Environmental Policy and Biodiversity

By R. Edward Grumbine

Scientists and policymakers must work together if solutions to the biodiversity crisis are to be found. Yet all too often, scientific data are unknown or incomprehensible to policymakers, and political realities are not fully appreciated by scientists.

Environmental Policy and Biodiversity addresses that problem by presenting both an overview of important concepts in the field of conservation biology and an examination of the strengths and limitations of the policymaking process. Topics covered include:

• the ethical and scientific bases of conservation biology
• the effectiveness of existing environmental policy in protecting biodiversity
• case studies from California, the Great Lakes region, southern Appalachia, and the Florida panhandle
• an examination of overall environmental policy goals and processes

Featuring provocative and clearly argued essays from a range of disciplines, Environmental Policy and Biodiversity provides resource professionals with valuable insight into conservation issues, and can serve as a useful tool in both graduate and undergraduate courses in conservation biology and environmental policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610912679

Book preview

Directors

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Environmental Policy and Biodiversity explores the developing influence of conservation science on U.S. environmental law, policy, and management. The spirit of the anthology derives from a statement policy analyst Lynton Caldwell made several years ago: Politically relevant evidence is often beyond the reach of science and scientifically relevant data may be unknown to or uncomprehended by political decision-makers. My aim here is to present for policymakers the latest findings of conservation biology in an effort to render Caldwell’s unknown comprehensible. In addition, it is my hope that this volume may bring policymaking processes and paradoxes within the reach of the scientific community.

This anthology provides an interdisciplinary approach to the many problems that issue from the science/policy/management interface. Some of these problems may have their genesis in biology and ecology. What, for example, do we know today about designing a system of nature reserves that will protect species, ecosystems, and landscapes into the future? But scientific information soon begets a myriad of policymaking problems. How might Congress revise current U.S. environmental laws to accommodate new scientific learning? Are federal agencies structured to successfully implement new laws? Which of several definitions of ecosystem-based management should be adopted? What is the proper role of private property ownership in biodiversity protection? Must citizens play a greater role in public lands decisionmaking? If so, how?

In a world where specific scientific knowledge provokes broad policy problems, solutions may be discovered through contextual questioning and wide-ranging analysis. Take the term biodiversity. Where has it come from? Why is this term being used so frequently? The answer is that biodiversity has ‘appeared’ today precisely because it is disappearing rapidly. The science of conservation biology has grown in direct proportion to the increasing rate and scale of extinction and habitat destruction. It is my thesis that the biodiversity crisis is forcing Americans and others to reevaluate not only their policy commitments but also the core cultural assumptions upon which environmental policies and practices are based.

I have combed the literature across several disciplines and selected the most provocative, clearly-argued essays that speak to this general theme. Several of the selections first appeared in somewhat obscure academic journals. Others, while generally accessible, represent the best thinking within a particular discipline that may not have been encountered by scholars and managers outside of that field. The text should provide fertile cross pollination between several disciplines including environmental science, law, management, policy, and politics. Resource professionals may gain theoretical and practical insight into the conservation issues they must deal with every day. The text should also serve as a useful tool in upper division undergraduate and graduate-level classes and seminars.

There are certain limits to the text. First, both biological theory and policymaking are evolving rapidly. What is current today may become obsolete tomorrow. This book represents a status report, not a seminal text. Second, during periods of rapid change, successful prediction is difficult at best. The balance between looking backward at the lessons of history and peering forward into the future is not easy to achieve. Third, it is too early in the biodiversity revolution to understand how general conservation biology principles and more equitable policymaking processes can best provide practical remedies in specific places. I firmly believe that no new universal management principles will supercede the status quo. There will exist instead a plethora of regional and local solutions. Fourth, during any period of profound change, uncertainty increases. When cultural assumptions shift, the world appears topsy-turvy and there exists a period when questions outnumber answers. I believe, nevertheless, that the contents of this book may guide the reader toward a deeper appreciation of what sustainable environmental policymaking is predicated upon—a more profound relationship with all the diversity of life.

