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The First World Conservation Lecture
The First World Conservation Lecture* M A X N I C H O L S O N , CB, CVO, L L D * *
731, F u l h a m R o a d L o n d o n SW6, U K
SUMMARY
This, The First World Conservation Lecture, was presented at the Royal Institution, London, UK, on 12 March 1981. The Lecture celebrated the 20th anniversary o f the World Wildlife Fund, and the first anniversary o f the World Conservation Strategy. The Lecture was organized by the World Wildlife Fund, UK.
We are here to celebrate the t w e n t i e t h anniversary n o t just o f the l a u n c h i n g o f a f u n d b u t o f a new w a y o f l o o k i n g at ourselves as the inhabit a n t s and the trustees o f a precious and vulnerable small planet. S u d d e n l y and u n e x p e c t e d l y a strange a s s o r t m e n t o f t h o u g h t s , impulses, frustrations, *Published with the kind permission of the World Wildlife Fund, UK. **Edward Max Nicholson, CB, CVO,Commandeur (Netherlands), Order of the Golden Ark, holds honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen, and The Royal College of Art London. He was educated at the University of Oxford, and was a member of the University's expeditions to Greenland (1928) and to British Guiana (1929). He was General Secretary (until 1940), later Chairman of PEP (Political and Economic Planning); now VicePresident of its successor body, the Policy Studies Institute. From 1945 to 1952 he was Secretary of the Office of the Lord President of the Council, then Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was member of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy from 1948-1964. In 1952 he was leader of the joint UN/ FAO Development Team in Baluchistan. Charter Member from 1949, and Director-General (1952-1966) of the Nature Conservancy, London, UK. From 1963 to 1974 he was Convenorof the Conservation Section of the International Council of Scientific Unions' International Biological Programme. President of the IUCN Technical Meeting in Edinburgh in 1956, concerned x~dth rehabilitation of areas biologically devastated by human disturbance, and relation of ecology to landscape planning. Member, Panel on Landscape Action Program, The White House Conference (USA) on Natural Beauty (1965). Secretary, HRH The Duke of .Edinburgh's Study Conference on The Countryside in 1970 (1963 and 1965). Council and Board Member of lIED. Godman-Salvin Medallist British Ornithologist Unions. Phillips MedaUist and Member of Honour IUCN, Geoffroy St. Hilaire Gold Medal, Soci~t~ Nationale de Protection de Nature de France, Premio Europeo Cortina-Ulisse (1971), Europa Preis ftir Landespflege (1972), Hon Member of World Wildlife Fund, Chairman EcologicalParks Trust, President RSPB, 1980. Principal Consultant and Chairman of Land Use Consultants Ltd (London) since 1966. Author of many books, Birds and Men (1951); Britain's Nature Reserves (1958), The System (1967); The Environmental Revolution (1970).
The Environmentalist, 1 (19 81) 109-116
observations and resolves w h i c h had b e e n simmering in m a n y m i n d s w e n t critical and fused t h e m selves into a d y n a m i c c o m p o u n d u n d e r the sign o f the P a n d a in 1961. I will try first to c o n d u c t y o u briefly t h r o u g h the processes leading up to that fusion, simply to help y o u to u n d e r s t a n d h o w we have c o m e to be here t o d a y , and w h a t kind o f people we conservationists are. I will then pass rapidly on to the main elements in o u r struggle and h o w t h e y can be successfully tackled. Finally, I will suggest some targets w h i c h we need to set ourselves for o u r still distant c e n t e n a r y y e a r 2 0 6 1 . I f in s k i m m i n g over the past I m e n t i o n certain participants in the d r a m a and o m i t others it is simply because I need to select e x a m p l e s illustrating the range and blend o f personalities w h o came t o g e t h e r in the e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o n s e r v a t i o n movem e n t . Many w h o c a n n o t be n a m e d here also cont r i b u t e d richly to the c o m m o n effort.
THE
START
OF
WORLD
CONSERVATION
My s t o r y starts in A u g u s t 1945. T h e d r o p p i n g in t h a t m o n t h o f an a t o m i c b o m b o n H i r o s h i m a t h r u s t m a n k i n d into an age o f a w e s o m e l y enlarged p o w e r and danger. S i m u l t a n e o u s l y , m u c h m o r e o b s c u r e l y , Julian H u x l e y was officially c o m m i s sioned to lead an e x p e r t i n q u i r y into c o n s e r v a t i o n o f n a t u r e in England and Wales. A m o n g his colleagues were A. G. Tansley, Charles Elton, J. A. Steers, E. B. F o r d , Cyril Diver and myself. T h e resulting R e p o r t , issued in J u l y 1947, has s t o o d the test o f time as the f o u n d a t i o n o f the N a t u r e C o n s e r v a n c y , for the science-based a d m i n i s t r a t i o n o f n a t u r e and natural resources. During this i n q u i r y Julian H u x l e y arranged for some o f us, including R i c h a r d F i t t e r ( o u r active S e c r e t a r y ) and myself, to c h e c k o u r findings b y visiting, in 1946, the Swiss National Park, w h i c h had already t h i r t y y e a r s ' experience o f managem e n t . O u r Swiss hosts t o o k the o p p o r t u n i t y o f bringing t o g e t h e r colleagues f r o m several o t h e r
© Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands
countries, and of discussing the formation of an International Union for the Protection of Nature. Meanwhile, Julian Huxley had been wafted away from us to set up UNESCO, as DirectorGeneral of which he convened at Fontainebleau in 1948 a meeting for the formal establishment of the International Union. I was not there, but I had arranged for the Foreign Office during that quiet August to draft the Union's constitution, which is so far as I know still unique. It provides for a membership of governments as well as government agencies and various kinds of voluntary bodies. It is not therefore either an official international agency or an NGO, but an odd hybrid. In the modern acronymic dialect you might perhaps call it a GONGO. For some years, however, only the smaller governments took part, especially those from what would now be called the Third World. Emotionally inspired missionary individuals and groups began by making the running until, at Copenhagen in 1954, a quiet revolution put the scientists in the driving seat. The movement had started to mature, and to attract mature minds.
GROWTH
POINTS
AND
GROWING PAINS
But, it soon became plain, that was not enough. However soundly the threats and challenges to conservation were identified, diagnosed and prescribed for, little practical result was achieved beyond a mounting pile of unfulfilled resolutions scattered around the world in filing cabinets. To make matters worse, the Union was chronically on the verge of bankruptcy, and could not even fund staff and meetings essential for its functioning. Meanwhile, world economic recovery and new technologies were rapidly increasing both the number and scale of impacts on the environment. The message was grimly clear: do better or go under. Here in Britain at the end of the 1950s the Nature Conservancy had fairly adequate statutory powers, a sound organization and a small but growing income from public funds. We were worried, however, at the lack of a strong support movement to share the burdens and provide political muscle, and at the still lowly place accorded to conservation in the peck order of Whitehall. We saw the need for far more naturalists and sympathizers to join well-run active voluntary bodies at sufficient rates of subscription to counter the criticism that they expected the taxpayer to pay for their pet hobby. We recognized too that the threat was worldwide. It would be morally obligatory and also a source of added strength to use 110
our British base to build up an effective world network. Our attempts at that time to persuade our American colleagues to adopt the same view unfortunately fell on deaf ears. The Americans had, however, made two notable contributions towards creating a new international order for conservation. Under the tireless leadership of Hal Coolidge the National Park concept had been carried to the point of securing, at the 1959 United Nations meeting in Mexico City, a decision to establish a United Nations List of National Parks and Equivalent reserves all over the world. This was followed by a successful First World Conference on National Parks at Seattle in 1962--again organized by Hal Coolidge-which resulted in setting standards, creating a worldwide club of national parks directors, and making it a status symbol for a country to have one or more notable national parks. Somewhat earlier, under the Fulbright Program of international aid, the United States had sent to East Africa an outstanding group of field biologists and range managers who within a few years transformed the basis of operation of the great wildlife reserves from the pre-scientific to that of professional ecology and conservation. Among these was Lee Talbot, now Director-General of IUCN. At the IUCN's meeting in Poland in June 1960 the management of wild grazing animals was a main theme, on which American and Russian scientists collaborated to great effect. There was a distinct feeling that nature conservation was moving towards the big league. The 'wind of change' was now blowing through Africa, and with imminent decolonization it was widely predicted that conservation of wildlife would be amongst the first casualties. The Union reacted vigorously, setting up, in cooperation with other international agencies, an African Special Project under Dr. E. B. Worthington, the Nature Conservancy's Deputy Director-General, who had just investigated for the British government the economic significance of wildlife in half a dozen East African territories.
