Having Your Land & Sharing It, Too: A World of Reconciliation Ecology
Having Your Land & Sharing It, Too: A World of Reconciliation Ecology
March 16, 2010 6:54 PM
Life is in peril. A mass extinction threatens to take more than 90% of the world's species. Evolution will not be able to replace these species, neither in kind nor in number. Our religious and ethical responsibilty to protect our world is challenged as never before. But there is good news: we can prevent this mass extinction with a method called Reconciliation Ecology. Reconciliation Ecology means working out ways for us to have our land and share it too.
Reconciliation Ecology is not a pipe dream. It is widely practiced all over the world. And it is successful. Reconciliation ecology puts nature back into the everyday lives of people, surrounding us with living wonders we usually associate with a vacation in a National Park. It is not expensive and it redesigns our own habitats so that we can keep them, keep living in them, keep using them for our needs, keep earning profits in them... while at the very same time making them havens for wild species of plants and animals.
The new habitats we engineer to satisfy both our desires and the needs of nature will not resemble those of a thousand years ago. This will surely put new evolutionary pressures on the species we harbor. They will change in ways we are only beginning to study. But surely it is better to meet them halfway, better to give them a chance to adapt to us, than to let them vanish utterly and leave our grandchildren with an impoverished world that bears evidence that we did not choose to fulfill our responsibilities.
At 7:30 PM
in McLane Hall, Room 121
CSU-Fresno campus.
Dr. Michael Rosenzweig
University of Arizona
Director, Tumamoc: People & Habitats
Editor: Evolutionaey Ecology Research