The book is structured into several sections. A general introduction frames conservation biology and public lands policy within the context of the biodiversity crisis, evolving world views of ecology and policy analysis, alternative definitions of environmental management goals, and unresolved problems in American environmental politics. Section I presents the major conservation biology concepts that are the driving wheels of change in policy today. Section II examines the strengths and shortcomings of U.S. laws from the standpoint of science. Section III offers case studies from Florida to California that highlight initial attempts to apply conservation biology principles and ecosystem management on U.S. public lands. Section IV explores theoretical and practical problems that constrain both scientists and decisionmakers as they search for a sustainable fit between environmental policy and ecological integrity.

A unique feature of the text is the interviews that conclude most sections of the book. These conversations with experts in various fields are meant to develop and extend the themes that arise from the essays. The book concludes with a brief summary essay.

In interdisciplinary work, one’s intellectual debts increase as academic boundaries fade away. The people whose ideas have been most influential to me are too numerous to mention here; however, their identities can be surmised from the literature cited sections of the general introduction and conclusion.

I wish to extend special thanks to those who contributed new material to this book: Jeff Hardesty, Deborah Jensen, Walter Kuhlmann, Lynn Maguire, John McCaull, Bonnie Phillips-Howard, Michael Soulé, David Wilcove, and Buzz Williams.

Several people were instrumental in improving the overall quality of the anthology. Barbara Dean and Barbara Youngblood at Island Press provided wonderful editorial support. Jeff Hardesty and Marcy Reynolds read parts of the manuscript and provided timely critical feedback. Colleen O’Driscoll word processed the entire manuscript; without her professional competence the book would not exist.

R. Edward Grumbine

Rattlesnake Gulch

Bonny Doon, California

INTRODUCTION

The reality that the biosphere is driven by . . . interdependence . . . challenges both small minds and big governments.

—Judy Meyer and Gene Helfman

In late 1987, I had a brief encounter with a national forest supervisor that shook me out of a complacency born of years of identifying myself as a biologist. The meeting took place in a glass-and-chrome skyscraper high above the streets of downtown Seattle. Riding up in the elevator, I could not escape the irony that decisions affecting millions of acres of public lands were made in an urban office building miles away from any native forest. Our discussion focused on a single subject—logging levels in the forest and their impacts on the greater ecosystem’s grizzly bears.

It didn’t take long for sparks to fly. The supervisor was adamant that the cut was sustainable. He also pointed out that there was no proof whatsoever that grizzlies inhabited his forest. I countered with a conservation biologist’s critique of the forest plan—it contained no credible discussion of habitat fragmentation, wildlife corridors, or the effects of roads on endangered species. I suggested that the uncertainty surrounding the grizzly was due to feeble attempts at data collection by the Forest Service. I stated that for these reasons it appeared that the agency was not using current scientific information or exhibiting good faith in managing the forest as part of the larger regional. . . .

The supervisor rose out of his chair and slammed his fist down on the desk: The Park Service stole the North Cascades from us in 1968 and I’m never going to let them forget it!

This outburst effectively ended our meeting.

Two short years later, this same supervisor decreed that no more old growth would be logged on the forest pending further ecological research. He made this decision without the (immediate) threat of litigation and despite considerable pressure to maintain the status quo from Forest Service leadership in Washington, D.C.

This story offers a small yet symbolic example of the changes that are sweeping across the landscape of public policy and environmental management in the United States at the close of the twentieth century. Ongoing environmental degradation, new ideas in science, and evolving environmental values are contributing to complex societal transformations. Environmental Policy and Biodiversity examines the developing influence of conservation biology on American environmental policy in the broad context of these events. The book’s contributors offer a variety of perspectives on two interrelated questions: (1) What does conservation biology have to offer managers and policymakers? and (2) Can the policymaking process in the United States protect biodiversity over the long term, and if not, what changes are needed so that it does?

An answer to the first question is relatively straightforward. Like any applied science, conservation biology may help decisionmakers and citizens understand better the consequences of alternative environmental actions. The second question is more provocative. The short answer is It had better. A longer answer is Possibly, but not without major changes in how scientists, policymakers, managers, and the general public conceive of and conduct their behavior.

