The Dangers of Black‐and‐White Conservation

The world is a complex place. To simplify this complexity, people often reduce it to simple either–or choices— black or white, do or don’t, yes or no, winners or losers, nature or nurture, and so on. Even our computer systems are based on binary logic. Conservationists are people, so we tend to do this too. Case in point: protected areas. Protected areas have long been the cornerstone of conservation, both nationally and internationally. Many of the areas we aim to protect exist as remnants of natural habitat in highly fragmented landscapes or are carved out of larger areas that are rapidly being eroded by human actions. The protected areas—parks, nature reserves, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas—are often viewed as “islands” of nature surrounded by an inimical matrix with little conservation value. Decades ago, ecologists provided a scientific foundation for this view in the theory of island biogeography, which likened nature reserves to oceanic islands and explained their species richness and rates of biodiversity loss in terms of the size and isolation of the reserves. Even though we know that reserves and protected areas are not really islands and the surrounding landscape is not really the same as an ocean, this binary view—that areas are either protected and have conservation value or they are not and they do not—continues to hold sway over a good deal of thinking in conservation and resource management. Another case in point: the benefits of nature. Conservation is ultimately founded on the values that people and societies place on nature. These values, too, have tended to be viewed simplistically, contrasting the aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical benefits of conserving nature and biodiversity with the more pragmatic and economic benefits of protection. This distinction is not new—many Nature Conservancy preserves, for example, were created based on their beauty or an ethical responsibility to protect remnant populations of rare plants and animals, and the U. S. National Wildlife Refuge System was established largely to manage populations of game species for recre-