What Makes a Zebra a Zebra?
How does a city kid from the Upper East Side of Manhattan become one of the world’s foremost authorities on wildlife conservation? Joshua Ginsberg, senior vice president of the global conservation program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, blames his father. William Ginsberg was an attorney, environmentalist, author, and professor of environmental law. He served as New York City’s parks commissioner in the 1960’s. Growing up, young Joshua spent afternoons in the Central Park Zoo cleaning out cages, feeding animals, and taking a young chimpanzee for a walk in her stroller. (“No pictures unfortunately exist of that, which is very depressing," he said.) Spending a decade and half as a field biologist on conservation projects across Africa led to prestigious posts doing the difficult work of preserving and restoring wildlife and the environment. Ginsberg will discuss wildlife conservation in his lecture at the Natural Resources Defense Council as part of its Visionary Speaker Series.
Coyotes in Central Park and Westchester County made headlines earlier this year. Are we seeing more wildlife in New York City?
Yes and no. The resilience of specific species of wildlife is astonishing. One can't generalize to all wildlife. There are a number of migratory birds that no longer stopover in Central Park. Certainly there's a deficit of species from the time that Manhattan was Mannahatta, in 1609, when explorer Henry Hudson sailed up the river. It's got a lot less wildlife in it now. The problem with coyotes in Westchester County now is that they eat cats, and people don't like them to eat their cats. But as an ecological replacement for wolves, they are doing a pretty good job across the state.
Are we encroaching on their habitats and just noticing them more?
No, I don't think so. Coyotes are a weird example because coyotes didn't exist in the Northeast until the 1940s. I have a graduate student lab at Columbia University, and one of my students years ago looked at the colonization of New York State by coyotes. It took 70 years for them to get from their native Southwest to Manhattan, invading both from the north on the Canadian border and from the West out near Buffalo. Coyotes have done well because they do well with people. And there’s a whole suite of animals -- coyotes and raccoons and possums and squirrels -- that do really well with people. It’s encouraging that there are things that can survive us but discouraging that there are so many things that cannot.
What are some of the important aspects of conservation that most people don’t think about?
Scale -- both in time and space -- is really, really important to conservation. Time scale you can summarize by the question how long is perpetuity? The question has a nice sense of irony to it. It is a question that my father and I, when he was alive, would bat around. He, the environmental lawyer, would talk about contracts and enforceability, and I, the biologist, would talk about modeling and our ability to project data and infer the future. But in the end, what’s really interesting is, both from a legal perspective and from a biological perspective, we don’t do very well at planning and implementing conservation, or almost any activity, past 100 years. We can’t model wildlife population much past 25 or 30 years with any real assurance of accuracy. So the time frame over which we're able to plan is relatively short when one thinks about ecological processes and very short when one thinks about evolutionary processes.
Can zoos play a real role in conservation?
At the most extreme you can conserve genes by keeping animals in zoos. Now whether those genes would ever get back to a wild population -- whether you're conserving what makes a zebra a zebra or an elephant an elephant when you keep them in zoos -- is an interesting question. But at some level you can conserve some essence of the animal in a zoological collection.
Right now there are two different philosophies on the future of wildlife conservation and how that relates to spatial scale. One of them says the world is going to look like an "exploded zoo" with isolated, relatively small populations of wildlife. Hence, we need to take our knowledge of intensive management techniques and apply them in the wild, because if we don't, we will lose species even faster than we are now. To help animals survive climate change and other global threats, we're going to have to be good at actively moving animals around. We are going to have to know about managing diseases in the wild. And then there's another philosophy that says that this vision constitutes failure, that what we really need to do is look at managing wildlife in the matrix, managing land use between fragments of what we call wild areas.
My brain acknowledges the former argument; my heart is more of the later philosophy. Success to me would be managing for shared cohabitation between wildlife and people. It's going to require us to make some pretty clear decisions about areas where wildlife just isn't going to be living and where it is. I don't think we can save every square inch of the Congo Basin, however much I may want to.
What do you want the world to look like?
We need to protect wilderness and more creatively manage exurban and rural landscapes. In cities, we should be thinking about not just planting trees but which species of trees we plant, how those affect wildlife, particularly small mammals and insects, invertebrates and vertebrates. We need to be looking at where our food comes from. Again, that is not necessarily something that wildlife biologists spend a lot of time thinking about, but that kind of sustainability is important because of our carbon footprint, how we manage open space in the exurban environment, and what that means for global processes.
In the end, I think, one does not go into conservation as a pessimist. You will commit suicide. You do this because you’re inherently optimistic. I used to joke with my father that I really, truly believe that the glass is one-eighth full. There is going to be a rash of extinctions. We’re looking now at hundreds if not thousands of species extinctions among those species we know about. And remember that we’ve only described 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity -- two or three million species described out of the 30 million species estimated out there. So there’s going to be massive extinction and there’s very little that we can do about a lot of that. We can reverse processes of destruction that are subsidized -- agricultural processes, fisheries -- and move toward providing incentives for processes that are complementary to and supportive of conservation. I think that’s the long-term answer.
