In one of several essays lamenting the decline of his home countryside and farm communities like it, Kentucky writer-farmer Wendell Berry comments pointedly on what he perceives as the fading away of old political distinctions. Longstanding political dichotomies, Berry tells us, have become confusingly meaningless. Communists and capitalists, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives: all have bowed down to supranational corporations and to the juggernaut of the global economy. None takes interest in food quality, land health, or the plight of struggling communities, urban and rural. All show contempt for country life and country places. For a person concerned about land and land-based cultures, old political camps are hard to tell apart.1
Although he is hardly a man filled with hope, Berry sees signs that a more honest political order is emerging. On one side is a political party that views local communities as valueless and hence dispensable: the party of the global economy, as Berry terms it, the party now plainly in charge. Opposing this party is one that seeks to preserve land and culture, viewing neighborhoods and local communities as “the proper place and frame of reference for responsible work.”2 This is the party of the local community, and it is only now becoming aware of itself, Berry argues. Though it remains weak and widely scattered, its resources are real and its potential is vast.
Berry’s observations are good ones for conservationists to weigh as they take stock of where they are and what lies ahead. The world is indeed a place of conflict, one where powerful resistance awaits those who endeavor to save, restore, connect, and heal. What Berry describes as clashing parties others might characterize in less institutional terms: as opposing ideologies, perhaps, or as alternative value schemes. But the conflict, however phrased, is as real as it is grave: those who would stoke the market inferno with anything that burns stand face-to-face with those who are alarmed by the mounting costs of doing so.
Useful as Berry’s dichotomy is, however, one wonders whether it cuts to the true root of current conflicts over lands and communities. People may willingly serve the global economy, but how many of them really applaud it as an intrinsic good? How many campaigns are openly fought under its transnational banner? If the global economy were the only foe, conservationists ought to have more to show for their work. Without powerful allies, that is, Berry’s party of the global economy should not be enjoying anything like its current success.
If the conservation movement is going to chart a successful path in coming decades, it needs to know clearly what it is up against. Berry is right, no doubt, in putting the community and its fate at the center of things. But the force pressing against communities is not the global economy so much as it is the ideology that undergirds it—the ideology of ardent individualism, the constellation of values that exalts people as individuals and seeks to liberate them from restraint. Sound communities can exist at all levels, from local to global. Indeed, communities need to exist at levels well above the local to confront problems that require action on a larger scale. What corrodes such communities is not global thought per se but rather the ethos of the self-centered individual, the person who insists on the right to grab and consume with little regard for neighbors, future generations, and other forms of life.
A sound conservation ethic is, fundamentally, an ethic of community, based on interconnection and interdependence. What pushes against such an ethic is not a single opponent but rather a suite of cultural opponents. And they are all the more influential because of the friendly faces they commonly present. Each of them has a good side, for each has helped the American nation to flourish. Yet, like all good things, these cultural elements are good only in moderation; they are good when kept in their proper places.
Environmental degradation is a symptom of a flawed culture, as historians such as Donald Worster have told us in some detail.3 To halt that degradation, conservationists need to confront these underlying cultural flaws. In the case of the United States, ironically, they largely take the form of excesses of virtue. They take the form, that is, of cultural beliefs and practices that honor the individual human and individual rights but do so in ways that threaten the well-being of the collective whole.
In recent decades, the conservation movement seems to have lost sight of its necessary role as cultural critic. Too often it forgets that it is, at root, a champion of the community as such, a defender of nature’s interconnected entirety. For the movement to make further progress, it needs to regain its communitarian grounding.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate where conservation now stands is to back up and reconsider the mature thought of the leading conservationist of the past century, Aldo Leopold. Leopold has hardly been conservation’s only major intellect, but he remains the dominant one, long after his death in 1948. To identify the main elements of his thought, especially the messages he thought the public most needed to hear, is to gain a useful vantage point for assessing the current situation.
As a lover of the entire land community, Leopold belonged to a minority strand of American culture. As he so famously put it in his Sand County Almanac, he was one of those who preferred to live with and among things “natural, wild, and free,” one who viewed “the chance to find a pasque-flower” as inalienable a right as free speech.4
Leopold is remembered chiefly for his land ethic, summed up in his essay of that name: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”5 So familiar are these sentences that it is easy to overlook the complexity of them and to forget that the land ethic was merely one part, albeit a central one, of Leopold’s finely argued, wide-ranging critique of the modern age.6
From the ample written legacy Leopold left behind, it is possible to tease out four elements of his thought that are especially useful for conservationists charting the path ahead. As the four elements make clear, conservation for Leopold focused on the totality of nature as an interconnected whole and on the need to counteract the chief forces—market economics and private property above all—that fueled harmful land-use choices.
