Perspective: Hospice Ecology

Perspective:

Hospice Ecology

Reading dozens of environmental publications and hundreds of e-mailed news stories each month gives one a pretty tough skin. There’s a lot of depressing stuff going on—from mushrooming sprawl, to increasing incidence of asthma in children, to almost-daily new evidence of global warming. Somehow I manage to absorb all this and retain a positive outlook—after all, the worse the problems the greater the opportunity for improvement!

But this story really struck me hard, right in the solar plexus. Biologists in Hawaii fighting to save some 360 endangered species (close to a third of all endangered species in the U.S.) are now describing their task as “hospice ecology.” They are managing species that they are convinced will become extinct.

Last March I spent two weeks on the Island of Hawaii, and I saw firsthand just how dire the situation is. My brother-in-law, an entomologist who is running a program there to identify biological controls for one of thousands of invasive plants—Christmas berry tree (

Schinus terebinthifolius)—explained to me how extensively invasive plants, animals, and diseases have upset Hawaiian ecosystems. On the Big Island, nearly all the plants one sees at lower elevations—below about 4,000 feet (1,200 m)—are introduced species. That’s right. Those lush trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous plants that line the roads and define Hawaii today are there at the expense of native species. To find native plants and animals one has to search high-elevation mountainsides.

Birding at about 6,000 feet (1,800 m) on the shoulder of Mauna Loa, I found six of the island’s seven remaining species of honeycreepers, including the ‘I‘iwi, pictured below. Like Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, Hawaiian honeycreepers evolved over millions of years from a single species to fill the available ecological niches. At one time there were more than 50 kinds of honeycreepers on the Hawaiian islands; most of those that survive today are threatened or endangered.

I knew all this as I explored the volcanic terrain last March, but it didn’t really sink in until recently, when I came across the term “hospice ecology.” Rick Warshauer, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, noted in an article that “what we’re dealing with is whole suites of organisms disappearing.”

So how does this relate to green building? Two thoughts come to mind. First, in ranking the broader environmental priorities with green building (issues like energy savings, water conservation, and indoor air quality), we must keep habitat protection at or near the top of the list. While problems like ozone depletion and global warming are certainly very great, those impacts may last centuries or millennia; with species extinction it may take

millions of years to fill the ecological niches being vacated.

Second, my short visit to Hawaii taught me that achieving healthy ecosystems often requires much more than simply ceasing to do damage. Active human intervention is often required in the form of fire management, or species reintroductions, or invasive species control—as my brother-in-law is doing. The feature article this month looks at various issues relating to ecosystem restoration. There is a not-so-subtle irony that the ecosystems we have so severely damaged in extracting resources or growing crops or putting up buildings now need human intervention for the very survival of certain species.

– Alex Wilson