The foregoing chapters, expressly and by implication, have patched together a catalogue of work tasks that await the conservation movement’s attention. The list is rather long, much of it dealing with the knotty challenge of fostering a nature-respecting culture. Indeed, one reason why the conservation movement today is so fragmented is precisely because the job list is so long. Busy working on the specific pieces, few conservationists give thought to the whole and thus to the matter of priorities.1
Can we sensibly pare down this working list? Can we identify the overriding conservation tasks, especially the ones that require concerted action if conservation writ large is to prosper?
It is unlikely that we shall ever see an end to the need for scientific research into how land functions and how human activities affect nature’s systems. Also never-ending is the need to counter conservation’s critics, especially the confused and confusing rhetoric that comes packaged in economic, libertarian, and technocratic jargon. Then, too, conservation is possible only when democracy functions effectively, and democracy, we know too well, is susceptible to many ailments. Whenever big money rules the political roost, conservation flounders. Campaign-finance reform is essential, and so is the revitalization of senses of citizenship and true citizen rule.
Without discounting the importance of such work, it is nonetheless possible to highlight six particular tasks that rise above the rest in their overall importance and in the need for orchestrated action to implement them. Together they supply an intellectual agenda for the cause of land conservation.
An overall goal. Agenda item number one, already flagged, is the movement’s need to clarify its goal, its overall vision of harmoniously living on the land. The goal needs to be one that plainly promotes good land use, broadly defined.2 It needs to portray people as having a rightful place on the land, not as aliens. And it needs to define success so that it includes human flourishing as well as ecologically healthy lands. For the goal to work, the movement as a whole, or a sizeable part of it, will need to employ it regularly in rhetoric and action. A goal that lacks widespread support is unlikely to reorient public thinking about the cause.
An updated version of Aldo Leopold’s goal, land health, is a likely candidate and deserves consideration. Ecosystem health, a variant, has its own proponents and also deserves a look.3 The latter term borrows a word from the realm of science, thereby linking the goal to ecology. But the word ecosystem is not popularly known and it arrives with awkward baggage. Many scientists deny that ecosystems really exist as places, given the difficulty of deciding where one ecosystem ends and the next begins.4 Indeed, an ecosystem is better defined as a set of ecological relationships rather than as a distinct physical place. Given this technical problem, it seems wise to stay away from the term. Leopold’s preferred term, land, is a familiar, nontechnical word and is not weakened by any scientific disputes. The difficulty with this term is that it works well only if, like Leopold, we give the term a broad definition, so that it encompasses waters, plants, animals, and people, as well as rocks and soils. It would take a deliberate, concerted effort by conservationists to broaden the term’s meaning in this way. Still, we already speak of our “homeland” and of being the “land of the free”—uses of the term that are not dissimilar. With enough work, the broader definition could take hold.
As for the term health, it conveys positive connotations. It also escapes the problems of being a technical, elitist word. Indeed, so positive are the word’s connotations that it is hard to imagine anyone arguing against it. President G. W. Bush saw rhetorical value in the phrase forest health when pushing his plan to accelerate harvesting western timber. The conservation movement might take his cue. Yes, we want healthy forests, along with healthy farmlands and healthy suburbs. So what would it mean for a particular landscape to be truly healthy, and how can we promote it? They are good questions to ask.
One alleged problem with land health as a goal is that the term is scientifically inaccurate. Health, some observers claim, is an attribute only of an individual organism.5 Land can be healthy only if it is so tightly integrated as to constitute an organism. The scientific evidence, though, shows otherwise, that lands are more dynamic and their composition more fluid. A shifting web of life cannot really be healthy.
The flaw in this complaint is that it defines health too narrowly. In common speech health is used more broadly than that, as in “community health” and “health of the economy.” Health denotes a state of affairs that is flourishing and properly functioning, free of disease or serious defect. To speak of healthy land is thus an accurate usage of the term.
