Conservation in Context

Since the Institute of Archaeology was founded in the 1930s, conservation has been an integral part of its activities, but it is now being practised and taught in new, more culturally responsive ways. An example of this approach is the involvement of staff and students in the conservation of a Maori meeting house at Clandon Park, Surrey, made possible by a partnership between the Institute and the National Trust.

By all credible accounts the diversity of species is in sharp decline, headed toward what Richard Leakey and Robert Lewin ( 1995 ) call "the sixth extinction." The causes of species decline include human population growth, economic expansion, pollution, climate change, mining, logging, urban sprawl, overharvest, and displacement of indigenous peoples. The legal and administrative protections placed between endangered species and eternity work, at best, in a limited fashion for a time. Our successes in preservation, as David Brower once noted, are temporary while our failures are permanent. But the problem is not limited to the decline of biological diversity. Many of the same forces that erode biological diversity jeopardize diversity of all kinds, including that of languages and culture. The modern world, it seems, is at war with difference even while professing devotion to it.
The loss of diversity cannot be attributed, on the whole, to ignorance. Considerable effort has been and is being made to document the decline, but how much such information reaches the public or particular decision-makers is hard to say. What is apparent, for those who wish to see, is an increasingly detailed and discouraging picture. E. O. Wilson (1992: 342 ) believes that we could lose a quarter of the world's biodiversity over the next century; with foresight and a bit of luck, we might hold the loss to 10%. Nor are we ignorant of the many reasons diversity should be preserved. Self-interest, cultural prudence, and arguments in defense of the intrinsic rights of species converge on the same goal of saving all that can be saved. We know that it would be foolish to wantonly eliminate the many services provided by species and healthy ecosystems. Beyond arguments grounded in utility, however, we have powerful moral reasons to preserve species that provide no useful service to Homo sapiens . But neither argument has changed much relative to what needs to be changed if biological and cultural diversity is to be preserved, so species, languages, and indigenous cultures continue to spiral downward. One suspects that the effort to preserve diversity runs against deeper currents. We profess great devotion to that which we seem incapable of protecting, in large part, I think, because modern culture aims everywhere for uniformity and control.
Modernization from its earliest beginnings formed around ideas such as progress, economic growth, and human superiority over nature and around the goals of standardization, legibility, efficiency, and control. Lewis Mumford begins his magisterial history of technology, for example, with a discussion of the clock, which he describes as "the foremost machine of modern technics" (1934: 15). The widespread adoption of the clock in the fourteenth century led to the quantification of time and "a new medium of existence" in which "one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it" (p. 17). The irregularities of actual days and seasons and those inherent in the human organism were swept aside in fa-vor of time that could be measured, counted, and made to count. The clock was followed in rapid succession by geometrically precise maps, doubleentry bookkeeping, the art of perspective in painting, and the marriage of vision and quantification that, in Alfred Crosby's (1997:229) words, "snap the padlock-reality is fettered." Ability to quantify visual space enabled Europeans to extend control in hitherto unimaginable ways and envision things yet to be invented, giving rise to still greater control and uniformity.
