Panel Discussion, continued...
Q: (inaudable question from the audience)
MORITZ: I better try to repeat that. The comment essentially was that at a recent presentation that talked about the Endangered Species Act, the questioner had spoken to one of the speakers who mentioned that there was a local mining operation. The question was, would there be any problem in using that [biodiversity] information to address the problem of mining developing in the local community. The speaker objected to that notion, saying that he hated that science was being used in a political way. The question is, how do our panelists feel about that. .
ROOPNARINE: I do that all the time. There's a real dichotomy in our society between what pure scientists are supposed to do and what activists are supposed to do. That's one of the new twists that have come up with this discipline that we call conservation biology. I think that by and large there are scientists that are willing to express their beliefs in a more public forum and in more political arenas. I think Michael Soule talks about it as wearing different hats. I don't have any problem myself using knowledge that I have to try to prevent things that I think are harmful or wrong.
In some ways, some people object to that because we may not have all the data. But you can study an area to death or study an area while it's disappearing. So, if we want to conserve things and if we want, as scientists, have ecosystems and species that we can continue to study, we have to take the data that's available and make judgment calls and say OK, this is not good. We don't have all the data but this is going to be bad for wildlife. I think we, as biologists, more and more of us have to come out and take sides.
STERLING: We talk about that all the time. Because I work at the American Museum of Natural History, which people think of as a purely academic institution, there's a real fear that we could become an advocate group by the work that I do or by the conservation biology at the Center for Biodiversity Conservation. We are committed to the idea that we will produce this data for use by whomever. We hope that the data is interpreted effectively to be used for conservation. The Spotted Owl is a perfect example with curators on our staff on both sides of the Spotted Owl controversy -- have used the same data sets to argue their case.
I suppose that in the best of all worlds that would be exactly what I would want. The one thing that I continue to say is that there's absolutely no way that you can be working in the field and not be some kind of advocate. We're just softer advocates than the folks who live in Washington and lobby the government. I think that we shy away from people using the data that we gather in a single minded strategy. We like to think of it as part of a whole.
So in the instance, what you are looking for is one piece of data, are their endangered species in our area that would be affected by this mining. You would want to look at ecosystems and ecosystem processes, you would want to look at a number of different things. Your legal vehicle, at the moment, is in the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act was put into legislation in order to conserve ecosystems and not just individual species. It comes out as an individual species policy but it is in fact, if you read very closely, it's an ecosystem legislation. So, I think it's important to gather all of those pieces of information, focusing on what you're concerned about.
|
BioForum Index