A more substantial challenge to land health is the difficulty of grounding the term in science and sound policy. When used as a normative ideal, land health goes beyond science to take into account a range of human interests. Moreover, people are part of the land, which means lands can be fully healthy only when they satisfy human needs. Leopold talked about wilderness areas as examples of healthy land, and they are, in the sense that they flourish ecologically. But wilderness areas lack people, and thus the health of them does not include the notion of human needs. More broadly useful are Leopold’s other examples of healthy lands—the long-used pastoral landscapes that people have tended in ways that satisfied Leopold’s basic definition. These landscapes did include people.6
Before unveiling land health as a preeminent goal, the conservation cause would need to do its scientific homework. It must draw together what is known about the land’s functioning and distill its key ecological elements. Deliberately and thoughtfully it needs to synthesize what ecologists know about the land and then transform that synthesis into a vision of people living on the land. Land health should be based on good ecological science, but needs to go well beyond that to become a fully formed vision of harmonious life. Once formulated, a sound goal could provide guidance for making decisions about individual land parcels, without dictating precise uses. It could also provide guidelines for mixing land uses at larger spatial scales.
A variant on land health is the idea of ecological integrity, which ecologists have crafted as a way to describe intact natural communities, ones that retain their natural composition and key ways of functioning.7 As a conservation goal, however, ecological integrity has defects, including those that plague biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration. As scientists use the term, ecological integrity describes a natural community that has few or no people in it. The needs of humans play no role in the term’s definition, and human changes to the land are at best neutral. This hostility to humans is strongest when ecological integrity is measured at small spatial scales. Consider a thousand-acre wheat field, so crucial to feeding people. Because the field will lack the full range of native species, plant and animal, it will lack integrity. Yet, it makes little sense to condemn the wheat field as bad land use without considering the larger context. Humans simply cannot dwell on lands without diminishing their integrity in this pure sense. An additional, more technical problem is that ecological integrity was developed to aid in the narrow, descriptive work of science and is being proposed to fill a much different, normative role.
Too much conservation work is now performed without adequate thought about how it all fits together. Collectively, the conservation cause has little or nothing in the way of an overall goal. Tract-by-tract preservation work too often unfolds with little concern about larger ecological landscapes. Specific policies are promoted with hardly any regard for how the work of one group relates to the work of another. This needs to change. Without coherence and cohesion, the conservation cause will continue to flounder, particularly when addressing urban sprawl, habitat fragmentation, and other landscape-scale problems.
A vision of private land ownership. What should it mean for a person to own land and other parts of nature (water flows, mines, animals)? What legal rights should an owner possess, particularly to act in ways that frustrate sound conservation? With 60 percent of the nation in private hands, few issues are more important.8
Questions about private ownership form the core of perhaps the greatest land conservation challenge of our age: how to get the private landowner to use land conservatively, while treating taxpayers fairly and while sustaining the core economic and civic functions that private property so effectively provides.
Over the years, conservationists have used a variety of tools to push, encourage, cajole, or enjoin landowners to act in ways more aligned with conservation. Lately, the movement has become comfortable with the idea of paying landowners money, with little recognition of the dangers of doing so. This solution can take the form of annual payments under government programs. Money is also paid under longer-term programs that involve the purchase of conservation easements or development rights. Rarely do discussions about payment programs mention their unfairness to taxpayers, for whom conservation becomes, at the personal level, involuntary. (When private donations are used the payments are voluntary but still unfair given the gross mismatch of costs and benefits; would it be fair to expect volunteers to fund public schools or national defense?) There is also little express attention given to the effects that payments have on landowners who are conserving without getting paid (the only truly voluntary conservation) and on landowners who would conserve voluntarily did they not see neighbors taking money. When payment becomes the norm, it seems foolish for a person to conserve without getting paid.
The root of the problem is this: payment programs tell landowners, loud and clear, that conservation is a voluntary activity, not an expectation of ownership. They keep the obligations of ownership low while calling into question the legitimacy of regulatory programs that force landowners to conserve without getting paid. If landowners in one county get paid to refrain from destructive practices, why should landowners in the next be forced to do it for free? Where is the fairness in that?
The whole matter of private ownership and private lands conservation is a complex one, more so than conservationists have acknowledged. A coherent platform is needed, one that addresses the full range of issues. What can we reasonably expect of landowners? When would incentive payments be fair, to owners and taxpayers, and when is regulation more appropriate? Both tools presumably have roles to play, but at the moment they are being used haphazardly.