The same trend toward greater control became evident in European philosophy, science, and politics in the turbulent seventeenth century. "From 1630 on," in philosopher Stephen Toulmin's (1990:35) words, "the focus of philosophical inquiries has ignored the particular, concrete, timely and local details of everyday human affairs: instead, it shifted to a higher, stratospheric plane, on which nature and ethics conform to abstract, timeless, general, and universal theories." The dream of reason aimed to establish rational methods, an exact language, and a unified sciencein other words, "a single project designed to purify the operations of the Human Reason by desituating them: that is, divorcing them from the compromising association of their cultural contexts" (Toulmin 2001:78). This was nothing less than the triumph, temporary perhaps, of rationality over reasonableness, calculation over emotion, generality over particularity. The result, in Toulmin's (2001:204) words, was "injury to our commonsense ways of thought [and] confusion about some highly important questions." The search for certainty extended past the abstractions of philosophy and science to change how people related to physical reality. Early and inaccurate means of surveying land, for example, surrendered to precise land measurement based on Edmund Gunter's 22-yard-long surveying chain ( Linklater 2002 ). The precise measurement of land permitted a market by which land became yet another commodity. According to the land ordinance of 1785 "surveyors shall proceed to divide the said territory into townships of 6 miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles" (Linklater 2002:73). The subsequent grid pattern marched westward from the Appalachian Mountains across prairies to the Pacific, regardless of variations of topography, ecology, or the long-established use patterns of the natives who did not believe in owning land, or in right angles for that matter. In the twentieth century, the drive for standardization was applied to the workplace ( Taylorism), to public economics as cost-benefit analysis, business operations, education, agriculture, forestry, urban planning, and governance. The culmination was what James C. Scott (1998:4) calls "a high modernist ideology . . . a muscle-bound version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature ( including human nature ), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws." The juggernaut of standardization, uniformity, and legibility is a product of large forces, including technological dynamism, the triumph of quantification, the need of the modern state to extend its control over its land and citizens and that of capitalism to grow without limit. Whatever their differences, all these forces converged around the goals of precise measurement, increasingly pervasive control, and growth of the human estate. The inevitable result was to increase scale, complexity, velocity, profitability, pollution, lethality, and bureau-cracy, and generate hidden costs and surprises. But the choices leading in this direction were not inevitable or even probable at the time they were made. The important point is that the particular form of modernization represents choices. At some points better choices could have been made, and some might still be made.
The well-advertised gains of modernization over the past two centuries are obvious, including greater material comfort, longer lives, increased mobility, and a huge gain in material wealth. On the other hand, any honest reckoning of the price we have paid and continue to pay for standardization must include unaccounted costs such as the destruction of natural systems, social regimentation, militarization, the extermination of indigenous peoples, inequality, and more. Still other costs are hidden. Part of the cost of quantification is that "inevitably meanings are lost . . . because it imposes order on hazy thinking, but this depends on the license it provides to ignore or reconfigure much of what is difficult or obscure" ( Porter 1995:85). And much is difficult and obscure, including the value of diversity itself in all its manifestations and even the capacity to think diversely. It is logical that the drive for standardization and uniformity might someday impose a grid-like pattern on the ecology of our minds until we are permitted to have no thoughts without right angles.
On the other hand, the world is full of surprise and paradox and mocks the human pretension to mastery. As management, standardization, and uniformity have increased without limit, so have their unanticipated effects. Often called "side effects," they are more accurately recognized as logical outcomes that we were not smart enough to foresee. Predictably, our attempts to render nature more orderly often backfire. Large dams, pesticides, wonder drugs, improved forests, highways, industrial agriculture, and factory farms run afoul of larger forces and limitations. But the same applies everywhere, relentlessly. Human per-versity or creativity, sometimes only a matter of a difference of perspective, will find ways to subvert clocks, walls, bureaucracy, straight lines, barriers, and regimentation. There are, in other words, limits to what we can control at any scale over any length of time; larger forces that care not one iota for either capitalism, reasons of state, or big science will, in due time, sweep all off the stage. Those limits, ecological, economic, political, organizational, and human were evident in the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it is no less likely that a capitalist society organized around a diminishing number of ever-larger corporations will also self-destruct. The belief that we might organize the entire planet for the convenience of capital and capitalists one day will be seen as perverse and self-defeating foolishness. By the same token the belief that we can render ourselves safe by building higher and thicker walls, imposing tighter surveillance, or developing ever more heroic and implausible technology will one day be seen as about as effective as a child hiding under bedcovers in a thunderstorm.
We struggle in vain to define how the world works, in part because our language, minds, categories of thought, perceptions, values, and intellectual tools have been honed to the goal of control. But it is apparent that the logic of human control and mastery runs counter to 3.8 billion years of evolution, and that discrepancy is not a small flaw but more like a fault line. The record of evolution is one of surprise, flow, networks of causes, unpredictability, nonlinearity, collapse, and creativity-all a description of what we see dimly and often wrongly. The very fact of biological diversity suggests humility about what we attempt to control and how we do it. The truth is that diversity of any kind could not have occurred in a thoroughly managed world, and it cannot be protected in a world that some purport to manage thoroughly for whatever good cause. The logic of the modern economy and state runs counter to the flow of evolution, and something will have to give. Given the odds, it would be foolish to wager on the alacrity, wisdom, and wherewithal of economists, businessmen, media pundits, or politicians.
