At this point, I think it's safe to say that biosphere stewardship is an existential problem for humankind. There's enough research (and frankly first person experience) to support this that I'm not going to try and make an argument for that here. Suffice it to say that if we don't take this problem seriously we will be inviting a maelstrom.
A seemingly obvious conclusion of this, held by many environmentalists, is that the general public should be rising up right now and working to solve this grave problem. Indeed not doing so feels like a moral wrong. While I do not disagree that something needs to be done, I wonder if the placement of responsibility is misguided.
Consider for a moment the fact that there are a whole slew of existential problems facing us today. World peace, hunger, poverty, education, human rights - just to name a few - are all equally large, equally intense problems facing our species today. Not only is there more existential breadth beyond just biosphere stewardship, but the depth of each of these problems is mind boggling as well. Biosphere stewardship itself is composed of climate change, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, pollution, deforestation, and so on. Furthermore, each of these problems exist on a wide variety of scales, from your neighborhood river to entire reefs, continents, and the whole atmosphere. How then, I ask, is any individual supposed to cover all of these things? How can we place responsibility for all of these on everyone? As I think is clear today, doing so is entirely non constructive and can only lead to anxiety and dismissal from the public as it's simply too much for anyone to actually fit in their brain.
Placing responsibility for all the world's problems on the masses - and by extension the individuals composing those masses - is misguided and not constructive.
Okay, but these problems still need to be solved. So who should the responsibility go to? For me the answer is simple, the responsibility should be given to the vast segment of our population who already cares. In the past couple of years I've worked with tons of people who are volunteering their time and money to try and be a part of the solution. And what an array of people they have been - from all walks of life, ages, demographics, and skill sets. In sum, there is a ready population ready and eager to solve these kinds of problems.
What's the issue then? If there's this workforce already engaged in the problem why aren't we seeing the kind of movement we want? In my mind there's a simple answer to this as well - the efforts being contributed are sorely uncoordinated and unoptimized.
If you read any meta studies on the conservation of species you'll quickly learn that the vast majority of our resources have been dedicated to birds and mammals with insects, crustaceans, and reptiles being all but ignored. If you go and look at your state government's organizations on ecological issues I'm sure you'll find (like I did in Massachusetts) a wide array of conflicting roles and responsibilities with lots of gaps in between. Many events (like cleanups) held by volunteer organizations work on relieving symptoms rather than solving the underlying problems. Scientific research often falls on unhearing or missing ears within governments. And mind you, there is no one actually working to coordinate the activity that is happening. In sum, lots of effort being expended with no guarantees of coordination or completeness.
There already exists a vast group of people who want to be a part of the solution, but there's no coordinated structure of responsibility for them to be a part of that guarantees completeness, a lack of redundancy, and that their work will indeed be part of a bigger picture.
Now obviously creating this vast organizational structure for the whole problem is a behemoth of a problem. But perhaps we could start with a subproblem - like herpetology stewardship in the greater Boston area - and learn how to create such a structure within that subproblem. From there we could begin to expand and subsume other taxa and larger areas as we grow our way to create the full organizational picture.
In summary, in order for us to tackle biosphere stewardship we must stop looking to "society" to rise up and take responsibility and instead create a clear and complete structure of responsibility for those already invested in the problem. By creating this "empire" of biosphere steward we'll be able to help ensure that the multitude of efforts and resources already being contributed to the problem are used in an effective, coordinated, and complete way. Through this we'll be able to ensure that biosphere stewardship is something that we can depend on happening, rather than leaving it up to fate as seems to be the case today.
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