Anda di halaman 1dari 2

Hannah Bohnaker

Inquiry Update
Since my conference, I have found a lot of interesting information about my topic
and the people involved in it. For instance, Kieran Suckling, a commenter on the article
that my inquiry project was initially based on, had a lot of negative things to say about
Peter Kareiva and his research, and the article itself. A bit of research into who he was
led me to the fact that he was heavily involved in the spotted owl protection in the
Pacific Northwest that stopped companies from logging and put a lot of people out of
jobs, as mentioned in the article. He used successes similar to that to start the Center
for Biological Diversity with two other men, and his entire career is based off of Soules
ideals of preserving biodiversity, no matter what the human cost might be.
While looking into Peter Kareiva, I found more of his reasoning to support the
Anthropocene, including the displacement of indigenous people by buying up their
land in conservation efforts. I also found his ridiculous claims about cod and polar
bears that Suckling brings up in his comment, and in context they didnt seem too
outrageous. I am a little skeptical of the polar bear comments 1, but he does make a lot
of solid points. I looked into his source for the claims about the recovering ecosystems 2,
written by two Yale scientists, Oswald J. Schmitz, and Holly P. Jones. They compiled
information of recovery times from 240 studies on ecosystems affected by predicted
irreparable damage, and found that most ecosystems bounced back in decades rather
than centuries.

1 http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/conservation-in-the-anthropocene
2 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005653

As far as The Nature Conservancys work with corporations, I read their most recent
progress report from their partnership with Dow Chemical Company.3 They report
mostly positive results in the quality of air and water, but thats pretty much what I
expected, considering these reports were published on TNCs website and linked on
Dows. Im currently trying to find other sources of information on the results of their
partnership.
All in all, I still have more to look into, and I think I always will, because this is such a
broad debate and new information is coming out faster than I could ever keep up with. I
do, however, feel a lot more confident and knowledgeable in this topic, and plan to
continue research into this well after the project is over.

3 http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/companies-we-work-with/dow/2013-dowcollaboration-annual-progress-report.pdf

Anda mungkin juga menyukai