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Interview: Peter Kareiva
Peter Kareiva, The Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist, talks about entering the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, writing fast and sleeping through meetings. —By Courtney Leatherman
Nature Conservancy: You were just elected to the academy—what do you think got you in?
Peter Kareiva: Many years ago I was one of the first biolgists to be good at field biology and mathematics. I developed ways of looking at the world spatially. These models became prominent in ecological theory and lanscape ecology. Now we talk about landscape mosaics all the time, but 20 years ago, no one did.
Nature Conservancy: Did the academy give you a plaque? I hear you’re not too big on awards, that you once threw one out the window.
Peter Kareiva: I don’t know what they gave me. I still haven’t opened the FedX package.
Nature Conservancy: You recently lamented “the Conservancy is now so science-based that I long for the days of inspiration and aesthetics.” What do you mean?
Peter Kareiva: Science is all about numbers. I love numbers, but we do things for reasons other than numbers. We protect places. Humans value places for things that are hard to summarize with a number. We have intutition. That’s hard to capture with numbers. When we try to reduce everything to a number it looks hokey and banal.
Nature Conservancy: But aren’t you working hard to quantify the value of nature, as part of the Natural Capital Project, a joint effort between the Conservancy, Stanford University and WWF?
Peter Kareiva: That’s a good use of numbers. If you’re tyring to make an economic argument you better have numbers. Corporations are not about inspiration; they can’t afford to be.
Nature Conservancy: Why are you constantly trying to inspire Conservancy scientists to publish?
Peter Kareiva: There are a lot of reasons to publish, but I think it makes you tell a story clearly. I don’t know how many Conservancy reports you read, but I can’t tell what they’re saying most of the time. I think I was misunderstood. I think people thought I was saying we needed to be academic. I wasn’t. I was saying it will help you be a better communicator. We can’t just be talking to one another.
Nature Conservancy: You do a lot of writing yourself. Right now, you’re coauthoring a conservation textbook. Why?
Peter Kareiva: I want to shake up the field. The book is about the decisions people have to make to meet their needs and protect biodiversity. We have a chapter on agriculture, a chapter on logging, a chapter on fishing. Conservation is as much about people as it is protected areas. Protected areas are doomed unless we make sure we do logging right, agriculture right.
We also talk about the romantic ideal of pristine nature; of course there is no such thing. Human impacts are already huge. Conservation is blind to the fact that the population grows by at least 200,000 individuals every day. That’s serious. It means we have to accomodate those people.
Nature Conservancy: So what should the Conservancy be doing about population?
Peter Kareiva: I don’t think we need to do anything, but we need to be realistic about it because it changes our strategy. We need to make clear scenarios—the same way people have dealt with climate change. You have scenarios for different levels of CO2 emissions, and for each scenario there are consequences. That’s what we should do about human population growth, make clear the consequences.
Nature Conservancy: Your colleagues claim you’re so prolific because you never sleep.
Peter Kareiva: That’s a total myth. I never use an alarm clock. If I get tired I sleep. Even through meetings. I’m just fast, and I don’t worry. I have published lots of mistakes. I think a lot of people are slow when they write because they think they’re going to get it right. That’s arrogant; you’re going to get it wrong. But you’re adding to the discussion. The standard of comparison is What’s the world like now, and can I improve things no matter what I do? Perfection does not slow me down.
Nature Conservancy: That sounds very healthy. You’re known to be a straight talker. Do you think before you speak?
Peter Kareiva: Probably not. Most people would say I don’t.
Nature Conservancy: Many people say that you’re “blunt and argumentative.” You do write a column titled “Rant & Rave” for an online science publication. Question: How do you get away with it?
Peter Kareiva: I don’t think I get away with it. I don’t take it too seriously. For me it’s fun, it’s play. Some people get offended, but on net people consistently really like it. I think people value plain-speak more than any of us realize. You can see through it otherwise.
Nature Conservancy: Why do you think that’s such a rare quality within conservation organizations?
Peter Kareiva: I think it’s fear of what will happen if people know the truth—mainly fear that there will be consequences, and maybe somebody won’t give us money. I think that fear’s misplaced.
Nature Conservancy: So what’s the No. 1 argument the Conservancy should have right now?
