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ON THE OUTSIDE

Robert Michael Pyle

When I received the Society’s Distinguished Service Award in Victoria, it was presented to "An Individual Outside of Academia and Government." Outgoing President Dennis Murphy kindly noted that the award recognized work and writing in the field of invertebrate conservation. Given this pulpit, I would like to speak to the conservation of small-scale life, from a posture outside institutions — and tie the two together if I can.

When you are a conservation biologist in government, academia, or an NGO, there are certain things you can do, and certain things you cannot. You have the power levers, influence, prestige, backup, and authority vested by your position. You also have the special set of restrictions, constraints, and degree of muzzling that go with that job.

Not infrequently, bureaucrats and institutional activists express envy of my independence. From time to time one of them makes the break to the freelance life, but most go back. For when the anchor of the job is cast loose, a whole new set of opportunities and limitations takes over. Hopefuls tend to forget the latter until they have to confront them in real life.

One does indeed gain a measure of independence. But the first, or bridging, step often consists of taking on consultancies and EIS-type work. This attaches its own species of thrall. Scientists who go to work for developers, certain they can maintain their objectivity and clean hands, may find themselves compromised before long, and listening hard for whispers of "biostitute" behind their backs. Working for the other side, or for the "stakeholders" in pursuit of that elusive "win-win," can make similar demands on intellectual and ethical freedom. I have known splendid and admired academics to lose credibility for endorsing unfounded or hyperbolic eco-rhetoric, as well as the other way around. In short, freelancing does not always guarantee, or equate with, real independence.

If you truly retain your separation from defining and compromising allegiances, it probably means you are not being paid for your contribution — at least not regularly. You do it out of love, fear, and rage, and they don’t pay for rent or beer. That’s the part that many wannabes, with office frustrations soothed by a bi-weekly paycheck, benefits, and support base, willfully tend to forget.

It is such a route that I (perhaps foolishly) have followed. After leaving stewardship work with The Nature Conservancy, I consulted with IUCN/WWF long enough to get the Invertebrate Red Data Book published (with Sue Wells and Marc Collins). But an inglorious period in WWF-International’s life (the head was on leave from a South African tobacco company, for example) conspired with desires to write and leave the city to send me permanently among the un- (or, charitably, self-) employed. The great nature writer Edwin Way Teale favored me with one superb piece of advice: don’t go freelance until your career warrants it. This I flagrantly ignored.

For fifteen years I have supported my conservation habit with writing books, speaking, and Paladin-style teaching. In that time I have suffered no control whatever over how I might exert my opinion, how I spend my time, or where I may live. I have, in fact, lived and worked out of an old Swedish farmstead a hundred miles downstream from my old office in Portland.

I have also done without a paycheck, benefits, and Social Security contribution (the real killer for freelancers, along with health insurance). I have had no travel budget, communications allowance, or photocopy facility, and no one to pay conference or journal fees, page or reprint charges, no agency backup or institutional imprimatur. This support, often taken for granted, tends to be forgotten by professionals when they survey the green pastures "outside of academia and government." Yep, you can cast off the reins and live where you choose: IF you can pay your bills.

This condition affects what one can do. When I attend a conference as a keynote or guest participant, and take part fully and with enthusiasm, members wonder why I do not join the organization. But as I probably attend 20 conferences and annual meetings a year on average, the dues and registration fees alone would beggar me. So the meetings I can attend just because I want to, and the subscriptions I can maintain, are very limited. I have belonged to the Lepidopterists’ Society since 1959, and there have been periods when it was the only dues statement I could meet.

One of the greatest challenges for independent scholar/conservationists is convincing agency people that this is NOT our job. Wildlife and parks agency people, TNC folk, journalists and others seeking expertise often have a hard time understanding that no one pays independents to do what they do, and there is a living to be made too. For example, the leading earthworm biologists on the West Coast are amateurs; the chief spider biologist in the region ekes a modest living on survey contracts and such, but has no paid position; and three of the most knowledgeable Northwest lepidopterists are, respectively, an unpaid curator-of-convenience, a truck driver, and a well-paid but extremely harried physician. Yet all of them find their knowledge in (sometimes unreasonable) demand by people whose days are spent on a payroll.

More and more, specialists in systematics and the natural history of organisms of concern are unemployed, at least as such. And if these resource people also happen to be dedicated to conserving the resource, as many of them are, their usefulness and their overcommitment at least double. It means that independents cannot always perform as their colleagues in government, the advocacy community, and industry would like them to. Sometimes they withdraw to their lairs, or the field or lab, out of sheer self-defense. It also means we must pick our battles carefully. I have concentrated on certain modest old-growth stands in the Willapa Hills, keeping my county roadsides unsprayed, the Washington Natural Heritage Advisory Council, and an array of invertebrate conservation activities, including biogeography and habitat protection of Northwest butterflies, the migratory monarch phenomenon, and support of the Xerces Society.

When I first wrote on the subject of Lepidoptera conservation, thirty years ago, it was rejected from the relevant journal — probably for its editorial shortcomings, but also the topic was considered arcane. Not so in Britain, where I studied for a year at the Monks Wood Experimental Station with John Heath, Eric Duffey, Jack Dempster, Mike Morris, Norman Moore, Jeremy Thomas and others: all working on rare insect biology and conservation for TNC (later the Institute for Terrestrial Ecology). From that experience came the Xerces Society in 1971, named for the extinct Xerces Blue, which was lost from the San Francisco Peninsula in 1943.

In the quarter century of the Xerces Society’s life — by no means wholly or even largely on its account, but measured by its existence — invertebrates have become big business in conservation biology. Literally, too — many forget that the Habitat Conservation Plan, now the darling of Bruce Babbitt and the very fulcrum of public discourse on endangered species, had its beginning with accommodations made on California’s San Bruno Mountain for developers vs. the federally endangered Mission Blue. Some believe that the butterfly, and perhaps the ESA, would have followed the Xerces Blue to extinction without the HCP; others feel the outcome is still debatable. What is certain is that insect conservation has become not only historically important, but commonplace. The same journals that considered the subject esoteric in 1967 now seldom publish an issue without conservation papers.

Insect conservation has also shown me the greatest danger to conservation biology, within AND without institutions. That is the potential for enmity, rancor, and counterproductive cannibalism within the ranks of believers. For we are all that, or we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing, for love OR money. It’s too hard. When we dismiss, diss, or rumble with one another destructively, we deliver the biota into the eager and willing hands of its enemies. Of this, I am convinced.

Of course, there will always be debate, and should be, over issues. We shall never find total consensus over reintroductions, species vs. systems approaches, and many other points of philosophy or practice. Naturally. But when I see competing consultants becoming mortal enemies, or whole bodies of opinion demonized, I worry. Lately, I have been concerned to hear some botanically driven fire ecologists attempting to marginalize independent lepidopterists who clearly have the goods (and data, and numbers) on certain over-energetic burns that are hard on insects of concern — hard to the point of local extirpation with little potential for recolonization, in some instances. Debate is good; discrediting those who dissent is unhelpful. The messengers are not the enemy, even when the tale they bring is inconvenient.

I accepted my award with great pleasure and joy, for all those who have toiled on behalf of E. O. Wilson’s "little things that run the world," and for all who have worked from the outside, with all the satisfactions and challenges it brings. For in the end, there are no independents; we are all interdependent. And among those who struggle to keep what’s good in the world, there is no outside — or better yet, it is ALL outside.

Robert Michael Pyle received a 1997 SCB Distinguished Service Award for his efforts to promote the conservation of invertebrates and to develop public understanding of conservation issues.

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