Profile of Stuart Pimm

by Andrew Pleasant* and the Pew Fellows Program
* From whom permission must be sought to reproduce what follows.

In a crowded room of opinions, Stuart Pimm has a distinct voice.

To the American ear, part of that distinction is the accent remaining from his roots in Derby, England, but that's simply superficial. The real power of his message resides in the content and direct delivery.

The messages Stuart sends are science-based. Spending time in the field counting the remaining Cape Sable sparrows in the Everglades or at a computer monitor editing a research article, Stuart is continually acquiring knowledge of the world and delivering that to the policy arena as fast as he can find people to listen. The 1993 Pew Fellow has no shortage of audiences. He has testified before numerous congressional, regulatory agency and research program committees, is a prolific writer of research papers, popular articles and three books including, "The Balance of Nature? Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities." That work calls for a factoring up of the scale of ecological studies from local to global levels. If those activities are not enough to fill an appointment calendar, Stuart also serves as a reviewing editor for Science.

Stuart, utilizing the resources of his Pew Fellowship, worked in four basic realms that are symbiotically intertwined around the central driving fact that human activity is killing species - plant and animal, marine and terrestrial alike - with which we share the Earth. The four main components of Stuart's Pew-funded activities were analyzing methods for ecological restoration, investigating the habitat destruction and actual number of surviving endangered species, scientific advocacy for a functioning renewal of the Endangered Species Act and discovering the true rate and number of species facing extinction on a global scale. While Stuart's Pew Fellowship has formally ended, these themes remain at the core of his work today.

"There is no surprise that I think the greatest challenge we face is the loss of species around the world," Stuart said. "All of the other problems - be it scarcity of fresh water or the consumption of arable land for example - ones that we can reverse, at least theoretically. The loss of a species is irreversible."

Stuart's research attempting to quantify the loss of species on a global scale has led to the conclusion that species are disappearing on a scale equivalent to the mass extinctions known in the geologic past. In fact, Stuart forecasts that unless preventive actions are taken, 50 percent of the species on the earth will be on a path to extinction by the middle of the 21st century. The fossil record of the planet's geologic history indicates that recovery from such a mass extinction requires millions of years. "What we are doing now will impoverish humanity for an inconceivable amount of time," Stuart said. "The good news is that we can stop extinctions. We really do have the ability. There are signs we have the will to grasp this problem and prevent it from happening. That is a choice we, as a society must make within the next few years."

Underlying Stuart's conclusions about the geologic scale of current extinctions are his investigations into the relationship between fragmentation of habitats and the loss of endemic, or native, species of plants and animals. He has led investigations on multiple continents looking at the relationship between human-caused, or anthropogenic, habitat destruction and the resulting rate of extinctions. Projections Stuart has made about the impact of deforestation and habitat loss are supported by direct evidence of the number of species extinct or on the brink of extinction in areas with a known loss of habitat. Those projections are based in no small part upon his work in relatively isolated island ecosystems and larger study areas in continental systems not limited by similar physical constraints. A part of Stuart's work in this area concentrated upon passerine birds (an order containing roughly half of all birds, passerines are the small to medium sized perching songbirds). That investigation revealed that while extinctions in island ecosystems have historically occurred at a greater rate, the bulk of future extinctions - without any changes in current practices - will result from our destruction of habitat areas on continents, especially in tropical forests.

One method to begin to slow the rate of extinctions is, quite obviously, to restore the ecological habitats damaged or destroyed by our activities. In a collaborative effort with 1990 Pew Fellow Wes Jackson at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Stuart has conducted research into methods of restoring biodiversity - the range of ecosystems, their components and the genetic diversity within species themselves - destroyed by our activities. Current agricultural and land use practices, particularly in drier regions, have resulted in eroded soils, lower crop yields and even crop failures. Their work through the Land Institute has been to explore routes toward creating a perennial, multi-species based agricultural industry versus the vast acreage of monoculture annuals (unlike perennials, these need to be sown each year) currently planted in patchwork patterns across the North American prairies. One of the greatest challenges in that effort is how to realign the agriculture industry away from current practices of large-scale single crop plantings. Their proposal does counter the perceived self-interests of many industries currently making up a bulk of the agricultural community and is not well received by many in that camp.

An area in which Stuart has opened himself up to the world in the most public fashion is his involvement in the battle over the renewal of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Throughout 1995 and '96, Stuart joined a number of Pew Fellows, their colleagues and many others in the successful battle against the potentially crippling rewrite of the ESA sponsored by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, and Rep. Richard W. Pombo, R-Calif., initially approved by the House Resources Committee in 1995. Winning that battle over the "dreadful" alternative to the ESA was not winning the war. "The policy objective that many of us share - an Endangered Species Act that actually protects endangered species - we have yet to achieve," Stuart said.

Stuart's work as a conservation biologist began in the 1970's, before there was a formal field of conservation biology. "I have had the awful experience of seeing an endemic species for the last time. That made me a conservation biologist," Stuart said. "I spend 100 percent of my time in conservation biology. That will be a lasting legacy of the Pew experience, I think it worked very well."

Quite recently, Stuart left his position as a professor of ecology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to join Columbia University. There he works at the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation helping to develop their program in conservation biology.

No matter where Stuart is based, his agenda will remain significant and relevant to the needs of the day. "There are simple ideas that resonate, among them ideas of heritage, stewardship and a sense of a responsibility for future generations." Stuart said. These are ideas that almost all Americans share. ""Nonetheless, I think it is extraordinarily hard to make sure science is relevant. I think it is important to demand policy-makers understand the very finite, very strict constraints that science imposes upon them. Consensus is a fine objective, but there is no point in policy-makers agreeing that the sun rises in the West when it simply does not."

For those beginning to weave a way through the complex web of interactions that in part obscure the true impact human activities and political policy have upon the natural world around us, listen and you'll hear the distinct voice of Stuart Pimm beckoning you onward. He will be spreading his science-based message whether he is wandering the field in a search for the last few members of an endangered species or working to protect them by testifying in front of a congressional committee.