Researcher(s):
Mali Smith
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2012 Completed: May 2013 Go to project site
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Anthropogenic climate change has started to cause shifts in the geographic ranges of plants, animals, and biomes around the world. These shifts will continue to get more drastic as warming does, driving species farther and farther from their native ranges. Populations of species that cannot migrate in time will likely dwindle and it is estimated that as many as one-third of all species could potentially go extinct. Clearly, there is a need to deviate from traditional, baseline-dependent conservation strategies in order to mitigate the biodiversity loss that is predicted to accompany global climate change. Scholars in the conservation field are engaged in a heated debate how to set up a practice like assisted migration, which cannot be judged with the traditional baseline criteria. In this thesis I explore articles written by these scholars’, searching for common recommendations among them. I found that among the most common prescriptions scholars have for assisted migration is an imbedded tension that pits extreme caution, trumpeting a lack of certainty and risk aversion, against a strong sense of urgency. These prescriptions reflect a profound unease with human beings as ultimate managers of ecosystems. In their common fixation on the development of a highly systematized, risk-averse, science-focused infrastructure to oversee assisted migration, these scholars reveal in themselves a recurrent desire to establish a non-human authority. However instead of yielding to the idea of the “pristine,” “pre-human” ecosystem as has been done in the past, now human authority is being relinquished to another “higher” institution: science.