Conservationists, ecologist Mark Schwartz wrote nearly three decades ago, faced a looming conundrum: Many species would likely be unable to keep up with the projected pace of climate change and could face extinction as a result.
Conservationists, ecologist Mark Schwartz wrote nearly three decades ago, faced a looming conundrum: Many species would likely be unable to keep up with the projected pace of climate change and could face extinction as a result. This didn’t pose “an insurmountable conservation problem,” he wrote — people could help species reach places with suitable physical and biological conditions. They might carry endangered animals to habitats cut off by mountains, rivers, or human barriers, for example, or plant endangered trees or shrubs higher up mountain slopes or farther north.
In one sense, these would be ordinary actions. People had been moving species around the world for thousands of years, as farmers and horticulturalists, and out of simple curiosity. But long experience had given conservationists reason to be cautious about taking such actions themselves, Schwartz wrote. The salvation of one species could mean the destruction of another.
Three decades later, people are still arguing over whether the risk of moving species to more favorable conditions outweighs the risk of inaction. This debate has spawned hundreds of scientific papers, media reports, and even side debates, including over what to call the novel conservation practice (which, in this article, will be referred to as “assisted colonization”). It is a debate fueled less by differences of fact and more by differences of philosophy.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: JamesDeMers via Pixabay
