The Collected Papers of Michael E. Soulé: Early Years in Modern Conservation Biology by Michael E. Soulé with Robert L. Peters (review)

As Half-elven Lord Elrond said of another time and place, “I was there.” In my case, it wasn’t “the day the strength of men failed,” but where men and women, but particularly one man, Michael Soulé, succeeded entirely brilliantly. They created the new, undeniably powerful discipline of conservation. It—well its supporting society—formed one May afternoon, in 1985, comfortably just after teatime, and in Michigan. In “Early Years in Modern Conservation Biology,” Soulé collects his early papers and writes an associated commentary about that meeting and of the subsequent decades.

One should not study any history—this one included—from a fear that ignorance of it will lead to its repetition. Nothing as complex and multifactorial as history could be that predictable. Rather, the origins and early development of any complex system can shape its subsequent paths, constraining the options explored and perhaps sending it in idiosyncratic directions. Soulé was uniquely qualified to avoid such restrictions. His great talent has been to shape the field as broad, inclusive, yet sharply focused on questions of undeniable immediacy.

“My name is Michael Soulé,” he explained to me over the phone. “You do not know who I am, I have had a chequered career, but I want to invite you to a meeting.” As one does when arm-twisting a colleague to attend a meeting, he quickly explained his credentials—he did his Ph.D. with Paul Ehrlich—and we had colleagues in common. Oh, yes, and there was that part about him dropping out of a full-time position at the University of California to enter a Buddhist monastery, before returning to academia in Michigan. “So what’s the meeting about?” I asked. “Conservation” he replied. “What’s that?” I asked. “Well, whatever it is, you are doing it!” And, from that May evening, that’s what I’ve always told people I do.

As these papers make clear, Ehrlich was a huge influence on Soulé, who is surely his most influential student. Ehrlich aggressively argued the need for environmental science to engage a wide public on issues of global importance. Soulé lays out such an agenda in Chapter 4.

Conservation is “a crisis discipline”, Soulé explains in chapter 2; it is “mission-driven”. Vitally, that should not disturb us—though it clearly did many. The parallels to medicine are self-evident. No one disputes the integrity of the medical profession because it seeks to improve and extend lives. Why should extending species’ lives and numbers be any different? Advocacy may be a dirty word to scientists, but activism should not be. You would not want to visit your physician if she did not care whether you lived or died. Why support a conservation organisation if it does not care if species live or died?

Next, the Buddhism thing. From the start, Soulé understands the ethical issues that underpin concerns for our planet. The first speaker at the Michigan conference was the philosopher Arne Naess—and he’s acknowledged on several of the early papers. The Pope’s powerful new encyclical has a powerful section on the loss of biodiversity, by any measure a demonstration of early conservation’s powerful legacy of global engagement.

Soulé returned to California, where on a short sabbatical, he, Michael Gilpin, David Western and I were all part of a conservation seminar class. Gilpin once remarked that the only theory underpinning conservation was from population genetics. Indeed, there was a healthy theory of genetic changes in small populations and Soulé was trained to understand them. The genetics of small population are prominent in chapters 2, 3, and 8. As a former “community ecologist,” I objected to a narrow focus. (Gilpin and I would write a paper together discussing a wider scope for theory as a consequence of those discussions.)

At weekends...