Is Intervention the New Conservation?

Yesterday the Guardian reported that the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding 14 projects intended to help wild species adapt to climate change faster than they otherwise would. The £54 million programme includes gene-edited butterflies, vaccines for ash trees, and resilience work on amphibians, mosses, and pollinators. ARIA describes its aim carefully: to explore whether adaptation in wild populations can be »measurably and responsibly accelerated«. Dominic Cummings, the programme’s mastermind and former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, showed less restraint, saying ARIA would fund »crazy« ideas that could »restore Britain’s place as a scientific superpower«.¹

»This is a strange kind of conservation – altering the conditions of nature, intervening to stop it from being destroyed by those altered conditions, then intervening again in nature’s own capacity to respond«

But hang on. Isn’t evolution supposed to be the long game, generations of small variation accumulating with no project manager in sight? As it turns out: not really. Evolution isn’t inherently slow; what’s slow is the turnover of generations. Selection itself can move quickly – after a single drought wiped out most of a Galápagos finch population in 1977, survivors’ average beak depth had shifted within that one generation, because only birds with deeper beaks could crack the tough seeds left behind.² Humans have already been steering selection for millennia through breeding.³ Wanting evolution to go faster wouldn’t put ARIA in the news. Wanting adaptation itself to become an object of deliberate intervention in wild (not domesticated) populations does.

We can’t specify some general fitness goal such as »resilience« and expect a population to discover it – we can’t optimise straight toward such a broad target. But a narrower property is a different matter. Making a butterfly survive at a given temperature, or an ash tree resistant to a named pathogen, is measurable and selectable. Perhaps that’s the actual distinction ARIA is testing: not so much planning what a species becomes as improving its odds against a future we’ve already chosen for it.

Which is where the programme starts to become strange.

The easy case is the tree vaccine – protecting an organism from a disease is barely different from any other medical intervention, and humans have shaped biological processes for as long as we’ve been farmers. Conservation itself is already intervention: protected areas, culled invasives, captive breeding, relocated populations, suppressed predators. Even »leaving nature alone« requires that we decide what counts as nature in the first place.

Chernobyl offers an uncanny counterexample. After the disaster in 1986, people vanished from the exclusion zone. Then wildlife returned and increased across much of it despite the radiation – what ecologists call passive rewilding, a system handed the chance to continue without us.⁴ ARIA proposes almost the opposite experiment: rather than removing ourselves from the system, we intervene inside it in a more precise way than ever.

What it doesn’t propose is a species deadline. Extinction risk is framed as a matter of decades to a century, with impacts projected out as far as 2100. The one hard date in ARIA’s own paperwork is a different kind of number: UK GDP, it notes, is »already expected to shrink by up to 3% by 2030« because of chronic nature degradation.⁵ That seems to be the real deadline. No ash tree or butterfly population needs to survive by 2030 – evolution, left alone, was never assigned a due date. But a GDP forecast has one. Once we intervene to make adaptation happen on a schedule like that, we give evolution something it never had on its own: a deadline, and an external definition of success.

This is a strange kind of conservation – altering the conditions of nature, intervening to stop it from being destroyed by those altered conditions, then intervening again in nature’s own capacity to respond. Preserving a process by modifying the process as it runs.

It would be easy to make that sound either heroic or horrifying, but neither is necessarily the case. At least not yet. A tree vaccine may be an entirely sensible response to a pathogen. A gene-edited wild population may turn out much harder to justify. The more interesting question to ask is probably what we think we’re actually conserving: the organism as it is, the ecosystem as it was, the evolutionary process itself, or maybe just the possibility that some recognisable version of nature still exists later?

Evolution has always produced adaptation without asking where it was going. It seems we’re now beginning to ask where it should go, how fast it should get there, and what we’re willing to do to help it along. Time will tell whether that’s a betrayal of conservation or its logical, uncomfortable next step.

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