The land community. Early in his professional career as a forester and wildlife manager, Leopold gained a strong sense of the interconnection of all life. His experiences in the Southwest, where overgrazing caused harms that rippled throughout the landscape, led him to see how managers needed to address land as an integrated system, not as a collection of discrete resources.7 Reading in philosophy led him down a similar path, toward a sense of the organismic characteristics of natural systems. Soon Leopold’s expanding ecological wisdom provided an empirical and theoretical base for this intuitive sentiment.8 The land was a community, he sensed. Its parts were interrelated in ways that reminded him of complex machines. They were interrelated, too, in ways similar to the organs of a body and the cells within an organ. These analogies were not exact, Leopold knew, just as it was not precisely right to equate the biota and a human community. But metaphors were useful tools in bringing home the basic truths of interconnection and interdependence.
During the final decade of his life this land-as-community idea stood at the center of Leopold’s thought. He routinely began with it when he spoke about conservation to general audiences. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Leopold asserted in his Almanac. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”9 An ecological understanding of land was essential if conservation was to succeed. Rural landowners especially needed to embrace this perspective. Only with it could they act with the sensitivity required to use land well.
Land health. One of Leopold’s chief complaints was the fragmentation that characterized the conservation movement of his day. The conservation workers were many, but they often pushed in different directions. Conservation was a “house divided,” Leopold protested; it lacked a philosophy and would not get far without one.10 The result, too often, was that conservationists worked at cross-purposes—some promoting productive forests, others soil conservation, others the efficient use of waterways, still others the protection of wildlife habitat—in the process employing tools that could and did clash. Leopold illustrated the danger: “I cite in evidence the C.C.C. [Civilian Conservation Corps] crew which chopped down one of the few remaining eagle’s nests in northern Wisconsin, in the name of ‘timber stand improvement.’ To be sure, the tree was dead, and according to the rules, constituted a fire risk.”11 Conflict in the field had secondary effects as well, for so long as conservationists promoted competing agendas, public action could stall.12
Leopold’s worries about conflicts within conservation soon merged with his ideas about land as community. To coordinate efforts, conservation needed an overall goal, a common target at which all conservationists could aim. Given that land worked as an integrated system, the logical aim was one linked to the ability of the system as such to function over time. For Leopold, there was “only one soil, one flora, one fauna, and one people,” which was to say “only one conservation problem.”13 A single problem called for a single resolution, however diverse the means to achieve it.
In an important essay in 1935 Leopold explored the principal signs of a land community beset with disease.14 Soon he would assemble those signs into affirmative if vague statements about what it meant for land to possess health. The land was a community, Leopold realized, and communities could be more or less healthy. Conservation was properly aimed at promoting that health. Land health, then, was the much-needed conservation goal.15
“Land health,” Leopold wrote in 1944, “is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.”16 “Health expresses the cooperation of the interdependent parts: soil, water, plants, animals, and people,” he had written two years earlier. “It implies collective self-renewal and collective self-maintenance.”17 Central to Leopold’s understanding of land health was the ability of land to retain its font of fertility—its soil. Fertility was preserved only when sufficient types and numbers of species were present to keep basic nutrients cycling through the system efficiently. Land is healthy “when its food chains are so organized as to be able to circulate the same food an indefinite number of times.”18 Only under such circumstances would the soil—“the repository of food between its successive trips through the chains”—retain its fertility and produce abundant, nutritious yields.19
In August of 1946, Leopold was asked by leaders of a new political party to draft its platform on conservation. In his brief response, Leopold made no mention of the specific challenges about which he knew so much—wildlife, forestry, wilderness, soil conservation. Instead, he pointed toward the polestar: “[T]he health of the land as a whole, rather than the supply of its constituent ‘resources,’ is what needs conserving. Land, like other things, has the capacity for self-renewal (i.e. for permanent productivity) only when its natural parts are present, and functional. It is a dangerous fallacy to assume that we are free to discard or change any part of the land we do not find ‘useful’ (such as flood plains, marshes, and wild floras and faunas). Too violent modification of the natural order has repeatedly disorganized the land’s capacity for self-renewal.”20
Leopold described healthy land as “stable,” not to suggest that natural systems were static but in the more specific sense of land that retained its ability to cycle nutrients effectively and thus maintain its soil fertility.21 In order to do that, the land needed to have integrity, by which Leopold meant the biotic parts necessary for this nutrient cycling to take place.22 Leopold used “stability” and “integrity” in tandem as a shorthand expression for land health, most famously when summing up his land ethic, his ardent call to promote the land’s stability (its ability to cycle nutrients), its integrity (the diversity of parts needed to sustain stability), and its beauty.23 It was the land ethic that transformed the goal of overall health into an individual but shared duty: “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.”24
Conservation economics. A third element of Leopold’s conservation thought regarded the economic realities of conserving land, particularly private land.25 How private owners used their land materially affected the surrounding land community. Because of that, and because communities endured far beyond any single owner’s life span, the public had a weighty interest in how a landowner behaved.