A coherent use of these tools should build upon a thoughtful inquiry into the legal rights that landowners ought to possess. What rights should be theirs, and what duties should they bear to act in ways consistent with the common good? When the law defines landowner rights, should nature play a bigger role, in the sense that an owner’s rights vary from parcel to parcel based on differing soils, slopes, drainage, vegetation, climate, and animal life? The answers are indispensable. At the moment, though, the only people asking the questions are opponents of conservation. And their answers are predictable: landowners should have the right pretty much to do as they please, with nature irrelevant, and when conservation is needed the public should pay for it.
Looming on the horizon is the whole matter of how extensive landowner development rights should be.9 As much as other Americans, conservationists assume that landowners have the inherent right to develop. They therefore avoid the issue. That silence is a huge mistake, the product of intellectual laziness, institutional fragmentation, and a simple lack of courage. A growing number of land-use laws already curtail the right to develop—laws protecting wetlands and floodplains, for instance. One day we may awaken and realize that private property is a product of law and that property laws, like all other laws, are subject to legislative change. There is no constitutional barrier to a massive redefinition of landowner rights.
The right to develop could be pruned severely in ways that treat landowners fairly and have no particularly negative effect on the economy. The United States could do what Great Britain did in 1947 (and what other countries have also done)—transform the “right” to develop into more of a privilege. The idea may seem unreasonable, but that is only because we have not studied private property as an institution. We have failed to see that private property is not an individual right first and foremost but rather a tool used by society to foster the common good. We have also neglected to think clearly about the market value of development rights. When vacant land rises in value due to its development potential, the enhanced value is not attributable to anything the landowner has done. The local community or society at large is responsible for the higher value.10 The landowner is merely the lucky beneficiary—or at least this is so under the present system, which allows the landowner to capture this communally created asset. But why should the value belong to the landowner? Why should a landowner be able to sit back and watch the value of his or her land go from $500 per acre to $5,000 or $25,000 per acre and then step forward and claim that profit? That is the system as we understand it. Having considered nothing else, we assume that ownership inherently entails this right. But it does not, and it need not.
In a recent essay, law professor Joseph Sax has usefully distilled our essential dilemma on this issue of development rights.11 Good land use will require many acres to remain free of substantial development. But which acres will be left undeveloped, when the possibilities are often many? If we really wanted to treat all landowners fairly, we would decide in advance the level of permissible development in a landscape and then calibrate the development rules accordingly. We would arrange things legally so that all landowners shared pro rata in the benefits of permissible development while development occurred only in places where it was appropriate, ecologically and socially. But we do not do that, of course. And we do not do it because we are reluctant to plan ahead. We are reluctant to tell landowners they may not develop until the problems being caused are readily apparent. By that point, however, substantial development has taken place (often in the wrong locations), and the regulatory brakes have to be applied hard, halting nearly all further development. Landowners who have already developed enjoy the benefits; landowners who waited are now subject to severe constraints. It is an unfair system, to be sure. Yet it exists, Sax tells us, mostly because prodevelopment interests are in charge of the system. Progrowth interests resist forward-looking land planning. By doing so, they keep in place an approach to land-use controls that inevitably produces unfairness. As for the resulting claims of unfairness, Sax observes, it is hard to be sympathetic when the people doing the complaining have largely brought the problem on themselves.
When the conservation movement does finally get serious about property rights, it should pay special attention to the public’s ownership interests in two key parts of nature: water and wildlife.12 For generations, courts have made clear that the public possesses expansive legal rights in these elements. Individual owners, in the case of water, possess merely use rights, which are subject to the public’s superior legal title and which can be exercised only in ways that are socially reasonable and beneficial. Wild animals are similarly owned by the public, even when they are found on private land. Were our legal system to take seriously these public rights, protecting them securely, our understanding of private land rights would change dramatically. We would recognize that the public has legitimate interests in the ways all private property is used, particularly property rights in nature. Early in our country’s history, courts routinely proclaimed that private property rights were subject to legal restraint when they clashed with the public’s rights.13 Such reasoning is unfamiliar to us these days. We assume that only individuals have rights. But the legal record says otherwise, particularly in the case of water, waterways, and wildlife. The conservation cause needs to revive and deploy these legal ideas.
