Conservation for a New Generation: Redefining Natural Resources Management

By Richard L. Knight and Courtney White

In hundreds of watersheds and communities across the United States, conservation is being reinvented and invigorated by collaborative efforts between federal, state, and local governments working with nongovernmental organizations and private landowners, and fueled by economic incentives, to promote both healthy natural communities and healthy human communities.
 
Conservation for a New Generation captures those efforts with chapters that explain the new landscape of conservation along with case studies that illustrate these new approaches. The book brings together leading voices in the field of environmental conservation—Lynne Sherrod, Curt Meine, Daniel Kemmis, Luther Propst, Jodi Hilty, Peter Forbes, and many others—to offer fourteen chapters and twelve case studies that
 
• demonstrate the benefits of government agencies partnering with diverse stakeholders;
• explore how natural resources management is evolving;
• discuss emerging practices for conservation, including conservation planning, ecological restoration, valuing ecosystem services, and using economic incentives;
• promote cooperation on natural resources issues that have in the past been divisive.
 
Throughout, contributors focus on the fundamental truth that unites human and land communities: as one prospers, so does the other; as one declines, so too will the other. The book illustrates how natural resources management that emphasizes building strong relationships results in outcomes that are beneficial to both people and land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597269216

Book preview

Barbara!

INTRODUCTION

Richard L. Knight

I vividly recall a comment, nearly two decades ago, by a graduate student during a seminar at Colorado State University. Faculty and students were listening to a distinguished speaker explain the concepts behind the new discipline of conservation biology. Understandably, some faculty from my College of Natural Resources were muttering under their breath while the speaker extolled the virtues of this new entry to the field of conservation. In effect, my colleagues were saying, Why do we need a new discipline when, after all, our own fields of wildlife, fishery, forestry, and range have been addressing similar issues for decades and are doing just fine, thank you. The student leaned over to me and whispered, These disagreements are a problem of your generation, not mine.

What the student meant, of course, is that his generation, the next cohort of natural resource practitioners, was excited and invigorated by the flood of ideas coming from new disciplines entering the well-entrenched fields of natural resources management. If we, the faculty, wanted to argue the virtues and ills of those new disciplines, so be it—but his generation was moving ahead and welcomed the changes. I got it!

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Two decades ago, the arena of natural resources management was confronted with a host of new disciplines (table I.1). Human dimensions, restoration ecology, landscape ecology, ecological economics, conservation biology, environmental ethics, geospatial sciences, and other new fields appeared, seemingly overnight, to expand the horizons of conservation practitioners and university programs.¹ What was different about those new disciplines was their metadisciplinary nature. They were more broadly based and more integrative than the traditional disciplines in natural resources. For example, wildlife biology had become focused on the population dynamics of single species—economically valuable species, endangered species, or species that threatened human economies. Conservation biology, on the other hand, took a more extensive view, from genes to organisms to biotic communities to ecosystems. Likewise, landscape ecology changed the way practitioners and academics viewed ecosystems, and conversations in natural resources management were now enriched by acknowledging the spatial and temporal dimensions of conservation work. Human dimensions balanced the one-sided emphasis on the scientific management of natural resources by admitting the importance of social capital and the multidimensional nature of our diverse publics. Ecological economics reminded us of the value of ecosystem services produced by healthy lands; by emphasizing the economic importance of restored landscapes, it provided conservationists with a powerful argument for conserving rather than developing land.

Natural resources management today is quite different from what it was decades earlier, and the changes have been remarkably well accepted. Students and faculty alike seem comfortable with the more integrative and crosscutting approaches. Practitioners also see the energy the new disciplines have brought to how we practice conservation. For example, fish and wildlife managers have benefited enormously from the ideas of conservation genetics, minimum viable populations, metapopulations, spatially explicit models, and new approaches in designing protected areas, all ideas that emanated from the field of conservation biology.

Table I.1

Traditional and Emerging Disciplines in Conservation

These new ideas have affected who is doing natural resources management, as well. Governmental organizations (GOs), from city open-space programs to state departments of natural resources to federal land-management services, now employ human dimension specialists and hire ecological economists. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have taken the ideas of landscape ecology and conservation biology to new heights, designing and implementing conservation strategies at landscape and regional levels. It is safe to say that the number of job descriptions, as well as the number of actual jobs, in the broad field of conservation and natural resources management has increased severalfold.

