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With Friends like These Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies

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Abstract

The human footprint is growing at the expense of other species and the integrity of ecosystems. What poet of the wild Snyder (The practice of the wild. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1990) called the growth monster remains not just unchecked but embraced in theory and practice by virtually all human societies. There is nothing new in this situation—it has been accelerating for several millennia and especially the last few hundred years. Nor is there anything new in the arguments made by those who justify it. Although the expression of self-righteous greed is rarer and sounds extreme amidst claims by business and political leaders that biodiversity is important, human behavior has not changed much judged by its consequences—we take more and more and continue to squander a heritage that we can never replace. Each species humans destroy diminishes not only the Earth community, but all who remain.

Reprinted from: Wuerthner et al. (2014), with permission of the author, editors and publisher.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am indebted to Rodman (1977) who to my knowledge first used the analogy of colonialism to describe the post-forager human relationship to the rest of nature.

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  1. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University, Oregon, USA

    David Johns

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  1. Leiden University, Institute Cultural Anthropology Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Helen Kopnina

  2. Kensington Campus , Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Haydn Washington

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Johns, D. (2020). With Friends like These Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies. In: Kopnina, H., Washington, H. (eds) Conservation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13905-6_5

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