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160 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 BOOK REVIEWS

1. Protecting Biological Diversity: Roles and Responsibilities. 2001.
Edited by Catherine Potvin, Margaret Kraenzel, and Gilles
Seutin. McGill – Queen’s University Press, Canada, 160
pages. Hardback - ISBN: 0773521585 - $75.00. Paperback
- ISBN: 0773521593 - $24.95.

2. Experiments in Consilience: Integrating Social and Scientific
Responses to Save Endangered Species. 2003. Edited by Frances
R Westley and Philip S Miller. Island Press, USA, 328 pages.
Hardback - ISBN: 1559639938 - $70.00. Paperback - ISBN:
1559639946 - $35.00.

3. The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded
World. 2006. By Jonathan S. Adams. Beacon Press, USA, 296
pages. Hardback - ISBN: 0807085103 - $27.95.

Life is full of ironies, and this is not the least of them: Many of
us “got into wildlife” because we like nature, yet spend most of
our professional lives dealing with “people” issues. The rapid
extinction of species and the ongoing homogenization of what is
left bring a sense of urgency to anyone who would like to see bio-
diversity protected. Not surprisingly, conservation biology has
often been called a crisis discipline. Because the problem is
human-caused, the answers must also involve humanity.
Conservationists have long realized that biologists and social sci-
entists will have to collaborate, and E. O. Wilson coined the
word “consilience” to more-or-less describe this idea in a 1998
book of the same name. The matter of application has remained
somewhat fuzzy, however. The three recent books reviewed here
attack this question from different perspectives and with varying
degrees of success.

One of the ironies of conservation is that the ideology,
know-how, and finances typically come from technologically and
economically developed but biodiversity-poor countries, whereas
the biodiversity to be conserved is usually found elsewhere.
Protecting Biological Diversity focuses on the need for scientists
and practitioners from both spheres to collaborate effectively and
equitably. Concerned about the perceived lack of clear ethical
guidelines for conservation practitioners, the editors “strive to
determine what ‘good practice’ may be.” An edited volume
resulting from an IUCN symposium held in 1996, this is a truly
international effort. Of the 26 authors, only nine call North
America home; nine are from India, and the rest originate from
across the tropics. Perhaps because of this unusual makeup of
authorship, the book focuses on an important but often-ignored
issue: The tension between local and expatriate outlooks on joint
conservation projects. Eight chapters offer case studies and make
some references to the importance of collaboration between locals

and foreign conservation biologists. For example, chapter one
states that “overall, these co-operative and collaborative projects
have been remarkably successful….” In general, the authors tend
to highly value local knowledge, ignore local deficiencies, and
focus on the mismatches. For example, “the philosophy behind
the integral reserve is that of pure conservation [but] in a poor
country, such as Madagascar, where citizens depend on wood for
fuel, it has proved impossible to prevent use of these resources”
(chapter 5). The language is often rather strong. For example,
chapter 1 denounces “The arrogant and shocking attitudes and
behaviour of some European experts.” It goes on to recount “A
well-known incident [that] involved an African researcher who

Three on Consilience:
The Difficult Art of Combining Biological
and Social Sciences to Protect Biodiversity

B O O K  R E V I E W S

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 161BOOK REVIEWS

was refused the right to take his seriously-ill spouse to the health
centre … while the Belgian expert allowed himself the luxury of
using the vehicle to spend the weekend in the regional headquar-
ters.” Potentially most helpful is the ninth chapter, which
includes a list of recommendations. Many of these, such as
respecting local people, laws, and customs, are commonsensical.
Finding ways to remunerate local populations when profit is to
be made from their knowledge or biodiversity and making results
available to local authorities should also prove non-controversial.
However, the authors of this and other chapters take it a big step
further: Researchers should not only provide results, but also
include field notes. They should not only communicate in the
official language of the host country, but “using local dialect in
all communications.”

As this book amply illustrates, western scientists have not
always acquitted themselves well. Scientific imperialism, often in
the form of ignoring the contributions of local team members
when authorship is decided, is a pernicious problem, and I com-
mend the editors and authors of Protecting Biological Diversity for
discussing it openly. Nonetheless, statements such as “conserva-
tion biologists and ethnobiologists have not yet proved their will-
ingness to conform to either local or universal values” (editors’
introduction to the final chapter) seem excessively strong.
Working in a foreign country, under time and budget constraints
and within a different culture and language, can be overwhelm-
ing. Regardless, many western scientists have taken these chal-
lenges on because of a deep commitment to helping solve com-
plex problems in far-away places. The book offers some thoughts
on how to be culturally sensitive, behaving ethically, and giving
credit where it is due, and thus providing insights on how incom-
ing collaborators can enhance the chances of forming successful
partnerships. However, the responsibility of host nations to also
invest in the collaboration seems to have been forgotten by the
authors and editors of this volume, which I generally found repet-
itive and one-sided.

