What's next for California conservation?

As part of the College’s 50th anniversary, science and environment writer Mary Ellen Hannibal traces the coevolution of California conservation and Berkeley research. 

At sunset on a clear October day last year, the conference center doors at UC Riverside banged open and a panoply of scientists, policy makers, tribal representatives, and community leaders poured into a courtyard for food and drink. The second annual meetup of California’s 30x30 initiative was diverse, festive, joyous. Beaming, the dean of Rausser College of Natural Resources, David Ackerly, declared: “This is a new era in conservation!” He was promptly swallowed by the crowd.

Indeed, 30x30 is not our grandparents’ conservation. With an ambitious goal of protecting 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030, the initiative revises what conservation is, who gets to do it, and what it is for. While more than 190 countries have signed on to the U.N.’s overarching 30x30 initiative, California is far ahead in design and implementation. The world is watching us. For several years now, constant statewide work has hammered out exactly how to identify priorities and objectives for investing more than $1 billion allocated by Governor Gavin Newsom via Executive Order N-82-20 in 2020. California has adopted an everybody-into-the-pool approach, and regular citizens have joined academics, agency personnel, tribal representatives and more to define a collective vision for protecting our natural resources.

From the University’s beginnings, Berkeley has been central in shaping state conservation and beyond. Today we look at those prior eras with a critical eye. California’s 30x30 is defined in large part around rejecting a discriminatory and elitist past, and while UC Berkeley has always sported a populist tone, the University has not been immune from damaging biases. Critically, the conservation of yesterday has not accomplished enough. By some measures it has failed miserably. The dispiriting numbers tell the story: a football field of natural land is developed every 30 seconds in the United States; nearly 3 billion birds have evaporated from the skies since 1970; one-third of American wildlife is stalked by extinction; half of all wetlands in the Lower 48 have been transformed, and not for the better. Homo sapiens has violently shape-shifted three-quarters of terrestrial Earth and two-thirds of the oceans. The impacts are equivalent to those measured by past epochal transitions.

We cannot go back in time to the Spanish crown’s fateful encounter with indigenous California in the late 1700s and undo the tragic rampages that ensued against people and nature. But we can forge a new vision and follow its path. We can trace three eras of conservation: 1) adoring nature; 2) managing nature; and 3) nature in crisis. Today, as Berkeley researchers participate in 30x30, we are on the cusp of a fourth inclusive engagement: integrating nature.

The University of California arose in its own new era. By the late 1860s, the Gold Rush had brought hordes of newcomers and rampant environmental destruction to California. The flora and fauna were terra incognita to Western science, and a handful of prescient botanists and geologists began in earnest to “discover” them, many of them realizing that its unique species were fast disappearing. Berkeley became one of many land-grant universities established to strengthen the nascent United States by teaching “agriculture and the mechanical arts” in support of American enterprise. Reckoning with the land grant today includes acknowledging theft from and displacement of Native Californians. Countering this extractive history is a critical component in our revisioning today.

Tension between commercial and intellectual objectives can be traced as far back as Berkeley’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. Gilman advocated for original research but was challenged by the California State Grange and other farmers’ groups who wanted the university to keep its eyes on the utilitarian prize of market-making. “Who pays?” has long bedeviled conservation. Wildlife support has largely been funded by levies on hunting tags. Affluent citizens have driven the conservation agendas of many land trusts and other NGO models; often, they have saved nature for themselves. Perhaps the most profound element of 30x30 is the funding it provides from state coffers most Californians have paid into. 30x30 brings us closer to meaningful recognition that the natural world is our commons, for which we all bear responsibility, including financial support.

Early Berkeley professors signed on to John Muir’s Sierra Club, pledging to protect California’s nature; some of them were racist. Paleontologist John C. Merriam was a significant force in developing both national and state parks. Like many, he was appalled at the mowing down of California and wanted to protect places like Yosemite from commercial development. In rocks he read poems. Echoing Darwin, he saw that life forms were related to each other across time. This was heretical to some Berkeley professors who still held the view that life comes instantly into being by divine fiat. Merriam called fossils the “sacred remains” of ongoing generations in which the “germ” of life advanced. Ferns that evolved before the redwoods towering over them created a “moving region of shade that reached back not for epochs simply, but for eons.” This is the past worth protecting. But Merriam dabbled in eugenics. This poisonous strain running through much of the conservation of the time makes it clear that we need to re-evaluate and rebuild the project today.

Science at Berkeley was critically supported by Annie Alexander, a C&H Sugar heiress who is ripe for a Netflix series. Alexander mounted fossil-finding expeditions to the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and all over California. She also shot animals, amassing a collection of specimens she sought to order and study. Alexander became concerned that fossil records would lack a connection to present-day vertebrates. To support a demonstrable evolutionary lineage between past and present, Alexander installed Joseph Grinnell as director of a new Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in 1906. This became the de facto home of “pure” biological sciences at Berkeley, located today across Strawberry Creek from the “applied” locus of Rausser College of Natural Resources.

