>Chris Perley here:  False premise Ben.  Protecting a HABITAT (why is
>everyone fixated on individual structural components of an ecosystem
>anyway - functions and processes are where it is at) requires active human
>management (read MONEY) whether we like it or not.

No this is partly false too. One example is situated in the Antarctic. This
area is completely protected from commerce and exploitation, as well as is
the Antarctic Ocean. It is the largest preserve in the world. Now I am going
to answer the other half of the question re management. The effect of ozone
depletion and the effect of transboundary pollutants means now that active
management is required to protect life in the Antarctic. One hundred years
ago, most of the forests in the western hemisphere were completely capable
of managing themselves as were most of the oceans in the whole world, but
now that is no longer the case. But there are degrees of active management
that are required now.

For instance in Costa Rica I went to Manuel Antonio Parque Nacional. Near
the park there is a very busy and thriving tourism village with a very
densely populated center, a beach, and nearby  a small protected area. The
park is over whelmed by visitors, and when I was there, there were serious
problems along the interface. The monkeys were had lots of problems and they
looked like they had a disease that was eating their flesh, like lepers. The
snakes were copulating near the trails and could not see the humans, and
people just gawked at them, not realizing that some were deadly coral
snakes. There were many trees blown down by a tropical windstorm, and the
park rangers were very concerned about the wildlife since the macaws and
other species were dissappearing, or few in number. The park was not able to
recover as fast as it would normally be able to if people were not there.
The park's main problem is that it is too small, and there is no natural
connectivity with other forests in the area.

In Corcovado the park was created to stop logging and mining. This park was
very large in comparison to Manual Antonio (I think that was the name) and
the park management plan was to limit the entrance of tourist to only a few
per day. The only place that I could stay at the first day was at a
biological station. There were howler monkeys at night -absolutely amazing
to hear - and at Manual Antonio there were no howler monkeys. At Corcovado
on my third day I met up with about twenty wild pigs, and they were a little
scary at first, but they took off running with the babies following. At
Manual there were no wild pigs. There are cotamundi everywhere, species of
brazil nut trees, and many palms. The palms petter out after you get more
than about 5-10 km from the ocean but they never completely dissappear. It
was quite a thrill to walk for a day up stream in the Rio Claro. There were
lots of fish in the river and lots of good pools to swim in, but it was so
neat to see all the overhanging vegetation and giant trees. The water was
crystal clear, but the stream near Manual looked like a cespool, full of
green algae, weeds.

In Corcovado it was like being in the most fantastic movie scene. The trails
were very neat in one respect ...because they had lots of leafs on them, and
many leaf cutter ants. The leaf cutter ants are so numerous that you see
them and their trails continuously. It was the Costa Rica summer, but in my
experience it was like fall. The dry tropical heat and drought was causing a
lot of leaves to be shed. In the north there is a completely different
ecosystem, one of the rarest of the rare, a dry tropical forest-savanna with
small flowering trees, huge spreading canopies, grasses up to three meters
tall, cactus, and snakes of course. I discovered a rattle snake that was
about 2.5 meter long. There were some very large iguanas, etc.

You know that the forest is self-sufficient. Only man seems to think that
the forest is insufficient. And we perpetuate the notion that the forest
needs us, but it only needs us because we made it imperfect, without any
integrity to continue as an ecosystem resilient to natural disturbances. The
only park that needs man there is Manual, and it needs man to remove the
men, and make it larger.

In Corcovado I saw an entire stand of trees with red and blue patches on it
along a stretch of beach. I ask a local boy who was driving our boat what it
was, and he said that it was a flock of scarlet macaws. There were about 150
of them. That in itself was an ordinary thing for him, but for me a shower
of dazzling and contrasting vibrant patches of yellows, blues and reds.
Absolutely amazing. I have only seen something like that once before, many
years ago when the Sockeye salmon spawned here in the fall. You could see a
river of red salmon swimming up stream to spawn and die. That run of salmon
practically died out, and it is not certain if the fish will ever be great
in numbers again. The bears thrive on the fish. They eat the roe and leave
the carcass which feeds vast numbers of bald eagles and so on. The shit that
the bears transport to the land is incredible, and makes the forest grow.

I am all for large preserves, the larger the better.

John Foster







Most ecosystems have
>evolved over continental scales.  Like it or not we have destroyed the
>ability of many ecosystems to keep working within that geographical scale.
>As an example there is a theory that elephants may have evolved in a
>continental ecosystem where they periodically reached huge numbers (no
>natural predators), wreaked their own home, then crashed.  Having a domain
>the size of a couple of continents saved them.  They don't have the
>continent to play in any more - so if we want to protect them, we have to
>intervene.  Intervene = money.  Either that or treat humanity as a virus to
>be expunged (the anti-humanist solution).  That was Jim's point I thought.
>
>You Buffalo Bill Americans wiping out the buffalo is another example.  They
>cannot wander the way they did, so they have to be managed.
>
>Actually the anti-humanist solution (which I associate most readily with
>those who see "HUMANS OUT!!" preservationism as the only possible
>environmental solution) is not an environmental solution in many ecosystems
>of any scale.  E.G. in NZ the introduction of mammalian pests is the single
>major cause of biodiversity decline in this country (a land of birds
without
>mammals - except the bird-like bats that flew over here).  Remove humans,
>and you sign a death warrant for biodiversity.
>
>Any other solutions?  Try active management of preserves AND an
>encouragement of habitat protection within the human dominant environment
>(i.e. discard the idea that protection and use are mutually exclusive).
>Unfortunately many just want more preserves, and are not that interested in
>changing peoples' underlying ethics to ecosystem management.  Try a little
>Wendell Berry on your morning muesli.  A little bit of Leopold for lunch.
>Stephen Budiansky's Nature's Keepers is also relevant.
>
>Chris
>



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