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Living Green: Wilderness or Gardening?
Reflections on the 2004 APRU Fellows Program
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APRU fellows posing for a picture
The theme of the 5th APRU Fellows Program was “Globalization and the Environment: Multidisciplinary Perspectives,” and it took place over two weeks at UC Santa Barbara and Osaka University. Twenty-one faculty participated from universities in Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and the US. We heard from more than a dozen experts whose research addresses the topic of the program, but with perspectives ranging from political science to conservation to technological solutions.
There was general agreement among participants that the environment suffers a death of a thousand cuts, with particular emphasis on problems having immediate consequences for human health (air and water pollution). We were also all quick to recognize the yin and yang of globalization. In principle, global governance can help enforce human rights and environmental protection, and global markets can improve economic opportunities. However, so far, economic globalization has enhanced differences among the world’s rich and poor, and the environment has suffered, particularly in poor countries where unsustainable resource extraction has become the obvious, suggested method for economic development. Of course, our views differed on which environmental problems were most pressing, and how to respond to negative components of globalization. Expanding on Rene Dubos’ challenge to make a difference – Think globally, act locally – we generated three new adages: “Think globally, act crazy” (to emphasize our concerns about globalization); “Act locally, impact globally” (to emphasize that human activities now pervade the globe); and, most importantly for a bunch of academics, “Talk globally”. Certainly we succeeded in this last category.
APRU fellows at a field trip in Japan
The program also introduced me to two amazing places – Santa Cruz Island, a dry wild spot off the coast of California, and Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake in an area of growing human impact. These places acted as touchstones, as concrete examples anchoring new thoughts about two ways that humans might address environmental problems: through wilderness and gardening. Wilderness epitomizes the idea that environmental protection happens best when human activities are reduced to a bare minimum, or eliminated altogether. In contrast, gardening requires interventions by humans to craft a world that is productive and under control, where all the species and processes that sustain human life persist through our ingenious design. One might argue that the wilderness perspective is naive, and the gardening perspective full of hubris. But in fact they simply represent two ends of a spectrum of thinking, and the challenge is to find a working balance between the two to address each environmental problem.
On Santa Cruz Island, human activities go back 12,000 years, but today the island is largely uninhabited. It appears wild, with a rugged, somewhat forbidding landscape. But in fact low human impacts are illusory. Agriculture has left a legacy of introduced species that have fundamentally altered the ecology of the island: annual grasses, a monoculture of fennel in the valleys, and pigs that severely disturb the shallow soils. Nine species on the island are endemic, that is, found only in that location, including several plants and a fox. The fox population plummeted from several thousand to perhaps 100 quite recently. The Nature Conservancy and academic ecologists are interested in restoring the wildness of Santa Cruz Island, by maintaining native species and removing invasives, but to do so they engage in a sort of gardening. They have built miles of fences, which may make it possible to shoot all of the thousands of pigs. With the pigs gone, native plants, which are ill-adapted to their disturbance, should do better. Also, golden eagles will have less to eat and may leave. Pork-subsidized eagles are implicated as predators of endemic foxes.
Lake Biwa harbors a similarly complex web of interactions surrounding introduced species. In the 1960’s, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago sent the emperor of Japan a gift: live bluegill sunfish. At the same time, the lucrative pearl mussel industry was collapsing in Lake Biwa. Pearl mussels have a complicated life history: adult mussels dangle a piece of luscious-looking flesh to attract fish, then release their larvae which attach to the fish and develop there, disengaging only when ready to transform into a tiny mussel. Biologists used the sunfish for a research project to determine if these new fish would serve as a suitable host for pearl mussel larvae. Unfortunately, the fish escaped, and they are now one of 12 introduced fish species in the lake. They are likely responsible for some portion of the loss of 40 per cent of native species from the lake. Some of these natives are still found out of the reach of sunfish in higher streams, but four or five, including some of the 10 endemics, are probably gone forever. Meanwhile, the pearl mussels have also disappeared, except for some small aquaculture operations.
Physical and chemical transformations of Lake Biwa parallel the biological shifts, and with equally interesting history. For rice paddies, water was diverted and shoreline marshes converted, which continued with commercial development into recent times. Water was diverted from Lake Biwa to Kyoto along a 12-km canal, constructed in the late 1800s; a 25-year project to regulate the lake’s outflow was just completed in the 1990s. The lake was used for thousands of years for fisheries, water for rice paddies, drinking water, and transportation, but it reached its nadir in the 1970s as algal blooms made the water unsightly, smelly, and unsafe. Local housewives mobilized to reduce their use of phosphate-containing soaps, against the lobbying of detergent companies. Phosphate in the lake has since declined and algal blooms are less common, but nitrogen and chemical oxygen demand remain above desirable levels.
The environmental emphasis in Lake Biwa concerns water quality, which has direct human benefit (although clear water also benefits a variety of other species, especially unusual native fishes and insects). Thus, the discussions we had about the lake were essentially about gardening – improving the lake for humans, rather than removing human impacts from the lake. Still, there was also a desire to reclaim a lost condition, to return to a more wild state. If drinking water for 14 million people were the only requirement, it could be achieved by cleaning even the foulest water. The technological solutions, however, address both purification of water from the lake and a cleanup of the lake itself.
I hesitate to attribute the wilderness vs. gardening dichotomy to culture. Some of the distinct focus of each week of the program is simply an idiosyncratic consequence of the two academic institutions: UC Santa Barbara has a strong program in ecology, and Osaka University in environmental engineering. But some of the distinction may also be cultural. Japan, where people have tended to agriculture for at least a millennium, has a much longer tradition of its dominant culture than in the US. Japan also has a restricted land area with a lot of people. Gardens have been integrated with Japanese life for thousands of years, as we saw in tours of palace gardens and in common living quarters. Inner courtyards of machiyas in Kyoto contain twisted old trees, running water, and that true harbinger of wildness – no straight lines. It appears to me that there is certainly a natural esthetic in Japan, but perhaps little space or tradition for uninhabited wildness. At the same time, technological achievement has high value. Some of these technologies actually reduce people’s ecological footprint – water saving dishwashers, appliance recycling, and toxic cleanup. Around Lake Biwa, problems of nutrient overload and anoxia are being solved in part by developing technologies to remove nutrients (as well as building an exceptional infrastructure for sewage treatment and some education of farmers about the consequences of fertilizer use).
My own thinking leans toward wilderness rather than gardening to deal with environmental problems. But this perspective was expanded and enhanced by the creative approaches to ecological gardening undertaken in Japan. Biodiversity – the other species on the planet with all of their fantastic lifestyles and roles – requires some areas where human impacts are very small, but in the remainder of the area, humans need to become gardeners, creating places that are productive and beautiful. To achieve sustainable, high standards of living, humans will consume more, and through technology we may be able to reduce our overall impact by wasting and polluting less. Or so we can dream.
Jennifer Ruesink is an assistant professor at the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. She participated at the 2004 APRU Fellows Program hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara and Osaka University. Her research interests are in marine community ecology especially food web interactions, species invasions and conservation.