If conservation is to regain its bearings, the place to begin is with the land, broadly defined, and with the people living on and drawing sustenance from it. Conservation, ultimately, is about promoting good land uses for the benefit of people, future generations, and the land itself. But what is good land use? What are its characteristics or elements, and how do they fit together? Is the best way to identify good land use to start with the land and its ecological functioning and then add the people, tailoring their activities so as to sustain that functioning? Or should we begin instead with the people and their needs and then insert nature into the mix?
The instinct of scientists is to begin with nature; that’s the aspect they know best. The instinct of economists, typically, is to begin instead with the market and with the production and exchange of goods and services and then somehow adjust the market to take better care of nature. A third approach, popular among some conservationists, is to begin with the human-nature bond in emotional terms and to ask how we might persuade people to love nature more. Here the assumption is that if people really cared about nature in their hearts, all else would largely fall into place; a more specific, ecologically based goal is apparently unneeded.1
Then there are the many people who approach land-use issues in fragmented terms, one parcel at a time, rarely pausing to consider landscapes as a whole. This last approach, probably the most common one, has the considerable virtue of practicality. When a land-use problem is obvious, why not tackle the problem directly instead of viewing it as a small part of something much bigger? Tract-by-tract conservation work largely fits into this category. Preserve a piece here, buy an easement or development right there, and perhaps all will work for the best.
None of these approaches starts from what ought to be the obvious place. Inevitably, people are the ones who decide whether land use is good. The logical place to begin, then, is not with science or with nature, much less with the market or with a simple love of the wilds. It is with a direct question: What makes land use good for people?
This question, it turns out, is a fruitful one, because it is relatively easy to identify the broad factors to use in evaluating land uses. The factors fall into three basic categories. Once we identify and explore these, spreading all the factors on the table, we can appreciate the many building blocks of good land use. We are also better positioned to spot the omissions and deficiencies that afflict much of today’s conservation rhetoric.2
Human utility, broadly defined. Embedded as they are in nature, people necessarily depend upon the land for daily sustenance. Good land use needs to meet these basic needs—for everyone, if possible. A good life, though, entails far more than just food, clothing, and shelter. There are the beauties that a surrounding landscape can provide, in terms of both the natural and the built environment. There are the conveniences and satisfactions that come when a home territory is well laid out and arranged in ways that foster healthy social interactions. Sometimes people want to escape society; good land use would offer remote places for them to go. Many people enjoy interacting with wild creatures, whether at backyard bird feeders or in secluded locations. Good land use would make this possible as well.
Once we start enumerating the many ways that good land use benefits people, the list turns out to be quite long. And it gets longer when we go beyond the immediate direct benefits and consider the types of land uses indirectly required if the land is to continue supplying these direct benefits. For soil to remain fertile and productive, for instance, soil fertility cycles need to keep functioning, which in turn has implications for the protection of biological diversity. For fisheries to remain productive, rivers and lakes also need to be healthy, which means water flows that are reasonably clean and not significantly altered in physical terms. Genetic diversity—a wide range of plants and animals—needs to be respected to ensure the continued viability of species that are directly and indirectly useful to people. Natural areas also require protection, not only because they directly benefit people but so that scientists can study them and gain the lessons needed to manage lands well. Then there are the many species and natural processes that play vital roles in keeping pests and diseases in check. Human utility, in short, is complexly tied to the land’s biotic composition and ecological functioning, as ecologists over the past century have so often said.3
There is little need to be fully comprehensive here in listing the ways that good land use can benefit people, because the central conclusion is easily stated. Good land use would promote overall human utility, with utility defined broadly to include aesthetics and quality-of-life issues as well as bread-and-butter needs.
When utility is defined this way, it is clear that it extends beyond the particular resource uses that are assigned prices by the market. Many land-use benefits lack market prices, though they are highly valuable to people, because they are never bought and sold. The market deals only in commodities and services that people can purchase and consume personally, without significantly sharing benefits with others. Clean air, healthy rivers, abundant wildlife, fertility cycles, stratospheric ozone, well-functioning atmospheric processes, basic disturbance regimes: these and many other components of nature, essential to human utility, carry no market price. Many are “public goods” in the sense that the public as a whole benefits from them, without regard for who pays. The market, notoriously, undervalues such goods.4 Other ecological benefits are more localized but still shared among enough people so that the person bearing the cost is unable to capture all the benefits. For this reason (along with others), it makes little sense to think that the market alone can dictate good land use, however useful it is in achieving more limited goals.
