Sorty Guido but I disagree with you and with many and all who have gone
before you, all esteemed and learned, but in my opinion, wrong.
I too am a qualified scientist so I relate easily to the main theme our
scientist colleagues espouse:
>...it is the duty of science to give all available information. A
>botanist is there to give information about plants, their ecology,
>their habitats. There is, scientifically, no sense in describing a
>population, if colleagues (and thus the public) are not informed where
>that population is. It is not the publication of a location that is
>responsible for the desctruction of habitats or steeling of plants,
>but the misuse of the information.
These are Guido's words but each other person supporting mapping states a
similar point.
In theory this is fine. But the key to my views lies in the:
>if colleagues (and thus the public) are not informed.
Yes, colleagues have to be informed, I see no alternative if the science
is to be valid. But we have to assume that imparting knowledge to a
scientist will result in the knowledge being used appropriately. To
ensure this happens, most scientists are employed within organisations
that can be embarassed if they do not conform to accepted standards of
behavious. Therefore, there is an enormous potential weight of peer
pressure, if not professional codes of practice, to prevent plant
location information from being abused.
However, non-scientists, and by that I mean those who are not
professional scientists, have no such pressure acting on them as they
are not overseen in their work by an employer who has standards or who
can be embarassed into co-operating. So a member of the public will
find it much easier to take public information and abuse it.
Clearly, even "professional scientists" can abuse in a similar manner
but then they are either acting as ordinary members of the public or
their employers are failing in the professional role as they must police
the standards their employees conform to.
To announce precise locations of plants to the world is an invitation to
have those plant populations ravaged to destruction. I can not support
this and can not see why others do not see and accept the transparently
obvious risk. If I take the Dominican Republic as an example, using two
plant groups to demonstrate the point.
First, D.R. is home to one endemic Pinguicula species. This species is
at very highh risk as it's distribution is very limited, requiring very
high altitude, cloud forest but a minimum temperature above about 5C.
The known locations for this plant are for small populations in very
localised areas that are in any case very few in number (Jan recently
published 4 or 5 such locations, I believe all that Jan knows of. There
are perhaps one or two more I know of but that is it.) I visited one of
the sites for this plant. It has been entirely destroyed. Every single
Pinguicula has been physically removed (i.e. the site didn't die a
natural death). And incidentally, every signle bromeliad and orchid in
the site has also been removed. Not a single epiphytic plant remains in
what was an epiphytic eden months ago. Why? Well two events occured.
First, a single person went there. He used a local Dominican man to act
as guide. This man tells me how the visitor systematically crammed as
many plants as he could into sacks. Not bags. Sacks! The gentleman
then came back down the mountain and, if we are to believe his passport,
returned to Germany, with the sacks. A few (3-4) months later, a groupo
of germans arrived in the same town. They found a different guide but
talked by name of the prvious german visitor and his Dominican guide.
They asked to be taken to the same location. Once at the location, the
already damaged site was systematically looted of all the remaining
epiphytes. Nothing was left. Not a single plant. Pings, broms,
orchids, Rhypsalis, Pteridophytes, the lot, all gone forever. They told
the guide which site to visit, they knew exactly where to go. And they
too used sacks, not just small bags, to remove everything.
The second example refers to a single species of Tillandsia. It was
thought to be an endemic but is now reclassified and occurs in 3 or 4
other countries. In Dominica, the distribution is known to be localised
to a single site where approximately 25000 plants were known to exist as
far back as 10 to 15 years ago. This location has systematically been
raped by americans, collecting just this one species. I visited the
site and it is now down to approximately 20 plants. Sacloads
disapperaed in each visit the americans made. There is even one
american, who claims to represent a botanic garden in the US, who
returns to DR each year to collect Bromeliads "for study". The island
has a limited flora and it unlikely there are new Broms to discover,
certainly not where the american keeps returning to. So all we have
here is an attempt at jutifying systematic and repeated destruction.
Now in both these cases, the root of the problem was that a specific site had
been identified containing "rare" plants. This opened the genie's bottle
letting all the evil out. We must not be guilty of doing this.
