Читать книгу Fundamentals of Conservation Biology - Malcolm L. Hunter Jr. - Страница 11

Preface

11:15 P.M. 20 June 1990 I’m not used to being this hot so late at night. I don’t know the sounds coming through the window … crickets? … frogs? … a wheezing air‐conditioning system? I don’t know what to do.

I’m in a dorm at the University of Florida; the fourth meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology has just ended; I’m sifting through various conversations of the last 4 days. I wonder if I should postpone my plans to write a sequel to my book on managing forests for biodiversity – a sequel that would focus specifically on tropical forests. At the meeting I’ve discovered that professors are using my book for a much broader range of conservation courses than I ever anticipated and that tells me that there is a niche to be filled.

Apparently various multiauthored books on conservation biology topics are not filling the need for a basic text. Perhaps I should add a brick to the foundation of the discipline before pursuing a more specific project. Now if I can rough out an outline before I get too sleepy …

27 August 1993 Over 3 years later and I have just finished the first draft. Actually the writing went reasonably quickly (I did not begin in earnest until May of 1992) because I chose a sort of stream‐of‐consciousness approach in which I wrote only what I knew or thought I knew. Now I look forward to spending the next several months combing the literature, correcting, refining, and updating this draft. It might seem that this approach would make it easier to convey my original thinking about conservation biology as opposed to reporting on everyone else’s thinking. Perhaps so, but I claim no truly original thoughts. I tend to think each person is no more than a unique melting pot for a vast community of ideas.

24 August 1994 Sifting through the literature of conservation biology has been great fun, although it has entailed some difficult choices. If many of my readers will be North American, should I keep things familiar and easy by illustrating general principles with redwoods, bald eagles, and well‐known foreign species like tigers? Or should I try to open some vistas by describing fynbos, huias, and thylacines? Many years of working abroad predispose me toward the latter approach, but I have curbed this temptation to some degree, partly to save the space it would take to describe the fynbos, and partly because I have tried to select literature that will be reasonably accessible.

As I enter the final stages of production I often think about my readers and how they will use this book. My primary audience is students who have some background in biology and ecology but who have not taken a previous conservation biology course. I also hope to reach some general‐interest readers and have tried to keep the prose fairly lively so that they can manage at least half an hour of bedtime reading before dozing off.

This is an opportune place to explain two features of the book. First you will note that there are almost no scientific names in the text; they are all in a separate list of scientific names, which also constitutes an index to all the species mentioned in the text. Furthermore, the literature cited section constitutes an index to authors, because after each citation the pages where it is cited are listed.

27 December 1994 Two more days before the book goes out to copy‐editing, and it is time to start listing all the scores of people who have helped in an acknowledgment section. I particularly want to thank Andrea Sulzer, the friend and artist who illustrated the book; the Department of Wildlife Ecology of the University of Maine, where a relationship that began in 1970 has recently led to a professorial chair endowed by the Libra Foundation; and Aram Calhoun who has shared all but a month of our marriage with this book. Finally a special thanks to everyone who buys this book for all its royalties are allocated to a fund to support conservation students from developing countries.

Second edition: January 26, 2001 Before undertaking this second edition I was rather dreading the prospect of replowing old ground, tearing apart my first edition and putting it back together again. In hindsight, the last 9 months of sorting through the conservation biology literature have been rather enjoyable, especially after I realized that it was okay to be selective in my reading. With 651 new references there is a lot of fresh material to chew on here; most of it is very recent (my last trip to the library was this morning) although I have also added some older papers from the “classical period” of conservation biology (the 1980s). A new glossary and many new illustrations are also prominent features of this edition.

Third edition: 15 May 2006 I am returning home from a 4‐month sabbatical in Australia, where weekends were spiced with pursuing wombats, whale sharks, and lyre birds, just in time to work on the production phase of this book. Two years ago when I decided to invite a coauthor to join me it took about 10 seconds to identify James Gibbs and, the next day, it took even less time for him to accept. I have worked with James for 25 years, since he was a new student at the University of Maine and I was a new professor, and it has always been a pleasure. James’ expertise with genetics and population biology, complementary experiences with field conservation projects around the world, and his willingness to dive into the social sciences was just what was needed to strengthen this edition.

Another salient feature of this edition is a strong shift to color images. Finding illustrations for this edition has been an enjoyable challenge and we are grateful to the many people whose works appear here.

Of course the substance of revising any textbook lies in new literature, and the field of conservation biology remains vigorous in this regard. The 762 new references added here are just a small sample of the high‐quality research that characterizes the discipline. We have also added three new case studies, holding back somewhat because we think case studies should largely be generated and presented by faculty and students based on their own experiences and interests. Overall the book is 6% longer than the last edition as measured by the number of words, but 50 pages shorter because of more compact formatting.

As with earlier editions, the royalties are going into a fund to support conservation students from developing countries, most recently the fieldwork of a student from Argentina studying cavity‐nesting birds in the Andes for her dissertation. In time the royalties will be sufficient for an endowed, perennial source of support for similar aspiring conservationists.

Fourth edition: 31 December 2019 New Year’s Eve and a steady snow is luring me outdoors to celebrate a thirtieth wedding anniversary, but first I need to draft the last few new words for our fourth edition. The most conspicuous new feature is the addition of Viorel Popescu as an author, continuing a tradition of extending academic lineages, given that Viorel earned graduate degrees with both James and me. Undertaking a collaboration like this requires considerable trust and James and I knew that Viorel had the talent and commitment to make a huge contribution to the book, leading the revision of four key chapters and carefully reviewing all of the chapters. Furthermore, he brought to the table many new perspectives as a native of another part of the world – Romania – where he remains active in conservation at many levels.

With a long interval since the third edition there has been a vast new literature to comb through, and it was challenging to limit the new additions to “only” 950 new references. The conservation literature has expanded dramatically, by embracing new theory and methods, and documenting many examples of both conservation successes, and the hard lessons of real‐world “wicked” environmental problems. For example, climate change was a mere hypothesis when this book began; now it is a defining reality, the focus of one chapter, and an underlying thread in many others. Many other chapters have been reformulated to reflect the ever‐changing landscape of conservation biology, among them “Conservation near People” that represents a new shift in attention to the privately owned lands where much of the future of biodiversity conservation will play out. Similarly, we have been more inclined to add new case studies than to remove old ones, but in the interest of keeping the length reasonable we have often opted for new images with long legends that constitute mini case studies. In short, this edition represents a substantial “overhaul” from the last edition.

Royalties from this book continue to support conservation students from developing countries and have finally reached a level sufficient to fund an endowed scholarship. Indeed, the first recipient, a student from Brazil, begins her PhD work 2 weeks from today.

A quarter of a century has passed since I finished the preface to the first edition of this book, and in many respects the world and this book are profoundly different. However, much remains the same: life on Earth is awesome, in the original, fundamental sense of that word, and now, more than ever, it needs the attention of dedicated stewards like you.

M. L. Hunter, Jr.