J. Baird Callicott

Committing to ecological restoration

Efforts around the globe need legal and policy clarification At the September 2014 United Nations Climate Summit, governments rallied around an international agreement—the New York Declaration on Forests—that underscored restoration of degraded ecosystems as an auspicious solution to climate change. Ethiopia committed to restore more than one-sixth of its land. Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, and Colombia pledged to restore huge areas within their borders. In total, parties committed to restore a staggering 350 million hectares by 2030.

Integrating Ecology and Environmental Ethics: Earth Stewardship in the Southern End of the Americas

The South American temperate and sub-Antarctic forests cover the longest latitudinal range in the Southern Hemisphere and include the worlds southernmost forests. However, until now, this unique biome has been absent from global ecosystem research and monitoring networks. Moreover, the latitudinal range of between 40 degrees (°) south (S) and 60° S constitutes a conspicuous gap in the International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) and other international networks. We first identify 10 globally salient attributes of biological and cultural diversity in southwestern South America. We then present the nascent Chilean Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) network, which will incorporate a new biome into ILTER. Finally, we introduce the field environmental philosophy methodology, developed by the Chilean LTSER network to integrate ecological sciences and environmental ethics into graduate education and biocultural conservation. This approach broadens the prevailing economic spectrum of social dimensions considered by LTSER programs and helps foster bioculturally diverse forms of Earth stewardship.

Changing lenses to assess biodiversity: patterns of species richness in sub-Antarctic plants and implications for global conservation

Article discussing patterns of species richness in sub-Antarctic plants and implications for global conservation.

Choosing appropriate temporal and spatial scales for ecological restoration

Classic ecological restoration seems tacitly to have taken the Clementsian “balance of nature” paradigm for granted: plant succession terminates in a climax community which remains at equilibrium until exogenously disturbed after which the process of succession is restarted until the climax is reached. Human disturbance is regarded as unnatural and to have commenced in the Western Hemisphere at the time of European incursion. Classic ecological restoration thus has a clear and unambiguous target and may be conceived as aiming to foreshorten the natural processes that would eventually lead to the climax of a given site, which may be determined by its state at “settlement”. According to the new “flux of nature” paradigm in ecology a given site has notelos and is constantly changing. Human disturbance is ubiquitous and long-standing, and at certain spatial and temporal scales is “incorporated”. Any moment in the past 10,000 years that may be selected as a benchmark for restoration efforts thus appears to be arbitrary. Two prominent conservationists have therefore suggested that the ecological conditions in North America at the Pleistocene—Holocene boundary, prior to the anthropogenic extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, be the target for ecological restoration. That suggestion explicitly assumes evolutionary temporal scales and continental spatial scales as the appropriate frame of reference for ecological restoration. However, ecological restoration should be framed in ecological spatio-temporal scales, which may be defined temporally in reference to ecological processes such as disturbance regimes and spatially in reference to ecological units such as landscapes, ecosystems, and biological provinces. Ecological spatio-temporal scales are also useful in achieving a scientifically defensible distinction between native and exotic species, which plays so central a role in the practice of ecological restoration and the conservation of biodiversity. Because post-settlement human disturbances have exceeded the limits of such scales, settlement conditions can be justified scientifically as appropriate targets of restoration efforts without recourse to obsolete teleological concepts of equilibria and without ignoring the presence and ecological influence of indigenous peoples.

The Land Aesthetic

SOCRATES: By Hera, it is a charming resting place. For this plane tree is very spreading and lofty, and the tall and shady willow is very beautiful, and it is in full bloom, so as to make the place most fragrant; then, too, the spring is very pretty as it flows under the plane tree, and its water is very cool, to judge by my foot.... Then again, if you please, how lovely and perfectly charming the breeziness of the place is! And it resounds with the shrill summer music of the chorus of cicadas. But the most delightful thing of all is the grass, as it grows on the gentle slope, thick enough to be just right when you lay your head on it, so you have guided the stranger most excellently, dear Phaedrus.

