international conservation about birds

Googling in images for "birds in cages" about a month ago, I hit upon a fascinating trail. From adverts for birdcages to blogs, including one from a former resident of Shanghai, who posted images of the significant things and places she had known just as she was leaving to take up a new job in the Middle East. Another site had images and articles about ornithologists in Hong Kong, where their collective interest in wild bird-life was the impetus behind a campaign for the conservation of habitat. Ornithology is so obviously a positive human activity, including a dimension of rare "dis-interest" in the taking care of shared planetary resources in the interests of another species. This disinterested activity feeds back into self-interest too, as who knows what the long term benefits of the conservation of natural habitat will be for humanity?

Taking care is what curating is all about, hence the referencing earlier (10th October 2008) in a previous post of the Barnett Newman quote "aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is for birds". So what is the "natural habitat" of artists?

The Wikipedia page on conservation biology, or conservation ecology, the science of analyzing and protecting Earth's biological diversity has a section on the history of the use of the term conservation:

• The term conservation came into use in the late 19th century and referred to the management, mainly for economic reasons, of such natural resources as timber, fish, game, topsoil, pastureland, and minerals, and also to the preservation of forests (see forestry), wildlife (see wildlife refuge), parkland, wilderness, and watersheds.
  
• Western Europe was the source of much 19th century progress for conservation biology, particularly the British Empire with the Sea Birds Preservation Act 1869; however, the United States began making sizable contributions to this field starting with thinking of Thoreau and taking form in the United States Congress passing the Forest Act of 1891, John Muir's work and the founding of the Sierra Club in 1895, founding of the New York Zoological Society in 1895 and establishment of a series of national forests and preserves by Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909.

Posted by Philip Courtenay