Eighteen years ago, as a young scientist on the rise, Daily arrived at a renowned research station in the hills of Costa Rica armed with nearly 100 shellacked plywood platforms. As a student at Stanford University, studying under the famed biologist Paul Ehrlich, she had seen how large birds, defying expectations, seemed to thrive on small bits of forest spackled in the area's coffee plantations, when theory predicted their demise. On her return, she planned to spread her feeding platforms in staggered densities to test that observation; local kids promised to monitor the mesitas.
But when the morning came, so did the bees.
Africanized honeybees had swarmed the mesitas. The locals, always supportive of research on their lands, were peeved; every year these killer bees claim a few lives in Costa Rica. No one died, but the experiment was an utter, fast failure. "It was an 'aha!' moment," Daily said later, "but it was, 'Aha, what an idiot I've been.'" She was at a loss. She already had a spot at the station. She couldn't just leave, nor could she learn how to study a different creature before her stint was over. She knew birds, of course, but was never great at sorting species by their song, which ruled out work in the cacophonous forest. On the farms, though, she realized, she could use her eyes and master a smaller list of warbles, tying the birds' incidence to cultivation methods and the forest's verge. It was pure survey work, but it hadn't been done. And so it was that Daily looked outside the forest.
"Because of that chance of bad luck," she said. "I went out and opened my eyes and finally awakened to all the biodiversity in the countryside."
What she saw helped change the future of environmental science.
Daily crept among the arabica's cottony blooms, indexing hundreds of species thriving in what she had expected to be a dull monoculture. There were fiery-billed aracari, rufous-breasted wrens, even violaceous trogons, their golden bellies burning bright. Few of these birds—and, in later surveys, insects, frogs, bats, or other mammals—could be considered pests. There was a weave at work among the plantation, the forest, and the animals strung between them. The natural world had never left this man-made system; it was, in many ways, benefiting it, pollinating crops and chomping up berry borers.
In turn, the farmers were dependent on this natural capital, as Daily would call it, for their own economic well-being. Ehrlich had mentioned the benefits that humanity derived from nature. But why had she stayed so focused on the forest? Daily wondered. Because it seemed pristine, untouched? That was a lie; global warming was well under way. Humanity's shadow cloaked the planet, and all of its shades deserved study. "Any sensible conservation science should look at this," she thought.
Her own field of conservation biology—then a hot young science dedicated to saving endangered species, and a dominant voice in environmental science at the time—did not. And so Daily, now a professor at Stanford, along with a host of collaborators, set out to change the science.
Though Daily would never say this, her quest in many ways reflects the failure of a past generation. For decades, scientists have warned that the world is showing signs of deep environmental strain, close to suffering a great wave of human-caused species extinctions. Yet despite these calls of alarm, victories for conservation have been few and dear, and development has continued apace. Farming has grown to cover a quarter of the world's land. Fisheries and fresh water are ever closer to exhaustion. In the United States, wetlands are disappearing, and contaminants are often found in inland fish at harmful levels. Up to a third of the country's native species are at risk of extinction. In 2010 the world failed nearly every target the United Nations had set for halting biodiversity loss. And on top of all that, we are wrapped in warming at a rate unprecedented in modern times, thanks to emissions of fossil fuels. As one scientist told me, given the rising temperatures, the Joshua trees are leaving Joshua Tree National Park.
Humanity's great influence across the planet has even prompted many scientists to argue that we have left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Many of the large nonprofit conservation groups, like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, prompted as much by the need for new donors as by scientific imperative, have embraced the concept, emphasizing pragmatic work that protects people and the natural world. It's strange to say, but climate change came with a silver lining, says Jonathan Hoekstra, director of WWF's conservation-science program and one of Daily's collaborators.
"We were a field that always looked backwards in terms of trying to frame where we wanted to go," Hoekstra says. "It was like walking backwards through life. It was crazy when you think about it. Climate change has forced us to say, man, the world is changing. It's changing in ways that are unprecedented relative to our historic benchmarks. We need to be open to the possibility that the best possible future is going to be different, in possibly profound ways, from the past."
The rhetorical shift to a human-centered conservation has been quick, if not always easy—angry debate and ethical qualms are hallmarks of the change. But it has also called for a new kind of science, one that finds a way to understand humans, animals, and the environment at once; a science built to knit together the forest and crop rows of the Costa Rican coffee plantation. It's a science Daily has helped construct for the past two decades, combining economics and applied ecology to describe the benefits that humans gain from the natural world—drinking water, pollination, recreation. And at the base of it all is one snooze-inducing term: ecosystem services.
You can call it the jargon that ate conservation. The study of ecosystem services has exploded in recent years, passing from fad to the defining frame of conservation science. In 1995, ecosystem services were mentioned just seven times in the scholarly literature; by 2012, they came up 4,116 times. Biodiversity, once the north star of conservation, has become one light in a constellation. Even the famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, a sentinel against capitulation in conservation, can now be seen singing the benefits of nature's services.
But the rise of this human-centered science has not come without pain, or loss. A cohort of leaders who only 30 years ago created another radical science—conservation biology—is increasingly marginalized. The vigor of activism has waned. And much uncertainty remains about whether ecosystem services, as it steps into the real world, will serve as a conciliatory vision to save species and the world or will simply be ignored, its models spinning away unnoticed by the powers that be. Perhaps worse, it could be taken as an apologia for climate change, absolving humanity of its collective environmental toll.
Few are more responsible for popularizing ecosystem services than Daily, yet these are fears she shares. Which is in part why, in 2005, she and several influential peers began the Natural Capital Project to apply their nascent science in the real world. It's taken time, more time than they first imagined, but in the past couple of years, the project's efforts have begun to flower, Daily says.
"I'm hoping conservation will have legitimacy and relevance like it's never had in the past," she says. "And thereby have impact and success like it hasn't really had in the past. Not on the scale that's required."
by Paul Voosen, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Nick Norman, National Geographic, Aurora Photos