Revolution is a rate- and scale-dependent term. To some students of U.S. environmental affairs, only Euro-American contact, the rise of industrial capitalism, the late nineteenth century divergence between resource management and wilderness preservation values, and the era of 1960s-1970s environmental lawmaking qualify as truly significant. Others point out that since dominant social values remain anthropocentric, any policy changes have only been mild efforts at mitigating the worst of environmental damage. Regardless of one’s view of these issues, there are strong links between how people perceive, value, and use nature and the ecological conditions of life (Ornstein and Ehrlich 1989, Evernden 1992, Kellert and Wilson 1993). And there are limits to how much people may physically transform nature to meet human needs. My thesis is that the body of theory and data growing out of conservation biology is combining with broad reevaluations of how science and policy analysis should be conducted—thus stimulating profound changes in environmental values and management goals. Within a decade, what may now appear as normal incremental reform to some will likely be labeled the great American environmental revolution by the majority.

The Biodiversity Crisis

Rapid changes are being driven by the accelerating of loss of biodiversity worldwide (Grumbine 1992). Human understanding of scarcity and diversity has grown as species and ecosystems have deteriorated. Extinction has become a compelling object of scientific study as it has become commonplace.

Though some still deny that a biodiversity crisis exists, empirical data suggest otherwise. At the biosphere level of diversity, scientists are concerned that species and ecosystems will be seriously impacted by global warming (Peters and Lovejoy 1992). Entire taxa are in decline across the planet. Three-fourths of the world’s bird species are in decline or threatened with extinction (Noon and Young 1991). Amphibians are disappearing mysteriously (Wake 1991). Groups of organisms are also in trouble at the regional level of biodiversity. More than 30 percent of North American freshwater fishes are rare, threatened, or endangered (Williams et al. 1989). Twenty-five percent of West Germany’s invertebrates are threatened (Wilson 1992). Since 1910, 80 percent of the Columbia River’s’ salmon population has been lost in the Pacific Northwest (Williams et al. 1992).

Ecosystem-level destruction is also widespread. While problems in Florida’s Everglades and the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests make the headlines, Noss et al. (1994) have documented that of all the ecosystem types in the United States, 19 percent have been reduced to critical levels. With habitat destruction so ubiquitous, it is not surprising that species and populations are faring poorly. Even if environmental deterioration ceased today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would still need twenty to twenty-five years to list all the candidate species that deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act (Luoma 1993).

Human activity accounts for the biodiversity crisis; both the rate and scale of loss are accelerating. Compared to background rates of extinction over geologic time, current rates are 100 to 1000 times greater (Raup and Stanley 1978, Primack 1993). Estimates of loss over the next ten years range from 2.5 percent to 15 percent of all species on Earth (Primack 1993). Put in terms of energy consumption, one species among five million vertebrates is capturing 40 percent of the net annual primary productivity that is generated when solar energy bathes the planet and is captured by living systems (Vitousek et al. 1986).

As human development continues to transform nature, nature exposes gaps in our understanding of biodiversity and pressure increases on policymakers to respond ecologically. Unfortunately, the present system of nature reserves (parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, etc.) worldwide was not created with ecology in mind. As of 1992, less than 5 percent of Earth’s land surface was under protected status (World Resources Institute 1992). But because neither parks and reserves nor species and ecosystems are distributed homogeneously across Earth, this data reveals little about the effectiveness of these lands for protecting biodiversity. In the United States, for example, the National Wilderness Preservation System does not include 49 percent of U.S. ecosystem types (Noss 1991). In California, 95 percent of alpine habitat is found in reserves while less than 1 percent of riparian ecosystems is protected (Scott et al. 1987). Beyond representation and amount of land, nature reserve design criteria are complex and just beginning to be understood well (see chapters 3 and 11).

Reframing Science and Policy Analysis

As the biodiversity crisis has accelerated, debates over fundamental approaches to science and policy analysis have intensified. Calls for new environmental management goals have increased in conjunction with the loss of biodiversity and new knowledge from conservation biology. But no policy initiatives appear to be effective at slowing down the rate of loss (Soulé 1991). The safety net of U.S. environmental laws is being stretched thin as society reaches and exceeds environmental limits through industrial expansion, population growth, and resource consumption (Doremus 1991). Yet public land managers, as exemplified by the U.S. Forest Service, often continue to defend the status quo (Brown and Harris 1992). This hesitation to change on the part of the public land management agencies is reflected in the success of administrative appeals and lawsuits brought by activists, which, in turn, slows down policy implementation (Grumbine 1992). Finally, societal views of appropriate relationships between people and nature are in a state of flux (Dunlap 1991, Steger et al. 1989). It appears that many citizens are asking for less development of nature and more protection and restoration. The above influences are interacting and evolving at different rates and scales.