As Leopold assessed the economics of sound land use, he was quick to see that conservation paid dividends, yet the dividends were largely ones that landowners acting alone could not capture. The benefits spread to the entire community, of which the landowner was only a small part. When all landowners conserved, each of them might gain. But conservation by an isolated owner rarely made financial sense.
For Leopold, these economic realities posed a challenge worthy of careful research. Repeatedly he would propose it as a topic: “the formulation of mechanisms for protecting the public interest in private land.”26 Existing institutions simply did not attend to the matter: “The present legal and economic structure, having been evolved on a more resistant terrain (Europe) and before the machine age, contains no suitable ready-made mechanisms for protecting the public interest in private land. It evolved at a time when the public had no interest in land except to help tame it.”27
Leopold devoted himself to the challenge of advancing conservation interests in the face of conflicting financial benefits, identifying the tools available and assessing the merits of each. Economic incentives, education, legal restraints, boycotts, social ostracism, community-based conservation measures—Leopold considered them all, only to conclude that none would do the trick. “How can private landowners be induced to use their land conservatively?” Leopold repeatedly asked himself. “This question heretofore determined only the choice of method for executing a conservation program (for example, the choice between education, subsidy, compulsion, or public ownership). Now, it seems to me, it takes rank with technological unemployment as one of the critical tests of ‘The American Way.’”28
Images of ownership. For Leopold, the leading conservation challenge of his day was starkly posed by the individual landowner living on and using a single tract of land. For the land to become healthy, this owner had to act well. Achieving good land use was difficult because economic factors were so unfavorable. Added to the dismal economics was the whole matter of what it meant to own land, legally and culturally. So long as ownership gave a person the right to ignore the common good, true conservation was doomed.
Leopold was no legal scholar and knew little about private property’s history as an institution. Had he known more, particularly about the many forms private ownership has taken in different times and places, he might have called even louder for institutional change. Yet his instincts were sound and he was prepared to act on them. Private ownership as commonly understood was itself a conservation problem, Leopold decided. Ownership gave landowners too much freedom to degrade the landscape to further personal interests. Ownership was a matter of individual rights, and hardly at all about limits and duties.
Early in his career Leopold raised the possibility that laws one day might force owners to take better care of their lands. In a provocative passage penned in the 1920s, he speculated that landownership in time would “carry with it the obligation to so use and protect it with respect to erosion that it is not a menace to other landowners and the public.” One day it would become illegal, he predicted, for landowners to allow erosion “to menace the public streams, reservoirs, irrigation projects,” and neighboring lands. Such “enforced responsibility of landowners,” though, was “of the future.”29 Until then and to help the change come about, conservationists should push hard for cultural change.
These four points do little more than identify the main strands of Leopold’s thought, leaving untouched its richness and subtlety. Nonetheless, they suffice to ground a lesson about needed change that conservationists might usefully keep fresh.
For Leopold, conservation posed a serious challenge to the practices and understandings of his day, and it would succeed only if it brought about major cultural change. Minor adjustments were simply not enough. To accomplish significant change, conservation required a solid grounding in ecology and economics; when “devoid of critical understanding either of the land, or of economic land use,” conservation could be “futile, or even dangerous.”30 Conservation also required “an internal change in our intellectual emphases, loyalties, affections, and convictions.”31 People needed to “change their ideas about what land is for”; and “[t]o change ideas about what land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for.”32
If Aldo Leopold was the leading conservation intellect of the first half of the twentieth century, his successor in matters relating to private land use has undoubtedly been Wendell Berry, who from his farm along the Kentucky River has written for decades on the ways that people inhabit their homes.
In his many writings Berry has added useful pieces to the conservation legacy amassed by Leopold. He has brought more of the social community into the land-use picture and linked that community, more strongly than Leopold had, to past and future generations. He has expanded Leopold’s critique of land-use economics while adding force and clarity to Leopold’s call for a new vision of private landownership. And, like Leopold, Berry has put the community and its long-term health at the top of his conservation agenda. Yet Berry has met similar frustration in his attempts to defend that community against hostile forces. After decades of work, he, too, would fall back on the need for people to better themselves, one by one, by embracing a sounder land ethic and by taking seriously the age-old call to love one another.33
Wendell Berry grew up in the 1930s and 1940s with a connection to the land rare for Americans at any time.34 He was born in the rural neighborhood where his parents and all of his grandparents had been born and where his great-grandparents had lived. Drawn to his grandfather’s farm at an early age, Berry learned to work fields with draft horses and to manage a diverse family homestead.35 Early in the 1960s Berry’s writing career took him away from his northern Kentucky homeland; his experiences included a year studying in California, travels in Europe, and a stint teaching at New York University. Only then, having seen the urban world close up, was he ready to head back home. Even working in Manhattan, though, Berry remained mindful of nature and of the grip it had on his soul, mindful that nature’s forces were ever restless, struggling to rise up whenever humans relaxed their firm hold:
In the empty lot—a place
not natural, but wild—among
the trash of human absence,
the slough and shamble,
of the city’s seasons, a few
old locusts bloom.36
By the mid-1960s, his mind and heart darkened by the deepening Asian war, Berry quit the city and returned to his native soil. His journey was not to a clean, healthy land—to the Arcadian place where protagonists of pastoral tales have typically started life anew—but to a landscape that humans had long scarred and misused, including the particular marginal acres that Berry and his family chose to make their own. The countryside of his upbringing needed good human stewards, better ones than it had had. He was eager to become one of them.