Human utility is no doubt the central factor defining good land use. For many people it is likely the only one. For the serious conservationist, though, other factors are also relevant; the bar of good land use is set higher.
Ethical considerations. Standing beside human utility is a constellation of factors that might be termed ethical. They, too, play significant roles in defining good land use. When people use ethical considerations in evaluating land-use behaviors, then the goodness of their land use will depend upon whether they have abided by these considerations. The point is a rather simple one, yet it is rarely mentioned directly and its implications are easy to overlook.5
Looming large in this second, ethics category is the whole matter of future generations. The popular goal of sustainability (as noted in chapter 4) presumes that people living today ought to look out for their descendants. Most people agree. What this duty entails, of course, is far from clear. But whatever shape the duty takes, it plays a vital role in defining good land use. Land use is good only when it fulfills the ethical obligations that people today have to tend the land for future generations.
This component, it needs emphasizing, could prove exceptionally influential if we decide to define broadly our obligations vis-à-vis the future. If we feel obligated to protect all life forms for future generations to enjoy (a widely held ideal), then land use will be good only when it achieves this conservation result. If our duties (instead or in addition) include the maintenance of representative examples of all types of natural areas, or perhaps the protection of the land’s overall natural productive capacity, then land use again will be good only if these duties are fulfilled. Land use is not good when these duties are breached.
A duty to future generations makes sense only when understood as a collective duty of people now living. It is implausible to think of it merely as a duty imposed upon an individual as such, to fulfill or not as the individual sees fit. Practically speaking, no individual could remotely fulfill such a duty. Here again, we stumble upon a potent reason why we cannot rely entirely upon the market to foster good land use. The market leads to land uses that benefit people living today, the landowner above all. Although the market does permit landowners to use their lands in ways that respect the future, individual owners can often accomplish little acting alone. Which individual alone can save a species, or protect the Earth’s soil, or halt the degradation of unique natural areas? Any sensible expression of a duty to future generations would require planning at large spatial scales. Only with such a perspective, and thus only by means of collective action, is it possible to keep the Earth functioning in ways that leave options open for the future. If we have duties to future generations, they bear upon us collectively, as a people. To assert that individuals should make up their own minds about such matters, implementing their own ethical leanings, is to deny that such ethical duties really exist.
Aside from possible duties to future generations there are other broad bases for interjecting ethical considerations into good land use. Many people sense religious duties to tend the land with care. For them, land use is truly good only when these duties are fulfilled. Religious belief, to be sure, is a personal matter. But it is wrong to jump from this truth to the false conclusion that religious duties are therefore inappropriate bases for public policy. Religious people are free to embrace their own ideas about good land use. They can freely advocate these ideas in the political arena, just as they can promote ethical ideals not grounded in religion. A moral claim that we should protect rare species is not somehow invalid because religious conviction lies behind it.
Along with future generations and religious beliefs is the claim that nature itself is intrinsically valuable, or that parts of nature have intrinsic value (rare species, for instance). Intrinsic value can be defined as all value possessed by nature that is unrelated to human utility. Philosophers vigorously debate whether nature can have such moral value on its own, independently of what people might think, or whether value instead can arise only when humans recognize it as such. For purposes here, in defining good land use, this distinction is unimportant. It is the ultimate moral vision that counts. If nature is valuable, then good land use ought to respect its value, whether the value is intrinsic or not. Intrinsic value in nature could reside at the level of the biotic community, requiring humans to respect the functioning of the community as such. Value could reside instead at the level of the species or (as animal welfare advocates claim) or at the level of the individual animal, particularly with animals that experience pain.
Finally, in this ethical category there are the considerations related to virtuous living. What does it mean to live a virtuous life, in terms of our interactions with nature? Does wasteful or excessive consumption amount to a defect in virtue? Is it wrong, in moral terms, to wantonly or needlessly impose suffering on other life forms or carelessly to alter lands in ways that kill plants and animals? The issue here is not the “rights” that other organisms might have. It is about people, and about what it means to live the virtuous life. A land use would be bad if it deviated from widely held notions of individual virtue.
These, then, are the major categories of ethical thinking about land (or at least one way to categorize them): approaches based on duty to future generations, religious obligations, intrinsic value, and virtue. As with the category of human utility, there is no need here to dwell on the category’s many variations. Land use will be good, for a people who recognize ethical limits (which is to say, a civilized people), only when it is consistent with their chosen ethical ideals: that is, only (1) when it adequately fulfills duties to future generations and to nature itself; (2) when it performs felt religious obligations; and (3) when it is consistent with shared ideas about virtuous living.