Grinnell remains an intellectual giant who made foundational contributions to science. He famously surveyed large swaths of California, documenting species and places in fastidious detail and establishing what is still practiced today as the Grinnell Method. Grinnell predicted that the world he portrayed in words and pictures would undergo vast alterations resulting in species loss. He helped to conceptualize the ecological niche, which describes the environment to which a species adapts, including its role in ecosystem interactions. Beginning in 2003, Berkeley faculty, including now retired Steve Beissinger, resurveyed Grinnell’s original California transects. The work has yielded a substantial body of information about the disruptions Grinnell predicted. Recently, Beissinger and colleagues published a study showing that since Grinnell surveyed them, bird populations have collapsed in the Mojave Desert. The birds have been unable to adapt to increasing heat and decreasing water.

Grinnell, who saw nature as dynamic, is a bridge figure to a new era of conservation thinking focused on management. He mentored George Meléndez Wright, who later became the first Spanish-speaking professional in the National Park Service (NPS). The National Park System was famously fostered at Berkeley by alums Stephen Mather and Horace Albright; Wright took Grinnell’s methods to the national parks, where he instituted biodiversity surveys to track change. He also met with many who lived on and made use of park lands, including ranchers, hunters, and Native Americans. He interviewed Totuya (Maria Lebrado), the last known survivor of the 1851 expulsion of the Ahwahneechee from Yosemite, when she returned in 1929. Recognition that Native Californians are the original natural resource managers here has been a long time in coming. A Tribal Nature-Based Solutions program concurrent with the state’s 30x30 initiative focuses on Indigenous cultures. Some of its funding is being used to rematriate tribal territories. This is a staggering turnabout for a state that sanctioned the genocide of its original inhabitants not much more than a century ago.

Another significant Grinnell acolyte was Starker Leopold, son of the patron saint of conservation biology, Aldo Leopold. Aldo counseled Starker to study with Grinnell at Berkeley, which he did. Grinnell died shortly thereafter, but it was as if a baton had been passed to Leopold, who carried it for 32 years as a Berkeley professor, greatly influencing the University’s role in both the hands-on world of wildlife management and the national park system.

In a world of endless administrative instructions and verbose reports, none perhaps has been as influential as Leopold’s 23-page paper, “Wildlife Management in the National Parks,” published in 1963 and known colloquially as the Leopold Report. The NPS had no science-informed guidelines for dealing with wildlife. Leopold counseled that “the key” to sustaining wildlife is to maintain habitat, but habitat is “not a fixed or stable entity that can be set aside and preserved behind a fence.” Fire suppression was de rigueur in Leopold’s time but he presciently supported prescribed burning. He championed predators and strongly recommended that national parks be thought of as “anchors of conservation in a continuum of uses.” Leopold didn’t know about global change, but the basics he lays out about how nature works amount to a blueprint of much of the eventual 30x30 vision, which advocates for large landscape connectivity across networks of protected areas and increasingly embraces working landscapes to help support biodiversity. Leopold contradicted his own thinking, however, and advocated that national parks “should represent a vignette of primitive America.” He omits Native American stewardship and forgets Grinnell’s wisdom: nature does not stand still and is embedded in time.

In 2016, Jonathan Jarvis, then the director of the NPS, commissioned “Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks,” a report to redress this blinkered perspective in the age of global change. The report, a collaboration among many scientists, is also intentionally 23 pages. Jarvis, who became the inaugural director of Berkeley’s Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity in 2017, said “Leopold looked to re-create something, which is tempting, and seems easy. But you can’t go back.” Managing what’s to come also depends on engaging with the actual past.

“We know now that systems have been manipulated by the presence and stewardship of Native people,” Jarvis said. “Revisiting Leopold” considers species and humans together, not separately, and fundamentally acknowledges that natural parks and wilderness areas are cultural as well as biological constructs.

The 1970s ushered in an era of redoubled human destructiveness to natural systems, but with it a fresh energy to tackle our problems. Rachel Carson sounded new alarms, and foundational nature protections like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act followed. Social upheavals roiled the Berkeley campus. To leverage interdisciplinary impact, the School of Forestry and Conservation merged with the College of Agricultural Sciences, and the College of Natural Resources was born in 1974.

Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing today, the Northern Spotted Owl became a focal species in the ongoing battle between those who would conserve the bird and those who would destroy its old-growth habitat. The conflict pitches economic gain against the health of functioning ecosystems. These seem to be nonequivalent goals, but we are charged with finding some kind of equitable solution among opposing factions. This example highlights a fundamental quality of nature that we have not adequately acknowledged: we depend on harvesting its products, but the collateral damage extends back into the evolutionary history of ecosystems that took millennia to evolve, which in turn jeopardizes our future. One great benefit of this battle royale is the 30-year longitudinal study of this species in its milieu, which has revealed many nuances about how nature operates over longer time scales.