Writing soon after his return, Berry remembered vividly a day in the spring of 1945 when he was ten and the world war was winding down. With a companion he borrowed a small boat during high flood and journeyed foolishly into the fast-flowing Kentucky River. The adventure was a grand one, or so it seemed once the two were home safe and the scolding from their worried elders had subsided. The Kentucky River had its seasons, angry and powerful ones, yet the particular flood that imperiled young Berry was not nature’s doing alone. Neither was the flood a few years earlier, the one back in 1937 that lifted riverside cabins off their foundations. “These were modern floods,” Berry realized, “and man-made. Too many of the mountain slopes along the headwater streams had been denuded by thoughtless lumbering and thoughtless farming. Too little humus remained in the soil to hold the rains. After this second flood more of the old houses built near the river in earlier times would be abandoned.”37
Mindful of this troubled history and painfully aware of the economic forces pushing his homeland down, Berry determined nonetheless to take up the reins dropped by earlier landowners. He would labor as best he could, working with nature and respecting its limits. He would protect his soil by planting clover and slowly rebuilding its dark fund of life. Guiding this work, he later explained, was an overriding desire: “to make myself responsibly at home both in this world and in my native and chosen place.” His was “a long term desire,” as he described, “proposing the work not of a lifetime but of generations.”38
Berry’s observations about land and land use were colored by his years spent conversing with respected farmers and wooing the soil. Experience and intuition forged in him a strong sense of land as a community, just as Aldo Leopold had declared. They also fostered a sense that land use was good only when it sustained the health of that community, human members included. Land health was “the one value,” the one “absolute good” that upheld the entire web of life.39 When speaking on the subject, Berry has frequently borrowed a line from English reformer Sir Albert Howard, who urged readers to understand “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, and animal, and man as one great subject.”40 For Berry, the community as such is the smallest unit that might properly be called healthy. “To speak of the health of an isolated individual,” given the individual’s dependence on the whole, “is a contradiction in terms.”41
Even more than Leopold, Wendell Berry has regularly spoken about land use as an ethical issue— indeed, a religious one. To abuse land is immoral as well as unwise, and this truth needs to be told. At the same time, Berry understands the complexity of good land use and how difficult it is for anyone to use a tract well. Mistakes are easily made. Lessons can come at high cost. Leopold portrayed the individual landowner as a member of the land community. Berry goes further, linking that owner to the surrounding social order and explaining how one owner’s success can depend upon the existence of a shared body of local land-use wisdom. In settled agrarian cultures, practical ways of using land are learned slowly and handed down from generation to generation.42
Because good land use takes time to emerge out of frontier conditions, the well-being of land is necessarily linked to the viability of the resident social order. Good landowners plan for the next generation, confident that it will carry on their labors. Conservative land use is most typical of owners who equate ownership with stewardship and who sense an accountability to those who come next. Yet communities that foster this ethic can endure only when the economics of communal life are favorable. Community economics, in turn, depend on the economics, good or bad, of operating the individual farm.
Even more than Leopold, Berry has addressed the challenge of farm economics, particularly the market forces that have ruthlessly depressed small towns. So competitive is farming that few owners earn more than modest incomes, especially on marginal lands. Free trade is an important element of this problem, particularly global trade, which forces owners to slash costs and to operate on ever-bigger scales. Bigger scales, though, mean fewer farmers, which means fewer people to patronize community stores and fewer children in local schools. These losses, in turn, mean closed stores and schools, declining towns, and a landscape bled of people.43
In his extensive writing, Berry has added usefully to our understanding of land conservation. He has spoken eloquently about the ways that one landowner’s success is linked to the well-being of the surrounding community. He has probed the powerful economic forces that undercut shared life and make good land use so difficult. Even when community members are all devoted stewards—a rare happenstance—local communities are buffeted by outside forces. In practice they struggle, and largely fail, in their attempts to hold on.
Both as writer and as member of his native community, Berry has labored to find ways for local economies to endure.44 Some farmers have turned to specialty markets for high-valued produce. Others grow food for community-supported agriculture projects and farmers’ markets. Timber-based communities have sought out value-added local industries, so that forest products shipped from an area can yield greater returns. Even in combination, however, these measures and others like them have had only modest effects. Prospects remain bleak.