Ethical ideals are highly important to people, or so public opinion studies tell us. With unusual consensus, the public perceives moral value in non-human animals and believes we should protect all species, regardless of utility.6 People embrace other moral values, of course, unrelated to nature. We cannot assume that support for nature would consistently override these competing ideals. Still, it is just as wrong to ignore or shortchange such thinking. People take morality seriously. Land-use decisions implicate many widely accepted moral principles.
Ignorance and precaution. Any well-considered definition of good land use is almost certain to dwell at length on the first two categories of factors: on overall human utility and on the relevant ethical considerations. A third category also requires attention, although it is more elusive and it enters the equation from a different angle.
Human knowledge about nature is far from complete. Many of nature’s parts are unknown or poorly understood; many processes and interactions are hard to evaluate and harder still to trace. Inevitably, decisions about land use and consumption are made behind veils of ecological ignorance. The more one learns about nature, it seems, the greater the recognition of that ignorance. Somehow, decision-making processes need to take into account this limited knowledge. It is dangerous to act based solely on what is known when that knowledge is obviously incomplete. It is even more dangerous to take major action based only on the few facts that can be empirically proven with high confidence, when countless other relevant facts are unproven or unknown. In scientific research it makes sense to insist on scientific proof; in real life it does not.
To fill in the gaps of our knowledge, hunches are required. Deep-seated intuition needs to be drawn upon. Wise land managers try to work with nature rather than against it, mimicking its ways and hoping to benefit from its built-in wisdom, even when not understood. Because mistakes are inevitable, it is prudent to leave room for second chances. When tinkering with a landscape, it is wise to save all the parts. Prudence is particularly essential in light of nature’s inherent dynamism and unpredictability, which adds further layers to our ignorance.7
These ideas are certainly familiar to readers of serious conservation literature, where the wisdom of acting cautiously appears prominently. A common version of the idea takes the form of the so-called precautionary principle.8 The legal mind is more inclined to phrase the same idea in terms of burdens of proof: the burden of showing harm ought to be kept reasonably low, conservationists assert, particularly when the harms that might result are grave. Would the sane person, told that he faces a 20 percent chance of getting hit by a car while crossing a street, decide to take extra precautions, or would he ignore the warning on the grounds that the chance of harm is too low or unproven?
Acting cautiously is related to one of the common legal tools used to stimulate better land-use decisions—the so-called “hard look” approach, illustrated by the National Environmental Policy Act ( NEPA ).9 In its requirement for environmental impact statements, NEPA embraces a look-before-you-leap attitude toward major government actions that will alter land significantly. The federal Endangered Species Act similarly directs federal agencies to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service before they act to learn whether their proposed activities will jeopardize the continued existence of any species.10 More protective than these laws are the legal rules that require producers of foods and drugs to test their products thoroughly before marketing them to ensure they cause no harm.11
The idea of acting cautiously toward nature stimulates widely different responses. Some think the point so obviously right that debate about it seems silly. Others take a sharply opposing view, usually phrased in terms of individual liberty: people should be free to alter nature as they see fit, unless and until the evidence of harm is manifest. According to ardent defenders of liberty, the burden of proving harm should rest on those who claim that harm will occur. Some would go even further, contending that evidence of harm should take the form of scientific proof, admissible in a court of law.12 It is worth recalling on this point the debate about Rachel Carson’s classic, Silent Spring.13 Carson’s chief complaint was that we were acting recklessly in our uses of pesticides, and that greater caution was in order. Many of her attackers, however, overlooked or affirmatively ignored the issue of caution. Their critiques presumed that caution was entirely inappropriate, and that pesticides were properly used unless and until their overall harmfulness was fully shown. Because the evidence of harm was incomplete and (in their view) not fully persuasive, Rachel Carson was wrong to challenge what pesticide users were doing.14
What we have, then, are alternative ways of talking about this third category of factors relating to good land use. The issue is about human ignorance and the limits of our sensory perceptions, about the recurring errors in human reason, about the wisdom of acting cautiously given our tendency to err, and about burdens of proof. At one time we freely introduced exotic species into landscapes, unconcerned about possible harmful effects. Now we are prone to hesitate; we have suffered too many instances of these introductions gone awry. That hesitation, however we phrase it, is an important component of land-use thought. Land use is good when it avoids gambles with nature that we are ill prepared to lose. Land use is good when managers refrain from charging ahead without study, reflection, and efforts to minimize unnecessary change.
This third category of land-use factors could easily be blended into the other two. Caution in the long run could well improve human utility. Caution can also stand as a cardinal virtue or as a wise way to implement our felt ethical duties. Yet so important is this constellation of ideas, and so easy is it for the factors here to get lost, that it seems wiser to break it out for separate recognition. The ideas should stand in their own category.
These three categories—overall utility, ethical considerations, and ignorance-precaution—provide a framework for thinking about good and bad land use and hence for considering conservation’s aims.
Plainly, to move beyond this three-pronged framework we would need to start making policy decisions—lots of them. At every step, in each of the three categories, alternatives are available and tough choices have to be made. Some choices, though, are far wiser than others—and the three-part framework, by identifying and distinguishing the relevant characteristics, can be of value in helping us make these determinations. An approach to land use that overlooks any of these considerations—that ignores one or even two entire categories of factors, as some do—is plainly deficient and deserves to be labeled as such.
Within conservation circles, there is hardly any issue that causes more confusion about land use, and about conservation policy overall, than the matter of science and its proper and improper roles in setting land-use policy. To take the next step in clarifying good land use, we need to address this issue. We need to consider what science is, what it can and cannot do, and how influential it ought to be in the policy arena. Sometimes science is given too much work to do. Just as often it is unduly slighted.
This issue is particularly critical today because of the tendency of many people, scientists and nonscientists alike, to want to make use of science-related terms when determining conservation goals. Ecological integrity in various forms has become one popular candidate as a land-use goal. Biological diversity and ecosystem health, variously defined, are other candidates.15
Why people prefer to use such science terms is not hard to figure out. Science carries prestige and an aura of objectivity. To ground a policy position in science is therefore to give it strength. Science terms also tend to incorporate a strong pronature slant, and thus they appeal to many ardent conservationists. Finally, science is technically complex in a way that elevates scientifically trained people to positions of expertise and hence authority. The more technically complex an issue, the more people are likely to turn to science to set policy. (Gifford Pinchot and other Progressive Era reformers relied on this cultural tendency a century ago to strengthen the conservation programs of the federal government.)16
Is it useful to talk about good land use in this way, borrowing terms from science (ecology mostly)? Can science in fact provide the core for conservation policy? Can it provide a solid foundation for good land use?
To answer these questions we need to understand clearly what scientists are doing when they study nature. The aim of science in this setting (involving land and potential uses of it) is as essential as it is modest. Its aim is to gain understanding about nature and how it functions. It is to learn how nature works. If scientists did their jobs perfectly, they would end up knowing precisely what nature entails and how it operates in a given location. With that knowledge, one could predict accurately what nature is likely to do next, based on assumptions about outside influences. One could predict how nature would respond to particular interventions or disruptions. All of this work— and here we get to the key point—is descriptive in nature: it describes what nature is, how it works, and how it will work. Science, in short, describes. What science does not do, what science is incapable of doing standing alone, is to make normative judgments about the goodness or badness of nature. Science, that is, has no power to evaluate the land.
We confront, then, a fundamental distinction between describing nature and evaluating it normatively. To illustrate, we can consider the case of two forests, one an “old-growth” forest showing little noticeable human alteration, the other a loblolly pine plantation with trees of uniform age, aligned in rows and protected by pesticides. A scientist would describe the two forests in vastly different ways in terms of their species composition and functioning. But a scientist using only science could not pass judgment on which of the two was better. The conservationist might instinctively prefer the old-growth forest to the single-species plantation. But the grounds of that preference would not be scientific alone. What if the pine plantation so successfully met timber needs that it allowed vast forest tracts elsewhere to remain untouched? What if the pine plantation itself harbored some rare species that could not exist elsewhere? Which forest, then, would we prefer?
To say that science is purely descriptive is to say that it is unable alone to prescribe good land use. We can appreciate this point, while identifying some of science’s rightful roles in land management, by comparing science with the three categories of land-use factors just distilled.
In identifying and measuring human utility, science is distinctly helpful but far from adequate for the task. Science tells us nothing about landscape aesthetics and very little about how land-use patterns might promote convenience, collegiality, and a high quality of human life. Science is on stronger ground when it comes to elements of human utility based on the consumption of food, fiber, minerals, or other elements of nature. For instance, whether particular land-use practices can or cannot produce desired resources over the long run is preeminently a science question. But whether the resources are needed is an entirely different question, based much less on science. How to make trade-offs is also not a science matter.
Many aspects of human utility depend in practice on the preferences that people embrace, individually or collectively. Science can inform our preference-setting processes, but it cannot on its own establish the preferences. The bottom line: human utility is determined by drawing extensively upon nonscientific factors.
As for ethical considerations, science has even less to say. What types of living are virtuous? What duties do we owe to future generations? Just as some questions are preeminently scientific and descriptive, others are predominately normative and nonscientific. Science can help clarify ethical choices by providing background data. When thinking about protecting rare species, for instance, we might want to know what protective steps will be required to fulfill the task, particularly when we have to decide how a duty to protect rare species stacks up against a competing moral claim. Still (and this is the bottom line here), the core reasoning on these matters is nonscientific. Science is a way to find facts, not to establish ethical norms.
Much the same conclusion is appropriate in the case of science’s possible role in setting levels of caution. Science deals with the known, not with the unknown. It is a way of explaining how nature works, not whether and with what justification people ought to alter it. As with the ethical issues, science can nonetheless help greatly with the factors in this category. Scientists can articulate the limits of what we know and do not know. Scientists can present estimates of error and point out how conclusions that depend on data can change radically when new data comes in—as it does from nature, at every moment. But precaution ultimately is a prudential consideration, not a scientific fact. It is a way of dealing with ignorance and the inevitable errors in human calculations. It is not at root a principle of science.
Given these various limits on science, it ought to be clear that we cannot employ a descriptive science term (such as ecological integrity) as a normative land-use guide without first altering it substantially. We would need to augment the science in it with a good deal of ethical, prudential, and other nonscientific considerations. Only after we have done that could the term stand up as a normative land-use ideal.
There is another reason why it is vital to hold fast this distinction between describing land (the job of science) and evaluating land (largely nonscientific). Only with the distinction can we make sense of the recurring complaint that ecological integrity (and similar science terms), when used as a land-use goal, is not “good science” or is not dictated by science. The com plaint goes like this: Science alone does not command that we manage lands so as to maintain their integrity. Thus, as a land-use goal, ecological integrity is not grounded in, or commanded by, sound science.
This complaint is entirely true. And it is just as entirely inapt.
Science alone does not command anything; it can never set a land-use goal, good or bad. Accordingly, no land-use goal, however phrased, can qualify as sound, unalloyed science. When ecological integrity (or biological diversity or ecosystem health) is put forth as a proposed land-use goal, the implicit claim is not that science alone commands the goal. It is that the proposed goal does a better job than any alternative in promoting good land use, in satisfying the categories of considerations that collectively compose good land use. Such a claim, of course, is laced with normative assumptions. And one could easily challenge them. But it is not relevant to dismiss the goal of ecological integrity because it is nonscientific.
This defense of ecological integrity against the charge of bad science also applies to Aldo Leopold’s proposed land-use goal, land health. Leopold crafted this goal with a careful eye on the land’s functioning, but he also took into account human needs, the limits of our knowledge of nature, and the errors that so often arise when people try to manipulate land excessively. Considered as Leopold proposed it—as a complex normative goal rather than as a scientific description—land health is not fairly criticized on the ground that it is bad science.
Just as the bad-science label is too quickly deployed, so, too, there is a tendency to accuse defenders of natural areas and wildness of committing a logical fallacy when they assert that we ought to preserve nature, perhaps with as little change as possible. The alleged fallacy is that these nature advocates are wrongfully jumping from the “is” of nature to the “ought” of conservation policy. Preservationists, that is, are wrongfully assuming that just because nature works in some particular way, we ought to value that as inviolable and unalterable.17
This is indeed a mistake in reasoning. But whether advocates of wild nature are guilty of the fallacy is by no means clear. It is, to be sure, not reasonable simply to point to unaltered or barely altered nature and use it as a land-use benchmark. Things are not that easy. We cannot designate a particular landscape or natural condition as a normative land-use standard unless we have first decided that it qualifies as, or would help promote, good land use overall. On the other hand—and here we see why nature advocates have perhaps not committed this fallacy of which they stand accused—it is entirely proper to use a given natural landscape as a benchmark for land management after we have done this evaluative work. Once we have defined the “ought” of good land use, carefully considering the many land-use factors, then we might legitimately point to a particular landscape or natural place and label it “good.” This could happen for one or more of the various reasons already mentioned. The landscape or natural condition that we point to could have intrinsic value that we want to protect. It could be worth protecting to keep it intact for future generations or to fulfill religious obligations. It could be valuable, most of all, because of the many ways it promotes human utility.
A given landscape, occupied or unoccupied, can in fact qualify as an exemplar of good land use. Indeed, there is perhaps no more vivid way to show good land use than to find or create examples of it for people to experience.
The frustration of a good many conservationists over the cause’s lack of overall direction has led to suggestions about the movement’s future course. Two ideas in particular (or groups of ideas, since they take variant forms) have been put forward with regularity. They are prominent enough to be taken seriously, and we can do that by judging them in light of the land-use factors outlined above. If one or the other suggestion rates well as a normative goal, we might then take the next step and ask more practical questions about it. Can the proposed goal be presented in the public arena in a comprehensible manner, given our shallow methods of public discourse? And does it hold the potential to move the soul as well as the mind?
Conserving biological diversity. One prominent idea has been to center conservation on the reestablishment of North America’s native fauna and flora, with all species, optimally, reinhabiting something like the ranges they occupied before European settlement began in earnest. This goal is sometimes talked about simply as promoting biodiversity, with the express or implicit clarification that it means biodiversity native to the continent circa 1600. Sometimes the goal is aimed more narrowly at protecting rare species, on the basis that such species are the ones most in need of care. Yet another variant of this goal is to focus on constellations of species, organized as biotic communities. The tendency again is to dwell on communities and species that are most at risk.
One vivid form of this biological goal is the call to restore big predators and other large mammals. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman has pushed the idea prominently, both in the practical work of the Wildlands Project and in his new conservation think tank, the Rewilding Institute.18 Many conservation biologists endorse a similar focus on predators. Their point is not necessarily that predators are more valuable intrinsically than other species; rather, landscapes that have room for big predators are likely to be able to accommodate lots of other species too. Predators help keep prey species from becoming pests and degrading landscapes. When we give big predators the habitat they need, we address a number of other conservation challenges at the same time. Landscapes with big predators are enjoyable places for people to live.
How might we evaluate this idea as an overall conservation goal? To begin with, biodiversity conservation is a goal framed expressly in nonhuman terms. It is the classic statement of the much-maligned idea that conservation is about nature, not about people, and that nature needs protecting above all from human change. This is a troubling implication, and it is particularly costly when used in political debates. The goal leaves conservation open to easy criticism by its opponents, which has not been slow in coming. The goal also fosters confusion among conservationists themselves, who can easily forget, or fail to see, why biodiversity is being conserved.
As to the reasons for biodiversity conservation, few people have taken the time to work out a full answer.19 And a full answer, publicly articulated, is needed if the goal is to be used broadly. An outline of a full answer would likely go something like this: Biodiversity ought to be conserved for quite a list of reasons. Most obvious are the ethical ones, having to do with intrinsic value and duties to future generations. Less obvious but more weighty are the ways that protecting biodiversity promotes human utility, broadly defined. To protect biodiversity is necessarily to protect a wide range of ecological processes and functions. It is to keep waterways clean and reasonably natural in flow, for instance, and to keep soil mostly in place. When these ecological functions are protected and a rather full array of native species do thrive in a given place, then the landscape is more likely to be a good for humans, too. Biodiversity protection, that is, can be used as a placeholder or a management parameter to keep conservation aimed so that it succeeds in generating a suite of human benefits. To keep all the parts is also a good precautionary measure, thus rating high in the third category of land-use factors.
One problem with biodiversity protection used this way is that most people have real trouble tracing its links to human welfare. It is simply not obvious that when we promote wild species we benefit people at the same time. The links are present, of course. But the connections for most people are too indirect and too easily challenged. Why be so indirect? If biodiversity promotes healthy lands, then why not talk about the healthy lands directly? And if healthy lands in turn are important because they supply good benefits for people, why not talk more openly about these human advantages?
The big problem with focusing on biodiversity, then, is this: it forces people to fill in the gaps left by unarticulated reasoning. It forces users on their own to connect biodiversity to the land’s functioning, and then to connect the land’s functioning to human welfare and to such matters as ethical living and the wisdom of precaution. To use biodiversity as a freestanding goal is to expect ordinary people to learn and appreciate the many ways that biodiversity can help them. Some people gravitate toward the goal without much thought. For more dubious audiences the goal is a demanding one intellectually. A person needs to think deeply about how biodiversity conservation can promote sound overall land use. When a person does not take time to do that, or when the intellectual steps and connections are just not seen, then biodiversity looks far less appealing as a prime goal. It becomes easy to agree that biodiversity advocates care only about wildlife, not about people. The misanthropy label can stick.
Another main problem with biodiversity conservation as a goal is that it leaves open the question of spatial scale. Do we merely want all wild species to exist somewhere, or do want them to return to all the places they once inhabited? The two answers are quite different. Neither charts a very sensible path.
If our goal is simply to keep species from becoming extinct, then we could successfully achieve it and still suffer massive declines in our natural landscapes. We could create biodiversity reserves or zoos, even as biodiversity continues to decrease in all the human-occupied places. Defined in this way, biodiversity protection would do little to sustain the places where people live.
If we choose the other option, pushing to reestablish wild species everywhere, we encounter equally severe problems. To adopt this more ambitious approach to biodiversity is essentially to embrace a wilderness model of conservation policy. We can restore all species to their pre-European settlement ranges only if we sharply reduce human numbers and dramatically change our ways of living. For conservationists, this proposal would be politically fatal. It suggests—indeed, it verily trumpets—that conservationists prefer to have as few people as possible on the land. The political backlash would be severe. The wilderness model is also problematic for another reason. When wilderness is the goal, we have no solid basis for deciding which human alterations are acceptable and which are not. All human changes are degrading, differing only in degree. When all change is bad, how do we compromise?
Land is well used when it satisfies a wide range of human needs. In the wilderness vision of conservation, those needs are not being met. Wilderness is thus not an example of good land use, all things considered. It is merely a component or fragment of good land use; merely a piece (albeit a critical one) of a larger landscape where people live and meet their basic needs.
Presumably, the rationale for using a wilderness-type conservation goal is because we do not really expect ever to achieve it. Trade-offs will be made. Other groups will look after the human-utility considerations, while conservationists stand up for the wild things. Rather than promote an integrated vision of humans in nature, conservationists could maintain a narrow, specialty focus in their advocacy—on wild nature. Conservationists can defend wildness; other people can look after more immediate human concerns. Things will then get sorted out in the crucibles of public sentiment and public policy making.
This line of reasoning is plausible enough, but the costs of it are high—too high. When biodiversity is the banner cause—and especially when the aim is to restore all species to their native ranges—conservation is wide open to all of the now-familiar critiques: it is elitist, misanthropic, impractical, and so on. More than that, biodiversity provides precious little guidance for conservation activists themselves in determining which land alterations are worse than others. It simply makes little sense to judge competing land uses based solely on their effects on wild species. Too many relevant factors are left out. Biodiversity concerns need to be subsumed into something larger. They need to be part of a more encompassing conservation goal that includes the full range of land-use factors.
Ecological restoration. A second goal being pushed today to bring focus to conservation efforts is the call to engage in ecological restoration. Here the work of William Jordan stands out, particularly his recent synthesis and call to arms, The Sunflower Forest.20 Restoration is an effort to heal land in natural terms. It is a plan to undo much of the change that humans have wrought so that lands more closely resemble their former conditions.
Some restorationists hope to return lands as much as possible to the conditions they were in before European settlers arrived. Others see that goal as impossible, preferring instead a less ambitious version. They call for renaturalizing a landscape, or revitalizing it, using locally wild species when possible but without attempting an exact match to any historical era. One reason why an exact match is impossible is because nature changes on its own. Thus, to return land to its “natural” condition we cannot simply mimic its condition circa 1600, even if that were possible. Even without humans around (and they were around in 1600), the land would have changed. Restoration’s target is inevitably in motion.
In Jordan’s view, restoration is a particularly attractive conservation ethic because the work that it requires, when done locally by local people, provides good opportunities to get people out on the land. It allows local people to interact, to work together, to learn about the land, to help heal it, and, one hopes, to gain a deep-seated respect and love for it. For Jordan, this last benefit is just as important as the practical work to heal the land. Long-term conservation requires a citizenry that values healthy, natural lands. Restoration ecology, therefore, can work on two levels at once: healing lands and promoting a culture of conservation.21
What, then, should we make of ecological restoration as a goal? How does it rate? When we start probing restoration, we find that it shares many of the defects of biodiversity and big-predator conservation. Explicit in the ethic of restoration is the belief that human-wrought change is bad, and the less there is of it the better. The charge of misanthropy, therefore, is just as strong here. Even the language of restoration is rather troubling: to restore is to undo, which is to say to reverse all the bad things that people have done to land. If a particular human land use is plainly a bad one, the message can make good sense. But what if a community is turning an ordinary wheat field back into a prairie? What is the message then? That wheat fields are bad? That agricultural land uses are bad? That people inevitably degrade land, even when they grow crops to eat?