CREATION OF THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND
When, later in the year, Julian Huxley wrote a series of articles in The Observer on the wildlife emergency facing Africa the stage was set for a new initiative. Strangely, however, it was not one of the leaders of conservation but an unknown London businessman, the naturalized Czech-born Victor Stolan, who first put his finger, in a letter dated 6 December 1960, on the need to tackle the problem by a new high-level body, free from The Environmentalist
bureaucracy and able to raise some millions of pounds. Sir Julian referred this letter to me for advice, and I felt bound to accept the logic of the argument. Peter Scott, a Vice-President of IUCN, was already thinking along similar lines, and I was finally encouraged to go forward by a conversation, just twenty years ago in York, with Guy Mountfort, who assured me from his knowledge of businessmen that such a proposition could win backing, and promised his assistance. After a memorandum (which I had drafted at Easter in the Cotswolds) had been approved by the IUCN Executive Board, the rest of the preparatory work was done in London by an informal
Conservation became perceived by media as a serious interest needing to be taken seriously group under my chairmanship between May and September. It culminated, in September, in the legal constitution at Zurich of an international tax-exempt charitable foundation called the World Wildlife Fund, and its public launch at Arusha in Tanganyika and in London. We could claim to have fulfilled the requirement to cut out bureaucratic delays. Less than ten months had elapsed from the original vague suggestion until the WWF was legally in operation internationally, while both the British and the United States National Appeals were constituted within the year, and the Swiss National Appeal only one day later. So much for the historical facts. More difficult is to describe adequately the impact on attitudes and opinions of this new step, and the sequence of ensuing changes in the concept and evolution of conservation, some of which are widely taken for granted, while others remain almost unrecognized.
THE PUBLIC GETS THE MESSAGE
Considering the most concrete consequences first, there was a vast increase in the number of column inches in the Press and of programme items on radio and television devoted to conservation. Moreover, the treatment was much better informed and more sympathetic than previously. Conservation became perceived by the media as a serious interest, needing to be taken seriously, and also as a subject of perennial attraction to readers, listeners and viewers. This conversion Vol. 1, No. 2 (1981)
did not, however, happen all at once. When Aubrey Buxton started his Survival series on TV in 1961 the pundits told him that it might be viable for about a dozen programmes. It has actually run for thirty years with over 350 programmes, and its own survival is still not in doubt. Fortunately several of the keenest and most knowledgeable conservationists have also ranked high as broadcasters, writers and film makers, able to enchant audiences and to get over to them the true facts and issues. The degree of public and official ignorance about conservation in all countries twenty years ago seems almost incredible today. The very word conservation was tabu in British newspapers and on the BBC, until l0 June 1960, when I managed to break it by organizing a newsworthy non-event. This was the New Forest Walk, commemorating the 50th anniversary of that taken on much the same route by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Despite the continuing almost total failure by the vast majority of schools to make use of the educational value of the subject, their pupils manage to become pretty well informed about it through other channels.
PEOPLE'S INTEREST DOES NOT FLAG Great as has been the success in making masses of people aware of the wealth of life on the planet, and of the human threats to it, even an abundance of information does not necessarily amount to knowledge, any more than an abundance of knowledge brings wisdom. People who a few years ago had never heard of ecology tend to confuse it with conservation of nature, and both with the more man-centred concept of the environment, and that again with quality of life. In some ways this engagingly muddled thinking can be helpful. It leads to a passion for coming to the rescue of whales and tigers becoming readily converted into campaigning against waste, pollution and excess population growth. One has only to contemplate, however, the platforms and congresses of the self-styled Ecology Parties to get some inkling of the inchoate churning of aspirations and ideas in the public mind as a result of our crusade. No matter. The body politic is quite capable of fending off in its usual mindless way such ill-advised attempts to bring the environment to the ballot-box. Meanwhile the pot is kept stirring, to the dismay of the many who regarded the environment as a mere passing fashion of the early 1970s which would soon go away. In fact, few new 111
movements have leaped so rapidly from a localized and elitist to a worldwide and generally supported cause, or have been able to maintain such strong momentum with so few hiccups or dissensions. In a recent poll in the United States six out of every ten respondents said they were active in or sympathetic towards the environmental movement and only 4 percent declared themselves unsympathetic. That study concluded: 'Unlike the antinuclear movement, about which opinion is polarized, the environmental movement continues to enjoy a very high level of support and an extraordinary small amount of opposition from the public.'
IMPACT ON RECEIVED BELIEFS Nevertheless conservation has its price, not only in sometimes costly preventive and remedial measures and in exploitative benefits foregone, but in more restrained attitudes and the sacrifice of some of the scared cows of a materialist society. Strange new concepts such as sustained yield practices, recycling, renunciation of the right to unload unwanted 'externalities' from industry to the community, and acceptance of 'the polluter pays' as a principle have a sharp end, which thrusts itself into commercial balance sheets and traditional ways of management. The rise of such a new idea-system affects the ranking in the socioeconomic peck order to earlier idea-systems, linked with man as the Lord of Creation, with the mastery of nature, with expanding affluence and exponential economic growth, with uninhibited free enterprise or the politically determined redistribution of income, and with such man-centred world outlooks as Marxism or certain presentations of Christianity. The inevitable impact on traditional or trendy values is manifest in such new awarenesses as are enshrined in the assertions of 'post-industrial society', and the growing, although still loose and formless, drift towards concepts and studies of human ecology. We should perhaps look back as far as the Reformation and the Renaissance for a comparable general disintegration of long settled values and patterns through the impact of new outlooks and new ideas. Conservation has not consciously switched from hunting the tiger and rhinoceros to pursuing the surviving herds of unblushing materialists. The message of ecology, however, undermines many recently cherished values and beliefs by a kind of seismic upheaval which is bound to leave in its train heaps of intellectual and ethical rubble. Seismic seems the right word because the 112
emotional force and intensity behind the idea of conservation is as important as its intellectual power.
MASSIVE ENROLMENT OF SUPPORTERS As I mentioned earlier, one of the main impulses leading to the foundation of the World Wildlife Fund was common also to some of its national movements. It was the conviction that future progress was conditional on recruiting far larger paid-up memberships to make manifest the scale of committed public support and private funding of conservation. We foresaw that a mere lobby to resist injuries to wildlife and the environment, and to secure preferential treatment, laws and handouts by the taxpayer, would rightly arouse opposition and become counterproductive. Conservationists should band together in bodies of their choice to study problems, acquire and manage valuable sites, and generally to take their coats off and do something useful and visible on the ground. They should be seen to be public-spirited, understanding and active citizens.