Our situation is captured in Einstein's famous observation to the effect that the kind of thinking that created the problem cannot fix it. The preservation of diversity will require a different manner of thinking that runs counter to much of conventional wisdom, including that described as environmental. In other words, the cause of protecting diversity must be broadened, deepened, and joined to other causes. Though the destination may be shrouded, the starting points are clear.
First, we should be clear about why diversity is important, and the strongest arguments are not first and foremost economic. To arguments of self-interest, prudence, and intrinsic rights-all valid enough-we should add the idea of celebration of beauty that is inherent in the diversity of life and human culture. Arguments from self-interest or duty often sound like a Puritanical sermon running on too long, the point being that guilt will move us to better behavior. Sometimes it does, but we are likely to be moved farther and to better ends by shorter sermons and the power of wonder, joy, and celebration. This is no more than to acknowledge Pascal's observation that "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." Second, the protection of diversity requires that we address the issue of economics, but on terms that the seventh generation out would find agreeable. "The juggernaut of technology-based capitalism will not be stopped," in the words of E. O. Wilson ( 2002:156 ), "but its direction can be changed." Changing the direction of capitalism means rigorously applying the laws of capitalism to protect the "natural capital" of wildlife, ecosystems, soils, forests-all of those factors on which capitalism depends. It requires eliminating what Norman Myers calls "perverse subsi-dies" for excessive and unprofitable logging, fishing, road building, and power plants. Further, redirection of the juggernaut will require limits on "the scale of human activities" (Ehrlich & Wilson 1991:761 ). A logical, if problematic, beginning point would be something like a global version of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 (rigorously enforced) to limit the size of corporations and make them accountable to the interests of the larger world. Nowhere is it written that we are to be ruled by distant and unaccountable economic powers or unresponsive governments. While we are at it we might toss out the habit of giving obeisance to pecuniary interests with the same disdain with which we once discarded the notion that kings ruled by divine right.
Third, if we are to choose to protect diversity we will need leaders who frame the real issues of our time and help craft the public laws, instruments, and means by which we might do so. We need policies that enable the world to make a timely transition from fossil energy to renewable energy and others that stop the destruction of habitat. There are larger questions having to do with the scale of the economy and the point at which further growth becomes not just superfluous but destructive. Soon, we will have to redress the growing income disparity between the rich and the poor and what could be an even larger gap between present and future generations. It is commonly assumed that the triumph of capitalism in the 1990s settled questions of the distribution of wealth once and for all in favor of the rich. But inequities worldwide continue to worsen, along with the incentives and capacity in much of the world to conserve biodiversity. In every way these are political issues that can be resolved only through political institutions and processes.
Fourth, for two centuries the western world organized around the master idea of freedom. It was, and remains, a powerful idea that helped humanity surmount the arbitrary au-thority of church, monarchy, and custom. But to traverse the topography of the century ahead we will need a larger master idea. As candidates, the concepts of diversity and sustainability have the drawback that they limit freedom, as presently understood. Most people will not accept such limits without understanding that freedom was never intended as license; rather, it entails personal restraint and the exercise of duties to the larger community. Edmund Burke ( Ophuls 1992), the founder of modern conservatism, put it this way: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites . . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." There can be no freedom amid social chaos or in a state of ecological ruin. This level of sophistication requires that people understand the linkages between human behavior and ecological health, and thereby comprehend how the world works as a system.
Finally, the protection of diversity will require a larger and yet more limited view of science and what it means to know. It is assumed, wrongly I think, that knowing is equivalent to measuring, explaining, and controlling. The protection of diversity will require, to the contrary, that we recognize reality and value what exists beyond our limited ability to measure and control. The fact is that diversity can be measured and described at a superficial level but can never be explained or known. The scientific impulse is to add something like "not yet," in the faith that we will, given time, figure it all out. I think it more likely that the right word is never in recognition of the limits of human knowledge and the many ways knowledge can be corrupted, co-opted, and misused. This is the kind of mature knowledge once proposed by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, rooted in the recognition of the kinship of all life and the limits of human knowledge. It is science driven by wonder and disciplined by humility in the recognition that there are mysteries we are powerless to name.