In the end, Berry the reformer has found himself stalled, much as Leopold did. Economic and social forces push hard against landowners, and they respond as agribusiness companies and university scientists tell them to respond: by embracing practices that slowly sap their lands and economies. Communities need better ways to fight back. The tools that Berry has identified, however, like the tools of Leopold, are simply not up to the task. Berry criticizes distant governments for failing to protect communities against outside forces, but how can this be done consistently with America’s cultural traditions?45
Like Leopold, Wendell Berry has concluded that real progress must await social growth. Friends of the land can only hope and pray for a new ethical order in which people value natural systems, in which they warmly embrace the work, social relations, and inner peacefulness that are necessary pillars of settled communal life.46 One cannot be optimistic, and Berry is not.47 But where else can hope find refuge?
When Aldo Leopold began his professional career, conservation was mostly a matter of protecting discrete resource flows, particularly wildlife, timber, and clean water, along with the human economies dependent on them. Wild areas, preserved for their recreational and spiritual benefits, were valued as distinct enclaves more than as vital parts of larger landscapes. By the time he died in 1948, Leopold had considerably enriched this base, intellectually, ethically, and aesthetically. He had bridged the conservation-preservation split in ways that rendered it artificial. He had successfully mixed utility and beauty, ethics and aesthetics.48
Leopold understood, as many others then did not and still do not, that to promote conservation is to stand up for community and to fight against fragmentation. The key battleground was the privately owned land parcel. It was there that conservation would stand or fall. Private land was declining because of bad decisions by landowners. Landowners, in turn, acted as they did because of unfavorable land-use economics, poor ecological understandings, and immature ethical and aesthetic ideals. Real change would need to address these deficiencies.
Wendell Berry usefully built on Leopold’s work by embedding his predecessor’s ill-behaving landowner into a social community and a local economy. As he did so, Berry shifted part of the blame for poor land use up to the communal level. Without healthy communities, Berry explained, even well-meaning owners could often do little. Bad land use had structural causes; until they were solved conservation would remain cosmetic. Yet having clarified the challenges, Berry was unsure how to respond to them, particularly to the domineering global economy. Farm towns had become pawns of outside forces, and he could see little to do about it.
Leopold and Berry, of course, have not been the only conservation voices of the past century. Others have stood with them. Few writers, however, have been as conspicuous in standing up for communities and embracing the advice that Leopold offered to all conservationists: “throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land use.”49 Few writers have seen so starkly that conservationists have a nasty cultural fight on their hands.
Conservationists taking stock of things today might usefully draw upon this conservation wisdom. The dominant social force at work today is indeed the market. With every decade, it wields greater influence on the ways we see nature and use our lands. To build on Berry’s work, then, as Berry has built on Leopold’s, it is essential for us to understand this pervasive institution.
Markets operate on the principle of competition. Free trade widens that competition, imposing ever-stronger pressures on market participants to cut their costs (in the case of working lands by eroding soil, deranging water flows, bulldozing wildlife habitat, proliferating exotics, and replacing complex biotic communities with monocultures). Markets also work by means of fragmentation, by treating people as individual consumers and producers and by dividing nature into its parts—some of them assigned market values, most afforded none. In the worldview of the market, neighborhoods, communities, and ecological systems have no direct value since none are for sale.
In a world shaped by the capitalist market, almost everything is up for grabs. Natural systems count for nothing unless market participants voluntarily choose to honor them. As for the future, individuals are nominally free to weigh it as they like. But competition imposes a stern discipline: those who act with restraint can easily lose out to those who ignore the future. Then there are the problems that come from the high specialization that the market requires. Low-cost production is commonly achievable only by those who fill a specific market niche. If the system itself is destructive, of lands or of people, there’s little the specialist can do except participate or drop out.
Many forms of land destruction arise as detrimental “externalities”—that is, as harms that one market participant generates and freely imposes on neighbors.50 The more fragmented a landscape is and the stronger the many competitive pressures, the greater this problem can be.51 Although Aldo Leopold never used the term externalities, the idea forcefully influenced his thoughts on private land. To divide an integrated landscape into private shares was to skew the economics of good land use. Along with the problem of externalities were the many factors that led landowners to act unwisely even within the boundaries of their tracts, the all-too-common cognitive, ethical, and economic shortcomings that Leopold confronted so directly in his writings.
As a mechanism for resource allocation, the market’s weaknesses and biases are profound. The market deals with people as individual consumers and producers, not as communal members. Government processes of study and taking action, weak though they often are, are replaced in the market by the manipulations of advertisers and the sound bites of industry. A further problem here: the market is efficient only in supplying people with goods and services that they can enjoy individually, with little or no sharing. Most conservation goods (migratory birds and healthy rivers, for instance) are not of this type, particularly ecological and landscape goals. (They are public goods, to use the economic term.) Mythology notwithstanding, the market can do a lousy job giving us what we really want.52
These days, the market has vocal, influential advocates, legions of them, who praise it lavishly as a method of ordering affairs and who applaud it for great accomplishments, all the while downplaying or ignoring its limitations. Their enthusiasm, so starkly uncritical at times, is at once an obstacle on the path and a revealing sign of where we stand as a people.