T h e S t o c k h o l m C o n f e r e n c e o f 1972 w a s n o t a b l y s u c c e s s f u l in e d u c a t i n g governments on their environmental responsibilities
This new approach has given most encouraging results. In the late 1950s England and Wales had about four County Naturalists' Trusts with a total of a mere couple of thousand members. Now the County Trusts for Nature Conservation cover every county, aggregating about 130,000 members, strongly backed and co-ordinated by the national Society for the Promotion of Nature Conservation. Even more spectacular has been the rise of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, of which I have the honour to be Presid e n t - f r o m a membership of 6000 in 1946 to nearly half-a-million now, including over 100,000 in the Young Ornithologists Club. Despite depression we are recruiting another 3000 members monthly, and have an income approaching £4 million a year. The National Trust now has over a million members. Far from cramping growth elsewhere, these are paralleled by many other fast developing bodies which work together under the banner of CoEnCo, itself aided by the WWF, which in the The Environmentalist
UK alone efficiently raises some £2 million for both world and British conservation. Just compare these figures with the £8 million put into the official Nature Conservancy Council by the taxpayer, and with the £90 million allocated through the Arts Council to the ever-hungry and vociferous world of the arts. These are just British examples, which could readily be matched elsewhere, from Switzerland to America. The phenomenally widespread and intense concern which one meets everywhere for ecology and the environment rests upon a vigorous expanding base of contributing and working members, who believe in their cause and are forever bearing witness to it in action.
GOVERNMENTS BEGIN TO TAKE NOTICE However self-reliant and resourceful they may be, conservationists frequently meet situations in which they need to look to government for backing, either on the plane of legislation as with the Wildlife and Countryside Bill currently before Parliament, or through EEC intervention to bring various countries up to standard, or through international conventions such as Ramsar on Wetlands or the CITES on trade in endangered species, or through decisions of public inquiries or on planning applications and other administrative affairs. Since the formation of the Wildlife Fund there has been a remarkable growth in national legislation and international agreements for the conservation of environment and wildlife. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 was notably successful in educating governments on their environmental responsibilities, and in promoting a series of internationally concerted new laws. It also led to the creation of the new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and to a fresh respect for conservation among the already established United Nations agencies. In such ways the rising wave of public concern for the environment, which can be dated mainly to 1961, has been reflected in a comprehensive modern framework of law and administration which has signalled the need for a change of course to many private and public organizations. Environmentalists have been relieved of much of the handicap of working against the grain of government and the law.
THE EYES AND EARS OF CONSERVATION Yet another area in which we can readily measure progress is in the quality and coverage of the intelligence and staff work at the service of conVol. 1, No. 2 (1981)
servation. In 1960 it was taken for granted that we could do no more than react, as sensibly as possible, to news of emergencies and pleas for help, which often had to be uncritically accepted because we simply did not know which were the threatened species, where they were, what was the nature and urgency of the threat, and how to go about remedial or defensive action. In my initial memorandum of almost twenty years ago on Saving the World's Wildlife, I emphasized the need for an international Operations Group to prepare and maintain a world map showing the main current threats to wildlife and wilderness, and pinpointing the projects and campaigns aimed at countering them. This elementary suggestion was revolutionary at the time, but it was easier said than done. Let us spare a kindly thought here for the thousands who have served as our eyes and ears, pressing through forests and thickets, up steaming creeks and icy tundra, climbing precipices and diving among coral reefs, to bring back accurate records, censuses, films, photographs and surveys which add up to an astonishingly complete and reliable picture of what is happening, right through to the ends of the earth and the depths of the ocean. Some soldiers and sailors have found themselves plastered with medals for accomplishing less than these, our unsung heroes and heroines. Thanks to them we can instantly command accurate information, sound scientific and practical evaluation and the capacity to bring the right resources to bear in the right project from almost anywhere on the planet. Further, they have helped to open millions of eyes to the incredibly rich diversity and essential unity of our heritage in the biosphere. Whatever others may do, we have learned to think and act as custodians of One Earth. Divisive labels such as East and West, the developed countries and the Third World, OPEC and the rest mean perhaps less to conservationists than to almost any other interest group. We try to serve them all without discrimination, coming to their aid wherever they are and whatever flags, religions, trades or associations they may otherwise be following. We do not preach a creed, a political programme, an economic pattern of even vague brotherly l o v e - - w e simply invite all who can see and care to get down to the obvious tasks facing them, and to tackle the job all together. The environmental movement has therefore enjoyed the benefits of a subject field perfectly suited to the modern media, and of a skilful and talented publicity effort, backed up by an inspiring message which proved capable of evoking keen motivation among an unexpectedly wide range of people, especially from the towns. That massive 113
build-up of interest and support has been quickly reflected in swelling memberships, mounting financial strength and greatly enhanced respect and back-up from Parliaments, governments and intemational agencies. At the same time the movement has developed a capability for learning about and dealing with a wide series of worldwide ecological emergencies, and for educating its participants to take a global view which adds to their influence and authority.
THE DILEMMA FOR CONSERVATION STRATEGY
These advances and achievements may all be classed as positive but preponderantly internal measures of mainstream development from the somewhat narrow base enshrined in the very title World Wildlife Fund. The conservation movement, however, has increasingly been faced with the dilemma of having either to play a losing game in trying simply to save wildlife from being harried and crowded out of existence by human encroachments, or of having to sally forth from its familiar natural base to fight against these encroachments on their own ground. Perhaps in some ways luckily, the latest decades have seen increases in the scale and severity of pollution so gross that not only wildlife but human health and welfare have been conspicuously interfered with. Many who had scant sympathy for wildlife but disliked being contaminated by oil at the seaside, deafened by mechanical noises, or put at risk by the carefree handling of chemicals and explosives, have come to welcome the vigorous activism of conservationists, and even to imitate it in kindred fields of safeguarding amenity and
The point is now being reached where once more despite local victories we are fighting a losing war historic heritage. Habitat protection has often gone hand in hand with recreational interests, and has provided another bridge between nature conservationists and much broader elements of public opinion. Hitherto, however, such extensions of campaigning activity have been mainly defensive and specific. The point is now being reached where once more, despite local and particular victories, we are fighting a losing war. Large battalions of industry, developers, defence planners and above 114
all reckless neglecters of family planning persist in creating additional pressures against which our defences cannot hold, unless we abandon the defensive and adopt a strategy of carrying the war into the opposite camp. Such a course bristles with difficulties and dangers. It draws us away from the firm ground of expertise and cohesion on which we have so far made our stand. It runs the risk of alienating or bewildering some of our adherents and disrupting their invaluable solidarity. It might also dangerously thin down the manpower still urgently needed for the primary tasks of conserving fauna and flora. It also involves operating in areas which kindred established interests regard as their own preserves, and may therefore lead to friction externally.
