My move from the ecology focus to the policy focus on Forest and Nature Management feels right, but it also results in an increased confrontation with Society. There, nature experts are a small minority, I have noticed. Every day, millions of considerations are made in Society to advance the position of humanity at the expense of everything else. Interesting content, but so far, it yields more questions than a policy course can answer. What is nature? Why do we want to protect certain things and not others? Is anyone even right in this discussion?
Society and politics simplify questions such as these to the extent that everyone can provide a yes or no judgment without any actual knowledge or nuance. The discussion about the wolf, for example. Entire political campaigns are run based on anti-wolf sentiment (in my home province, Drenthe, mainly) because nature conservation is viewed by most as something fun and idyllic, as long as we don’t suffer any negative consequences. Humans are nowhere near ready to successfully protect nature because that requires sacrifice. The wolf is seen as the Big Bad Wolf, a fairytale figure that looms above humans in the food chain. And that is something we don’t tolerate because our landscape can only bear that which we have placed in it. But what gives humans the right to view nature as something subordinate to us? Are we ourselves not nature? Where does nature start and end?
What gives humans the right to view nature as something subordinate to us?
Still, every time I finally become convinced of my limited knowledge of social processes as a Forest and Nature Management student, I encounter people who are following the same programme and have even less knowledge. Sometimes, it is because they have only just started. I spoke with a man who decided to turn his life as a computer programmer around for this study trajectory. He had never before delved into the exhausting discussions about nature in the Netherlands and was full of innovative ideas. I told him about my concerns, about who gets to decide and whether such decisions are justified. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It would be a lot easier if the wolf could talk. Perhaps then they would make their own laws allowing them to kill as many sheep as they want like humans are doing now.’ Not to mention what kind of judicial system a society of sheep might develop if they could talk. I wonder which species would be more harshly persecuted in the sheep’s judicial system: wolves or humans.
Ilja Bouwknegt (24) is a master’s student in Forest and Nature Conservation. Ilja is an active member of the study association WSBV Sylvatica and sometimes does bat research at night.
