What We Take Forward

Sometimes separate streams of conversations flow together into a single channel. Over the past month, I have felt a strong sense of convergence with several quite distinct discussions. I’d summarize them as different ways of trying to answer a single question: When does climate change force us to seek out a new set of options?

I’m a conservation biologist — or at least, I was trained to be one. Early in my PhD, I was asked to co-author the first climate change chapter in a well-known conservation biology textbook. Published in 2006 but largely prepared in 2004, the chapter remains one of my most highly cited collaborations.

I’ve thought a lot about that chapter over the past month. How we balance the legacy of our work before we became aware of the seriousness of climate change with what we need to do for the future presents important emotional, financial, and reputational issues for most of us in the water community.

The lead author and I spent most of our attention describing patterns we could see in climate impacts, but I drafted the adaptation material. Reflecting back, reviewing what we know about how have ecosystems responded to past climate shifts essentially ended my career as a conservationist before it began. I could pick my job title for my first job following graduation, and I called myself an adaptation specialist rather than a conservation biologist.

Not everything I learned in grad school was wrong or irrelevant. Pollution, overharvesting, and the outright destruction of forests or other critical habitats really has nothing to do with climate change, and these actions are all important for sustainability. But conservationists must reckon with the same (or more extreme) theory of change that engineers have been adjusting to for over a decade: the past is not a good guide to the future, and using the past to define a set of targets is no longer helpful. Indeed, if we manage ecosystems (or infrastructure or communities or policies) according to past climates, we might accelerate their dissolution and prevent them from adapting autonomously. Returning a species to a habitat that is disappearing because of climate change or replanting a forest that has burnt catastrophically is at best “unwise use.” But the shift was also easier for me. I had no legacy, reputation, or recommendations to defend, and so I had nothing to lose. Climate change was my starting place.  

Over the past month, my discussions with colleagues working in WASH, conservation, engineering, and cities tell me one clear story: we’re all struggling with the issue of what we adjust, what we discard, and what we take forward. My intuition in most of these cases has also been same: the more we can look forward instead of backwards, the more likely we are to build a new legacy on a firm footing.

John H. Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA