The importance of the natural sciences to conservation

The last century has seen enormous environmental degradation: many populations are in drastic decline, and their ecosystems have been vastly altered. There is an urgent need to understand the causes of the decline, how the species interact with other components of the environment, and how ecosystem integrity is determined. A brief review of marine systems emphasizes the importance of natural sciences to understanding the systems and finding solutions. These environmental crises coincide with the virtual banishment of natural sciences in academe, which eliminate the opportunity for both young scientists and the general public to learn the fundamentals that help us predict population levels and the responses by complex systems to environmental variation. Science and management demands that complex systems be simplified, but the art of appropriate simplification depends on a basic understanding of the important natural history. It seems unlikely that meaningful conservation and restoration can be accomplished unless we recover the tradition of supporting research in and the teaching of natural history. We must reinstate natural science courses in all our academic institutions to insure that students experience nature first-hand and are instructed in the fundamentals of the natural sciences.