For communities to be healthy, their defenders need to craft effective ways to contain these powerful forces. The market needs firm boundaries if it is to respect lands and people. Private property must become less of a shield. Particularly as technology advances and populations rise, citizen governance, aimed at protecting the community and its health, becomes all the more vital.53
One wonders, given the plentiful evidence of degradation, why conservationists face such resistance today. Why is it so hard to contend with the forces of fragmentation? The term community conjures up good images for most Americans. Public opinion polls show overwhelming support for environmental protection.54 Save for free market fanatics, no one stands up to defend self-centered behavior. Given this broad support for conservation, and given that markets as such—and advertisers and big industry in particular—enjoy at best mixed public favor, why has conservation so often stalled?
The answers are not hard to find, for they appear in the news media and in public speech nearly every day. Organized conservation, it is said, conflicts with core values of American culture, particularly when conservation means binding rules and regulations. To put it otherwise: blocking acceptance of conservation are not so much the familiar faces of the market— development, individualism, and selfishness—but far friendlier faces, the cultural emblems that make America what it is. Conservation’s opponents have appropriated these emblems after defining them in ways that make conservation duties appear costly, even un-American. It is familiar strategy in the culture wars, using cultural emblems as weapons. To the conservation side, the damage has been great.
Liberty. Foremost on the cultural list is the powerful ideal of individual liberty, the bedrock of American culture. Liberty is the ability of a person in isolation to develop and implement a vision of the good life. Liberty means freedom from restraint as one goes about daily life.
The difficulty with this ideal is that it contains no brake on its power. Liberty resists all restraint, however reasonable and necessary. Also absent from it is a principled way to determine when the liberty of one person should yield to the liberty of another. Particularly in land-use settings, where actions on one parcel can spread wide ecologically, one owner’s actions can materially disrupt the lives of many others. Where does one person’s liberty end and another’s begin? Then there is the critical matter of individuals who want to exercise their positive liberty by joining with neighbors to engage in communal lawmaking, as by imposing rules to protect land health. How does the value of this positive liberty compare to the negative liberty of the individual who wants to act without restraint?55
Democracy. Related to liberty and similarly deployed against conservation is the familiar face of democracy, the power of ordinary people to govern their lives, free of kings, oligarchies, and other higher powers. In a democracy, sovereignty is exercised by the demos —the people—rather than by a monarch or ruling class.56 But how do people exercise this power? Majority rule, one way of exercising popular power, regularly produces laws that many people oppose. From the perspective of conservation’s opponents, majority-run government can appear as an alien, intrusive power, interfering with private lives and controlled by special interests.
Like liberty, democracy as popularly understood is simply incoherent intellectually. It leaves unresolved the critical question of majority rule versus individual choice. Incoherence, in turn, opens the way for image manipulation. Libertarians ask: Isn’t the market the most democratic of all institutions? Isn’t the market the arena in which people can form their choices individually and act upon them with little restraint? Don’t land-use laws conflict with true democratic rule?
Private property. Just as revered as the political ideals of liberty and democracy is the institution of private property, which has risen high in the pantheon of cultural icons since the fall of the Soviet Union.57 Though the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union were countless—most conspicuously in the responsiveness of government to the popular will—many Americans have pointed to private property as the key distinction: the Soviet Union fell because it lacked private property, the United States has thrived because it respects private rights.58 The explanation sounds convincing, even though grossly incomplete. One reason the story has caught on is that it taps into the unquestioned power of secure private property to foster economic enterprise. Private property does bring good things, and the success of the United States is certainly linked to it.
Yet private property, like liberty and democracy, loses its clarity as soon as one approaches it. Again, the land-use context offers good evidence. The landowner who drains wet areas can cause flooding affecting the landowner downstream. In such a circumstance, how can the law protect private rights? Is property respected by allowing the upstream owner to drain or by protecting the downstream owner against flooding? In facile discussions of private property, the downstream owner is typically overlooked. The simple, much-used paradigm conflict is one that pits the individual owner against the state, with no mention of neighboring landowners or other community members.59
Private property shares ambiguities with liberty and democracy, to which it is closely linked. Considered abstractly, private ownership includes no means of deciding where one person’s property rights end and another’s begin when neighboring land uses clash. It includes no way to decide when the property rights of one landowner should be limited by the legitimate desires of other property-owning community members to enjoy a healthy, beautiful landscape.60
Equality. Finally, there is the friendly cultural ideal of equality, which stands alongside the other three, even though strong tensions exist among them. Equality is the most incomplete of the four cultural ideals in that it operates only when linked to independent understandings of fairness and human rights.61 The truth is, no two people are identical. Given the inevitable differences, the question then becomes: When do we ignore the differences between two people, thus treating them as equal, and when in the name of equality do we take the differences into account? When it comes to voting, gender and race are irrelevant but age and citizenship are not. Again and again, equality raises the issue of which differences we consider and which we ignore. In isolation, equality never supplies an answer. It is the bluntest of tools.
