Barbara Dean, Island Press

Friday, 24 Oct 2003

COVELO, Calif.

When I stepped outside this morning, I was greeted by the howl of a lone coyote — coming from the hill to the west of my house instead of from the river canyon to the east, which is the direction from which the coyotes usually call. I remember the first time I heard that sound, soon after I moved here. I had no idea what I was hearing — it was truly otherworldly, or perhaps like a very weird cocktail party in the distance. Over the years, I’ve come to hear the lilting, spine-tingling yelps and howls as a measure of wildness, and when the coyotes seemed to go silent a few years ago, I feared that it meant bad things for this near-wilderness. But the rangy, canny canines returned shortly thereafter, to my relief. Each time I hear them now — always with a start — I feel my inner compass reorient to the wild world surrounding me.

I’ve been mulling over one of the administrative items from our Roundtable meeting on Wednesday. We’re approaching the end of the strategic planning process that Island Press has been involved in for a year, and Dan Sayre (vice president and publisher, and leader of the RT meeting) told us that within the next few months, as part of the final piece of that process, we editors will need to update and revise our plans for our subject areas. This bit of news was met with something less than universal enthusiasm, since updating editorial strategies in the midst of an already over-the-top workload conjures visions of sleepless nights, no weekends, and an endless series of apologies to authors for delays in working on their manuscripts.

But, if I put aside the effect on my day-to-day life, I’ll admit that I do actually enjoy the process of updating these plans, which gives me a chance to step back and take a look at the Big Picture of what we do at IP: What are the trends within the subject areas we are responsible for? What kinds of information do people working on these issues need? How is the audience growing, shrinking, shifting?

As I see it, the Biggest Picture of all, the one that frames everything else, is the sobering fact that biodiversity — this complex, interconnected action of life and its processes that is responsible for the health, stability, and beauty of the natural world (which includes, of course, human life) — is in crisis.

As most of you probably know, the estimates of the current rates of biodiversity loss in different habitats are so alarming that biologists speak of the current crisis as a sixth mass extinction event. Humans are off the hook for responsibility for the first five such events, since the most recent one was 65 million years ago. But this one, the sixth event that we are in the midst of right now, is, undeniably (if mostly inadvertently) the result of human activities. Human consumption and increasing human numbers are altering habitat, triggering the spread of invasive species, and, in marine areas, depleting biodiversity through overfishing.

One of the great benefits of my job is the chance to learn about the fascinating intricacies of the natural world. As I have worked with scientists who are leading the way in improving our understanding, I’ve learned that the choices that biodiversity rests on are often, unfortunately, cause/effect issues that do not happen at a scale of time or distance that we can easily perceive. Consequences of, for example, land conversion or environmental change often do not materialize until well after the changes have happened; scientists call this “lag effect.” Likewise, most environmental problems are not generated primarily by a single large perturbation, but are rather the result of many, often unrelated, insults, until the cumulative effect results in a major catastrophe. What this means, as Michael Soule points out in Conservation Biology: Research Priorities for the Next Decade, is that untutored human intuition, even with the best intentions, is likely to be inadequate for providing useful responses. Local extinctions or other environmental changes that happen out of sight — far away — are often “invisible” to individuals elsewhere and therefore seem unconnected and irrelevant to people immersed in busy lives.

Updating my editorial plan means taking a refreshed look at how books can help to meet the challenges of stemming this sixth extinction. Most of the books in IP’s Ecosystems Studies area are published for people who are working to better understand, protect, and restore biodiversity. We also try to reach students, both those who are training for environmental professions and those who will pursue other careers but want to be fully educated citizens. And members of the public, both activists and ordinary citizens, are an important part of our universe, because the protection and restoration of natural processes are increasingly the responsibility of everyone on the planet in many different ways. Without at least a basic grasp of ecology and the connections of all life, it is hard for anyone to make sound choices about consumption and other behavior or to vote wisely. We work hard at making the language in our books accessible to anyone interested in the subject, so that nonspecialists as well as biologists can learn about, say, the ecology of forest fires in Flames in our Forest: Disaster or Renewal?

At the heart of my part of the planning process, and underlying all of my daily work with manuscripts and my frequent conversations with authors, scientists, and others working on biodiversity issues, is the shared, gut-level knowledge that biodiversity is the very ground and substance of life. That without it — without the uncounted species from the invisible microbe to the Asian tiger; without the processes of pollination, soil regeneration, and carbon cycling that different species perform — life would not exist. That below a certain level of biodiversity, humans would not survive. And certainly, without the soaring hawk or howling coyote or whining mosquito, our lives would be unspeakably impoverished.

This knowledge is never far from me here, thanks to a home and a job that keep my awareness of life’s diversity and interdependence above a subliminal level. Speaking of which (the job part), it’s time for me to turn to the multitude of emails in my in-box, and to the stack of other tasks and manuscripts on my desk. Thank you for sharing the days with me during this week of diary-writing. I’ve enjoyed it, and hope you all have, too. Now, I’m going to take a brief break to play in the meadow with Chira before shifting gears. And this weekend, I think we’ll go to the river, where, if we’re lucky, we may encounter signs and smells of those howling coyotes …