Peter Kareiva: A conservation scientist at home in a megacity

As chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization, Peter Kareiva has spent most of the past decade in the air, touching down to work with other scientists, conservationists, community organizations, political and business leaders on projects to protect nature — for nature’s sake and for people — on every continent except Antarctica. Now he’s coming to roost in what might seem an unlikely perch: Los Angeles, a city not known as a paragon of preservation. This summer, Kareiva became director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Los Angeles is changing, Kareiva says. And cities are a crucial site for conservation science and solutions to the grand challenges of the twenty-first century: population growth and urbanization, threats to ecosystems and biodiversity, climate change, and sustainability in a world of inequality. What better place could there be for a scientist who has been called “one of the most innovative and provocative thinkers in conservation today”? Here are some highlights from an extensive and provocative interview with Kareiva in the Fall 2015 issue of Boom: A Journal of California.

Boom: With The Nature Conservancy, you’ve been all over the world. What attracts you to L.A.?

Kareiva: Well, you know, I lived in L.A. 20 years ago. And at that stage, I was surfing and enjoying the weather. This time around, it’s that I like cities! I know that’s kind of unusual for a conservation biologist. But I’ve always liked cities. And L.A. is a great city.

I like cities because of the creativity and the people in them. And now I like cities as a conservationist because I think they’re essential to get right in order to solve the big environmental problems — food, water, climate, transportation, all the supply chains that drive what happens in the world. Getting that right all depends on cities because that’s where most of the activity is, the energy is, the people are.

L.A. is a pretty neat city because I like to run against the grain a little bit. And when I tell my buddies I’m going to L.A., they all say, “Why L.A.?” Most conservation biologists would go to Montana or go to Wyoming.

Well, first of all, L.A. is doing a lot of interesting things with conservation. The whole notion of restoring the L.A. River is just wild. L.A. was a leader in dealing with coastal pollution decades ago. And now L.A. is facing a big water shortage, and how it is dealing with that, in everything from residential to industrial use is fascinating. The energetics of the city — just in terms of carbon emissions are daunting. You have a sprawling city, notorious for not having mass transit, that could actually turn out to be carbon-neutral. That would be remarkable. And that would tell you that other cities could do it too, that you wouldn’t have to start with a perfectly designed city. So all of that’s pretty appealing. And then there is diversity. Why do biologists do conservation? They like biological diversity. I like people diversity. I like food diversity. And L.A. has got all that….

Boom: So you’re making a move from where you’ve been for 10 years now, The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organization, and doing all these great, exciting projects on the ground, around the world. Why make the transition to academia, to UCLA?

Kareiva: Well, I’m still going to stay connected to The Nature Conservancy in some ways, precisely for what you just said, because they’re always doing stuff. But there is a problem with organizations that are always doing stuff, whether NGOs or the federal government. They’re called action institutions. And action institutions do not pause to think about what they’re doing. They do not pause to ask, really, how well is this working? Is there a better way or is there a different way to do things? Rarely do they even pause to analyze the data they’ve collected. And so after 10 years at The Nature Conservancy doing stuff, I think there now needs to be some research and real deep analysis of what’s working and not working and all the things they and everybody else are doing in the environment.

And the other thing is that, you know, universities are places where, ideally, it’s fine to have arguments. It’s not always so fine to have arguments in the NGO world or even the federal agency world because there’s a tremendous cultural push to reaching consensus, sometimes reaching consensus somewhat artificially, but not resolving the issues. And it’s understandable that federal agencies have to achieve consensus. It’s understandable that NGOs have to reach consensus. But I think that we’re at a time now in the environment where we don’t know what the consensus should be, and we should be having these arguments….

Boom: Some of the debates you’ve been involved in have gotten very heated and personal at times. And I wonder if there are other things that you’ve learned that have changed your approach.

Kareiva: Well, the two immediate, short-term, personal things that I’ve learned are, one, to be a lot better at listening and paying attention to other people’s values. The other thing I’ve learned is to open every paper and every talk with some sort of statement that says, “Hey, look, I love nature too. I go out. I like species. I don’t want to see them extinct.” And then move on from there. It’s sort of like announcing “I believe in God too,” or, “I’m a patriot as well. I believe in the United States.”

Boom: “I believe in nature.”

Kareiva: Right.

Boom: But wait, you’ve been the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. What made some people think you don’t care enough about nature?

Kareiva: By paying so much attention to what nature can do for cities and people or corporate behavior, there’s sometimes the assumption that means that I don’t love nature as a value. And that by not loving nature just as a pure value, as an ethical value, I’ve surrendered too much and made it too easy to compromise and not produce the outcomes that conservationists want. Where I come back on that is, well, what you have to realize is that nature is one of many values. And there certainly is an ethics to extinction. But there’s also an ethics to freedom from violence. There’s also an ethics to freedom from hunger. There are all these values and ethics. And so love of nature is one of many values that shape our decisions. And you can’t just make it automatically the trump card, because if you do that, it means you’re not going to listen to anybody else or even have a conversation with anybody else. It ends all conversations to tell someone that nature is the highest value that trumps all other values. I am not willing to say that nature should trump all other values. And that unwillingness makes some conservationists squirm and think I am uncommitted.

But the other thing is — and this is what I think I did wrong and scientists often do wrong — is that there are a lot of debates about conservation and the environment that really are all about values, and we couch them in science. And I should have known better. Now that I reflect on a whole bunch of debates that I’ve been involved in, they were really consistently about values. What does one part of society value versus another part of society? And science was used to create an answer to support a preference that had already been arrived at by values. And I should have been smarter about that.

Now the way I like to reframe it is this. I know it sounds like it’s, you know, kind of a smiley face answer. But I say everybody is an environmentalist. And to a certain extent, everybody is an environmentalist. You’d find very few people who would say “I don’t like the environment. I don’t like nature.” So everybody is an environmentalist. And the right way to ask the questions, we face — in L.A., in national parks, with endangered species, the whole environmental movement and conservation movement — is “What do we want the world to look like in 2030 and 2050?” If we actually frame the question that way, “What do we want the world to look like in 2030 and 2050?” I think we’d find a lot more common ground, because it’s looking forward. Almost everybody loves running streams and rivers with fish in them that their kids can play along, and everybody loves the coastline, and everybody would love the opportunity to go to a place like Yellowstone.

So let’s ask “What do you want the world to look like in 2030 and 2050?” Start with that and then ask, “Okay. How might that happen?” Instead, if you look environmental debates, it’s all about what do we do tomorrow? What do we do tomorrow about building this road or about this corporate activity or about this housing development or about this invasive species or about this threatened and endangered species? And by making it so proximate, you lose sight of the common ground that people have. People might differ about what they do tomorrow because they’re worried about jobs lost or not lost. But in fact, looking to 2030 and 2050, they have a lot more common ground. Let’s paint a picture. To make it real, you have to pick real dates. And it would either be 2030 or 2050 because that’s where all the models and projections go when you’re starting with science. So you pick one of those two dates. I’m inclined to do 2030 because that’s not too far off. And then just start from there.

I think it would be an interesting exercise — something we could do at UCLA is to do some of that visioning. But it has to be based on science. It can’t be fantasy. You have to do some hard calculations and say, “Well, would there still be enough land to feed people, and where are you getting your energy from? And how much?” You know, it’s not just science fiction. It’s got to be grounded, with real constraints….

Click here to read the full interview in the Fall 2015 issue of Boom: A Journal of California.