As in the case of biodiversity, ecological restoration standing alone shows too little awareness of human needs. It supplies no basis for judging the merits of land-use trade-offs. A more mild form of restoration would seek to keep lands as natural as possible when they are not being intensively used by people. That idea is plainly worthy. But what does mild restoration really accomplish? Does it achieve much ecologically when it merely involves small tracts here and there? And are restorationists doing any more than seizing the leftover scraps of land after the bigger land-use players have fed at the banquet?
When used as an overall conservation ideal, restoration is problematic because it is an exclusive land use, or nearly so. Restored areas provide few or no places where people can live and grow food. People visit restored tracts but do not stay. If restored places do contribute to human welfare other than for recreation, it is because they promote the ecological well-being of their surrounding landscapes. Yet, the language of restoration has no good way to talk about these larger landscapes and about the ecological connections between restored places and nonrestored places.22 Only indirectly and in poorly explained ways is restoration linked to the functioning of human-occupied lands.23
These two broad approaches, biodiversity protection and natural-area restoration, are attractive because they appeal to the hearts and souls of many people (and, of course, because they do involve important work). And therein lies the key to their popularity. Compared with sustainability they are positively enlivening, particularly the work of reviving big fauna. But their grave defects remain. In the end, both goals tend to drag conservation down when they are promoted as freestanding goals. Both goals are open to the charge of favoring nature over people. Neither supplies much guidance for the hardest work of conservation. Neither, moreover, is particularly useful in responding to the cultural criticisms that conservation faces about liberty, private property, equality, and the like.
When Aldo Leopold wrote about conservation in his “Farmer as a Conservationist,” he brought matters down to the level of the individual landowner and phrased them colloquially. Conservation came about when land did well by its owner and when the owner did well by his land. In this much-quoted phrase and others like it, Leopold linked conservation to the satisfaction of human needs—feeding the farm family and providing shelter and heat. At the same time, the owner was expected to maintain the land’s ecological health, its beauty, and, if at all feasible, its rare species.
When Leopold talked about conservation being good for the land he principally had in mind lands that humans had already degraded. Yet even lands put to ordinary use could gain in ecological health and beauty. Human use could make them more fertile, productive, and biologically diverse. When conservation is understood this way, the human actor plays a more honorable, beneficial role. Restoration-style conservation does entail making lands better, with people as the agents of change. But the end point of restoration typically is to heal lands and then set them aside. They become places that people might visit, but not places for them to live. What Leopold had in mind was quite different and more ambitious. He was not out to restore entire biological communities that had no people in them. He sought to promote the health and beauty of landscapes where people lived and worked.
The conservation movement needs a message that shows people as positive agents of improvement, not merely sources of degradation. And it needs a benchmark for good land use, plainly constructed in such a way that human needs are taken seriously and satisfied insofar as possible, not shunted to the side for others to worry about. To ignore human needs and merely champion nature is to erect a policy framework in which conservation is opposed to humans. And to a large extent, this is where we are today. When conservation cares only for nature while other social entities look out for people, conflict is inevitable. The tradeoffs begin. Yet it is far from clear that in the United States trade-offs really are needed. It is far from clear that to feed and clothe ourselves we really need to relinquish our felt ethical obligations toward nature or to diminish the land’s long-term fertility. No doubt conservation does clash with profligate living and with unbridled individual liberty. But it brings many good things as well.
To succeed in a serious way, conservation needs to offer an alluring vision of what life could be like if people embraced conservation ideas. It needs to offer an entire package, just as Leopold did in the single-farm setting in his “Farmer as a Conservationist.” With his vision of the corn-belt farm years into the future, Leopold responded to the desire of his farm audience to witness, on the ground, what his conservation message was all about. Conservationists today need to follow this example, coming up with more of them, adapting them to contemporary scenes, extending them to suburbs and cities, and otherwise talking about the good things that conservation can bring. Conservation is not just about living responsibly. It is about health, beauty, strong communities, vibrant life, and ways of living that yield deep satisfaction.