Emerging out of and contributing to these events is a new ecological model that recognizes flux over balance in nature. Whereas in the past ecologists characterized natural systems as orderly, steady state, and in equilibrium, the new model considers nature to be dynamic, full of uncertainty, and episodic at different spatiotemporal scales. Ecologist Stewart Pickett and his coauthors suggest that scientists must pay greater attention to ecosystem processes, the context within which specific research problems are embedded, and the range of fluctuations of natural systems (Pickett et al. 1992).

Developments in environmental policy analysis show intriguing similarities to the emerging ecological model. Since the 1940s, policymaking has been built upon analytical methods in which technical rationality focused analysts narrowly on solutions to problems (Fischer 1990). This view legitimates several key assumptions about the role of science in policy: the precise prediction of outcomes is possible and leads to success; rational analysis is sufficient; and technical input is objective and value-free (Brunner and Ascher 1992; for historical overviews see Merchant 1990 and Toulmin 1990).

Under the influence of Harold Lasswell’s work (1971) a more comprehensive approach to policy analysis has gained ground. Policy science, as Lasswell terms it, emphasizes the policy process and the broad context of environmental decisionmaking (Brewer and deLeon 1983 and chapter 19). This policy framework does not view policymaking as a linear process leading to a correct solution. The process instead is ongoing as problems are redefined and beget new responses. Knowledge of organization structure and behavior and the policy process framework are as important as scientific knowledge. For example, scientific information cannot help policymakers deal with funding constraints, bureaucratic behavior, agency ideology, the role of the media, or issues of social equity. Political economist Aaron Wildavsky (1979) portrays policy analysis as science, craft, and art. He characterizes good analysis as comparative, tentative, open to new learning, self-reflective, and contextual.

Note that the new ecological model and the policy sciences share key descriptive terms—context, process, inclusivity, and adaptation. These similarities exist for two major reasons. First, both ecology and policy analysis are in the process of reframing their positivist scientific roots. Up to the present, modern science has conceived of reality as relatively fixed, all problems as soluble, and rational methodology as the (only) true source of knowledge about the world; viewed individuals as independent of their context; and considered human behavior as ultimately rational and predictable. In public lands management this perspective has resulted in managers favoring universal over contextual solutions, rigid command-and-control management over adaptive approaches, technical language over the local vernacular, and the state over the individual.

In contrast, Tim Clark (1992) describes policy analysis as postpositivist. This alternative conception of policy challenges policymakers to consider multiple problem definitions, explore context-dependent meanings and relationships, and make explicit the analyst’s viewpoint throughout the process. Human behavior is recognized as subjective, selective, variable, and adaptive.

Ecology and policy science also share common ground because both are actively reframing cognitive maps of how nature works and humans behave to better fit recent learning. If ecological studies of natural disturbances support a flux of nature map of the world, then the old steady-state framework must be adjusted. If experience shows that scientific analysis bears relatively little impact on policy implementation, then policy analysis must be reframed so that the nonscientific aspects of policy are taken into account.

Conservation Biology Leads to Ecosystem Management

The tension between transformation and maintaining the status quo in environmental policy is producing calls for new goals for public policy and land management. Traditional resource management is changing into ecosystem management.

Though different agencies operate under a variety of federal and state mandates, resource management in the United States from the beginning has depended upon maximizing production of goods and services for humans, whether these involve board feet (commodities) or wilderness recreational visitor days (amenities). The assumption that the world gains value only as people transform sources (water, trees, rocks) into resources (reservoirs, lumber, ore) underlies both conservation and preservation in U.S. policymaking. Managers and lawmakers have been careful to speak of balance and sustained yield, but these concepts have never been defined in any United States law.