Equality is particularly troublesome in the context of land-use disputes when it is linked to private property. Is equality fostered by a law that treats landowner A and landowner B the same when each wants to build homes or graze cows or cut trees? Is it violated when a law allows A to proceed with development but stops B from doing the same? To answer such questions we need to distinguish sharply between a law that views A and B differently as people and a law that treats A’s land differently from B’s land. To distinguish between A and B as people might well be improper. But land-use laws rarely do that. They deal instead with land, and two land parcels are never truly the same. If A’s land is submerged and B’s land is high and dry, a law might wisely distinguish between the two without violating any well-conceived ideal of equality. In public discourse, though, we typically pay attention to the owners as people. And so the cry of unfairness is raised.
We only need listen to the rhetoric of forces resisting land-use rules to see how these four cultural symbols are deployed. Used in combination they ably protect developers, home builders, mining companies, and agribusiness groups. Land-use laws restrict individual liberties, so it is claimed. When imposed by distant governments, and particularly when fueled by the lobbying efforts of interest groups, such laws distort legitimate democratic processes. In all cases, restrictions diminish private property rights, unfairly forcing owners to use their lands to benefit other people, without compensation. Laws that burden some landowners and not others—as nearly all do—also raise the specter of unequal treatment. All in all, land-use laws, it is argued, collide with our cherished ideals.
It is to this constellation of ideas that conservation needs to respond, thoughtfully and forcefully.
To dwell upon the disheartening status of conservation today is to wonder whether the current predicament is not to a large degree self-induced. In their endless flurry of deals, lobbying, and litigation, have conservationists failed to attend to the intellectual and cultural sides of the issue? Have we driven ahead, confident of our bearings, only to find ourselves ambushed in a culture war we are ill prepared to fight?62
Opponents of conservation talk openly about this quartet of cultural and political ideals, which are, for them, very much on the public table. Where, though, is the conservation response? What does it mean, to conservationists, to own land privately? As industrial interests see matters, environmental rules interfere with core civil liberties. What do conservationists have to say in rebuttal?
Too often they have nothing to respond, at least not directly. Too often they ignore the issue, or accede implicitly to the accuracy of what opponents contend, arguing only that environmental benefits make the costs worthwhile. More and more, conservationists reject the idea that there even is such a thing as a “conservation perspective” on such issues, priding themselves instead on a plurality of views. But to celebrate plurality in itself is to have no sensible response to opposing claims. In a sound-bite world, in a world of two-sided journalistic stories, a movement that lacks coherence becomes especially easy prey.
More than conservationists realize, the battle over land is being waged as much in the realm of public rhetoric as on the land. And as in most rhetorical battles, the tools of choice are the ideals that Americans have long used to frame their disputes. Because of the pluralism that characterizes conservation, it is hard to generalize about where conservation thought now stands, save to point out, as we must do, that conservation does not present a coherent message to average citizens. The rhetorical deficiencies are many, particularly when we put today’s rhetoric side by side with the core ideas of Leopold and Berry.
First, while conservationists feel comfortable talking about emotional attachments to land, they have largely discarded Leopold’s language of ecological connection and ecosystem processes. Few talk about land as community, the centerpiece of Leopold’s thought. Exceptions do exist, important ones. But to the average listener conservation deals with particular parcels of land that need protecting against human overuse. People are not part of the land community as they were in Leopold’s thought; they are only the force that brings about degradation.
The dangers of single-parcel conservation are particularly acute when the parcels being preserved have no people living on them. An oft-repeated criticism is that conservationists care about wild things, not about people. The charge is easily disproved, yet it rarely is. It would lose force if conservationists employed a different rhetoric, if they talked regularly about the health of entire landscapes, people included.
A second rhetorical deficiency is that conservationists (with important exceptions) tend to ignore lands used to meet basic human needs, or if they address them they implicitly portray users as inherently bad. Leopold focused his mature work almost entirely on working lands; Wendell Berry, from his farm, has paid little attention to anything else. As Leopold put it, the conservation challenge is “co-extensive with the map of the United States.”63 The message deserves more prominence than it gets.
A third deficiency of conservation rhetoric is that it rarely engages with the economic assessments of opponents, except to weigh in from to time on cost-benefit analyses. Indeed, the whole field of economics has largely been abandoned to universities and to staffs of libertarian/free market advocacy groups, whose position papers flow forth without end.64 Conservation is nowhere near as costly as the public assumes. Indeed, one would hardly realize, given the assumptions so commonly accepted, that environmental laws generate economic benefits that exceed their costs, usually by a wide margin.65 To listen to public officials, mimicking the rhetoric of opposing groups, environmental protection is a luxury when the economy is weak. Conservationists need to dispute this point far better than they have.
