Strip malls aren’t the only unfortunate characteristic of suburban sprawl. Research associate professor of biological sciences Gretchen Daily, ’86, MS ’87, PhD ’92, and her colleagues recently reported in Nature that household size is shrinking worldwide, resulting in more housing construction per capita—and a concomitant increase in the use of land and materials, as well as consumption of water, fuel and other resources. All of which, the researchers conclude, threatens life-supporting biodiversity and habitat.
Daily’s broader passions are investigating the nitty-gritty science of ecosystems and winning advocates across disciplines for conservation. For 10 years, one of Discover magazine’s “50 most important women in science” has been tromping across the Central American countryside, trying to figure out what its flora and fauna tell us about the future of life on the planet.
Stanford: What have you learned in Costa Rica?
There is a tremendous opportunity to harmonize our primary activity—growing food and timber—with conservation. What we are finding in Costa Rica is that many interesting birds, beetles, bugs, bees and amphibians can be sustained in human-dominated countryside. A lot lives there that people thought would be restricted to forest. We are finding that maybe 50 percent of tropical biodiversity seems able to persist in open countryside. One note of caution, though: that means at least 50 percent of animals and plants there can’t make it in the open countryside. That loss might be catastrophic.
You have brought people together across many disciplines to work on conservation issues. Why?
Everyone realizes we need the scientists there. We also need the economists to help you weigh choices, the lawyers to help design legal frameworks for making these decisions, and people in the business and policy communities to show how we might put theory into practice.
What has grown out of those efforts?
One new area is conservation finance. This has been something I’ve been getting into a lot. I wrote a recent book on it [The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable, with Katherine Ellison, Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2002]. Historically, we have seen conservation broadly defined as something we should take on as a charitable project or that there should be laws about. And overall, most things are headed in the wrong direction at an accelerating rate. The way some of us are trying to reframe this is to align with economic conservation. We are focusing on incentive-based strategies.
Is that sort of thing going to be effective everywhere?
I run a group at Stanford called the “Chocolate Group,” which includes people in all sorts of disciplines. The historical perspective is key, as is the perspective of diverse cultures. There isn’t going to be one blanket answer for the world.
