solve them, but we pay little heed to what we do, buy, and consume. Some of my reputable colleagues drive SUVs to the office every day, possibly where they write about climate change. I know excellent biologists who spend much of their professional lives condemning unsustainable fisheries or reporting high levels of toxic contaminants in marine megafauna, yet when eating at a restaurant they order swordfish or tuna from overfished and declining stocks. At this point their study subjects cease being endangered wildlife and become food. Although most conservation biologists probably behave noticeably better than most uninformed citizens, it is disturbing to see the hypocrisy of avowed conservationists, as if monks advocating poverty were to wear jewelry and expensive silk robes.

Some of us have started to realize our current lifestyle is inconsistent with the message we voice. We wonder how we can ever stop contributing to global problems and eventually become part of the solution, at least in the areas we are most passionate and concerned about. Would that imply giving up comfortable life standards? Does that mean never again savoring that melt-in-the-mouth delicious fillet of Mediterranean swordfish, “just because” (apart from being loaded with mercury and PCBs) members of this shrinking population are caught in pelagic driftnets that incidentally kill thousands of cetaceans, sea turtles, and other endangered wildlife?

(...)

Although generally speaking people are unlikely to ever become virtuous unless they are forced to do so, there are growing sectors of modern societies that look for alternative models and seek inspiration from less consumptive patterns of behavior.

(...)

Personal examples matter, particularly by those closer to our heart. Calling for top-down enforcement will not bring us far without much bottom-up consensus, and this kind of awareness must be created step by step starting here and now.

Only 2 km away from one of my field sites in Greece there is an open-air dump. It is often in flames and sometimes I can distinctively smell its smoke, which I know includes dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical. Although it is terrible that in a country like Greece tons of garbage are still routinely dumped close to houses and schools, I know my garbage is there too. The plastic bag I trashed yesterday is burning today in that dump just around the corner. In addition to blaming others for dumping and burning and doing my best to document and stop this practice, shouldn't I also try to reduce my input of rubbish? That is where I get stuck because when I wake up in the morning it is nice to drink my tetra-packed grapefruit juice and have my plastic-cased yogurt for breakfast. Even if I am informed about the hazards posed by garbage incineration, I find it hard to give up my little comforts.

As conservation biologists, we often expect others to modify their behaviors or quit a job based on evidence that it has negative impacts on the environment. Nevertheless, we are rarely willing to change our own habits, even when we are fully aware of the detrimental effects of our actions. A plush life is pleasant, and we see it as our right, yet we demand others to become virtuous for the sake of conservation. We blame others, but find it hard to realize what is wrong with our own behavior and to change it. I suspect that an important part of the challenge is to be a good example in the first place, no matter what others do. It is striking to see how many people committed to conservation have not abandoned a single consumptive pattern, despite the eco-drama before our eyes.

For instance, fisheries scientists advocate for stricter quotas, which would therefore limit consumption, yet they themselves may practice little restraint in their personal consumption of seafood. If we take the premise that the individual does not matter, this is not an intellectual contradiction. We may also argue that if we do not eat swordfish, someone else will. Jennifer Jacquet, a talented PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, makes a provocative analogy: “Is this not like an early abolitionist owning a slave?” Jacquet, whose published work offers a brilliant analysis of the marine fisheries crisis, contends there is little accountability in conservation science for practicing what one preaches, and she thinks this may be linked to an overall hesitation to criticize consumption of any sort in the Western world.

Credible criticism of this kind would imply endorsement of counter-current choices and detaching from some of our dearest consumptive habits. This is something few of us are ready to do, but possibly something that some of us should consider doing at least to the extent possible, while carefully avoiding extremism and polarization. Being consistent with our ecological theories in daily life does not need to entail moral or religious harshness. It may be seen simply as an application of judgment and free will or a way of acting as responsible citizens of this planet.

As articulated in joint work by Jacquet and Pauly, a system of management or conservation based exclusively on purchasing power will not adequately address the problems facing the world's fisheries (or any other global problem) because of corporate skillfulness in dodging consumer choices. There are no simple solutions to the global crisis and even doing the right thing in daily life requires much pondering and learning. Irremediable as they may seem, problems may only be solved when individuals start addressing them. As highly educated conservation biologists who are aware and supposedly clever, aren't we good candidates to kick-start the process? Aren't we some of the best candidates to provide imaginative and appropriately informed examples of sustainable (and still enjoyable) living?

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” If we cannot manage to embody our teachings at least in part, it may be unrealistic to expect that others will change anything in their life, whether it is to stop eating whale meat or to refrain from hunting endangered wildlife for sport. This is not meant to be a recipe to save the planet. When conservation biologists stop ordering swordfish and opt for organic chicken or vegetables, the world will not be substantially different. The immense, complex, and global problems of our times will not disappear by the time all the members of our conservation elite have abandoned their unsustainable habits. Yet, only then will there be convincing evidence that responsible individual behavior can spring from science-based understanding of cause–effect relationships and only then will there be any hope that, beyond theory and preaching, the inspired and knowledgeable choices of a few visionaries may affect a larger community in a growing spiral of understanding."


Click here to read the complete article online or to download the article in PDF.

El tic-tac de los conservacionistas - The conservationists tic-tac

Bill Adams, is a challenging and insightful person that I recommend to be read, as he always brings to debates a critical perspective over issues encouraging reflection. This fragment of the preface of his book Against Extinction. The Story of Conservation is a must.