In the dynamic landscape of contemporary conservation, all of those emerging disciplines are now well established; they have professional organizations, journals, annual meetings, and memberships that are outpacing those of the traditional disciplines. In Colorado State’s Warner College of Natural Resources, the outdoor recreation department has changed its name to Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, while the fish and wildlife biology department is now known as the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology. Likewise, the forest, range, and watershed programs have merged into a Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Watershed Stewardship with a robust emphasis on restoring degraded watersheds and promoting healthy natural and human communities. That student who spoke to me two decades ago was right: Change empowered by the entry of new ideas was an issue of my generation, for what seemed like radical ideas then are today universally embraced.

As natural resources management was experiencing profound changes in its intellectual repertoire, our home planet and its inhabitants were likewise showing significant alterations, ranging from destabilization of the atmosphere to a global extinction spasm. And, because of our burgeoning human population, inappropriate technologies, and rising materialism, the earth is increasingly in a degraded state.² The changes in the health of the only planet we will ever know have hastened the acknowledgment that land uses that decrease land health are nonsustain-able, as are human communities dependent on those uses. Collectively, those changes reveal the obvious: that human communities cannot survive and prosper on degraded lands, that land health and human health are entwined, indivisible. Wendell Berry sank the stake when he wrote, You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. To save either, you must save both.³

What is needed now is not to revisit those new disciplines, for they have become fully integrated into the traditional fields of natural resources management. What is different from a decade or so ago is how the conservation of natural resources is being practiced.

Inspired by Aldo Leopold’s writings,⁴ this new way of managing natural resources is captured by the following comment: Conservation occurs at the nexus of land use and land health. Therefore, conservation that works is conservation that works well for both people and land. Actions that benefit one at the expense of the other are not conservation, they are something else. Healthy natural communities coincide with healthy human communities; the reverse seldom occurs.⁵ This new way of doing conservation is not opposed to human land uses, whether they be logging or outdoor recreation. It is opposed to land uses that degrade the health of the land (in the Leopoldian sense of land health⁶). In other words, natural resources management in the twenty-first century is all about land health and prosperous human communities.

Historically, natural resources conservation was the result of federal initiatives. Legislation was passed, appropriations provided, and new programs implemented with a top-down approach.⁷ Today conservation is often the result of bottom-up initiatives emanating from watersheds and supported by local governments, tax incentives, and financial support from private entities and NGOs (table I.2). In the face of rapid change, institutions, agencies, universities, and practitioners are experimenting with new approaches to natural resources management. On the ground, practitioners are reexamining the role of institutions and agencies and trying new forms of governance. In universities, teachers and students are placing emphasis on topics such as human dimensions and valuing ecosystem services. The private sector, whether NGOs or foundations with money to support conservation, is becoming increasingly important in shaping the landscape of conservation. The traditional focus on wilderness protection is being augmented with the emerging idea of working wildlands—that is, keeping lands productive while keeping human densities low, thereby maintaining the capacity of the land to support biodiversity.

Although there are many defining elements of this new strain of natural resources management, they all have in common the following elements that revolve around land, people, institutions and organizations, ecology, and economics:

They work across administrative boundaries rather than staying within them.

They integrate social capital with ecological and economic dimensions.

They encourage bottom-up participation rather than strictly top-down initiatives.

They acknowledge all biodiversity rather than only economically valuable species.

They emphasize economic incentives rather than federal appropriations and unfunded mandates.

Finally, they are not exclusionary; rather, they are inclusionary. All interests are welcome at the table, not just favorites at any particular time. Translated, this means that all appropriate land uses are encouraged but, importantly, only to the degree that the land can sustainably accommodate those uses.

Table I.2

Contrasting Approaches to Conservation

Empowered by these concepts, hundreds of attempts to reinvent natural resources management have been occurring at the watershed level nationwide.⁸ A defining component of most of those efforts is that they have been locally initiated and are more bottom up than top down. Another component they all share is that few of them were initiated by federal agencies. Indeed, most federal, top-down efforts are increasingly sharing their authority of the resource with more local agencies (state, county, city) and NGOs (and, interestingly, rediscovering the ideas of early progressive thinkers such as Lewis Mumford).⁹

Just as ecosystem management has never been codified by Congress, the attempts taking place across the United States to build healthy human and natural communities are, at best, only loosely structured by mandates from the Beltway. It is time to capture the entrepreneurial strain that is providing the momentum around natural resources management in today’s changing world. It is time to coalesce this vast amount of tinkering and experimentation into a coherent blueprint for conservation that works. In other words, now that conservation is being increasingly shaped by local initiatives, it is time to examine whether this new model of conservation, which is more regional and bottom up, is compatible with our equally fast-shifting society and changing environment.

