Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share S2E13. Holly Doremus on Conservation in the Anthropocene
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
S2E13. Holly Doremus on Conservation in the Anthropocene
On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental law at Berkeley and the co-director for the Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Diversity. Doremus has a interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Plant Physiology from Cornell in addition to her JD. For Doremus, one of the benefits of an interdisciplinary educational experience is that it has helped her to
better understand what questions different disciplines are able to address and what questions they may not have thought to ask.
In our approach to answering conservation questions, we need to reevaluate what our goals are in order to decide how to achieve them. At the start of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, crucial questions, including fundamental questions concerning the nature of a species, and our risk tolerance and willingness to commit social resources to conservation, were either not understood or were seen as better addressed later. A further contemporary challenge is that the ESA was not framed to protect the proportion of species that are at risk today.
One consequence of the Anthropocene is an increasingly number of species under protection, which means greater limits on individual and commercial activity. Doremus believes that congressional intervention will become more common as the number of ESA controversies increases (6:44-23:34).
Due to the tendency of politics to act as a set of competing performances, Congress is not the place we should start the conversation about reconsidering our conservation approach. Rather it should begin in academia, where crucial interdisciplinary discussions can happen. Academics can generate an updated consensus of the public’s opinion on biological conservation (23:35-46:27).
Even if conservation goals were agreed upon, there would still be many questions about how to achieve those goals. To what extent should humanity take the role of the world’s gardeners? Who gets to decide what the garden looks like? How much control should we have over species in order to achieve our conservation goals? What are the obligations of the public to pay for the conservation that it wants? These are all complex political and scientific questions that will have to be answered in order to make legitimate progress in conserving the biological world (46:28-1:02:10).
View all episodes
By Free Range with Mike Livermore
5
1313 ratings
On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental law at Berkeley and the co-director for the Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Diversity. Doremus has a interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Plant Physiology from Cornell in addition to her JD. For Doremus, one of the benefits of an interdisciplinary educational experience is that it has helped her to
better understand what questions different disciplines are able to address and what questions they may not have thought to ask.
In our approach to answering conservation questions, we need to reevaluate what our goals are in order to decide how to achieve them. At the start of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, crucial questions, including fundamental questions concerning the nature of a species, and our risk tolerance and willingness to commit social resources to conservation, were either not understood or were seen as better addressed later. A further contemporary challenge is that the ESA was not framed to protect the proportion of species that are at risk today.
One consequence of the Anthropocene is an increasingly number of species under protection, which means greater limits on individual and commercial activity. Doremus believes that congressional intervention will become more common as the number of ESA controversies increases (6:44-23:34).
Due to the tendency of politics to act as a set of competing performances, Congress is not the place we should start the conversation about reconsidering our conservation approach. Rather it should begin in academia, where crucial interdisciplinary discussions can happen. Academics can generate an updated consensus of the public’s opinion on biological conservation (23:35-46:27).
Even if conservation goals were agreed upon, there would still be many questions about how to achieve those goals. To what extent should humanity take the role of the world’s gardeners? Who gets to decide what the garden looks like? How much control should we have over species in order to achieve our conservation goals? What are the obligations of the public to pay for the conservation that it wants? These are all complex political and scientific questions that will have to be answered in order to make legitimate progress in conserving the biological world (46:28-1:02:10).