10 - Conclusions

Summary

two california ecologists, Robinson and Quinn (1988), have studied an experimentally fragmented California grassland. They noted that there is debate over how subdivision of a habitat will affect extinction, and then they concluded that extinction, immigration, and species turnover are “relatively independent of the degree of habitat subdivision” (pp. 71–82). Another ecologist, Dennis Murphy of Stanford University, questioned the scale and methodology of the Robinson and Quinn undertaking and found both of them lacking. He also criticized the consequences likely to follow from the results of the controversial 1988 study: “their conclusions are what every land developer and every timber industry representative wants to hear – chopping up natural habitats does not really put species at risk” (Murphy 1989, p. 83).

If applied ecology is, in fact, tied to case studies, to natural history, and to rough generalizations rather than to exceptionless empirical laws and a deterministic general theory (see Shrader-Frechette 1986; Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1990), then scenarios like the one involving Robinson, Quinn, and Murphy are likely to occur repeatedly. Indeed, every application of ecology, in a controversial situation involving environmental welfare, could be one in which battles over conservation principles will have to be fought anew in different places and at different times. Applications of ecological science, in other words, will parallel the problems of decentralized democratic decisionmaking. Wholly decentralized decisionmaking, however, could be both inefficient and unjust. For example, without national laws like the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, virtually every town and state in every country would be forced to pass some sort of regulations of its own to deal with various local problems of racism.