Ecosystem management may change all this. A general goal of ecosystem management would be protecting native ecological integrity over the long term. Yet the concept means different things to different people; its definition is still in flux. A recent review of the academic literature and several federal and state policy documents relating to ecosystem management found general agreement on ten key themes (Grumbine 1994):

Ecological integrity. Norton (1992) defined managing for ecological integrity as protecting total native diversity (species, populations, ecosystems) and the ecological patterns and processes that maintain that diversity. Consensus is developing to uphold ecological integrity over sustained yield as a new management goal.

Hierarchical context. When working on any specific problem, managers must bear in mind connections among all levels of biodiversity.

Ecological boundaries. Management requires working across administrative/political boundaries.

Interagency cooperation. Using ecological boundaries necessitates cooperation among all agencies and stakeholders.

Data collection. New research and data collection are needed as well as better use of existing data.

Monitoring. Managers must track quantitatively the results of their actions so that success or failure may be evaluated.

Adaptive management. This management framework assumes that scientific knowledge is provisional and part of an ongoing learning process.

Organizational change. Changes are required in the structure of public lands agencies. These may be simple (forming an interagency committee) or complex (altering bureaucratic power relationships).

Humans embedded in nature. Humans are part of nature and act as fundamental influences on ecosystems.

Values. Though science plays an important role, human values determine management goals.

It is not yet clear how ecosystem managment will be defined and applied in environmental policy. In addition to papers from the academic literature, several professional societies have issued statements on the subject (Wildlife Society 1992, Society of American Foresters 1993, Ecological Society of America, in press). Though overlap exists, there are, in effect, two policy definition streams running side by side. Authors advocating for an inclusive vision of protecting ecological integrity (Grumbine 1992, Goldstein 1992, Karr et al. 1993, Clark and Minta 1994, Noss and Cooperrider 1994) are more often employed independently or with academia. All of the various government documents reviewed, however, attempt to graft the new ecosystem view of nature onto the old resourcism standard of for humans only (California Resources Agency 1991, Robertson 1992, Overbay 1992, USDA et al. 1993, Bormann et al. 1993, Comanor 1993). Much of the fuzziness or lack of precision surrounding ecosystem management derives from these conflicting perspectives.

If ecosystem management is to take hold and flourish, the relationship between the new goal of protecting ecological integrity and the old standard of providing goods and services for humans must be reconciled. This will not be easy—managers and policymakers have come to expect human needs to be fulfilled without undue amounts of ecological damage. But new scientific information from conservation biology and the biodiversity crisis appear to provide evidence against maximizing resource extraction. The goal of ecological integrity places the protection of ecosystem patterns and processes before the satisfaction of human needs. Goods and services may flow from ecosystems but not without having basic safeguards against environmental deterioration in place before resources are extracted. Others would argue that since people are part of ecosystems, human needs for resources are just as important as protecting biodiversity, and that policymakers should therefore plan for resource extraction before ecosystem patterns and processes are fully protected.

Uncertainty and American Politics

As the debate over ecosystem management illustrates, the interplay of science and policy is complex. Constructing new goals for environmental policy touches upon fundamental issues relating to scientific uncertainty and the American democratic process.

Accepting uncertainty is a daunting challenge as contemporary science and politics evolve to deal with new management goals. Even as we gain insights from conservation science, many new data gaps are exposed, and the role of risk analysis in decisionmaking increases in importance. Yet neither of these developments inspire confidence in politicians. Experience has shown that in the political arena scientific uncertainty often creates conflicts concerning appropriate research design, proper presentation of data, protocol errors, and data interpretation (Ozawa and Susskind 1985, Murphy and Noon 1991). But without concomitant understanding of the limits of science by everyone involved in the policy process, policymaking will remain gridlocked while expert witnesses are pitted one against another.

Different professional standards and expectations between scientists and politicians exacerbate conflict. Whereas scientists are committed to skeptical inquiry and the quest for accuracy, politicians depend upon feasibility and popular acceptance. The formal education of scientists is generally bereft of politics and policy analysis, whereas most politicians have never had any scientific training. Walter Rosenbaum (1990, p. 83) captures this well: In environmental affairs, Congress is an assemblage of scientific amateurs enacting proposals of great technical complexity to ameliorate . . . complicated environmental ills that most . . . but dimly understand. The upshot is that many politicians and citizens look upon science as a tool for providing incontrovertible answers—the truth—whereas science more often provides insight into the potential consequences of a range of policy choices.

