Conservation

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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This term covers the protection and preservation of the Earth’s resources (e.g. plants, animals, land, energy, minerals) or of historical artefacts (including books, paintings and monuments) for the future. The term is most widely used with reference to the environment.

Most people today think the conservation movement began with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, but conservation is far older than that. As far back as 1860, laws were introduced in Tasmania, Australia, to protect native species of bird, and extinctions in the 1600s (the aurochs in Poland, 1627, the dodo in Mauritius, some time in the 1670s) had all had an impact.

By 1680, Poland had introduced reserved forests for the European bison, or wisent, and that probably saved many other species as well. The publication of Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell in the early 1830s made people far more aware of extinction, as did the publications of Charles Darwin, who even commented about Australia’s need to preserve its wild life:

A few years since this country abounded with wild animals; but now the emu is banished to a long distance, and the kangaroo is become scarce; to both the English greyhound has been highly destructive.
—Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 1836.

Later on, Darwin’s friend, the ornithologist John Gould said something similar:

Short-sighted indeed are the Anglo-Australians, or they would long ere this have made laws for the preservation of their highly singular, and in many cases noble indigenous animals; and doubly short-sighted are they for wishing to introduce into Australia the productions of other climes …
—John Gould (writing in 1863), quoted in A. B. Costin and H. J. Frith, Conservation, Pelican Books, 1971, 131.

As well, the British were beginning to see some of the problems of deforestation in their Indian and African settlements, and ever since then, scientists have been aware that extinction is demeaning of life.

Rachel Carson was certainly responsible for making the general public aware of some of the many problems that come from using pesticides, and she made the general public aware of the word ‘ecology’, but others had known of both the word and the more general conservation problem throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The earliest recorded use of the word was in 1873, and the Journal of Ecology (the title is a sign that ecology had finally been noticed) was first published in 1912. In fact, there were many other people who delivered the same message, as much as forty years earlier, but Rachel Carson did it better.

When she wrote, Carson was much more forceful in her care and compassion, and more poetic in her writing, so she drew people’s attention more effectively to what was happening. As well, there were many more people around, and many more chemicals. The time was right.

The impact was greater because pollution was increasing very fast, and killing people all over the world. In some parts of the world, pesticide pollution is still on the increase. More to the point, like Charles Darwin, Carson offered a huge range of examples.

In the most general terms, pollution happens when something is released into the environment of a living thing, to the harm of that living thing. Plants need phosphates and nitrates to grow, but if they get too much phosphate or nitrate, the plants can be killed.

Once the harm starts, helpful fertiliser becomes pollution. The phosphates and nitrates which you put on your garden or farm are not pollution. Not, that is, until they wash off into a neighbouring creek, and start poisoning the algae in the creek.

Faecal pollution of the Australian bush by dogs is a problem: because most bush plants have adapted to low levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, and the contamination allows weeds which otherwise would be starved out to gain a toehold.

So the best thing that conservationists can do is to seek strategies which maintain the balances of nature, to ensure that the various extremes of human exploitation are kept under control, and to ensure that biodiversity and genetic diversity are not threatened too drastically.

In the earth sciences and agriculture, conservation is more concerned with management of resources such as water, and with manipulation of the environment to provide convenient circumstances.

For example, a scheme was seriously put forward at one stage to use nuclear explosives to cut a channel from the sea to the usually dry Lake Eyre in South Australia, the aim being to increase evaporation and hence increase the rainfall in the area.

Flying over Lake Eyre, look for pelicans in the lower left quadrant.

This would have needed to be a large channel, as the total drop from the sea to Lake Eyre is only about 10 metres, but the increased rainfall would undoubtedly have an impact on the flora and fauna around the lake, and also on the pelicans which reproduce there when the lake fills with water from rain falling in Queensland. There would also be long-term problems with the salt left behind by the evaporating sea water, which would also impact on other species in the lake and surrounding areas.