The second book, Experiments in Consilience, emerged from
a 1997 Canadian initiative “to build interdisciplinary connections
and stimulate the exchange of expertise among specialists con-
cerned with the conservation of biodiversity.” Social and biolog-
ical scientists working in teams analyze a series of workshops con-
ducted by the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group of the
IUCN. Overall, the authors agree that “bridge building between
specializations” is both feasible and advantageous, but also costly
and only “useful if it contributes to species conservation.” The
tone throughout is fairly optimistic. For example, chapter 5 eval-
uates in detail the overall performance of the IUCN workshops
and concludes that the process “is indeed both generic and robust
and worthy of further study and development.” Ironically, given
the recommendations of the previous book, the authors of chap-
ter 2 identify “globalization of scientific norms and culture,”
rather than conformation to local language and customs, as one
of the most important characteristics contributing to their suc-
cess. Another encouraging conclusion is that “progressive
resource-based companies are motivated to become involved in
… conservation of species and habitat” (chapter 16).

This book would be primarily of value to those planning
similar workshops. Where similarities exist between the two

books, this one is clearly superior. For example, chapters 9 and
15 focus on how to incorporate local knowledge into conserva-
tion projects, and this issue is also addressed in other chapters.
Nonetheless, weaknesses exist, most having more to do with the
subject matter than with the book itself. “Just as there is no free
lunch, there is no (or little) free interdisciplinary collaboration.”
Most of the species and habitats in need of attention are far less
glamorous than the gorillas and wolves (typical of the obsession
with birds and mammals so common in conservation) featured
in this book, and the IUCN workshop approach would be hard
to replicate. The closing paragraph of this book states that “we
must continue to refine this and other conservation processes to
make use of the conservation world’s greatest resource: the judg-
ment and wisdom of all those who care about saving our endan-
gered spaces and the species therein.” I finished the book, per-
haps as the editors did, with a better understanding of the
experiment and a glimmer of hope, but with no abiding enthu-
siasm or sense of closure.

The final and most recent volume, The Future of the Wild,
is a single-authored effort by one of the leaders of The Nature
Conservancy. His approach carries a different flavor, more an
extended op-ed piece aimed at an educated lay audience than
detached scientific discourse. In his introduction, Adams explains
the impetus for his work: “Across North America and indeed

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around the world, conservation scientists, activists, and commu-
nities have begun crafting visions for conserving and restoring
wild creatures and wildlands. Such visions smack of particularly
naïve optimism,” Adams argues, because our idea of the wild is
overly simplistic in today’s world. The scale at which we are used
to framing conservation questions is too small: “Parks and
reserves need to be large enough to absorb the blows from a once-
in-a-century” event, whereas “tiny refuges tucked into a landscape
otherwise completely converted to intensive human use will not
long survive.” Part 1 of the book, entitled “thinking big,” is
devoted to making this point by using examples such as the
Spotted Owl. Adams argues that science, rather than “politics,
aesthetics, and economics,” must to be allowed to determine the
shape of conservation efforts. To do that, “conservation must
come to grips with the human communities that surround parks
as well as the more distant communities that value parks and

wilderness … that they never see.” Adams provides a positive
conceptual framework: “Conservation cannot just be the art of
saying no … [it] must offer a sense of the possible, and a reason
for hope.” Part 2, “science and community,” focuses on how
landscapes in California and Florida have mainly become urban
or near-urban over the last few hundred years and how some
communities are trying to address conservation problems in such
modified landscapes. Adams expects both conservation and soci-
ety to change. “Some of the changes in conservation will be rev-
olutionary, others evolutionary. All will require new appreciation
for where science, community, and values intersect.”

Arguably, the element most missing from modern conser-
vation biology is hope. The number of new reserves being estab-
lished worldwide, even tiny ones, has declined precipitously since
the 1980s, and the administrations of several western countries
are trying to dismantle protections for many of those that cur-
rently exist. Adams offers some hope in Part 3, where he presents
Yellowstone as an example of how things might work. He
emphasizes ideas that have been important in the conservation
literature for some years, such as looking at landscape-level effects
and creating connections among smaller reserves by judicious use
of wildlife corridors, but he does so in the context of actual com-
munity-wide efforts to achieve integration in fragmented, multi-
ple-use landscapes. The challenge is how to achieve this grand
vision on the required scale.

Recent decades have brought the unpleasant realization that,
while the human sphere is growing, the rest of the biosphere is in
decline. As the human population continues to expand and the
average resource consumption per individual maintains an
upward trajectory, the need for the priority-juggling exercise that
is conservation grows as well. Thus, the better we understand the
human element of this equation, the more effective we can
become in reaching our goals for the biological side. Adams’s
thought-provoking and accessible book, which could be the basis
of discussions in undergraduate classes, might offer a small step
in this direction.

The three books address a variety of mostly non-overlapping
topics involving the interaction between the human and natural
sciences in conservation. Ultimately, however, the underlying
issue remains the ever-growing size and impact of the human
population. As global climate change shows, even the largest and
best-protected preserve established today may offer little conser-
vation value tomorrow. Literature in this field could thus benefit
from further integrating this topic into its analyses — something
that has become rather rare in current mainstream conservation
literature.

Gad Perry
Department of Range, Wildlife, and Fisheries Management

Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas

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