If you go down to the woods today, it may surprise you that they’ve withered, or disappeared. Nature’s vanishing act goes largely unnoticed, despite its dramatic scale. And as the animals and plants die along with it, so too does what conservation biologist Kevin Gaston calls our “personalised ecology”.
This shift, he says, may have big implications for our attitudes towards nature and for conservation.
Gaston is Professor of Biodiversity & Conservation at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and he will be speaking on the subject of “Personalised Ecology” at the 13th Oppenheimer Research Conference (ORC), which takes place in Midrand from October 9-11.
“Each of us has a personalised ecology, a unique set of direct sensory interactions with
nature.”He says that “each of us has a personalised ecology, a unique set of direct sensory interactions with nature. It changes through our days, our seasons and our lifetimes. It is shaped by the opportunities we have for interacting with nature, as well as our capabilities and motivation for so doing.”
“For some of us, our personalised ecology may be something we very consciously work to influence, and may play an important role in how we think of ourselves. Nonetheless, for many people and populations, personalised ecologies have been in decline, often severely.”
The physical, mental and emotional benefits of being in touch with nature are well documented. A study by the European Centre for Environment & Human Health at the University of Exeter found that a “nature fix” of a mere two hours a week had a significant effect on general wellbeing. The snag is that getting to the Great Outdoors, or even small parks and green spaces, can be a slog for those who live in Nairobi’s Kibera shacklands, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, downtown Los Angeles. A further impediment to obtaining the full benefits from being in nature is that global warming is turning some areas that might once have been considered wilderness into wastelands.
Gaston says that “much attention has been paid to the health and well-being consequences of nature interactions, and the links between declines in these interactions and current epidemics of some chronic health conditions. However, personalised ecologies have also long been held to have significant implications for the future of nature and biodiversity, particularly through the way these influence attitudes and behaviour towards nature.”
In short, the less nature there is, the less we care about it and the less we are likely to do about it.
Gaston says that he “began with a pure ecological research focus and then on what people were doing to the planet and biological systems. Then I spent a period doing a lot of work on urban ecology and that forces you to look at things from both directions, and thinking as much about the impacts of nature and ecology on people as people on ecology and nature.
“One of the oddities in this is that ecology as a discipline excludes people other than their impacts on other species’ ecology. You could argue that we probably know the ecology of some other species better than we know the ecologies of people.”
This brought him to the idea of personalised ecologies and how the “extinction of experience” was shaping and undoing nature.
“We all have a set of interactions with wild organisms,” he says, “depending on where you live and where you work and how you spend your free time and how you move around. It’s very different for somebody in an inner city setting and in a very rural wilderness. But each of us has a set of interactions of which some are more conscious than others.”
“It’s a very dynamic thing. Every day that experience is a bit different, with different sets of species, different things that we interact with. And it changes with the seasons and through our lifetimes. There are times when we have richer personalised ecologies than others. Part of the reason for calling them personalised ecologies is that they are unique. They are personal, almost like a fingerprint, but also personalised because the choices we make shape that personal ecology.”
“For some of us, that’s a very overt and significant dynamic to our lives. For other people, much less so and they may be quite oblivious to much of their nature interactions. But that’s the heart of the idea, and some people, in a prison or a submarine for example, might have almost no personalised ecology.”
Apart from looking at personalised ecologies, Gaston also researches the sometimes subtle effects of artificial light on natural ecologies.
“People didn’t pay very much attention to the introduction of artificial light for a very long time. We’ve known for an awfully long time that two of the biggest determinants of patterns of life are temperature and light. You would predict that if we start messing around with natural light cycles, we will have impacts upon nature in many different ways.
“Of course, we’ve known that seabirds fly towards lighthouses and moths fly towards streetlights and so forth. But now we’ve documented consequences on a huge array of microorganisms, plants, fungi, animals in almost all ecosystems, and in all the different realms: freshwater, marine, terrestrial.
“Light is having impacts on plants and patterns of growth and flowering and leaf fall. That has impacts on the things that are eating the plants, whether insects or other invertebrates. And then that in turn impacts on their predators.
“A lot of recent understanding has been about that interconnectivity and the flows through ecosystems, whereby the impacts of lighting are not just limited to the areas which are being lit or the organisms that are being lit. It’s permeating through landscapes.”
“We’ve been very flagrant in the way we use light, at night. We haven’t limited ourselves to lighting where we need it, when we need it, how we need it, which is fundamentally what we need to do.”
But in trying to get people to see the light, Gaston says that “people quickly leap to the ‘oh, you’re telling me I shouldn’t have any nighttime lighting’. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying, let’s get the right kind of light in the right kind of places when we need it.
“I mean, I’ve been in nature reserves where no one’s allowed out at night, but the isolated toilet block in the middle of nowhere is still lit at night. That’s because it’s out of sight, out of mind, and cheap.”
While he insists that it’s important to dim the lights, it’s also important not just to halt the encroachment on and damage to nature, but to renew and grow it.
Some might call this rewilding, but Gaston prefers to call it “nature renewing, or renewing biodiversity”.
“In much of the world, rejecting what we’re doing just isn’t enough,” he says. “We’ve got to restore, renew, recover many regions over very extensive areas. We could go a long way down that line, improving the lot of nature and biodiversity and reducing extinctions, and at the same time providing people with better nature interactions.”
“I think that’s the heart of current conservation challenges, and the past, present and future of personalised ecologies may be important conservation issues to consider.”
Professor Kevin Gaston will address the topic “Personalised Ecology” at the 13th Oppenheimer Research Conference (ORC), which takes place in Midrand from October 9-11. The conference will be livestreamed.
Yves Vanderhaeghen writes for Jive Media Africa, science communications partner of Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.
- From Conference Guide to Conference Ranger - October 2, 2024
- R6million Oppenheimer grant funds wildlife corridors research in Namibia - October 2, 2024
- We’ll miss the big one if Africans aren’t asking the questions - October 2, 2024