Subject: Re: Pocket gophers (was 48)
Date: Nov 9 11:27:09 1995
From: David Wright - dwright at u.washington.edu


On Thu, 9 Nov 1995, M. Smith wrote:
> Real habitat
> protection/conservation/maintenance is so much more easily done at
> landscape levels. This high-maintenance, intensive management of days
> gone by (should be of days gone by anyway) is preposterously expensive
> when compared to the preventitive measure of managing landscapes.

So should we just let populations such as Kirtland's Warbler and
California Condor go down the tubes? Do extreme threats not warrant
extreme measures? And is the current emphasis on "landscapes" (what
ever happened to tree-fall gaps, by the way?) going to prevent *any*
more species from becoming threatened by extinction as a result of habitat
loss? Yes, it makes a lot of sense to avoid habitat loss in the first place
(hardly a modern revelation), but it does not change the fact that further
habitat loss which will push more populations to the brink is inevitable,
regardless of our enlightened status re landscape ecology -- unless human
society makes some *big* changes, *fast*. The bottom line is that for the
next few decades, at least, we are going to be faced with the choice of
using ad hoc measures of varying extremeness to save threatened populations
or letting them go extinct.

David Wright
dwright at u.washington.edu