PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #3: Conservation Ecology: Threatened and Endangered Species.
Presiding: J. Lawler
Monday, August 5. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Graham Meeting Room, TCC.
Barriers to cooperation among ecologists: Lessons from crises within two habitat conservation plans.
Goldstein, Bruce*,1, 1 Natural Heritage Institute, and, Berkeley, CA
ABSTRACT- Reaching technical consensus in collaborative negotiations is challenging when ecologists from different backgrounds are assigned a common task, but approach the task from fundamentally different perspectives. My paper examines two cases where efforts to reach technical consensus collapsed, ending their efforts to identify a species preserve for two regional habitat conservation plans (HCPs). I focus on the moment when the crisis erupted, ending the civility and sense of common purpose among members of both technical committees. I trace the differences among members of the two technical teams to fundamental technical issues, including data standards, validation techniques, whom one can trust to conduct the validation, and appropriate temporal and spatial scales of analysis. I then explore what lay behind these differences. While members of the committees prefer explanations of incompetence and negotiation in bad faith (by the other side, not themselves!), I suggest that their differences vary by organizational affiliation, which include regulatory science, university research, private consulting firms, and environmental organizations. These different work experiences provided each committee member with different conceptions of how the plan should proceed, and what kind of science was required. I trace the collapse of each technical committee to each side's inability to look beyond their individual ideas and perspectives, a condition that anthropologist Helen Verran has called 'epistemological arteriosclerosis', or 'hardening of the categories'.
KEY WORDS: Endangered Species, Landscape Planning, Habitat Conservation Planning, Peer Review