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Phil Pister
"As professionals, nothing would be worse that to leave
as our legacy a boxcar loaded with reprints concerning
recently-extinct species."
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Mike: Talk about the professional and change in natural resource management.
Phil: …The greatest problems I encountered in promoting preservation of desert fishes involved a combination of physical and philosophical aspects, deriving from an agency still entrenched in recreational pursuits that predominated following World War II. Most agency upper-echelon personnel were utilitarian thinkers, and they just could not see the loss of desert and other native species as being significant. If an issue did not address issues of sport fishing – where there was a lot of noise and confusion – it did not get attention. When I pressed them on the issue, they’d simply dismiss it by denying its significance. Their question would be, “What are you messing around with these worthless little fish for? What good are they?” I had colleagues who would say: “I’m going out to get some of these pupfish because they make good bass bait.” These people tried to get under your skin. You just had to turn away and ignore the barbs. You became agile in responding in a productive way to that kind of thinking. In addressing this dichotomy of thinking, Leopold’s (1949) A-B cleavage fits well here: “…One group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its function as something broader.” Our agencies still retain a good share of “A” types, but that is changing. Another Leopold (1953) quote that fits well here is : “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
Today, most students come out of school already of the “B” persuasion, reflecting an ecological education and not just the ability to turn a crank in a traditional way. It remains a bit of a shock when they run into the Old Guard, “A” persuasion employees who relegate the meaning of a forest to board feet of lumber. The German philosopher Max Planck (1950) stated this so well: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light. But rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” I think there is progress. I don’t see many of the Old Guard anymore, and those that remain are approaching retirement. Managers today seem to be far more receptive to new ideas than when I was starting my career. There has been an enormous change since the mid point of the twentieth century.
There is no easy answer to things like pupfish restoration and preservation. The Owens pupfish was one of the first fish listings when the first Endangered Species Act was implemented in 1966. Sadly, these fish are not much better off now than they were back then. All one can say is that we are currently much more aware of such problems and of the fragility of the resource, and there are recovery plans in progress for all listed species. It is going to be a constant battle – we will never be able to walk away from such things, either legally or ethically.
Biologists now must face increasingly difficult questions, such as: ”Some projects are inherently bad for the resource. Should an ethical biologist become involved?” Or, “Irrespective of the righteousness of the cause, is distortion of the truth ever permissible?” Education of future biologists will necessarily require a strong infusion of ethics and philosophy, because therein lie the answers far more than in technology.