By not publishing sites, we can not stop the public from looking for
sites and then destroying those sites. But we can make it harder for
them to find the sites instead of offering the information on the WEB,
as is proposed. As to scientists who abuse the information. Well, we
do have to make the sites known, or at least able to be known, to
scientists. But where they are found to be abusing the system we should
be reporting the scirntist and the employer to the authorities and
forcing the authorities to take action. (This we fail to do. I see no
serious effort by the ICPS membership or the other CP groups' members to
police CP sites and report possible or known site damage and the
perpetartors. We should have a policy on this but I don't know of one.)
To swith to a totally different type of example. In the UK, we have
just and finally banned the public ownership of hand guns, even under
special licence. At last we have realised that while this will not stop
a criminal from obtaining a gun, the number of guns in public
circulation will drop so reducing the potential for them to be stolen
and abused by criminals or just abused by members of the public.
Similarly, in the UK we ban the publication of a limited number of books
(like the "Anarchist's Cookbook") that publish details such as how to
build your own bomb. It doesn't stop anyone building a bomb but
restricting access to the information does stop a lot of idiots from
finding out how!!! I can not see what harm the general public suffer
from the implementation of such controls. Yet the lack of such items in
the poublic domain does not in any way prevent scientists from doing
their work either with guns or bombs!!!
Publishing the sites of rare plants is purported to be in the public
interest. Rubbish. No one, none of my esteemed colleagues (all of whom
arte better scientists than I), has ever published a single line of
evidence to support any claim for a benefit to the public. More than
99% of the world's population (i.e. the public) will never visit such
sites yet every single extinction aided by such publication hurts 100%
of the world population often in ways we have yet to fully comprehend
(e.g. medicines we have yet to discover in plants which become
extinct). Of the minute number of people who want to visit the sites,
the majority (many hundreds of my CP colleagues fo example) will never
do so. But they will be satisfied by photos and videos of the sites, as
long as plant species become available. The few that do visit the sites
will consist of people who are either scientists (therefore able to get
location details) or amateurs close enough to the scientists to also be
given location details on a trust basis, or they will care enough to
search. This will not stop the thieves, but it means they will have to
ask for information (and maybe expose themselves in doing so) or search,
which takes significant time and money.
We should not, we must not, publish exact sites for anyone to read. We
should have policies and codes of practce ratified by ICPS and any CP
society that wants to be recognised by ICPS. The membership of ICPS and
all other CP Societies should agree to and actually police such
policies. After all, if a "friend" comes back from a lant hunting foray
with wild collected plants, then if you don't expose the "friend" you
too are part of the crime. We should encourage programmes of plant
propogation that cause mass distribution of new or rare species, so that
collecting them becomes unprofitable. (By all means use this to fund
compensation for the collector's costs, but not as a profit making
exercise.)
I see that ICPS is electing it's officers again and I see that again, as
always we have very worthy candidates. They all espouse conservation,
so I would like to see some real moves instigated by them toward ICPS
becoming focussed on conservation in pragmatic ways that make a
difference. Talk is not enough. We all can and do say how much we
care. Our society (our societies) are big enough to actually make a
difference in practical ways. I believe this is important enough that a
sub-group representing all the societies and geographies should be
formed to come up with pragmatic proposals. And hopefully one such
proposal will be to ban the public availability of plant mapping!
In the near future I will publish any other thoughts on what we can
actually do, via another route already being worked.
And by the way, I have my own views on when plants should or should not
be removed from the wild and in what numbers. A rare plant must be
brought into cultivation to help protect it, so small numbers removed
from reasonable sized colonies is, in my opinion, a benefit to
conservation. Exactly how many plants counts as "reasonable" depends on
many factors (which is why a sub-group should create such criteria).
But if anyone takes more than is obviously reasonable, say hundreds of
plants all of one type, then irrespective of what I thought before, they
are not and could not be my friend. And I wouldn't hesitate in letting
CITES know of individuals who rape and destroy endangered sites. I wish
I felt we all thought alike on this.
I hope those who have supported Plant Mapping do not take this as a
personal attack. It is not intended as one. But I radically oppose
such a move and have argued why. Let those who support it give actual
benefits the Public would gain and let those same supporters demonstrate
that extinction would not be accelerated, as I have demonstrated is
already happening whenever and wherever precise location details become
known.
Speech ends!!!
Sincerely
Paul