The wilderness is in quotations because DJ does not believe true wilderness exists, at least not in North America since the megafauna was eated some 9000 years ago...
Daniel Janzen speaking at the Long Now foundation, about his role and vision in/for the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in Costa Rica. This is a small patch of land which contains as many species as all of North America, and then some, and which covers a number of habitat zones.
His model for conservation is farming. The wild area should be treated and managed as a farm. He starts with the obvious crop: ecotourists, who pay big bucks to visit, and whose dollars represent a larger part of Costa Rica's income than do all of its other agricultural products combined (and the residents are acutely aware of this). Next, waste management-- he had an orange juice company dump their rinds on old clearcut land, in a layer about a meter deep. The mulch killed all the invasive grasses which had corrupted the land, and soon was full of larvea from a local fly species which eats rotting fruit. The birds were also happy, with so many flies to eat. After one year it was a horrid black ooze. After two, it was a rainforest with a rich loamy soil.
His next big idea-- biological literacy. By this, he means
1) indexing all life by a fixed michocondrial gene (this is being done, worldwide)
2) Cheap, portable sequencing machines so that you, a tourist in the field, can "drop a leg of the bug" into your box and get the species as well as the encyclopedia/field guide/etc knowledge on this bug. My analagy is it would be like a digital camera.
My final thought on biological literacy links it to Jeremy Rifkin's Third Industrial revolution. If the first was based on print, and the second on telephone, and the third on peer-to-peer, then would the fourth be biological literacy?
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