A Conversation with Eric Dinerstein

Eric Dinerstein, Chief Scientist for the Conservation Science Program at the World Wildlife Fund, came to speak at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources about implementing landscape scale conservation and WWF's work in this area through their ecoregional planning.

EMI: In general, what are the key factors needed for effective landscape scale conservation?

Dinerstein: The first thing is to clearly identify what your goals are. You look at the landscape ecology literature, but it is not clear what they are trying to maximize. Is it maintaining connectivity for species that have poor dispersal capabilities? Is it maintaining big blocks of habitat for species that are very sensitive and require big buffer areas from major threats? To what extent are they dealing with a species that is a good disperser and you are trying to conserve its habitat? To what extent are they trying to conserve rare habitats? It is not clear to me in a lot of these landscape designs what the biodiversity goals are that they are trying to achieve. That is number one.

Another critical thing that again I don't think many landscape designs address is to determine what used to be there. Where we are now is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and I don't think that is what we should be doing in conservation. Often we see in the literature a focus on what is the minimal critical set to maintain biodiversity or to achieve representation. Often that is a minimum critical set of what is there now. We need to go back to what defined the place. We need to pick a benchmark. What was the place like 50 or 100 years ago? We need to go back to some time when wildlife populations and processes fluctuated naturally, which is sometimes impossible. But if you can, then you should design your landscapes around that. If you design around what is there today, you might be missing out on some important features of the system.

EMI: During the course of the day, you have mentioned several times the role of key individual. What is their role?

Dinerstein: I think what we are doing is visionary. I don't think this approach would have happened if you go off and talk about bottom up approaches. I don't think the great advances in conservation, and this may sound heretical, come from bottom up approaches. The idea to put a man on the moon in about 1970, that was so outrageous and the technology did not exist. Or to map the human genome that was just proposed a couple of years ago. That was just so impossible, but think of the incredible victories they made in doing it. Those weren't done by somebody in some small office tinkering with a rocket or someone playing around their PCR machine. It was someone with a vision at a very high level saying let's do this. That's what you need for conservation at the ecoregion scale. Someone who sees that scale and says this is visionary, this is not what we can achieve now but in ten years we can make it a reality. The difference between the human genome and this is that we know how to do conservation. We did not know how to build rockets. We did not know how to map the human genome. We did not have the technology. We have the knowledge and technology to do conservation. We just don't have the will. We lack the visionary leadership.

EMI: A lot of the work is based on expert opinion. What happens when experts disagree? How do you overcome that?

Dinerstein: Experts always disagree. The other big problem is not so much that scientists disagree. It is when you get to the stage of ranking and setting priorities, because you can't do everything. That is a hard thing. It is hard to get scientists to say, let's do this first, this second, this third, because there is not enough information to say that. They are all priorities, and that is a big struggle.

EMI: How has WWF approached presenting the ecoregional concept? How has it been received? What have been the strategies in promoting it?

Dinerstein: That is difficult. Some people have just embraced it and run with it. They see the logic of it; they see the power of it; and they recognize that what they have been doing in the past just does not amount to enough, because they have been looking at the wrong scale. That is one extreme. There are others who see it as one more thing to add on to their portfolio and ecoregions become something they got to do along with fifteen other things that actually fit nicely under the umbrella of ecoregion-based conservation, but they just made it one more add on project. That is where we have our work cut out for us - reminding people what this is. Some people just don't get it. Threats don't operate at individual sites. Biodiversity strategies based on constellations of connect-the-dots will not lead you to where you want to get as efficiently as taking a broad view and saying these fifteen areas, not these fifteen. And these threats and these policies should be focused on as important leaders for conservation and not everything. That is challenging.