Even when scientific data provides clarity on policy issues and uncertainty is reduced, certain features of American politics hinder acceptance and implementation of new information.

In the United States, business and development interests are often privileged due to the general policy goal of maximizing production of resources from ecosystems. Most American environmental laws place the burden of proof on those who advocate for less development rather than those who desire more. Southern California activist Dan Silver notes, for example, that protecting the California gnatcatcher and its coastal sage scrub habitat is difficult because the California Environmental Quality Act and local land use regulations are implemented primarily through local governments that are often influenced by powerful business interests (Silver 1993; see also Jensen et al. 1993).

Public funding of scientific research also poses political difficulties. Ongoing monitoring of management experiments is essential to ecosystem management, but long-term projects have not usually attracted funding from decisionmakers with short-term political goals. Unfortunately, because of conflicting legal mandates and bureaucratic competition, there is little coordination among or within public land management agencies over establishing or prioritizing research agendas. Links between basic and applied research and scientific and social science methods are spotty, inadequate, and . . . almost entirely lacking (Stern 1992, p. 1899; see also Stern et al. 1992, and U.S. Congress OTA 1992).

Finally, a critical feedback loop in the science/policy process is missing. Though many research efforts exist, governments, from the local to the federal level, have not established institutions with the mission of bringing the actual social consequences of science to the attention of scientists and the public (Brunner and Ascher 1992, p. 297).

With few effective ways to translate science into policy and data into information accessible to laypeople, it is not surprising that there are increasing conflicts over the proper role of citizens in the policy process. Numerous studies have detailed how the rational analytical planning model adopted by all public lands agencies has failed to integrate public input into the planning process (Blahna and Yonts-Shepard 1989, Mohai 1987, Wondolleck 1988). Many citizens feel alienated from the public participation process. Most observers agree that including all relevant stakeholders, increasing participants’ knowledge of policy problems, emphasizing relationships between healthy economies and healthy ecosystems, and scaling decision timelines to match the difficulties of specific problems will empower citizens and result in better decisions (for one list of reforms, see Landre and Knuth 1993).

U.S. environmental policy decisions cannot be divorced from American beliefs about private property rights. With but 20 percent of the United States in public ownership, biodiversity cannot be protected by focusing only on public lands. This presents daunting challenges to citizens who believe that people should be free to do whatever they wish on lands they own. To ease the transition away from a sole focus on property rights toward the goal of protecting ecological integrity, some policy analysts are emphasizing packages of economic incentives to nudge society toward a sustainable future. These include conservation easements, various tax exemptions, land exchanges, and the development of market-based mitigation banks modeled after the Clean Air Act’s experimental provisions (Shaffer 1993). Other commentators support systems of community-controlled common property resources that include limits on an individual user’s rights to develop resources, community-based rules for maintaining healthy ecosystems and social equity, information sharing among stakeholders prior to decisionmaking, clear communication, and sovereignty of local interests over central authority (Bromley 1992, McKean 1992, Ostrom 1990).

Theoretical frameworks for fitting science into policy and citizens into the policy process abound. But if the most high-profile attempt in the early 1990s by the federal government to put theory into practice on the public lands is any indication, policy dilemmas will not be resolved overnight. Option Nine, the Clinton administration’s preferred solution to the biodiversity crisis in the Pacific Northwest, does not appear to follow the advice offered by its own social assessment team to understand . . . the shortcoming of previous approaches, . . . before adopting new solutions (USDA et al. 1993, p. XII–110). Option Nine’s major experimental theatre for ecosystem management is the creation of almost two million acres of Adaptive Management Areas (AMA), "landscape units designed to encourage the development and testing of technical and social approaches" (emphasis added) to ecosystem management (USDA et al. 1993, p. III–24). But policy documents suggest that logging levels in the AMAs will be similar to previous unsustainable levels (USDA et al. 1993). Cutting may also proceed before planning is completed (USDA and USDI 1993). In addition, the documents provide no specific standards and guidelines for how decisionmaking will be shared between federal managers and local interest groups. And, surprisingly, there is no means for communicating between the federal interagency teams assigned to flesh out policy specifics for AMAs and the public comments received through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process (Phillips-Howard 1993). The key question remains: Is it possible to apply and monitor the results of new information (scientific experimentation) while opening up decision processes to all stakeholders (social experimentation) in the service of protecting ecological integrity?

