Abstract of the Commemorative lecture
Gardenification of wildland nature and how to absorb the human footprint
I, my wife Winnie Hallwachs, hundreds of other biologists, and hundreds of thousands of wild tropical species, are deeply grateful to Dr. Kazuo Inamori and his advisors for having chosen to legitimize the conservation of tropical wildlands by granting it this year's Kyoto Prize in Basic Science. I am here today to speak on behalf of tropical wildlands.
Where in the human genome can you comfortably place 235.000 wild tropical species? In the garden. Why 235.000 species, why so many? Because that is the size of those blocks of wildland biodiversity and their ecosystems that are sustainable. If we place those species anywhere other than in a human safe zone, they will continue in their downward spiral as grist in the human mill, just as they have for the past ten thousand years. My advice as a lawyer to wildland nature: if you can't beat Oem, join Oem.
Can we directly blend several hundred thousand species of wild organisms into society's sex drive? I doubt it. Likewise, I cannot imagine how to hide or integrate a couple of hundred thousand species of wild organisms, and all the things that they do to and with each other, in all those things we use for shelter. Feeding remains as the only hopeful refuge for our wildland biodiversity. We are hard-wired to be farmers, to be caretakers of our domesticates in their gardens. Gardens are forever.
How do we hide 235,000 species in the garden? We recognize wildland nature as a garden per se, with all the traits that we have long bestowed on a garden. And this, in turn, leads to the question of how do we absorb the human footprint. If we cannot absorb the footprints, even the most wellmeaning users will destroy the garden. And if we exclude those who leave footprints, our wildlands will not be gardens. Restoration.
Restoration biology is an old concept. It is omnipresent and it works. Anyone planning the sustainable use of a wildland garden has to recognize many different crops from one place, for many different kinds of users, with many kinds of footprints. How much can I harvest? That is to say, how big a footprint can my garden absorb? But there is one core difference between an agroscape and a wildland garden. It must remain a wildland garden into perpetuity, with the footprints being sustainably absorbed at many scales. And absorbing the footprints will mean, as a general rule, giving up on 5% of wild biodiversity and ecosystems for the indefinite survival of the 95% remaining. That is the price of being fitted into the human genome. There is no free footprint.
In closing.
I live and I study biology in one site in Costa Rica, side by side with a very large team of gardeners (http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr). But I have chosen here to talk abstractly and of broad concepts. What matters is the goal of wildland survival into perpetuity D the specific actions are place-based, time-based, society-based. Abandon the goal, and no protocol, no convention, no law, no formula will succeed.
With today's extension of the intellect through electronics comes the opportunity to do better basic science, but also to more selectively withhold knowledge. How will the balance play out with respect to the remaining tropical wildlands? Science and society are uneasy partners in the wildland garden: in the best of worlds we may achieve a very fine and finely negotiated partnership, and in the worst of worlds, annihilation of one by the other. A wildland garden with gentle trodding from caring gardeners just might achieve the partnership. A wilderness faces certain annihilation as a battlefield.