DEFENSIVE SKIRMISHES
The World Conservation Strategy, so thoroughly thought out and so well launched a year ago, represents a half-way house between a defensive and an offensive posture for the movement. It
World population has shot up to 4.5 billion, overall rate o f increase is somewhat diminishing but no one is tackling this problem with the urgency that it calls for pulls together, reinforces and makes ready for action the sum of the allied elements which have already become committed to the conservation movement to some degree. In one respect, it goes further, and seeks to bring into a wider alliance the hitherto uncooperative and discordant movement for development in the Third World. That movement has been persuaded, through its leading agencies, to subscribe to well-meaning declarations of intent. There is no evidence, however, that these are even beginning to lead to the changes of programme, practice and priorities necessary to reduce, let alone to eliminate, the massive harm which it is still inflicting on the environment. At least two other worldwide forces of destruction remain equally rampant. The cornucopia of low cost energy which let loose so much thoughtless, selfish and barbarian change on midtwentieth century society has, despite cries of anguish from many quarters, hardly begun to be replaced by an energy-conserving alternative. The Environmentalist
Irreplaceable oil is still being squandered for inessential or even trivial and harmful uses at rates which will be bitterly regretted, if not by us then by our unfortunate successors. Since conservationists were almost alone in giving warning of the energy crisis, and since that crisis confronts all men with the most undeniable and painful demonstration of the necessity to respect the limits of the earth, it seems that a major opportunity is being missed if conservationists do not play a leading role in insisting on more serious and more rapid action to conserve energy. It is nearly twenty-seven years since the International Union at its Copenhagen meeting (at the instigation of Fairfield Osborn) rechristened itself 'for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources', but the movement is open to the charge of not having lived up to the additional obligation which it then assumed. At the same Copenhagen Assembly, I chaired a group to advise what we should do about the then impending world population explosion. We contented ourselves, against criticism from Bill Vogt and others, with sending a telegram to the international meeting then in progress on the subject, in Rome, stressing our concern that the threat should be tackled. Since then world population has shot up from around 2.7 to around 4.5 billion (or thousands of millions). Although the overall rate of increase is currently somewhat diminishing, it is as clear as daylight that no one is tackling this problem with anything like the urgency that it calls for. TACKLING THE THREE NASTY GIANTS So here we are, well justified in congratulating ourselves on the vast and successful efforts we have made to save tigers and rhinoceroses, yet still hesitating to take on the three Nasty Giants which are undermining the future of life on earth, for us as well as the animals. These are the giants of Reckless and Harmful Technological Development, Profligate Waste of the world's readily available energy reserves and Senseless Multiplication like crazy rabbits. The sad truth is that someone will have to tackle those three big nasties, and if it isn't to be us, who will? A solution may perhaps be found, on the lines already initiated in the World Conservation Strategy, by pursuing a middle course between that of standing aside and that of accepting detailed involvement. Such a middle course might call for: 1. successive critical studies and continuous monitoring of the course and current effects on the environment of the major human activities having most impact on it; Vol. 1, No. 2 (1981)
2. convening regular meetings with the leading organizations concerned, as is already being done with the Development agencies, to secure joint appraisal of progress and of persisting problems; 3. massive use of the movement's publicity and educational resources to spotlight cases where particular interests are doing particular damage, as has been done for example over whaling; 4. the development of proposals for intemational conventions and national legislation calculated to compel persistently damaging interests to come to the conference table, for example in such cases as the trade in tropical timber. Such a development of the World Conservation Strategy would enable the muscle and voice of the environmental movement to make themselves felt more vigorously within the circles from which most of the continuing damage to the planet emanates. It would also strengthen the hands of the many already active within those circles who are struggling to mitigate the damage, and would make it politically possible for governments to take decisions and to allocate resources to back up preventive and remedial action. TARGETS GROWTH
FOR
CHECKING
POPULATION
Time is running out, for this lecture even faster than for this planet, so to illustrate how such a middle course could work I will take only the case of population. We are fatalistically offered the prospect of an increase of 1.5 billion by around 2000, bringing the global total to 6 billion, with a staggering 6 billion more to follow next century. The implications of this for the planetary environment and resources, including wildlife, must be catastrophic. My alternative proposals would be to: 1. Bring together those concerned immediately and set realistic targets of maximum tolerable human numbers, by areas and dates, at the year 2000, with a ceiling of 5.5 billion. 2. Produce a joint statement showing how the rate of world increase has actually been reduced in the past decade from 2.0 to 1.7 percent, and how newly available, low-cost, safe, effective and acceptable methods might get it down, with an extra effort, below 1 percent by the turn of the century. 3. Cost out the financial implications of fitting annually an extra 25 million women worldwide with effective family planning devices. For example, the Filshie Clip, developed by the Simon Population Trust for harmless reversible female sterilization, has now passed 115
its trials and is going into production, along with several alternative techniques, offering women for the first time safe, foolproof and unobjectionable, long-term means of regulating their own fertility. 4. Apply the expertise and organization of the environmental movement to finding solutions for the public relations and financial problems involved. These are clearly beyond the immediate capacity of the world family planning movement, but could be brought within it by expert and resolute assistance. 5. Enlist the aid of national conservation organisations in greatly broadening the existing narrow support base of the family planning bodies, and in reinforcing them with experienced and successful organizers where these are needed. The stakes are high. If some such urgent, largescale specific effort is not mounted, our prospect by the end of this century is of losing rather than adding essential national parks and equivalent areas, and of having to raise more and more funds, not to go forward but to be driven more slowly backward. Moreover, it can be shown that the closer world population can be held down to its already excessive level, the better the chances for all will be to escape starvation and social and economic chaos.
MORE
CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE
Damping down the population explosion, unhappily, is only one of several pressing tasks. A similar approach is no less urgently necessary for energy conservation, and its reconciliation with environmental requirements; for the recasting o f development policies, for example over such necessities as water supply; for land use strategy and the conservation o f habitat, notably in relation to tropical forests, arid lands and wetlands; for the completion of the remarkable progress made over control o f pollution and the conservation o f threatened animal and plan t populations; and for bringing into the open, and eventually under control the arms traffic and defence expenditure which swallows up unproductively and harmfully so vast a share of the earth's overstretched resources. More fundamentally, the world needs a meeting of minds and concentration of effort in the field of human ecology similar to that which was achieved by our movement thirty years ago for the ecology of the biosphere and its conservation. By the year 2000 there ought to be an international Union for Human Ecology and a world Homo Sapiens Fund, working in intimate collaboration with IUCN and WWF to carry over the 116
scientific principles and practical techniques which we have successfully developed to the service of this last wretched and mismanaged species - the only one to threaten itself (as well as all the rest) with extinction. An intelligent, imaginative and vigorous audit of man's tenure of the earth in the light of modern ecology could do much to ease not only physical but economic and psycho-social tensions. Some initiative from the existing conservation movement to inspire and encourage it would also demonstrate that our basic concern is not anti-human but pro-human, even if some of us cannot help sharing Baudelaire's dismay with 'the eternal and incorrigible barbarity of man'.
" Should we celebrate our anniversary in 2001 as a World Day of Shame for the X X century and its disastrous contribution to the Future
l
Let me suggest in conclusion one or two points to be considered for the agenda of a WWF centenary meeting in 2061. First, it should be able to review in stark retrospect the full tale of damage and destruction from the 20th century materialist orgy. It should assess the extent to which the mad human population increase has by then been not just checked but reversed. I would hope it would be back to no more than at most our present numbers, with a further steady fall in prospect. It should also review the extent to which enlarged human leisure has been guided towards the detailed care and enjoyment of the planet, and the renewal of its damaged and destroyed habitats. It should study the prospects of repopulating suitable areas with species which have been rescued from threatened extinction. It should particularly consider the black spots remaining, and how they can be cleaned up. These are the kind of points which I would hope our successors would be able to deal with, as they settle into their programme for the second half of next century. I trust when that anniversary arrives they will forgive me for using this earlier occasion to prompt them on matters which they will understand far better than any of us here can. May I also extend to them, on behalf of all of us who have lived in this century, our heartfelt apologies for the appalling mess which we have just made of the earth, and have bequeathed to them to clear up as best they still can. Perhaps we should plan to celebrate our anniversary in 2001 as a World Day of Shame for the Twentieth Century, and for its disastrous contribution to the future (if it does leave a future) for Homo Sapiens.
