Conservation in the Internet Age: Threats And Opportunities

By James N. Levitt and Tom Vilsack

Since the earliest days of our nation, new communications and transportation networks have enabled vast changes in how and where Americans live and work. Transcontinental railroads and telegraphs helped to open the West; mass media and interstate highways paved the way for suburban migration. In our own day, the internet and advanced logistics networks are enabling new changes on the landscape, with both positive and negative impacts on our efforts to conserve land and biodiversity. Emerging technologies have led to tremendous innovations in conservation science and resource management as well as education and advocacy efforts. At the same time, new networks have been powerful enablers of decentralization, facilitating sprawling development into previously undesirable or inaccessible areas.

Conservation in the Internet Age offers an innovative, cross-disciplinary perspective on critical changes on the land and in the field of conservation. The book:

• provides a general overview of the impact of new technologies and networks
• explores the potentially disruptive impacts of the new networks on open space and biodiversity
• presents case studies of innovative ways that conservation organizations are using the new networks to pursue their missions
• considers how rapid change in the Internet Age offers the potential for landmark conservation initiatives

Conservation in the Internet Age is the first book to examine the links among land use, technology, and conservation from multiple perspectives, and to suggest areas and initiatives that merit further investigation. It offers unique and valuable insight into the challenges facing the land and biodiversity conservation community in the early twenty-first century, and represents an important new work for policymakers, conservation professionals, and academics in planning, design, conservation and resource management, policy, and related fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597268516

Book preview

2002

CHAPTER I

Introduction

James N. Levitt

Since the founding of the Republic, generation after generation of Americans has fallen in love with magnificent and, in several instances, seemingly magical communications and transportation networks that have brought us closer together and helped to transform the way we live, work, trade, learn, and play. New networks have played critical roles in the vast, largely beneficial changes we have seen in North America since the late 1700s, when the words communication and transportation were virtually synonymous. If you wanted to get a complex message to your spouse or a head of state in 1776, it had to be physically carried, as fast as a horse or a courier on foot could travel. To expand our ability to travel and communicate—a capacity that did not substantially change from Julius Caesar’s day to George Washington’s—has been a central element of the American dream.¹

Our passion for new pathways was unambiguously expressed in the early 1800s as reports from the successful Lewis and Clark expedition filtered through the land—one Washington, D.C., resident reported, on Captain Lewis’s celebrated return to the capital city: Never did a similar event excite more joy.² Pre–and post–Civil War entrepreneurs who masterminded the construction of transcontinental railroad and telegraph lines understood the importance of their efforts to the nation. The oratorical expressions of gratitude made when the Pacific railroad was completed were nearly religious in fervor. John Taylor, speaking in Salt Lake City in 1869, characterized the achievement as so stupendous that we can scarcely find words to express our sentiments or give vent to our admiration.³ In the mid–twentieth century, Americans’ love affair with automobiles and the open road was widely acknowledged, as we were encouraged on nationally syndicated television to see the U-S-A in your Chev-ro-let. And, in our own era, we have witnessed irrational exuberance regarding the economic promise of the Internet—a network that promises us anywhere, anytime access to almost anything.⁴

But fervor subsides, and in the afterglow Americans have repeatedly come to understand that new networks not only expand economic and social frontiers, but also present the United States with new challenges, including the potential for dramatic environmental disruptions. Coming behind Lewis and Clark, with the enthusiastic approval of Thomas Jefferson, the American Fur Company scoured the West for beaver pelts until, within decades, the business became uneconomical, due to the overaggressive harvesting of beavers. The railroad and telegraph networks built after the Civil War similarly helped to accelerate the disruption of vast areas of prairie habitat; with the encouragement of the U.S. Army, buffalo hunters, many of whom literally shot their rifles out of the windows of moving trains, nearly wiped out seemingly limitless populations of bison on the Great Plains. And the automobile and petroleum industries, central to the post–World War II ascendancy of American industry, are now closely associated with myriad environmental challenges, including the widely recognized threat of global warming.

Yet, remarkably, even as they have enabled both economic growth and environmental disruption, new networks and the entrepreneurs who created them have also set the context for landmark conservation initiatives. These efforts to responsibly steward land and biodiversity have left permanent marks on our historical record, on the landscape, and on the national atlas. It was the American Fur Company’s steamboat Yellow Stone that carried George Catlin up the Missouri River to make his wonderful paintings of Native Americans and wildlife in 1832.⁵ Railroad entrepreneurs Jay Cooke and Frederick Billings were key players in the effort to create the world’s first national park at Yosemite in 1872.⁶ Laurance Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson and an accomplished venture capitalist and aviation investor in his own right, is a major figure in the history of the American conservation movement in the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rockefeller was essential to the conception of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that helps states and localities acquire conservation land, in part with revenues derived from the Highway Trust Fund and offshore oil leases.⁷

As we enter the twenty-first century, Americans are beginning to see, as earlier generations came to see, that the current crop of new networks exemplified by the Internet and FedEx-style express delivery networks, in addition to reducing the friction of distance and generally contributing to our economic well-being, may also be associated with disruptive environmental impacts. An emerging body of empirical research, as well as anecdotal reports, suggests that new communications and transportation networks may be significant enablers of what demographers call selective deconcentration—also known as sprawl—in rural, suburban, and urban communities across the nation. The same demographic shifts are associated with an accelerated loss of open space at local, state, and national levels, as well as with the degradation of wildlife habitat in regions ranging from Cape Cod to the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

As in earlier eras, however, there is also good news. Conservationists are finding new and powerful applications for the Internet and its relatives that have the potential to change the game in conservation science, education, advocacy, constituency and membership development, fund-raising, and administration, as well as the management of natural resources. Indeed, entrepreneurial individuals and organizations throughout the United States and in far-flung locations around the globe are undertaking on-the-ground conservation projects of unprecedented scale and scope with the assistance of new technologies and the active support of captains of the new economy.

