Soulé opens GWS 2013 with passion

Michael Soulé kicked off the conference with a passionate and sometimes emotional plenary speech Monday morning. Dr. Soulé made a strong case for  preservation of wild things and wild places. “Each extinction that occurs now diminishes life.” “Speciation stopped about a decade ago [for larger animals]. Death is one thing, the end of birth is another.” “We need to staunchly defend what’s left and not be nicey-nicey.”

Dr. Soulé drew a sharp contrast between conservation and “new conservation,” or gardening, which he identified strongly with Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. He gave several good arguments for why a gardening approach to nature is dangerous, detrimental and unsustainable, going so far as to say that it presents the “final solution” for wild nature. He suggested that the objectives of this approach are not conservation but to increase consumption for profit interests. Three times he encouraged the audience to google the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy. More moderately, he described “new conservation” as not conservation but humanitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, “I’m a human,” but 98% of charitable giving goes to humanitarianism, and of the remaining 2% much goes to animal welfare, including domesticated animals. “Probably less than 1%” goes to wild nature.

Dr. Soulé did contradict himself in responding to a question on how to make large-scale conservation corridors possible, stressing that they need to benefit people through recreation, health benefits of exercise, tourism, and outfitting businesses such as REI. Dr. Soulé received a round of applause for replying to a question on population with, “The answer is simple, we need to empower women.”

Dr. Soulé’s talk was webcast, and he fielded several questions from the remote audience. The webcast will be made available through the George Wright Society website. Tomorrow’s plenary by Emma Maris, author of Rambunctious Garden will also be webcast.

You can view Dr. Soulé's bio on http://www.georgewright.org/gws2013_plenaries