The Environmentalist
731, F u l h a m R o a d L o n d o n SW6, U K
SUMMARY
This, The First World Conservation Lecture, was presented at the Royal Institution, London, UK, on 12 March 1981. The Lecture celebrated the 20th anniversary o f the World Wildlife Fund, and the first anniversary o f the World Conservation Strategy. The Lecture was organized by the World Wildlife Fund, UK.
We are here to celebrate the t w e n t i e t h anniversary n o t just o f the l a u n c h i n g o f a f u n d b u t o f a new w a y o f l o o k i n g at ourselves as the inhabit a n t s and the trustees o f a precious and vulnerable small planet. S u d d e n l y and u n e x p e c t e d l y a strange a s s o r t m e n t o f t h o u g h t s , impulses, frustrations, *Published with the kind permission of the World Wildlife Fund, UK. **Edward Max Nicholson, CB, CVO,Commandeur (Netherlands), Order of the Golden Ark, holds honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen, and The Royal College of Art London. He was educated at the University of Oxford, and was a member of the University's expeditions to Greenland (1928) and to British Guiana (1929). He was General Secretary (until 1940), later Chairman of PEP (Political and Economic Planning); now VicePresident of its successor body, the Policy Studies Institute. From 1945 to 1952 he was Secretary of the Office of the Lord President of the Council, then Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was member of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy from 1948-1964. In 1952 he was leader of the joint UN/ FAO Development Team in Baluchistan. Charter Member from 1949, and Director-General (1952-1966) of the Nature Conservancy, London, UK. From 1963 to 1974 he was Convenorof the Conservation Section of the International Council of Scientific Unions' International Biological Programme. President of the IUCN Technical Meeting in Edinburgh in 1956, concerned x~dth rehabilitation of areas biologically devastated by human disturbance, and relation of ecology to landscape planning. Member, Panel on Landscape Action Program, The White House Conference (USA) on Natural Beauty (1965). Secretary, HRH The Duke of .Edinburgh's Study Conference on The Countryside in 1970 (1963 and 1965). Council and Board Member of lIED. Godman-Salvin Medallist British Ornithologist Unions. Phillips MedaUist and Member of Honour IUCN, Geoffroy St. Hilaire Gold Medal, Soci~t~ Nationale de Protection de Nature de France, Premio Europeo Cortina-Ulisse (1971), Europa Preis ftir Landespflege (1972), Hon Member of World Wildlife Fund, Chairman EcologicalParks Trust, President RSPB, 1980. Principal Consultant and Chairman of Land Use Consultants Ltd (London) since 1966. Author of many books, Birds and Men (1951); Britain's Nature Reserves (1958), The System (1967); The Environmental Revolution (1970).
The Environmentalist, 1 (19 81) 109-116
observations and resolves w h i c h had b e e n simmering in m a n y m i n d s w e n t critical and fused t h e m selves into a d y n a m i c c o m p o u n d u n d e r the sign o f the P a n d a in 1961. I will try first to c o n d u c t y o u briefly t h r o u g h the processes leading up to that fusion, simply to help y o u to u n d e r s t a n d h o w we have c o m e to be here t o d a y , and w h a t kind o f people we conservationists are. I will then pass rapidly on to the main elements in o u r struggle and h o w t h e y can be successfully tackled. Finally, I will suggest some targets w h i c h we need to set ourselves for o u r still distant c e n t e n a r y y e a r 2 0 6 1 . I f in s k i m m i n g over the past I m e n t i o n certain participants in the d r a m a and o m i t others it is simply because I need to select e x a m p l e s illustrating the range and blend o f personalities w h o came t o g e t h e r in the e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o n s e r v a t i o n movem e n t . Many w h o c a n n o t be n a m e d here also cont r i b u t e d richly to the c o m m o n effort.
THE
START
OF
WORLD
CONSERVATION
My s t o r y starts in A u g u s t 1945. T h e d r o p p i n g in t h a t m o n t h o f an a t o m i c b o m b o n H i r o s h i m a t h r u s t m a n k i n d into an age o f a w e s o m e l y enlarged p o w e r and danger. S i m u l t a n e o u s l y , m u c h m o r e o b s c u r e l y , Julian H u x l e y was officially c o m m i s sioned to lead an e x p e r t i n q u i r y into c o n s e r v a t i o n o f n a t u r e in England and Wales. A m o n g his colleagues were A. G. Tansley, Charles Elton, J. A. Steers, E. B. F o r d , Cyril Diver and myself. T h e resulting R e p o r t , issued in J u l y 1947, has s t o o d the test o f time as the f o u n d a t i o n o f the N a t u r e C o n s e r v a n c y , for the science-based a d m i n i s t r a t i o n o f n a t u r e and natural resources. During this i n q u i r y Julian H u x l e y arranged for some o f us, including R i c h a r d F i t t e r ( o u r active S e c r e t a r y ) and myself, to c h e c k o u r findings b y visiting, in 1946, the Swiss National Park, w h i c h had already t h i r t y y e a r s ' experience o f managem e n t . O u r Swiss hosts t o o k the o p p o r t u n i t y o f bringing t o g e t h e r colleagues f r o m several o t h e r
© Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands
countries, and of discussing the formation of an International Union for the Protection of Nature. Meanwhile, Julian Huxley had been wafted away from us to set up UNESCO, as DirectorGeneral of which he convened at Fontainebleau in 1948 a meeting for the formal establishment of the International Union. I was not there, but I had arranged for the Foreign Office during that quiet August to draft the Union's constitution, which is so far as I know still unique. It provides for a membership of governments as well as government agencies and various kinds of voluntary bodies. It is not therefore either an official international agency or an NGO, but an odd hybrid. In the modern acronymic dialect you might perhaps call it a GONGO. For some years, however, only the smaller governments took part, especially those from what would now be called the Third World. Emotionally inspired missionary individuals and groups began by making the running until, at Copenhagen in 1954, a quiet revolution put the scientists in the driving seat. The movement had started to mature, and to attract mature minds.
GROWTH
POINTS
AND
GROWING PAINS
But, it soon became plain, that was not enough. However soundly the threats and challenges to conservation were identified, diagnosed and prescribed for, little practical result was achieved beyond a mounting pile of unfulfilled resolutions scattered around the world in filing cabinets. To make matters worse, the Union was chronically on the verge of bankruptcy, and could not even fund staff and meetings essential for its functioning. Meanwhile, world economic recovery and new technologies were rapidly increasing both the number and scale of impacts on the environment. The message was grimly clear: do better or go under. Here in Britain at the end of the 1950s the Nature Conservancy had fairly adequate statutory powers, a sound organization and a small but growing income from public funds. We were worried, however, at the lack of a strong support movement to share the burdens and provide political muscle, and at the still lowly place accorded to conservation in the peck order of Whitehall. We saw the need for far more naturalists and sympathizers to join well-run active voluntary bodies at sufficient rates of subscription to counter the criticism that they expected the taxpayer to pay for their pet hobby. We recognized too that the threat was worldwide. It would be morally obligatory and also a source of added strength to use 110
our British base to build up an effective world network. Our attempts at that time to persuade our American colleagues to adopt the same view unfortunately fell on deaf ears. The Americans had, however, made two notable contributions towards creating a new international order for conservation. Under the tireless leadership of Hal Coolidge the National Park concept had been carried to the point of securing, at the 1959 United Nations meeting in Mexico City, a decision to establish a United Nations List of National Parks and Equivalent reserves all over the world. This was followed by a successful First World Conference on National Parks at Seattle in 1962--again organized by Hal Coolidge-which resulted in setting standards, creating a worldwide club of national parks directors, and making it a status symbol for a country to have one or more notable national parks. Somewhat earlier, under the Fulbright Program of international aid, the United States had sent to East Africa an outstanding group of field biologists and range managers who within a few years transformed the basis of operation of the great wildlife reserves from the pre-scientific to that of professional ecology and conservation. Among these was Lee Talbot, now Director-General of IUCN. At the IUCN's meeting in Poland in June 1960 the management of wild grazing animals was a main theme, on which American and Russian scientists collaborated to great effect. There was a distinct feeling that nature conservation was moving towards the big league. The 'wind of change' was now blowing through Africa, and with imminent decolonization it was widely predicted that conservation of wildlife would be amongst the first casualties. The Union reacted vigorously, setting up, in cooperation with other international agencies, an African Special Project under Dr. E. B. Worthington, the Nature Conservancy's Deputy Director-General, who had just investigated for the British government the economic significance of wildlife in half a dozen East African territories.
