Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AQUATIC CONSERVATION: MARINE AND FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS

Aquatic Conserv: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst. 12: 579–581 (2002)

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/aqc.545

Editorial

Environmental revolutionary biology

You rarely find papers on environmental or conservation education in Aquatic Conservation. This is notsurprising; these areas are not within the main scope of the journal. But education certainly is within theremit of aquatic conservation. Indeed I believe it to be at the root of it, but, at its most crucial, not in thesimple sense of putting over conservation messages. Present education policy in the developed worldcontributes mightily to our environmental problems.

Several things have come together for me to form this view, each at first disparate. The first was a talk byAlastair McIntosh } Scottish writer, social activist and Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology,University of Edinburgh } at a meeting in Liverpool in September 2000 of the Society for EcologicalRestoration. The second was at a recent conference in Cape Town on environmental flows, at which Idiscovered there was a highly specialized journal on the topic of ecohydraulics. The third is a considerablepersonal frustration at the disappointing results of freshwater restoration projects with which I and othershave been involved. And the last is a deepening feeling that as a teacher in a British university I am beingmanoeuvred into becoming part of the environmental problem rather than its solution.

McIntosh made, among others, a very profound statement. To restore habitats permanently andproperly, he said, you need first to do something about repairing the human societies that damaged thesehabitats, and to do that you have to get into the minds of the individual people who comprise thesesocieties. It makes a neat aphorism and I sensed something very important in it, but I didn’t really knowwhat it meant in practical terms at the time.

On the second issue, I had the job of commenting on the environmental flows meeting as part of theclosing session. Environmental flows, or compensation waters as they were formerly known, comprise theamount and seasonal timing of water allowed to be released from dams to maintain a ‘healthy’ river systemdownstream. Typically, irrigation engineers begrudge a few per cent of the mean annual flow, whilst the realneeds of the downstream river are closer to 100 per cent. After all, the river system developed itscharacteristics in response to all of its flow. There needs to be some compromise if there is to be anyirrigation agriculture or hydroelectric power generation or domestic water storage but those concerned withthe environmental issues, whether these be the maintenance of salmon fisheries or the subsistence needs oftraditional peoples in the downstream floodplain, approach the problem in a supplicatory way. Please maywe have a little more? This is despite an easy demonstration of the economic, social and cultural values of afully functioning river system. I didn’t understand such supplication. Also, I hadn’t realized what a big issuewas at stake because the information was buried in highly specialist journals. I complained about the jargon(including lots of unexplained acronyms used to describe models) which makes communication outside thespecialism very poor. I put jargon down to insecurity on the parts of authors. Jargon is a device forexclusion. It keeps others out; it creates a cosy in-world, a laager of self-protection lest, if the informationbe put in plain language, the emperor be seen to have no clothes. Somehow, this jargon (which is sogenerally rife in the academic and official literature that many writers do not realize they are immersed init), seemed also part of the environmental problem, but I didn’t know how it fitted in.

The third item, my frustration at poor results in restoration projects, is apparently easily explained. Theyhave been too small, too unambitious, done on the cheap and unable to take in improvements in thecatchment area, which are ultimately essential for sustained restoration of both lakes and rivers and theyhave been kept modest by conflict with other interests. The projects were each like the house that the littlepigs built, easily blown over by the wolf, whereas they needed to have the linked defences of a vast moatedand curtained fortress. The deeper layer of reason is that Society is not prepared to pay, financially orpolitically, to do the job properly and the deepest question is why. We live, over much of the world, in anincreasingly soulless, abused and developed environment. In the lowlands of Britain much of it no longerhas even the cosmetic prettiness of the past, let alone retaining any qualities that could be construed asinspiring. I didn’t understand why we tolerate this, why we are apparently so apathetic to forcing changefor the better.

The fourth thread was teaching and education. We can argue about what it should be about but I can tellyou what it is presently about. It’s about making a lot of individually shaped pegs fit into a standard holethat is most convenient for the smooth running of a materialist society dependent on continued economicgrowth. It isn’t about challenging thinking; it’s about conformity. It starts at the age of 5 in the schools.Syllabuses are increasingly centrally prescribed, technology and skills concerned with making money(‘enterprise’) are promoted, and standard examination jumps are set up for the poor young horses to clear.The sole purpose has come to be clearing the jumps, cunningly camouflaged with course aims and learningobjectives. The process continues in the universities. It is quality controlled and assessed to death and whatthat actually means is that it is standardized into mediocrity. The quality is predictable but not necessarilyof any absolute value. There are always, thank goodness, some intellectual rebels, but the system produces,on the whole, pawns who do not question very much and who increasingly are led to depend on thematerial crutches sold dearly to them by a system to which they have been carefully moulded over 16 yearsof orderly training. And therein lies the link which joins these four threads into the environmental cross wepresently bear.

The key to Alastair McIntosh’s aphorism is in the nature of the education of the individual.In educating for conformity, we undermine the abilities of all young people to gain confidence to bethemselves and think what they like. Education becomes merely a device to avoid failure, to avoid knockingdown the contrived jumps. It destroys much of the ability to build something better. Many of ourenvironmental problems in the developed world are to do with high consumption of materials and energyand of the wastes that this consumption produces. If we undermine the confidence of our children to bethemselves, and lead them to rely more and more on the commercial products they are daily indoctrinatedinto needing, we remove any hope of orderly change. One of the benefits of growing older is the realizationthat most of the things we thought we needed are indeed totally dispensable, that most of the thingscommerce makes or the services it purports to provide have nothing at all to do with a happy and fulfilledlife. And what of the limitations of restoration projects? Limited aims for restoration are consistent with theprimacy of exploitation in a consumerist world. And jargon in science? Jargon and specialist journals arealso conformist devices, part of a system of inward-lookingness that hampers the solution of big andgeneral problems. And I regret that I am drawn in to a teaching system that denies the young a chance todevelop their individuality and a research system which, for the most able of these subjects of our teaching,provides sophist rewards in the recognition of long publication lists in esoteric journals full of endlessjargon.

All things are connected, all problems are interlinked, but my thought here is for the role of the scientificliterature in particular. Perhaps journals need to become wider in scope to recognize the big problems, justas the early 20th century definitions of conventional subject areas, such as biology, geography, sociology,psychology and physics, as reflected in conventional university departments and examination subjects, needto be abandoned and new understanding fostered by new groupings. Perhaps, we need to emphasize thewide scope of Aquatic Conservation so as to be able to embrace understanding of ourselves and our motives,

EDITORIAL580

Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Aquatic Conserv: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst. 12: 579–581 (2002)

and hence of the limited success or downright failure of the management, restoration and conservationtechniques which most of its present papers espouse. As Head of a Department of Environmentaland Evolutionary Biology, I once had a letter addressed to ‘Environmental Revolutionary Biology’.So be it!

BRIAN MOSSSchool of Biological Sciences,

Derby Building, University of Liverpool,

L69 3GS, Liverpool, UK

EDITORIAL 581

Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Aquatic Conserv: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst. 12: 579–581 (2002)