Berkeley welcomed the new mission-driven discipline of conservation biology in the early 1990s. Faculty member Adina Merenlender was an eager participant, but she points out that in many ways, conservation biology was another iteration of ivory tower thinking. Many of its early practitioners identified as quantitative ecologists, applying population biology and genetics to conserving species. “These academics approached the wildlife managers as dummies who didn’t know anything,” she says. Real animals as well as real people were often ignored in their calculations. Merenlender points out that social scientists at Berkeley, including Louise Fortmann, Sally Fairfax, and Nancy Peluso, pushed for acknowledging how people truly interact with ecosystems. “They were hard on the conservation movement,” Merenlender says, “and critical of all those white guys doing parachute conservation,” collecting specimens in far-off countries and taking them home, “or setting up a park with a government but no participation from the people.” Merenlender is a hands-on practitioner today, and she is also co-author with legendary pure Berkeley ecologist William Lidicker and alum Jodi Hilty (PhD ’01 Environmental Science, Policy, and Management) of the 2006 book, Corridor Ecology: The Science and Practice of Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity, now in its second edition. Over time, the pure and the applied have increasingly made their peace.

Climate change has done its part in developing academic approaches to natural systems, its pressures hastening the development of Earth System Science, a discipline in the Geography Department at Berkeley. From the early 1990s and onward, the revelations of feedback mechanisms between the Earth’s hydrology, atmosphere, geology, and biology have helped conservation efforts understand that living things are integrally tied to nonliving systems. Ackerly is co-author of 2009’s “The Velocity of Climate Change,” a foundational paper that tracks elements of Grinnell’s niche concept with projections of future temperature and precipitation under different climate change scenarios. How will species respond as their world changes fast? With alum Lisa Micheli (MS ’96 Civil Engineering, PhD ’00 Energy and Resources) in 2011, Ackerly co-helmed the Terrestrial Biodiversity Climate Change Collaborative (TBC3), a collective of scientists from disparate disciplines, agencies, NGOs, and universities. TBC3 has published periodic biophysical data and analysis to help conservation managers in decision-making. In recent years TBC3 has become more focused on the most proximal of concerns for California landscapes: fire.

Fire has been a fundamental shape-shifter not only on the landscape but in hearts and minds. For decades, Native leaders have been telling California state agencies that their historical stewardship through cultural burning promoted a productive relationship between abiotic and biotic systems, and they have tirelessly repeated that California’s biodiversity evolved in relationship with humans. Berkeley anthropologist Kent Lightfoot is among the first to quantify the assertions of ethnographers and tribal elders that Native Californians burned the landscape for at least 8,000 years. Scott Stephens and colleagues have further quantified the mitigation of destructive wildfire by intentional burning.

We stand chastened by past reluctance and refusal to see the impacts of the history that makes our present lives both possible and imperiled. As the global 30x30 is defined, criticism has been leveled in some nations that Indigenous people are again losing out, forced from their homelands in the name of protecting those places. California is working with a very different model. Today, for example, national parks are increasingly building co-stewardship models with tribes. The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria recently counseled the NPS at Point Reyes National Seashore to remove elk fencing at Tomales Point, advancing cultural and biological health. 30x30 climate resilience goals are advancing in partnership with many tribes. The Wiyot Tribe land return rematriates 46 acres of ancestral land in service of cultural, ceremonial, and environmental goals.

Today, 30x30 is funding literally hundreds of projects across the state that meet its standards for durable nature protection. Some wish that 30x30 would take a more comprehensive, prescriptive approach, as in Leopold’s elegant, if flawed, guide to managing the national parks. But 30x30 rather brilliantly works around the conundrums inherent in defining what nature is to begin with, much less what it might take to help it persist. For a very long time, the majestic picture of Yosemite, for example, seemed to be an unambiguous symbol of value. But that picture was bereft. It erased people and process. Now we know that nature knits up a bewildering array of interactions over time periods that exceed human life spans. In providing new support for work in many cases already underway before Governor Newsom signed the legislation, 30x30 goes to the heart of the matter in strengthening the bonds between local people and their places.

In the past, conservation asked people to look at, visit, and experience awe in nature. It has wrestled with brokering peaceable arrangements between people and the species we view as pests, those we want to hunt, and those we are driving to extinction. Conservation has labored mightily to quantify insights concerning habitat connectivity, predators, and ecological interactions. Today, conservation asks that people participate directly to redefine our basic relationship with nature. To bring Merriam’s rapture up to date, we are participants in nature’s “epic,” called on to sustain landscapes “where one looks through the veil to meet the realities of nature and unfathomable power behind it.” As it turns out, we are part of that power.

• California 30x30 website
• The New Conservation (Breakthroughs, 2021)