CREATION OF THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND
When, later in the year, Julian Huxley wrote a series of articles in The Observer on the wildlife emergency facing Africa the stage was set for a new initiative. Strangely, however, it was not one of the leaders of conservation but an unknown London businessman, the naturalized Czech-born Victor Stolan, who first put his finger, in a letter dated 6 December 1960, on the need to tackle the problem by a new high-level body, free from The Environmentalist
bureaucracy and able to raise some millions of pounds. Sir Julian referred this letter to me for advice, and I felt bound to accept the logic of the argument. Peter Scott, a Vice-President of IUCN, was already thinking along similar lines, and I was finally encouraged to go forward by a conversation, just twenty years ago in York, with Guy Mountfort, who assured me from his knowledge of businessmen that such a proposition could win backing, and promised his assistance. After a memorandum (which I had drafted at Easter in the Cotswolds) had been approved by the IUCN Executive Board, the rest of the preparatory work was done in London by an informal
Conservation became perceived by media as a serious interest needing to be taken seriously group under my chairmanship between May and September. It culminated, in September, in the legal constitution at Zurich of an international tax-exempt charitable foundation called the World Wildlife Fund, and its public launch at Arusha in Tanganyika and in London. We could claim to have fulfilled the requirement to cut out bureaucratic delays. Less than ten months had elapsed from the original vague suggestion until the WWF was legally in operation internationally, while both the British and the United States National Appeals were constituted within the year, and the Swiss National Appeal only one day later. So much for the historical facts. More difficult is to describe adequately the impact on attitudes and opinions of this new step, and the sequence of ensuing changes in the concept and evolution of conservation, some of which are widely taken for granted, while others remain almost unrecognized.
THE PUBLIC GETS THE MESSAGE
Considering the most concrete consequences first, there was a vast increase in the number of column inches in the Press and of programme items on radio and television devoted to conservation. Moreover, the treatment was much better informed and more sympathetic than previously. Conservation became perceived by the media as a serious interest, needing to be taken seriously, and also as a subject of perennial attraction to readers, listeners and viewers. This conversion Vol. 1, No. 2 (1981)
did not, however, happen all at once. When Aubrey Buxton started his Survival series on TV in 1961 the pundits told him that it might be viable for about a dozen programmes. It has actually run for thirty years with over 350 programmes, and its own survival is still not in doubt. Fortunately several of the keenest and most knowledgeable conservationists have also ranked high as broadcasters, writers and film makers, able to enchant audiences and to get over to them the true facts and issues. The degree of public and official ignorance about conservation in all countries twenty years ago seems almost incredible today. The very word conservation was tabu in British newspapers and on the BBC, until l0 June 1960, when I managed to break it by organizing a newsworthy non-event. This was the New Forest Walk, commemorating the 50th anniversary of that taken on much the same route by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Despite the continuing almost total failure by the vast majority of schools to make use of the educational value of the subject, their pupils manage to become pretty well informed about it through other channels.
PEOPLE'S INTEREST DOES NOT FLAG Great as has been the success in making masses of people aware of the wealth of life on the planet, and of the human threats to it, even an abundance of information does not necessarily amount to knowledge, any more than an abundance of knowledge brings wisdom. People who a few years ago had never heard of ecology tend to confuse it with conservation of nature, and both with the more man-centred concept of the environment, and that again with quality of life. In some ways this engagingly muddled thinking can be helpful. It leads to a passion for coming to the rescue of whales and tigers becoming readily converted into campaigning against waste, pollution and excess population growth. One has only to contemplate, however, the platforms and congresses of the self-styled Ecology Parties to get some inkling of the inchoate churning of aspirations and ideas in the public mind as a result of our crusade. No matter. The body politic is quite capable of fending off in its usual mindless way such ill-advised attempts to bring the environment to the ballot-box. Meanwhile the pot is kept stirring, to the dismay of the many who regarded the environment as a mere passing fashion of the early 1970s which would soon go away. In fact, few new 111
movements have leaped so rapidly from a localized and elitist to a worldwide and generally supported cause, or have been able to maintain such strong momentum with so few hiccups or dissensions. In a recent poll in the United States six out of every ten respondents said they were active in or sympathetic towards the environmental movement and only 4 percent declared themselves unsympathetic. That study concluded: 'Unlike the antinuclear movement, about which opinion is polarized, the environmental movement continues to enjoy a very high level of support and an extraordinary small amount of opposition from the public.'
IMPACT ON RECEIVED BELIEFS Nevertheless conservation has its price, not only in sometimes costly preventive and remedial measures and in exploitative benefits foregone, but in more restrained attitudes and the sacrifice of some of the scared cows of a materialist society. Strange new concepts such as sustained yield practices, recycling, renunciation of the right to unload unwanted 'externalities' from industry to the community, and acceptance of 'the polluter pays' as a principle have a sharp end, which thrusts itself into commercial balance sheets and traditional ways of management. The rise of such a new idea-system affects the ranking in the socioeconomic peck order to earlier idea-systems, linked with man as the Lord of Creation, with the mastery of nature, with expanding affluence and exponential economic growth, with uninhibited free enterprise or the politically determined redistribution of income, and with such man-centred world outlooks as Marxism or certain presentations of Christianity. The inevitable impact on traditional or trendy values is manifest in such new awarenesses as are enshrined in the assertions of 'post-industrial society', and the growing, although still loose and formless, drift towards concepts and studies of human ecology. We should perhaps look back as far as the Reformation and the Renaissance for a comparable general disintegration of long settled values and patterns through the impact of new outlooks and new ideas. Conservation has not consciously switched from hunting the tiger and rhinoceros to pursuing the surviving herds of unblushing materialists. The message of ecology, however, undermines many recently cherished values and beliefs by a kind of seismic upheaval which is bound to leave in its train heaps of intellectual and ethical rubble. Seismic seems the right word because the 112
emotional force and intensity behind the idea of conservation is as important as its intellectual power.
MASSIVE ENROLMENT OF SUPPORTERS As I mentioned earlier, one of the main impulses leading to the foundation of the World Wildlife Fund was common also to some of its national movements. It was the conviction that future progress was conditional on recruiting far larger paid-up memberships to make manifest the scale of committed public support and private funding of conservation. We foresaw that a mere lobby to resist injuries to wildlife and the environment, and to secure preferential treatment, laws and handouts by the taxpayer, would rightly arouse opposition and become counterproductive. Conservationists should band together in bodies of their choice to study problems, acquire and manage valuable sites, and generally to take their coats off and do something useful and visible on the ground. They should be seen to be public-spirited, understanding and active citizens.