Peter Kareiva: We’re talking more about valuing nature for people. The question is to what extent we want to measure in a serious way, not a marketing way, the well-being of people. To what extent is that going to be part of our agenda? Someone is going to force us to answer that: You say people are better off when conservation is done. How do you know?
Nature Conservancy: You’ve wondered out loud about another issue: "Does sustainability mean an ascetic lifestyle?” Well, what do you think?
Peter Kareiva: I think it’s an interesting question. We can’t really have sustainablity as one of our strategies unless we have a measure of it. Right now I defy you to try to find one anywhere. It’s a very touchy- feely verbal idea, but it’s not well-defined. I pose that question about the ascetic lifestyle because some people think it just means that you have to give up things. But where did they get that idea? Why is that? The Conservancy isn’t going to solve this problem, but someone needs to. It’s not just people in sandals and burlap clothes who don’t have a care and live in a tent.
Nature Conservancy: I hear your wardrobe might actually meet that definition of sustainability.
Peter Kareiva: I invest mainly in food and drink.
Nature Conservancy: In addition to asking tough questions, you’re known for dispensing a lot of advice—particularly when it comes to technological communication. I need some. I’ve never learned to make a PowerPoint, what do you recommend?
Peter Kareiva: Don’t learn.
Nature Conservancy: It’s not really your job to worry about marketing or fundraising, so if you were in charge, say you got a $1 billion grant, where would you take the Conservancy? What would the best science have you do?
Peter Kareiva: This will get me into trouble. I would set up a ton of internship programs for everything from high school to college to graduate school students around the world. The reason I’d do that is because the problem is so big that you need that many scientists dealing with it, and those scientists would be much more creative, and they’ll go out and have jobs and careers and be able to do a lot more than they could at the Conservancy. If the Conservancy put all its money into partnerships and interships we’d get so much better science, so much better conservation. And nobody else does that. But they ain’t going to like that.
Nature Conservancy: But “they” probably won’t be surprised. You have a reputation for being a mentor to young scientists, and you say you enjoy mentoring even more than the science itself. Why?
Peter Kareiva: Think about it. It’s fun, and you can make a huge difference so easily. I could spend 50 hours with a student or young scientist and make a difference, or I could spend 50 hours on a paper, and it’s still not going to make a difference. In the Conservancy’s language, it’s leverage.
Nature Conservancy: But I’ve heard that it was your students who really turned you on to conservation science.
Peter Kareiva: True. I was doing all agriculture stuff, and they asked me to teach a course on patch models, and one of my students wrote the modeling of the spotted owl and logging but didn’t have a Ph.D. So I was asked by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund to testify on behalf of the owl. I testified and said his models are really quite good.
Nature Conservancy: Still, why did that get you to make the leap to conservation science?
Peter Kareiva: It became obvious to me that it was easy to make a contribution to conservation with my science because a lot of basic, simple things could be done to help. It was easy. Easier to make a difference. A mathematician trying to contribute to ecological theory was a lot harder.
Nature Conservancy: But you learned some hard lessons from that trial.
Peter Kareiva: One problem of the Endangered Species Act is that it’s ended up being cast as though it’s people versus species. It shouldn’t have been about the owl. It should have been about What’s the value of maintaining old growth forest in the Northwest and what are the alternatives?
Nature Conservancy: What’s the biggest threat to biodiversity?
Peter Kareiva: Direct habitat degradation.
Nature Conservancy: What about climate change?
Peter Kareiva: Climate change is something we have to deal with. It’s a threat to the human economy. There are going to be losers in climate change—countries, coastal communities, livelihoods. That’s a serious problem. For biodiversity, there will be a lot of adjustments.
Nature Conservancy: How should the Conservancy adjust?
Peter Kareiva: Climate change will influence what we’re doing. It is a serious threat to our on-the-ground investments because it means our management approaches will often be designed for historical conditions that no longer apply; because climates will move on the ground but our preserves cannot move; and because climate change really means more storms and droughts and floods, which can be very destructive. But still, the bottom line, go to any place in the world and ask what are you most worried about in terms of the collection of species and it will be direct habitat degradaion through urban sprawl, highways, agriculture production. Climate change is highly disruptive, no question. But species will move around; there will be evolution.
Nature Conservancy: Speaking of evolution, now that you’re in the academy, will you evolve? Will you lose the black sneakers and buy a suit?
Peter Kareiva: No.
