Writing on his Dot Earth blog Andy Revkin has dubbed Peter Kareiva the “inconvenient environmentalist,” and I don’t disagree.

Kareiva is the chief scientist of the world’s biggest environmental group, the Nature Conservancy, and is “inconvenient” because he tells uncomfortable truths about the environment. Among these truths:

Nature is often resilient (i.e. BP oil spill, wildlife thriving in the vicinity of Chernobyl), not fragile.

There is no wilderness untrammeled by man.

The disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others.

Conservation, by most measures, is failing. To survive it must change.

These points, and more, are argued by Kareiva in a recent essay published in the Breakthrough Journal, which you can read here. Greenwire also recently published a good story about Kareiva and his interactions with environmentalists and ecologists here.

He notes that the focus on “horror stories,” such as Jared Diamond’s famous (and debunked) claim that Easter Island’s inhabitants devolved into cannibalism after they mindlessly cut down the last trees, harm the conservation movement (in the book Collapse).

The trouble with this viewpoint, Kareiva writes, is its focus on the idea of a fragile nature prone to collapse. The movement, accordingly holds the creation of parks and preserves, to the complete exclusion of the people who already live in those places, as its highest goal.

In his essay, Kareiva says conservation must adapt to survive:

What should be the new vision for conservation? It would start by appreciating the strength and resilience of nature while also recognizing the many ways in which we depend upon it. Conservation should seek to support and inform the right kind of development — development by design, done with the importance of nature to thriving economies foremost in mind. And it will utilize the right kinds of technology to enhance the health and well-being of both human and nonhuman natures. Instead of scolding capitalism, conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures. Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor. Instead of trying to restore remote iconic landscapes to pre-European conditions, conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers. Nature could be a garden — not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life.

The bottom line, he argues, is that conservation must give up its view of preserving pristine wilderness and focus on developing natural settings that are more people friendly. I suspect he would like a community such as The Woodlands.

As we get deeper into the Anthropocene I bet his views will be picked up by more and younger conservationists.