Just as disturbing as the inattention to economics is the near silence from conservationists on private property and what it means to own land. There is no need to guess what libertarians think on the subject, for they trumpet their views. Conservation groups, with few exceptions, keep their thoughts to themselves. Leopold, again, is feted but not followed.
This lack of discussion about private property is linked to the reluctance of many conservationists to talk about their work in moral terms, except on the issue of endangered species. Moral language, of course, requires careful use. But moral criticism can address ideas and practices rather than people. It can accentuate the moral good of healthy lands and intact communities without resorting to accusation. Opponents of conservation hardly hesitate to frame liberties and property rights as moral claims. For conservationists to avoid the terminology is to concede the high ground.
Finally, there is the plain fact that, outside the academy, conservation thought has mainly dispensed with all talk of an overall goal. On few issues was the mature Leopold more adamant. Land health for Leopold was the antidote to many ills. It helped coordinate efforts. It helped instill an ecological perspective. Slogans such as “jobs-versus-owls” would persuade far fewer listeners if the conservation cause communicated a well-conceived goal.
In the common understanding, environmentalism is a liberal cause. Classically defined, liberalism is a political and cultural perspective that honors the individual human and seeks to free him or her from unfair restraint.66 Its original opponent was the feudal system, which situated people within layered social orders and enmeshed them in status rules. So powerful has liberalism become, in both its welfare and libertarian forms, that it significantly defines American culture.67
Were Leopold alive today, he would know how to talk about the claim (the condemnation, as many see it) that conservation is inherently liberal in the classic sense.68 As Leopold perceived things, humans inevitably were members of biotic communities. They did not and could not thrive in isolation. Though they were free to throw off all shackles and pursue self-selected goals, they would assuredly harm the land in doing so. Leopold exalted individuals in that he respected their free will and believed that they could lead honorable, ethical lives; the individual did count, and it was to the individual that Leopold addressed his now-famous ethic. At the same time, Leopold openly condemned versions of individualism that dignified narrow pursuits of self-interest; “bogus individualism,” he would term it.69 Ecologically and ethically, humans were integrated into larger systems, whether they knew it or not. Conservation was about mending the communal fabric, not enhancing individual freedoms.
Writing in the same vein, Wendell Berry also honors the individual, but only when the individual stands tall as a responsible community member. In Berry’s view, contemporary people need to be tethered to past and future generations if they are to tend the land well.70 Health comes from respecting nature’s limits and from building healthy relationships, not by casting them off.
Despite this communitarian heritage, conservation is showing more and more signs of embracing classic liberalism. In the name of pluralism it invites people as individuals to develop their own ideas about land and to embrace moral views of their own choosing. In doing so, it implicitly denies Leopold’s and Berry’s beliefs in intrinsic moral values. In its resistance to “ top-down” thinking and its enthusiasm for community-based processes, it rejects any overriding goal conceived by leading intellectuals. For conservation to embrace such relativity, abandoning its ecologically informed morality, would be to turn sharply from its core teachings.
Conservation is losing ground—or at least failing to advance as it might, given public opinion— because it shies away from the culture wars. It says too little about the moral and civic ideals that opponents have invoked. If conservation really conflicted with these ideals, the impasse might make sense. But present conflicts have arisen primarily because libertarian and proindustry groups have reshaped and distorted our ideals. Conservation needs to rise to the challenge.
• Conservation needs to speak openly about the conflict in American culture, pitting those who stand up for the communal whole against those who are content to let people do as they please. American audiences don’t shy away from conflict; some seem to relish it. Friendly faces and respectful language can remain. It is the underlying clash that needs clear labels: the Battle for Community, the Struggle for Responsible Living.
• Conservation also needs better ways to display the tragic consequences of fragmenting lands and people—legally, economically, and socially. Conservation must be—and be seen as—a powerful antidote to this fragmentation.
• Even more urgent is the need for the cause to develop a thoughtful critique of the capitalist market.71 So infatuated has America become with the market that it understands poorly what the institution can and cannot do. In equal need of scrutiny is the claim that environmental laws reduce the productivity of the market. Some do, but many have just the opposite effect: they remedy market failings and thus aid overall efficiency. On economic issues as on moral ones, conservationists need to do their homework and then charge ahead.
• Related to the market issue is the institution of private property, and here, too, conservationists can do better. The vision of private ownership put forward by conservation opponents is seriously miscast.72 It rests on bad law, bad history, and bad policy. Conservation is not about rejecting private property, which in its place is wonderfully useful. It is about pressing for much-needed reform.
• Similar work needs to be done in crafting messages that address the other ideals cited by conservation’s opponents. Liberty has a positive side as well as a negative one; it is freedom to, as well as freedom from. Liberty’s positive side respects the power of people to join with others to make rules for their common good. In like manner, democracy comes in many forms, one of the most venerable being majority rule based on one person, one vote. Strong individual rights, the kind that conservation’s opponents so ardently deploy, restrain these democratic processes. On this issue, too, conservationists must not give in.