ABSTRACT
Environmental ‘conservation’ is often associated with keeping things the same, including preserving ecosystems from human depredation. And yet the environment is the contemporary product of evolutionary diversity and competition to yield the ‘survival of the fittest’. The experiences in this book suggest that conservationists need to be innovative to cope with the massive demographic, climatic and economic changes we are facing; building adaptability is perhaps our most important goal. To do this, we need to invoke the qualities that Charles Darwin found essential to the adaptability of life on Earth – the variety and competition that drive evolution. Paradoxically, conservation is organized against Darwin’s principles with centralization of decisions and power squeezing out variety and competition, the lifeblood of adaptability. Indeed, decentralized organizations are better at finding new solutions for complex problems (Peters and Waterman, 1980), while hegemonic nations often stagnate (Landes, 1998). Even economics is beginning to appreciate the importance of evolution. For instance, Beinhocker (2006, p187) suggests that ‘evolution is a general-purpose … learning algorithm that adapts to changing environments and accumulates knowledge over time. It is the formula responsible for all the order, complexity, and diversity of the natural world’. However, conservation agencies are concentrating staff, money and power in head offices, when they should nurture the quality and independence of field managers, who are often the real drivers of innovation (see for example Peters and Waterman, 1980). It is no coincidence that most of the innovations that we describe in southern Africa are associated with highly motivated professionals working extensively in the field.
