School of hard knocks: Conservation science comes of age (again and again)

That same year, the term “conservation biology” was coined in an attempt to bridge the gap between academic research and environmental policy.  An explosion of interest, enthusiasm and new research followed.  Later, noted Harvard biologist and conservationist E.O Wilson would call it “a discipline with a deadline”.
By the early 80s, I had my first conservation science job at WWF-Canada, where our principal focus was conserving endangered species and their habitats.  While we were winning a few battles—removing species like the White Pelican from the endangered species list in Canada and helping launch legislation like the Species at Risk Act—it often felt like we were losing the real war against ecosystem destruction and degradation.
Saving endangered species from extinction, while of course urgent, is also expensive.  Preventing them from becoming endangered in the first place is smarter, cheaper and more effective.  That requires widespread habitat protection.  But, we can’t turn the entire country into a national park.  People live here—we work, we eat, and we build our homes and cities on the land.  So the real question – the question that Monte Hummel, Arlin Hackman and I puzzled over, as the list of threatened species continued to grow—was how much (or perhaps, how little) of the landscape do we need to protect in order to conserve biodiversity in Canada?
We found the answer in conservation biology and it was both the logic and the driving force behind one of the most successful conservation movements in Canadian history:  The Endangered Spaces Campaign.

The key was to ensure that all natural habitats are “represented” in the protected area system, in secured zoning of an adequate size, shape and location to have ecological integrity.  In other words, they had to protect the species that live there.
To get Endangered Spaces off the ground, we mapped nearly 500 eco-regions covering the entire country, turning the map of Canada into an ecological patchwork quilt.  Each year for the ten-year campaign, as we pressed governments to protect more lands, we measured the number, size and sufficiency of protected areas existing or needed in every province and territory, both on land and in the oceans.  For the entire decade, ending in 2000, we published scorecards, praising and reprimanding governments, as needed, to keep the protected areas coming.
In the end, this “grown up” approach to conservation science helped us double the amount of area protected in Canada.  More importantly, these new tools helped us find where these new parks needed to be to best secure ecosystems and wildlife, as rapidly as possible.
Today, all species—on land and in water—are up against a whole host of new challenges. WWF continues to push conservation science forward to find the solutions.  In the Arctic, where a warming climate is driving some of the most dramatic habitat changes in modern history, we’re using science-based tools to see into a very different future for polar bears, walrus, and caribou so that we can proactively protect the new areas these species and others will depend on to survive into the next century.  In our oceans, we’re drawing on emerging research about the “acoustic” needs of whales and dolphins to help protect a critical dimension of their environment that, until recently, had not been considered.  And, through our emerging Living Rivers Campaign, we’re applying a breakthrough understanding of river health to help protect some of Canada’s last wild waters and better manage those impacted by dams, diversions and water withdrawals.
Now comfortably “thirty something,” conservation biology is no longer a young field.  But until we have figured out how to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature, it will continue to grow and mature (as will we).  A discipline with a deadline, indeed.