Today I start my blog on wildlife conservation, sustainable rural economies and life in and around the Delaware Bay. Over the last 10 years, I blogged during research trips to the Canadian Arctic, Tierra del Fuego, and Delaware Bay in my home state of New Jersey.
It was not easy using dial up and satellite connections in places like Coral Harbor, Nunavut, or Punta Arenas, Chile, but the work was new and naturally led to a blog. I hoped to provide people concerned about migratory shorebirds on Delaware Bay a glimpse of the birds’ far flung breeding and wintering areas and an intimate view of their lives. We had a conservation objective: we were trying to stop the hemorrhage of horseshoe crabs being commercially harvested from Delaware Bay because it was destroying one of the most important shorebird migration stopovers in the world. Our work invited controversy; the blog became a target and a distraction.
For that reason this blog will not be partisan and won’t point to problems without considering solutions. I hope for more. Although few would admit as much, conservation has become a small battlefield for liberal and conservative politics. Far to often we see the work of good wildlife biologists and conservationists become fodder in controversies like climate change, animal rights or land use that, in the end, become so political good solutions get washed away in over-heated rhetoric.
This blog will take on interesting questions of conservation and sustainability arising from my scientific and conservation pursuits. Can a scientist be objective and still be passionate for the land? I think yes. If I am clear about my position, one can judge my work to find if bias has distorted my reasoning.
Can a conservationist love New Jersey, the most populated and one of the most corrupt states in the country? Emphatically yes. I live near a river that feeds into the Delaware Bay. I can see the bay as I write this post, and I can think of no better place in the world. Can this rural landscape of Cumberland County, the poorest in the State of New Jersey with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, ever find economic security with its ecological integrity intact? This is truly uncertain. Many land planning and resource-use issues follow default political positions — a result of liberal or conservative bias. Most solutions are unsuccessful and problems persist. Lasting, effective innovation evades most of rural south Jersey.
This blog arises from a love of this rural landscape and respect for its beleaguered residents and stressed wildlife. I hope to explore what is possible in a time and place where prosperity and environmental integrity appear mutually exclusive. I live in what could be described as a devastated rural economy — most manufacturing has left, the great recession has decimated construction and housing prices, local agriculture drifts ever closer to industrial scales squeezing out small framers, and the local fishery is all but depleted of its most important species. Yet solutions really do exist, they are not intellectually complicated, mostly they are choices. As a scientist I can help clarify choices, as a conservationist I can make my own.