The critical need for innovative, constructive conservation strategies continues to mount in the face of myriad conservation and environmental challenges, ranging from local loss of wildlife habitat to global climate change. This book examines, in a cross-disciplinary fashion, the emerging threats and opportunities to the conservation of land and biodiversity associated with pervasive new communications and transportation networks. It considers the potentially constructive and disruptive conservation impacts of the Internet in four parts.

Precedents and Prospects

The first part offers a broad view of the impacts of emerging communications and transportation networks on society and the natural landscape. In Chapter 2, James Levitt examines the historical precedents to the network-enabled land use and conservation challenges that we now face. In the fine chapter that follows, William Mitchell, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, shows how the fragmentation and recombination of the built environment spawned by technological change offer both exciting social opportunities and significant challenges.

The Potential Impact of New Networks on Land Use and Biodiversity

The second part examines emerging empirical and anecdotal evidence that the Internet age has sparked dramatic changes in demographics, land use patterns, and biological systems. In Chapter 4, Kenneth Johnson, professor of sociology and demography at Loyola University, analyzes the rural rebound of the 1990s, a decade that saw a net positive migration of Americans from metropolitan counties to nonmetropolitan areas rich in natural and recreational amenities. Ralph Grossi, president of the American Farmland Trust, shows in Chapter 5 that America consumed open space at an unprecedented rate during the 1990s in metropolitan, metropolitan-adjacent, and nonmetropolitan counties alike. In Chapter 6, John Pitkin, president of Analysis and Forecasting, Inc., and James Levitt examine the relatively high level of Internet penetration in households in two fast-growing nonmetropolitan counties in Central Oregon, with a particular focus on usage in households that came to the area at least in part to enjoy its natural and recreational amenities. The second part concludes with a chapter by Andrew Hansen and Jay Rotella, both associate professors of ecology at Montana State University. Hansen and Rotella show how an influx of affluent private landholders in the Greater Yellowstone region appears to be disturbing the habitat of many resident wildlife species.

Harnessing the Power of New Networks to Achieve Conservation Objectives

In the third part, leading conservationists show how they are, even in the context of network-related environmental disruption, using the Internet to dramatically improve their effectiveness. In Chapter 8, Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas, presents Species Analyst, a Web-based project that allows researchers from around the world to pool and analyze an unprecedented wealth of data on humanity’s biological heritage. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and Frank Gill, senior vice president for science at the National Audubon Society, in Chapter 9 look at the remarkable progress in citizen science and interactive education made possible by BirdSource, an imaginative Web-based venture. In Chapter 10, Jacob Scherr, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, tells the story of the successful campaign—fueled by the Internet and e-mail—to stop industrial development of Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California, Mexico, breeding grounds for the endangered gray whale. Finally, in Chapter 11, William Roper, executive director of the Orton Institute, and Brian Muller, assistant professor of planning and design at the University of Colorado, show how pioneering interactive computer simulation and visualization tools can enhance community planning.

The Internet Age as Context for Conservation Innovation

In the final part of the printed book, the authors look ahead to opportunities for landmark conservation initiatives in the Internet age. In Chapter 12, Bob Durand, Massachusetts secretary of environmental affairs, and Sharon McGregor, Massachusetts assistant secretary for environmental affairs, show how their state is using geographic information systems (GIS) tools fashioned for use by local towns and planning boards, coupled with an innovative Community Preservation Act, to protect and preserve the state’s landscape and natural resources. Joel Hirschhorn, director of natural resources policy studies for the National Governors Association, examines in Chapter 13 the growing interest of local, state, and national agencies in conserving land—not only to protect fragile natural resources but also to stimulate sustainable economic development. In Chapter 14, Peter Stein, general partner of Lyme Timber, which recently helped to forge the largest conservation land-easement deal in American history, and James Levitt consider the role of network entrepreneurs as key innovators in the history and future of the American conservation movement. Finally, Levitt concludes with an overview of opportunities for landmark conservation initiatives in coming decades, informed by the thinking of conservation leaders from the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors.

Web Site: A Sampler of Conservation in the Internet Age

Several of the essays in this volume focus on projects that were designed to capitalize on digital tools for conservation. To the extent that these projects have achieved their goals and are becoming models for other conservationists, they are effectively changing the game in a broad cross section of professional fields. Such projects include the Species Analyst, developed at the University of Kansas; the BirdSource project, jointly developed by the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology; the campaign to save Laguna San Ignacio spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council; and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s efforts to use Web-based tools to understand threats to biodiversity and promote community preservation. In other chapters, including those written by Kenneth Johnson, Ralph Grossi, Andrew Hansen, and Jay Rotella, the authors employ GIS technologies to contribute to our understanding of changing demographic and land use patterns in North America.

To give readers greater insight into the look and feel of these new information technology–based tools and projects, Island Press has created a Web site, available at www.islandpress.org/internetage, with links to the organizations and applications discussed in this volume as well as to other relevant conservation-related materials available on the World Wide Web. Many of these Web site addresses are also listed in the following chapters.⁸ Our hope as authors is that the essays and examples offered here may inspire others to advance the state of the art to levels that we are not yet able to imagine at this dawn of the new