At the heart of these barriers to incorporating science into policy lies the pluralistic nature of political negotiations in the United States. How can conservation biology concepts survive the inevitable checks and balances of American politics? More specifically, how much room do we have to negotiate what constitutes a viable population, a healthy, functioning ecosystem, or a habitable Earth? Put simply, Americans are discovering that there is a relationship between economic possibility and ecological necessity. It remains to be seen if a political system rooted in human-centered values and the private property rights of individuals can be transformed to foster sustainability in less than a human generation.

The Biodiversity Revolution

Will current efforts to institutionalize new learning succeed? It is too soon to tell. Philosopher J. Baird Callicott (in press) notes that a reigning, normal paradigm is given up very reluctantly and only for the most compelling of reasons. It appears, nevertheless, that conservation biology and its policy offspring, ecosystem management, are providing powerful evidence that human projects cannot expand indefinitely at the expense of ecosystem integrity.

There is a tradition in U.S. policy analysis of viewing natural resources as fundamentally shaping political institutions. Links exist between environmental policy and political stability because (1) resource development is judged by the state as critical to security; (2) natural resource allocation decisions (e.g., grazing shall predominate on public rangelands) give rise to certain bureaucratic structures (e.g., rancher-dominated grazing advisory boards) that maintain a stable political environment; and (3) the state must preserve some healthy environments (e.g., national parks) as a source of American values (Francis 1990). If this is true, any efforts to transform the status quo present a challenge to the state’s stability, institutions, and values.

Does ecosystem management constitute such a challenge? Asking a series of corollary questions based on the ten dominant ecosystem management themes provides perspective: Why is it so difficult to acknowledge ecological boundaries over political borders? If management is scientifically based, why is there such a lack of data collection and monitoring on public lands? If interagency cooperation is mainly absent, what is the basis for agency relationships? If adaptive management portrays resource work as a continuous learning experiment, how have managers been using new information gained through research on the public lands? If people have been perceived by policymakers and managers as apart from nature, where have citizens been sequestered?

The above questions should make plain that the biodiversity crisis is contributing to profound societal transformations that reach well beyond environmental policy. The opportunities for those involved in policy are great—and full of uncertainty. Scientists may restrict themselves to a narrow data collection-and-advisory role, or they may begin to test the uncharted waters of science-based advocacy. Government representatives might question whether the biodiversity crisis exists and continue to support policies that extract resources from already degraded landscapes, or they may exercise leadership in negotiating difficult issues of distributive and social equity among diverse constituencies. Agency bureaucrats may support decisionmaking processes that are based on expert advice and the maintenance of managerial discretion, or the agencies may seek advice from citizens and act as facilitators through open forms of leadership. Citizens may retain the adversarial roles of developer and preservationist, or they may learn about the flux of nature and the new ecological world view and speak for the interests of not only humans, but all the diversity of life. The contributors to this volume share a penchant for exploring the policy implications of the second set of these pairs of statements.

When Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot teamed up in 1905 to bring wise use conservation to American environmental policy, they proclaimed a new era in the relationship between people and nature. Science would replace expediency. The economics of superabundance would be supplanted by the efficient use of natural resources. Wise use conservation was not challenged as a management framework for the balance of the twentieth century because there was an abundance of resources to extract from North American ecosystems. The majority of Americans were united behind Pinchot’s vision of the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest period.

Environmental affairs are different today. Conservation may have been an improvement over the cut-and-run tactics of the nineteenth century, but old-growth forests, prairies, and roadless lands have nevertheless all but disappeared. The loss of diversity in North America during the reign of wise use has been great. And Americans today no longer share a common vision of how environmental policy should be framed. The tree of life is being shaken to its roots, leaving the relationship between people and nature open to question.

Whether they focus on conservation science or new models for policymaking, the contributors to this book explore how we might learn from the biodiversity crisis and create a more inclusive partnership with nature. The choice is ours—a world where the gap between ecological integrity and environmental policy continues to grow wider, or a world of damaged but recoverable diversity where the operative word is hope.

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