Bioproportionality: a necessary norm for conservation?

F. Mathews
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

In the early stages of the environment movement, one of the principal objects of conservation was wilderness. In the 1980s, the category of wilderness gave way to that of biodiversity: conservation was reconceived as biodiversity conservation. With this change of categories, the focus of conservation shifted from the saving of vast and abundant terrains of life to the saving of types of living thing, particularly species. A little-noted consequence of this reframing was a reduction in scale: minimum viable populations of species, which set targets under the new biodiversity-based conception of conservation, were often orders of magnitude lower than the populations that might have occurred in wilderness areas. Exclusive focus on the value of diversity thus tended to lead conservationists to lose sight of the value of abundance. To correct this disastrous miscarriage of environmental intentions, a new complementary category is here proposed: bioproportionality. It is not enough to conserve minimum viable populations of all species. The aim should be to optimize such populations. Optimized targets will be estimated by reference to the principle of bioproportionality: the population of each species should be as abundant as is consistent with an ecologically proportionate abundance of adjoining populations of other species. Applied to the human population, this principle will require a dramatic reduction.
生物比例:保护的必要规范?
在环境运动的早期阶段,荒野是保护的主要对象之一。在20世纪80年代,荒野的类别被生物多样性的类别所取代:保护被重新定义为生物多样性保护。随着类别的变化,保护的重点从保护广阔而丰富的生命地形转移到保护生物类型,特别是物种。这种重新定义的一个鲜为人知的后果是规模的缩小:在新的基于生物多样性的保护概念下设定目标的物种的最低生存种群数量往往比荒野地区可能出现的种群数量低几个数量级。因此,只关注多样性的价值往往会导致自然资源保护主义者忽视丰富性的价值。为了纠正这种对环境意图的灾难性误判,这里提出了一个新的补充类别:生物比例。仅仅保护所有物种的最小存活种群是不够的。目标应该是优化这些人口。优化目标将参照生物比例原则进行估计:每个物种的种群数量应与其他物种相邻种群的生态比例一致。将这一原则应用于人口,将需要大幅减少。
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