Our goal in this multiauthored book is to capture the dynamic state of natural resources management in the years following the rise of ecosystem management in the early 1990s. Almost every component of land–land use–people relationships is in flux, and no one has yet attempted to capture the change. The contributors to this book are actively engaged in these new approaches. For every new approach to conservation described in the chapters of this book, there is a case study by a practitioner highlighting how the approach is working on the ground.

Our book consists of three parts bracketed by opening and closing chapters that explore the fundamental truth that unites human and land communities: As one prospers, so does the other; as one declines, so, too, will the other. In the opening chapter Curt Meine provides a narrative of human health and land health through the eyes of a Cree Indian tribe north of the Arctic Circle. Woven into his story is a capsule of conservation and the stages it encompasses, beginning with unregulated exploitation of natural resources and moving to the development of conservation and preservation, followed by environmentalism, and ending with the current paradigm of ecosystem management.

Part I of our book, Agencies and Institutions: The Need for Innovation, has three chapters and four case studies. The chapter authors critically examine the need for the government agencies that manage our public lands to partner with diverse stakeholders, NGOs, and other components of the private sector in finding ways to promote healthy landscapes along with prosperous human communities. Building on the need for agencies to take a fresh approach to natural resources management, Part II explores emerging tools in the new toolbox of conservation. Titled A Changing Toolbox for Conservation, it has four chapters and three case studies. Ranging from community planning to conservation planning, valuing ecosystem services, and the need to use economic incentives that promote conservation, the topics of these chapters, along with the case studies that illustrate the effectiveness of these new tools, demonstrate how natural resources management is changing. Part III, The Radical Center: Finding Common Ground, consists of three chapters and five case studies. The chapters demonstrate the need for cooperation on natural resources issues that have historically divided us. The case studies illustrate how the emphasis on the importance of building strong relationships in natural resources management usually results in desired outcomes for both people and the land. Following Part III, the book ends with a chapter by Bob Budd and a conclusion by Courtney White. Budd tells a story of people and place, the North Piney River in Wyoming, to illustrate the connections between people who come to know and understand a watershed and the resulting solicitude they show for the land’s health. Courtney White’s conclusion provides a synopsis of the book, as well as a peek into the future, acknowledging the uncertainty that awaits us all.

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What conservation is today is highly debatable. What is not debatable is that effective conservation—today and in the future—will be different from what it has been. To move successfully into our future, we need a vision that configures the changes into a comprehensible pattern. Such a blueprint not only will provide guidance to agencies and organizations, but also, and even more critically, will offer a conceptual and pragmatic road map for students, who are the future practitioners. Without such direction, it is certain that their education will prepare them for a time that has passed. The hope of this book is to provide that conceptual and pragmatic vision.

Notes

1

R. Knight and S. Bates, eds., A New Century for Natural Resources Management (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995).

2

United Nations, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (New York: United Nations, 2005).

3

W. Berry, Private Property and the Common Wealth, in Another Turn of the Crank (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995), p. 56.

4

C. Meine and R. Knight, eds., The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

5

R. Knight, Bridging the Great Divide: Reconnecting Rural and Urban Communities in the New West, in Home Land: Ranching and a West that Works, ed. L. Pritchett et al. (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 2007), pp. 13–25.

6

B. Callicott and E. Freyfogle, eds., Aldo Leopold: For the Health of the Land (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).

7

R. Nelson, The Federal Land Management Agencies, in A New Century for Natural Resources Management, ed. R. Knight and S. Bates (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), pp. 37–60.

8

S. Yaffee et al., Ecosystem Management in the United States: An Assessment of Current Experience (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996); G. Meffe et al., Ecosystem Management: Adaptive, Community-Based Conservation (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

9

B. Minteer, Regional Planning as Pragmatic Conservation, in Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground, ed. B. Minteer and R. Manning (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), pp. 93–113.