Biocomplexity and conservation of biodiversity hotspots: three case studies from the Americas

The perspective of ‘biocomplexity’ in the form of ‘coupled natural and human systems’ represents a resource for the future conservation of biodiversity hotspots in three direct ways: (i) modelling the impact on biodiversity of private land-use decisions and public land-use policies, (ii) indicating how the biocultural history of a biodiversity hotspot may be a resource for its future conservation, and (iii) identifying and deploying the nodes of both the material and psycho-spiritual connectivity between human and natural systems in service to conservation goals. Three biocomplexity case studies of areas notable for their biodiversity, selected for their variability along a latitudinal climate gradient and a human-impact gradient, are developed: the Big Thicket in southeast Texas, the Upper Botanamo River Basin in eastern Venezuela, and the Cape Horn Archipelago at the austral tip of Chile. More deeply, the biocomplexity perspective reveals alternative ways of understanding biodiversity itself, because it directs attention to the human concepts through which biodiversity is perceived and understood. The very meaning of biodiversity is contestable and varies according to the cognitive lenses through which it is perceived.

The metaphysical transition in farming: From the newtonian-mechanical to the eltonian ecological

Modern agriculture is subject to a metaphysical as well as an ethical critique. As a casual review of the beliefs associated with food production in the past suggests, modern agriculture is embedded in and informed by the prevailing modern world view, Newtonian Mechanics, which is bankrupt as a scientific paradigm and unsustainable as an agricultural motif. A new holistic, organic world view is emerging from ecology and the new physics marked by four general conceptual features: Each level of organization from atoms to ecosystems (1) exhibits emergent properties, (2) exerts downward causation from whole to part, (3) is a systemically integrated whole, (4) the parts of which are internally related. Organic agriculture has been favourably compared with industrial agriculture by the United States National Academy of Sciences Board on Agriculture. Aldo Leopold was among the first to criticize industrial agriculture and to envision a new motif for agriculture informed by ecology. A future post-modern ecological agriculture will help to solve the ethical problems engendered by modern mechanical agriculture.

Can a theory of moral sentiments support a genuinely normative environmental ethic

The conceptual foundations of Aldo Leopolds seminal land ethic are traceable through Darwin to the sentiment‐based ethics of Hume. According to Hume, the moral sentiments are universal; and, according to Darwin, they were naturally selected in the intensely social matrix of human evolution. Hence they may provide a ‘consensus of feeling’, functionally equivalent to the normative force of reason overriding inclination. But then ethics, allege K. S. Shrader‐Frechette and W. Fox, is reduced to a description of human nature, and the question remains open whether one really ought or ought not value, approve, or do this or that. The moral sentiments, however, are informed by culture. Specific ethical injunctions, even so, are not culturally relative, because cultural beliefs are amenable to cognitive criticism. New experience and new discoveries of science may bring to light hitherto unrecognized ‘proper objects’ of our moral sentiments.

Agroecology in context

Agriculture and medicine palpably manifest a cultures world view. Correspondingly, changes in agriculture and medicine may be barometers of change in a cultures overall outlook. “Conventional” industrial agriculture and “modern” surgical/chemical medicine clearly express the Newtonian mechanical model of nature. The modern classical world view represents nature to be an externally related, atomic, reductive, material, and mechanical aggregate. Modern medicine, correspondingly, treats the body as an elaborate mechanism and industrial agriculture regards soil as a substratum for monocultures assembled from fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers, and chemical pesticides. The nascent agroecology and wellness movements each express and reflect the new paradigm variously emerging from ecology and quantum physics. Ecology and the new physics, each in its own way, represent nature to be an internally related, systemic, integrated, organic whole. Agroecology translates this abstract new vision into a concrete agricultural vocabulary: The farmstead is regarded as an artificial ecosystem with a multiplicity of diverse plant and animal constituents interacting with one another and with environing natural ecosystems in complex and mutually supporting ways.

Wetland gloom and wetland glory

Mountains were once no less feared and loathed than wetlands. Mountains, however, were aesthetically rehabilitated (in part by modern landscape painting), but wetlands remain aesthetically reviled. The three giants of American environmental philosophy--Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold--all expressed aesthetic appreciation of wetlands. For Thoreau and Muir--both of whom were a bit misanthropic and contrarian--the beauty of wetlands was largely a matter of their floral interest and wildness (freedom from human inhabitation and economic exploitation). Leopolds aesthetic appreciation of wetlands was better informed by evolutionary natural history and ecology. For example, cranes--wetland denizens--are more ancient than other large American avifauna and this evolutionary information and perspective enhances our aesthetic experience of them; and the ecological relationships between wetland species--such as sphagnum moss, tamaracks, and pitcher plants--informs our aesthetic experience of the wetlands biotic community. The Leopold land aesthetic involves all sensory modalities, emphasizes cognition as well as sensation (in this regard it may fruitfully be compared to the philosophy of Kant), and is more akin to an aesthetic of muisic than to an aesthetic of painting.