In a provocative new essay in the New Yorker magazine, Jonathan Franzen asks some tough questions about the state of climate policy and its relationship to biodiversity conservation. In particular, he describes the difficulty of balancing priorities to reduce carbon emissions over the long run (and the consequences of landscapes dominated by biofuels and wind turbines) against the immediacy of habitat loss and species extinctions today. He singles out two places, ACG in Costa Rica and Manu National Park in Peru as strong examples of the kinds of projects needed in the future where, as he puts it, “In an era of globalism of every sort, a good conservation project has to meet new criteria” — namely, being ecologically big enough to tolerate and adapt to climate change, supported by local communities who benefit from biodiversity protection, and financially stable if not self-sustaining.