T h e S t o c k h o l m C o n f e r e n c e o f 1972 w a s n o t a b l y s u c c e s s f u l in e d u c a t i n g governments on their environmental responsibilities
This new approach has given most encouraging results. In the late 1950s England and Wales had about four County Naturalists' Trusts with a total of a mere couple of thousand members. Now the County Trusts for Nature Conservation cover every county, aggregating about 130,000 members, strongly backed and co-ordinated by the national Society for the Promotion of Nature Conservation. Even more spectacular has been the rise of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, of which I have the honour to be Presid e n t - f r o m a membership of 6000 in 1946 to nearly half-a-million now, including over 100,000 in the Young Ornithologists Club. Despite depression we are recruiting another 3000 members monthly, and have an income approaching £4 million a year. The National Trust now has over a million members. Far from cramping growth elsewhere, these are paralleled by many other fast developing bodies which work together under the banner of CoEnCo, itself aided by the WWF, which in the The Environmentalist
UK alone efficiently raises some £2 million for both world and British conservation. Just compare these figures with the £8 million put into the official Nature Conservancy Council by the taxpayer, and with the £90 million allocated through the Arts Council to the ever-hungry and vociferous world of the arts. These are just British examples, which could readily be matched elsewhere, from Switzerland to America. The phenomenally widespread and intense concern which one meets everywhere for ecology and the environment rests upon a vigorous expanding base of contributing and working members, who believe in their cause and are forever bearing witness to it in action.
GOVERNMENTS BEGIN TO TAKE NOTICE However self-reliant and resourceful they may be, conservationists frequently meet situations in which they need to look to government for backing, either on the plane of legislation as with the Wildlife and Countryside Bill currently before Parliament, or through EEC intervention to bring various countries up to standard, or through international conventions such as Ramsar on Wetlands or the CITES on trade in endangered species, or through decisions of public inquiries or on planning applications and other administrative affairs. Since the formation of the Wildlife Fund there has been a remarkable growth in national legislation and international agreements for the conservation of environment and wildlife. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 was notably successful in educating governments on their environmental responsibilities, and in promoting a series of internationally concerted new laws. It also led to the creation of the new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and to a fresh respect for conservation among the already established United Nations agencies. In such ways the rising wave of public concern for the environment, which can be dated mainly to 1961, has been reflected in a comprehensive modern framework of law and administration which has signalled the need for a change of course to many private and public organizations. Environmentalists have been relieved of much of the handicap of working against the grain of government and the law.
THE EYES AND EARS OF CONSERVATION Yet another area in which we can readily measure progress is in the quality and coverage of the intelligence and staff work at the service of conVol. 1, No. 2 (1981)
servation. In 1960 it was taken for granted that we could do no more than react, as sensibly as possible, to news of emergencies and pleas for help, which often had to be uncritically accepted because we simply did not know which were the threatened species, where they were, what was the nature and urgency of the threat, and how to go about remedial or defensive action. In my initial memorandum of almost twenty years ago on Saving the World's Wildlife, I emphasized the need for an international Operations Group to prepare and maintain a world map showing the main current threats to wildlife and wilderness, and pinpointing the projects and campaigns aimed at countering them. This elementary suggestion was revolutionary at the time, but it was easier said than done. Let us spare a kindly thought here for the thousands who have served as our eyes and ears, pressing through forests and thickets, up steaming creeks and icy tundra, climbing precipices and diving among coral reefs, to bring back accurate records, censuses, films, photographs and surveys which add up to an astonishingly complete and reliable picture of what is happening, right through to the ends of the earth and the depths of the ocean. Some soldiers and sailors have found themselves plastered with medals for accomplishing less than these, our unsung heroes and heroines. Thanks to them we can instantly command accurate information, sound scientific and practical evaluation and the capacity to bring the right resources to bear in the right project from almost anywhere on the planet. Further, they have helped to open millions of eyes to the incredibly rich diversity and essential unity of our heritage in the biosphere. Whatever others may do, we have learned to think and act as custodians of One Earth. Divisive labels such as East and West, the developed countries and the Third World, OPEC and the rest mean perhaps less to conservationists than to almost any other interest group. We try to serve them all without discrimination, coming to their aid wherever they are and whatever flags, religions, trades or associations they may otherwise be following. We do not preach a creed, a political programme, an economic pattern of even vague brotherly l o v e - - w e simply invite all who can see and care to get down to the obvious tasks facing them, and to tackle the job all together. The environmental movement has therefore enjoyed the benefits of a subject field perfectly suited to the modern media, and of a skilful and talented publicity effort, backed up by an inspiring message which proved capable of evoking keen motivation among an unexpectedly wide range of people, especially from the towns. That massive 113
build-up of interest and support has been quickly reflected in swelling memberships, mounting financial strength and greatly enhanced respect and back-up from Parliaments, governments and intemational agencies. At the same time the movement has developed a capability for learning about and dealing with a wide series of worldwide ecological emergencies, and for educating its participants to take a global view which adds to their influence and authority.
THE DILEMMA FOR CONSERVATION STRATEGY
These advances and achievements may all be classed as positive but preponderantly internal measures of mainstream development from the somewhat narrow base enshrined in the very title World Wildlife Fund. The conservation movement, however, has increasingly been faced with the dilemma of having either to play a losing game in trying simply to save wildlife from being harried and crowded out of existence by human encroachments, or of having to sally forth from its familiar natural base to fight against these encroachments on their own ground. Perhaps in some ways luckily, the latest decades have seen increases in the scale and severity of pollution so gross that not only wildlife but human health and welfare have been conspicuously interfered with. Many who had scant sympathy for wildlife but disliked being contaminated by oil at the seaside, deafened by mechanical noises, or put at risk by the carefree handling of chemicals and explosives, have come to welcome the vigorous activism of conservationists, and even to imitate it in kindred fields of safeguarding amenity and
The point is now being reached where once more despite local victories we are fighting a losing war historic heritage. Habitat protection has often gone hand in hand with recreational interests, and has provided another bridge between nature conservationists and much broader elements of public opinion. Hitherto, however, such extensions of campaigning activity have been mainly defensive and specific. The point is now being reached where once more, despite local and particular victories, we are fighting a losing war. Large battalions of industry, developers, defence planners and above 114
all reckless neglecters of family planning persist in creating additional pressures against which our defences cannot hold, unless we abandon the defensive and adopt a strategy of carrying the war into the opposite camp. Such a course bristles with difficulties and dangers. It draws us away from the firm ground of expertise and cohesion on which we have so far made our stand. It runs the risk of alienating or bewildering some of our adherents and disrupting their invaluable solidarity. It might also dangerously thin down the manpower still urgently needed for the primary tasks of conserving fauna and flora. It also involves operating in areas which kindred established interests regard as their own preserves, and may therefore lead to friction externally.
