Sparing vs. Sharing: Ecological Conservation

How can we balance our demands for food production against the necessity to conserve biodiversity? This difficult question is often debated by Conservation Biologists sitting on two sides of a great debate elegantly expressed as Sparing verses Sharing.

I'll define each of these in turn so we can compare and contrast the two. I'm hoping, this will allow us to see how we might utilise both concepts in unison to manage the use of our precious land sustainably. 

Sustainably. What a loaded word! I'm using it here in it's purest sense, as a way to describe a land management technique which maintains a stable state of ecosystem health and food production. A sustainable environment protects the health of the Earth and Humanity at the expense of neither. What a pleasant thought!

So, the debate. To begin, what is Sparing? This photo actually sums it up nicely:

It is the widely practiced concept of setting aside parcels of land as conservation zones (the forest in the background) and then intensively farming the land outside those areas (the monoculture crop in the foreground). 

The United States commonly employs this conservation technique. Yellowstone National Park is a classic example. It is a massive piece of land set asside for the sole purpose of protecting the natural environment within it. No one lives there; no one farms there. It is cordoned off as an area of preserved wilderness, probably as close to ecological heaven as one can get these days.

To feed the Nation, however, the area outside the park is managed at the other extreme, as industrialised farmland. These swathes of monoculture are intensively managed for the sole purpose of maximising food production. Unfortunately, this makes them effectively ecological deserts, ecological hells. 

One can't deny there are benefits to such a Sparing land management approach. The wildlife (eagles, bears, trout, lynx, etc in Yellowstone) live safely within its bounds while we maximise our food production benefits outside feeding our swollen population.

Simple segregation equals win win right? Hmmm... Not so fast. This Sparing approach has major drawbacks which make it difficult to see how such a system could achieve sustainability in the long term. 

For one thing, cordoned off Wildlife Preserves function as isolated islands. This does not cater for migratory species such as caribou. For species that don't migrate, it isn't necessarily heavenly either. If such protected areas are small, the species populations within them may be small too leading to inbreeding depression.

Additionally, the agricultural land outside these areas contributes little, if anything, to a stable environment. The intensive cropping practices erode soil health turning rich loam into hard pan, not sustainable from an ecological or food production point of view. Yikes!

Maybe a Sharing land management approach is better? What is Sharing anyway? Well, as one might expect in great debates, it is the polar opposite of Sparing. Rather than segregating wildlife conservation areas from agricultural areas, they are blended into one. The two are literally intermingled. Shade coffee plantations are a classic example. The coffee crop is integrated into the ecological landscape, intercropped under the forest's natural tree cover. What's not to like, right?

I mean, look at this guy walking through the lush diverse forest harvesting his coffee along the way. Surely, this must be the win win situation. Hmmm... Unfortunately, this Sharing approach has major drawbacks too. 

If we think back to those Yellowstone species for a moment, there is no way farmers would, or should be expected to, tolerate grizzly bears roaming around eating their livestock and crops. Human-wildlife conflict is a glaringly obvious issue for Sharing.

Additionally, if this approach is practiced widely, it means nowhere acts as a safehaven for pristine habitat. Some species simply can't thrive in anything less because their habits, lifecycles, food requirements, etc are incompatible with human interference at even low levels. 

Everywhere is a compromise for both wildlife and farmers. Not only that, a Sharing style of farming is intrinsically less efficient and productive because space is left for nature. This means, larger tracts of land must be cultivated to produce the same outputs as smaller areas of intensively farmed land. Counter intuitively, this results in less space for wildlife and wilderness. What a shame!

So, if neither side of this Sparing verses Sharing makes sense, what do we do? We must find the happy medium of both. We can Spare areas of protected wilderness and then Share a blend of agricultural and managed natural landscape between. 

This ensures the protected islands are connected by a matrix of natural corridors. It also ensures the agricultural land can rotate through cultivation and regeneration in both time and space within the matrix to sustain healthy soils and ecosystem services for the long-term. This is the hallowed sweet-spot of true sustainability for ourselves and our World.