Gardenification of tropical conserved wildlands: multitasking, multicropping, and multiusers.
Tropical wildlands and their biodiversity will survive in perpetuity only through their integration into human society. One protocol for integration is to explicitly recognize conserved tropical wildlands as wildland gardens. A major way to facilitate the generation of goods and services by a wildland garden is to generate a public-domain Yellow Pages for its organisms. Such a Yellow Pages is part and parcel of high-quality search-and-delivery from wildland gardens. And, as they and their organisms become better understood, they become higher quality biodiversity storage devices than are large freezers. One obstacle to wildland garden survival is that specific goods and services, such as biodiversity prospecting, lack development protocols that automatically shunt the profits back to the source. Other obstacles are that environmental services contracts have the unappealing trait of asking for the payment of environmental credit card bills and implying delegation of centralized governmental authority to decentralized social structures. Many of the potential conflicts associated with wildland gardens may be reduced by recognizing two sets of social rules for perpetuating biodiversity and ecosystems, one set for the wildland garden and one set for the agroscape. In the former, maintaining wildland biodiversity and ecosystem survival in perpetuity through minimally damaging use is paramount, while in the agroscape, wild biodiversity and ecosystems are tools for a healthy and productive agroecosystem, and the loss of much of the original is acceptable.
Janzen
D
D
Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. djanzen@sas.upenn.edu
D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D005523:Food Supply; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012371:Robotics; D014329:Tropical Climate