CHAPTER ONE

THIS PLACE IN TIME

Curt Meine

We head north at sunset through choppy waters along the east shore of James Bay. Fred guides our fleet of three fully loaded, twenty-foot freighter canoes though a labyrinth of islands, mainland points, and submerged granite ledges. Fred is the ouchimaw in this part of the Cree nation of Wemindji. Among the James Bay Cree, the ouchimawch serve (in the words of one student of their vital role) as senior grassroots managers of this vulnerable ecosystem.¹

We have spent several days at the community’s annual gathering on Old Factory Island, forty miles downshore as the canoe glides (figure 1.1). Now we are heading back to the village, where the Cree relocated two generations ago, in 1959. Bouncing over the waves in the pink subarctic twilight, we pass islands crowned in dark spires of white spruce and balsam fir. One small island catches my eye. Beneath a rise of barren granite, a series of terraces steps down toward the chilly waters of James Bay. The land around the bay in Quebec and Ontario is rebounding. At the time of the last glacial maximum, twenty thousand years ago, this place lay buried under five thousand meters of glacial ice at the heart of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The burden was so immense that it compressed the earth’s crust. Over the millennia, as the great ice sheet melted back, the depressed land has sprung back. It is still rising. The geologist’s term for the phenomenon is isostatic rebound.² The Cree speak of the growing land.

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Figure 1.1 Old Factory Island, James Bay, Canada.

The terraces on the small island are ancient beach ridges, each one marking a pause in time as the land has grown. The terrain at Wemindji has risen about seventy meters over the last six thousand years. It continues to rebound at the rate of about a meter per century—fast enough to outpace the rate of sea level rise that also came with the melting, fast enough even to be noted across a human lifetime. Wemindji’s elders can tell you of places that have emerged from the waters, of plants and animals living differently here than they once did, of the Cree responding and adjusting.

My opportunity to be here has come through colleagues from McGill University in Montreal who have joined the Cree in an innovative partnership. ³ The academics and the Wemindji Cree are collaborating on a proposal to establish a protected area that would embrace two entire watersheds feeding into James Bay. The proposed protected area would coincide closely with the hunting territory that Fred oversees in his capacity as ouchimaw. It is a creative proposal that defies traditional expectations—as well as recent criticisms—of protected areas as a conservation strategy.⁴

The twelve hundred Cree of Wemindji represent the latest generation to live upon, and with, the growing land. By almost any conservation standard they have lived well here and have done so for some five thousand years. Cree traditions and practices have served to reinforce a tight network of reciprocal relationships connecting the land, the water, the plants and animals, the people, and the spirit.

In the four centuries since the arrival of the Shaped-Wood People from Europe, the resilience of those relationships has been constantly tested.⁵ Yet, even against the backdrop of those last four centuries, the rate of change in the last two generations stands out as remarkable. Transformation has come to the culture, economy, and landscape of the James Bay Cree in a series of cascades, one consequence after another: the forced relocation of Cree children to government-supported residential schools;⁶ the movement toward permanent settlement in Wemindji; the loss of the age-old pattern of families living a subsistence life in the bush for half the year; the announcement in 1971 of the Quebec provincial government’s vast plan for hydropower development in the Cree lands east of James Bay; construction of the paved Route de la Baie James to facilitate the hydropower plan. Now the pressure to open gold and diamond mines in Wemindji country is growing. And in this subarctic land, the impacts of global warming on the ice and wind, the plants and animals are noticed even by the younger Cree. The Wemindji Cree wonder, along with communities around the world, how changes in their land will result in changes in their identity—and vice versa—and how they ought to respond.

My academic colleagues and my new friends from Wemindji are gathered to review the progress of their partnership. My appointed task, the reason for my even being here, is to offer a few relevant—I hope—words about Aldo Leopold and the land ethic in the land of the Cree. I am not at all convinced that this is possible.

The sun sets by the time Fred maneuvers our big canoe around the last spruce-studded point, into calmer waters, toward the lights of Wemindji.

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As we may learn from the growing land, the terra is only relatively firma. Our science and our stories tell us that land changes and that human communities change. They change in different ways, at different rates. They change in response to each other. They change due to forces large and small, long-term and immediate, far away and close at hand. Amid such change, conservation aims to encourage ways of living by which we can meet our material needs, allow ourselves and our communities to flourish, express our human hopes, honor the beauty and mystery of the world, sustain its biological diversity, and promote its ecological