DEFENSIVE SKIRMISHES
The World Conservation Strategy, so thoroughly thought out and so well launched a year ago, represents a half-way house between a defensive and an offensive posture for the movement. It
World population has shot up to 4.5 billion, overall rate o f increase is somewhat diminishing but no one is tackling this problem with the urgency that it calls for pulls together, reinforces and makes ready for action the sum of the allied elements which have already become committed to the conservation movement to some degree. In one respect, it goes further, and seeks to bring into a wider alliance the hitherto uncooperative and discordant movement for development in the Third World. That movement has been persuaded, through its leading agencies, to subscribe to well-meaning declarations of intent. There is no evidence, however, that these are even beginning to lead to the changes of programme, practice and priorities necessary to reduce, let alone to eliminate, the massive harm which it is still inflicting on the environment. At least two other worldwide forces of destruction remain equally rampant. The cornucopia of low cost energy which let loose so much thoughtless, selfish and barbarian change on midtwentieth century society has, despite cries of anguish from many quarters, hardly begun to be replaced by an energy-conserving alternative. The Environmentalist
Irreplaceable oil is still being squandered for inessential or even trivial and harmful uses at rates which will be bitterly regretted, if not by us then by our unfortunate successors. Since conservationists were almost alone in giving warning of the energy crisis, and since that crisis confronts all men with the most undeniable and painful demonstration of the necessity to respect the limits of the earth, it seems that a major opportunity is being missed if conservationists do not play a leading role in insisting on more serious and more rapid action to conserve energy. It is nearly twenty-seven years since the International Union at its Copenhagen meeting (at the instigation of Fairfield Osborn) rechristened itself 'for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources', but the movement is open to the charge of not having lived up to the additional obligation which it then assumed. At the same Copenhagen Assembly, I chaired a group to advise what we should do about the then impending world population explosion. We contented ourselves, against criticism from Bill Vogt and others, with sending a telegram to the international meeting then in progress on the subject, in Rome, stressing our concern that the threat should be tackled. Since then world population has shot up from around 2.7 to around 4.5 billion (or thousands of millions). Although the overall rate of increase is currently somewhat diminishing, it is as clear as daylight that no one is tackling this problem with anything like the urgency that it calls for. TACKLING THE THREE NASTY GIANTS So here we are, well justified in congratulating ourselves on the vast and successful efforts we have made to save tigers and rhinoceroses, yet still hesitating to take on the three Nasty Giants which are undermining the future of life on earth, for us as well as the animals. These are the giants of Reckless and Harmful Technological Development, Profligate Waste of the world's readily available energy reserves and Senseless Multiplication like crazy rabbits. The sad truth is that someone will have to tackle those three big nasties, and if it isn't to be us, who will? A solution may perhaps be found, on the lines already initiated in the World Conservation Strategy, by pursuing a middle course between that of standing aside and that of accepting detailed involvement. Such a middle course might call for: 1. successive critical studies and continuous monitoring of the course and current effects on the environment of the major human activities having most impact on it; Vol. 1, No. 2 (1981)
2. convening regular meetings with the leading organizations concerned, as is already being done with the Development agencies, to secure joint appraisal of progress and of persisting problems; 3. massive use of the movement's publicity and educational resources to spotlight cases where particular interests are doing particular damage, as has been done for example over whaling; 4. the development of proposals for intemational conventions and national legislation calculated to compel persistently damaging interests to come to the conference table, for example in such cases as the trade in tropical timber. Such a development of the World Conservation Strategy would enable the muscle and voice of the environmental movement to make themselves felt more vigorously within the circles from which most of the continuing damage to the planet emanates. It would also strengthen the hands of the many already active within those circles who are struggling to mitigate the damage, and would make it politically possible for governments to take decisions and to allocate resources to back up preventive and remedial action. TARGETS GROWTH
FOR
CHECKING
POPULATION
Time is running out, for this lecture even faster than for this planet, so to illustrate how such a middle course could work I will take only the case of population. We are fatalistically offered the prospect of an increase of 1.5 billion by around 2000, bringing the global total to 6 billion, with a staggering 6 billion more to follow next century. The implications of this for the planetary environment and resources, including wildlife, must be catastrophic. My alternative proposals would be to: 1. Bring together those concerned immediately and set realistic targets of maximum tolerable human numbers, by areas and dates, at the year 2000, with a ceiling of 5.5 billion. 2. Produce a joint statement showing how the rate of world increase has actually been reduced in the past decade from 2.0 to 1.7 percent, and how newly available, low-cost, safe, effective and acceptable methods might get it down, with an extra effort, below 1 percent by the turn of the century. 3. Cost out the financial implications of fitting annually an extra 25 million women worldwide with effective family planning devices. For example, the Filshie Clip, developed by the Simon Population Trust for harmless reversible female sterilization, has now passed 115
its trials and is going into production, along with several alternative techniques, offering women for the first time safe, foolproof and unobjectionable, long-term means of regulating their own fertility. 4. Apply the expertise and organization of the environmental movement to finding solutions for the public relations and financial problems involved. These are clearly beyond the immediate capacity of the world family planning movement, but could be brought within it by expert and resolute assistance. 5. Enlist the aid of national conservation organisations in greatly broadening the existing narrow support base of the family planning bodies, and in reinforcing them with experienced and successful organizers where these are needed. The stakes are high. If some such urgent, largescale specific effort is not mounted, our prospect by the end of this century is of losing rather than adding essential national parks and equivalent areas, and of having to raise more and more funds, not to go forward but to be driven more slowly backward. Moreover, it can be shown that the closer world population can be held down to its already excessive level, the better the chances for all will be to escape starvation and social and economic chaos.
MORE
CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE
Damping down the population explosion, unhappily, is only one of several pressing tasks. A similar approach is no less urgently necessary for energy conservation, and its reconciliation with environmental requirements; for the recasting o f development policies, for example over such necessities as water supply; for land use strategy and the conservation o f habitat, notably in relation to tropical forests, arid lands and wetlands; for the completion of the remarkable progress made over control o f pollution and the conservation o f threatened animal and plan t populations; and for bringing into the open, and eventually under control the arms traffic and defence expenditure which swallows up unproductively and harmfully so vast a share of the earth's overstretched resources. More fundamentally, the world needs a meeting of minds and concentration of effort in the field of human ecology similar to that which was achieved by our movement thirty years ago for the ecology of the biosphere and its conservation. By the year 2000 there ought to be an international Union for Human Ecology and a world Homo Sapiens Fund, working in intimate collaboration with IUCN and WWF to carry over the 116
scientific principles and practical techniques which we have successfully developed to the service of this last wretched and mismanaged species - the only one to threaten itself (as well as all the rest) with extinction. An intelligent, imaginative and vigorous audit of man's tenure of the earth in the light of modern ecology could do much to ease not only physical but economic and psycho-social tensions. Some initiative from the existing conservation movement to inspire and encourage it would also demonstrate that our basic concern is not anti-human but pro-human, even if some of us cannot help sharing Baudelaire's dismay with 'the eternal and incorrigible barbarity of man'.
" Should we celebrate our anniversary in 2001 as a World Day of Shame for the X X century and its disastrous contribution to the Future
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Let me suggest in conclusion one or two points to be considered for the agenda of a WWF centenary meeting in 2061. First, it should be able to review in stark retrospect the full tale of damage and destruction from the 20th century materialist orgy. It should assess the extent to which the mad human population increase has by then been not just checked but reversed. I would hope it would be back to no more than at most our present numbers, with a further steady fall in prospect. It should also review the extent to which enlarged human leisure has been guided towards the detailed care and enjoyment of the planet, and the renewal of its damaged and destroyed habitats. It should study the prospects of repopulating suitable areas with species which have been rescued from threatened extinction. It should particularly consider the black spots remaining, and how they can be cleaned up. These are the kind of points which I would hope our successors would be able to deal with, as they settle into their programme for the second half of next century. I trust when that anniversary arrives they will forgive me for using this earlier occasion to prompt them on matters which they will understand far better than any of us here can. May I also extend to them, on behalf of all of us who have lived in this century, our heartfelt apologies for the appalling mess which we have just made of the earth, and have bequeathed to them to clear up as best they still can. Perhaps we should plan to celebrate our anniversary in 2001 as a World Day of Shame for the Twentieth Century, and for its disastrous contribution to the future (if it does leave a future) for Homo Sapiens.
The Environmentalist