Biodiversity and Wildlife Are Not Synonymous

I agree with most everything that Peter Brussard, Dennis Murphy, and Reed Noss said in their editorial (Brussard et al. 1992), but not with their suggestion that conservation biologists should try to make wildlife and biodiversity synonymous in the public mind. That, in my opinion, would be a step in the wrong direction. The first thing that came to mind when I read their suggestion was physicist Paul Davies' observation that "the world is not a collection of objects, it is a network of relationships." Of course it is the "objects" (e.g., wildlife) that drive the relationships. Nevertheless, the reality is that the coin of nature has two sides, pattern (including, but not restricted to, wildlife) and process (including, but not restricted to, relationships) (Leopold 1949; Perry et al. 1989; Noss 1990). The keystone definition of biodiversity, with all its warts, does at least provide the basis for communicating this critically important concept. Clearly, a measurable goal such as no net loss of wildlife is essential, and is not provided by the keystone definition. But it seems doubtful to me that conservation will succeed in the long run unless we explicitly recognize, and educate the public about, the network of relationships and processes that ultimately determine the health of any individual species. Consider, for example, some of the problems associated with maintaining viable old-growth reserves in the Pacific Northwest. Eighty years of fire exclusion, 50 years of intensive logging, and 10 years of drought have combined to produce a highly altered regional landscape that is not only short of old-growth habitat, it is vulnerable to insects, pathogens, and catastrophic fire (Perry 1988). Forests east of the Cascades crest are weakened from chronic insect infestations, and drought and insects are beginning to take a toll in west-side forests. The remaining old-growth fragments exist as islands within a sea of young stands that are highly susceptible to crown fires. The upshot is that the regional landscape has been transformed over the past 100 years from one that was probably very effective at damping the spread of disturbances, to one that magnifies them (Perry 1988; Franklin et al. 1989). If it plays out as predicted, climate change will exacerbate the situation (Peters & Darling 1985; Overpeck et al. 1990; Franklin et al. 1989; Perry & Borchers 1990; Perry et al. 1990; the collection of papers edited by Peters and Lovejoy 1992). How secure are old-growth-dependent species in this milieu, even those in reserves? Not very-wildfire and pests are singularly unimpressed by human boundaries. There are some measures that might buffer the landscape of Pacific Northwest, most notably thinning and controlled burning in young and mid-aged stands (preold-growth). Yet many of the latter are naturally established, and some environmentalists and conservation biologists resist any management of "natural" stands, arguing (with history on their side) that the risk of screwing up natural processes is too great. But what about climate change, pollution, highly altered regional landscapes with a dearth of refugia? In the face of these is there any such thing as a process that either is not already, or soon will be, affected by humans? I would argue not. But the point here is not whether natural stands in the Pacific Northwest should be managed or not, rather it is that the decision must be made in the context of processes and interrelationships that span many temporal and spatial scales. This must be the essence of conservation strategies in the modem world, a point that Brussard, Murphy, and Noss clearly recognized. But pruning away the concepts of process and relationship from the central definition of what conservation biology is about is not the way to accomplish this. The real issue here, as they argued, is education. What do conservation biologists need to educate the public about? A recent nationwide poll conducted by Peter List and Brent Steele of Oregon State University produced what, to me, were some very informative results. Ninety percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the Statement "Humans have an ethical obligation