"If conservationists have a consistent and shared sense of time, it is one that is oddly broken-up. In my experience their awareness of time falls into three discrete categories. The first might be called, with apologies to Charles Lyell, "deep time". I mean by this, time measured on the geological timescale of millions of years. This scale of time makes humans as a species seem rather trivial arrivists in the long, teeming prehistory of life forms; a steady evolutionary game of planetary proportions in which Homo sapiens appears as a late, sudden and rather destructive disruptive force, whose effects Agent Smith, in the film The Matrix, rather nicely captures when he describes humans as a virus on Earth. Conservationists do this idea of time very well. They understand, through books like Edward Wilson´s The Diversity of Life , the astonishing diversity generated by evolution in the water-thin living skin of the Earth. They also respond in both an intellectual and emotional way to the enormity of the extinction spasm of the last two centuries in the light of previous episodes of destruction through the depth of geological time.

The second scale at which conservationists understand time is their own experience. Those who love nature tend to explain conservation themselves in terms of things they have actually experienced. Mosts conservationists can trace their passion for living things to particular places and times, when they engaged with other species or with landscapes, when what is often called "the wild" reached into the mundane and urban world and touched them. Conservationists remember childhood engagements with nature, and note how they have been sometimes beyond all recognition: lost under tarmac and concrete, devoid all too often it is one of degradation. Scratch a conservationist, and beneath every upbeat line about success stories, there is usually a depressingly downbeat assessment of the retreat of nature over their lifetimes.

The third scale at which conservationists think of time is in the immediate present. It seems that conservation problems are always urgent; everything is a crisis. In books and films, and in the minds of conservationists, nature often faces catastrophe, usually at humans hands. Something always needs to be done, and done at once.

Whatever sense of time conservationists times have, I suggest that they rarely have a good sense of history. They think they know what needs to be done, but in thinking things through, they tend to jump from deep time to their own lives´experience, and then again to the immediate challenge of today without much pause for thought. Often they have little understanding of the way in which problems have come about, or how their predecessors understood similar problems and tried to tackle them. Conservationists often know very little of their own history.

(...)

Conservation debates are not really arguments about nature, but rather about ourselves and the way we choose to live. They are moral debates, about the way we cope with our own demands of each other and the biosphere."

Phenomenology

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.

One of the aims of this blog is to "inspire people to open our eyes and hearts to the world" as said in the video presented in this post.

Thus, the inspiration section will contain anything that promotes major awareness of our surroundings, including the paths and thougths of those people that can inspire us, promoting further momentum and reflection regarding what we pursue on life. Creativity and passion, are maybe one of the most important elements required for leadership, so they will be represented in this blog.

Besides the wonderful music, framing and photography in this video, there are certain quotes that are worth remembering.

"I have never set out to become anything in particular, only to live creatively and pursue the scope of my experience for adventure and passion."

"I never want to keep this for granted so I try to keep motivations simple, real and positive.

"Fires of happiness, waves of gratitude, for everything that brought us to that moment in time to do something worth remembering."

Why “Candy”?

As Ed Templeton says in Beautiful Losers, one of the tragedies we face as we grow up, as we turn into adults, is losing the joy of creating and being happy that appeared to be the ultimate goals in life when we were kids. Ironically -a sweet finding based on personal experience- our passion for candy is much more difficult to lose in spite of years flowing by.

Considering the power of candy, I decided to name this initiative Candy for Conservationists. Candy appears as a metaphor for what I think conservationists - people who have a passion for life, a passion for nature and for the diversity of people who are part of this world- need to overcome the complex challenges we are facing in the 21st century. Candy is a metaphor for inspiration, for creative ideas, and for the tools and knowledge that we require to make things happen.

It is my belief that one of the problems undermining conservation efforts are the ways we interact with each other and approach conservation challenges. Instead of sharing the joy of working together for a meaningful purpose that transcend our existences, ego and institutional battles have become the norm rather than the exception. We pay too much attention to the labels and roles (academic, governmental officer, practitioner, biologist, lawyer) that we are supposed to comply with, and as a result, start pretending and playing an endless games with no possible winners. It is no surprise that some of us forget what drove us to work in conservation in the first place. Thus, we experience a lack of passion. We seem tempted to do things in ways that are just acceptable and mainstream, therefore maintaining the status quo so that our comfort zones are not threatened. We need to regain perspective, walk two steps back, and remind ourselves that we are all humans trying to deal with coexistence in a unique biosphere. And that unfortunately we are far from doing it right.

By inspiring each other and challenging the way we are thinking and framing issues, clarity and creativity could overcome the dangers of assumptions, stereotypes and prejudices. The “Candy” that you will find in this blog seeks to make people think outside of the box, to interact differently within conservationists, and to engage with people outside the conservation community. The challenges for conservationists in the 21st century are so complex and significant that I really believe we need to put our efforts towards a global movement; we need to feel momentum and remember that we are not alone.

This blog will serve as a bridge: to improve communication among conservationists, especially between academics and practitioners, as well as between professionals in the Global North and the Global South; to promote a better understanding, among these fragmented groups; to be a place where ideas in academic papers will be shared in a way that anyone can read them, challenge them, and add to them constructively. Posts will be in Spanish and English because one of the factors that drove me to start this project was to share the ideas and information that I am being exposed to during an MPhil in Conservation Leadership at the University of Cambridge, with people who have not had this unique opportunity.

I hope to engage the passionate (and especially young) conservation leaders who are willing and committed to this challenge, one which involves promoting conservation in an ethical and coherent way. I hope to engage people who share the idea that it is important to love something worth sacrifice and those who believe in collective action. Despite the morality promoted in today´s world, I hope to engage people who still want to just live simply and pursue happiness. I hope to engage people who have the energy and vision required to make things happen. Everyone is invited to be a part of this movement.


Bruno Monteferri, 2010.

You Are What You Do from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.