Wolverine Conservation Part 3

Sweden Calling

Upon submitting (with admittedly little forethought) an application to speak, I was invited to present findings based on our snow-tracking component at the first International Wolverine Symposium in Jokkmokk, Sweden a few years back.  I thought, “Cool!  Won’t this be fun?!  And important!”  I began to arrange my travel plans.  I found out there would, of course, be an eight-hour flight.  Then I learned of the fourteen-hour train-ride north through Sweden, at night no less.  My first reaction to this was to think of the personal expenditures of time and energy and money.  Who were these people, picking Jokkmokk as the locale, anyway?  Why not at least Stockholm?!  This was obviously going to take a toll.  Then I thought more specifically of the planes and trains, blasting along on their hydrocarbon diet.  And then I got to thinking of the Internet, and the ease of modern communication.  How our papers were published in the scientific literature anyway, and would be available online.  How I could communicate with these same people by eating no more than a scoop of oatmeal (organic, no less!) to power my legs for a few steps to get to my office desk and my fingers to type.  How there would be no conservation issues in some areas of wolverine range were it not for our desire for, and sense of entitlement towards, insane levels of mobility.

Suddenly, the thought of going to Jokkmokk to personally tell people about wolverines didn’t seem cool at all.  It seemed unconscionably stupid.  So I cancelled.  And I thought a lot about the other trips I’d taken in the name of conservation - not so good, maybe.  Fun, perhaps.  Makes a guy feel pretty happening, too.  But how could I be expressing a concern for conservation with any integrity while living significant elements of the life of extravagances that was at the root of basically all our conservation crises?  What example would this set?

How much has our desire for “status” cost us, anyway?

Creating A Context for Conservation

I am finding that as I age, I am experiencing a profound feeling of deja-vu with most new conservation initiatives.  We’ve been treading water for years in our approach to conservation – doing reductionist, self-indulgent species-by-species work as though the plight of our particular subject as noticed today is somehow unique and eminently ready for ‘mitigation’.  But few of our issues are unique, and while we may win some minor conservation skirmishes, we are being annihilated in the war, decade by decade, to an escalating degree.  Whether we’re talking wolverine, caribou, prairie rattlesnakes, burrowing owls – ourselves - the problem is the same: we cannot ultimately conserve in a system lacking a context for conservation. We must engineer a system where conservation has a context in which to occur.  And beyond the need to recruit more messengers of this fact from all walks of life, we most desperately require working models - individuals serving as living, functioning illustrations of alternatives - lots of them. 

Leaders like ours, who tell us we can solve our sustainability issues while maintaining our present standard of living, are either intentionally lying to us or have no deeper understanding of the issues.  Our standard of living, achievable at present only through endless physical growth, is the problem.  We can choose our current economy or we can choose a more modest, sustainable one, but we can’t have both.  They are, given our present means, mutually exclusive.  The first choice will rob us of wolverines first, and sooner or later our own comfort or worse, as collapse – which is occurring right now - is the inevitable outcome in any closed system like ours where there are no limits to growth.  This is not conjecture.  It is scientific fact. 

The second choice is life.

Wolverine Need Role Models

The second choice – a sustainable economy - has become a tall order.  I see enormous perversity in how the more desperate our need to embrace this concept grows, the faster our choices take us in the opposite direction.  The place to start providing for the future of wolverine is to open the dialogue of root causes and keep it in the forefront of our communications… “Wolverines need wilderness, intact forests, quiet places to bear their young and a refuge from trapping (here’s where we almost invariably stop)… all of which require support from a human society living in a context of sustainability where consumption, growth and population are moderated to a state of equilibrium with the environment.”  The first part of this message is an example of Thoreau’s “branch-hacking”.  This last part, the vital “striking at the root” context almost always omitted by specialists is the most important point, the systematic application of which would make knowledge of the preceding unnecessary.  It must become a normative part of our social understanding.  This can only be facilitated through determined, sustained dialogue.  It can be done.  It’s starting to work with global warming, another symptom of the collapse we are engineering.

We are in the midst of various collapse-based crises today, with many more poised to occur.  When they happen, or when the existing ones like climate change or the imminent end of natural gas hit their crescendo of effect, what sorts of ideas would you like to see “lying around”?  Friedmanesque ones, with an elite flock of vultures glutting themselves on the sea of our bones covering the carcass they’ve made of the planet, or ones of your own that will result in a world that provides for wolverine and the kinds of people who must have them and all they stand for? 

Consider how you’ll enjoy an alternative version of the world sanctioned by your silence.

Pioneer’s CEO said to me once that if people wanted him out of the bush, they could quit demanding his products, recognizing I am sure that this is an oversimplification.  Essentially, I agree with him, although with some powerful colleagues spending fortunes to spread misinformation designed to cast doubt on the urgency for alternative technologies, this is no simple thing.  Thanks in part to such giants, alternative technologies remain elusive, but make no mistake, they do exist (one of the most powerful of which is simply to demand less).  Here’s where we play our part.  If we think wolverines need less oil and gas exploration or clear-cutting, for instance, then we’d better speak-up about root-causes.  More than that, we’d better get ourselves some solar panels, scrap our plans to build that new home for an old one, get a bicycle and some snowshoes and cancel that trip to present our data in California.

We have arrived at the unimpressive point in our history where, if a person wanted to know how to best approach right-livelihood, whether in business, politics, conservation, education, forestry, agriculture, urban development or medicine, all they need do is study the fundamental practices ala our mainstream and be sure to apply the opposite.  How we arrived here is a cinch.  Suffice to say here that there is virtually nothing about the way we live right now in developed nations that can be sustained.  There is no context in which to conserve wolverine.

We can change this.

Thank-you for indulging me.

Jonathan Wright