Crafting mechanisms for collective action. Many conservation problems can be addressed only by means of remedial actions taken at a level well above the individual citizen or landowner. Local community action (zoning and public health rules, for instance) is sometimes wide-ranging enough to get the job done. Increasingly, though, action on state, national, or even international scales is necessary because the problems are so broad. Nature is intricately interconnected, and market forces operate without borders. If some conservation problems arise because of a poorly managed natural commons—the tragedy of the commons, made famous by Garrett Hardin—just as many are the result of the opposite situation: because landscapes have been carved into pieces too small for the owner or manager to use responsibly. This is the so-called tyranny of small decisions, or tragedy of fragmentation.14 No one acting alone can sensibly protect a river, clean up mercury-laced air, or preserve enough wildlife habitat to keep a mobile species alive. Without good methods of collective action—and strong senses of citizenship and democracy to undergird such action—conservation will remain unable to remedy large-scale problems.
The need for collective action has hardly gone unnoticed. Ecosystem management, another vague conservation concept, is based on the recognition that parcel-by-parcel work is inadequate.15 The idea of community-based conservation is founded on the same wisdom.16 Step by step, we are recognizing the need to craft mechanisms for making land-use decisions at levels well above the individual parcel. Sound mechanisms would likely be organized around natural features such as catchment basins rather than along arbitrary political lines. Yet, this means creating whole new types of government intervention—at a time when antigovernment sentiment runs high. Resistance will no doubt remain strong.
The people most affected by new conservation rules—primarily landowners—would of course need to be involved in any governance scheme. But they cannot be left to do the work alone. Landowners are economically interested parties. Collectively they have accumulated a rather disturbing record of ignoring people downstream and downwind while degrading the integrity of ecological systems. The frequent assertion that landowners know best—and have the most at stake—is only partly true. And the truth that it contains is often offset by the tendency of landowners to construct their own versions of “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
Conservation requires coordinated action. This is true despite the laments of moralists that we are too quick to blame the system for our problems instead of shouldering responsibility ourselves. In the case of land use, the system does deserve much of the blame. Good land use would be far easier to achieve if our systems were reformed. Indeed, without such reformation, many conservation projects are nearly—or even completely—impossible. The predicament is easy to explain in economic terms. The individual who practices conservation generates benefits that flow to the community, while the costs all accrue to the individual. There is thus a mismatch of costs and benefits, which can be remedied only when everyone works together. Even without this economic theory, though, it is quite evident that many landowners misuse lands because the market pressures them to do so or because good land use is impractical or futile. If I refrain from building a house in the green space around the city, thereby showing my support for open space, what good have I done when other people build instead? Either everyone restrains or nothing is accomplished.
Sound decision-making processes are not easy to erect. Making the challenge harder are the well-fueled suspicions people have about government and the fact that governments are increasingly dominated by money. The conservation cause has no choice but to attack the problem head-on, doing all it can to revive true democracy and responsible citizenship. In a recent work, The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, David Orr presents that situation as clearly and forcefully as anyone could: “There are some things that can be done only by an alert citizenry acting with responsible and democratically controlled governments. Only governments moved by an ethically robust and organized citizenry can act to ensure the fair distribution of wealth within and between generations. Only governments prodded by their citizens can act to limit risks posed by technology or clean up the mess afterward. Only governments and an environmentally literate public can choose to adopt and enforce standards that move us toward a cradle-to-cradle materials policy.”17 We are afflicted with bad politics, Orr tells us, which is aggravated by faulty senses of patriotism and civic duty. Probusiness interests have exacerbated our condition by labeling government as the enemy of liberty and incompetent to boot. Politically bruised and lethargic, almost drugged by the entertainment industry, we need to awaken as citizens.
The conservation cause needs to use particular force in countering the claim that conservation laws interfere with individual liberty. It is simply not true, all things considered. When government protects our air, our water, our wildlife, our children, it increases our liberties. When we gather together to make rules for our shared landscapes, we exercise one of our most important, positive liberties. When we adopt public policies that provide for future generations, we act upon our ethical ideals, freely embraced.
Arrogance, ignorance, and burdens of proof. Our assessment of good land use has teased out for independent attention the whole matter of ignorance and factual uncertainty. So important is this issue, however, and so deeply does it pervade conservation disputes, that the movement ought to position it in the front rank of high-priority issues. Conservation needs good ways to talk about this ignorance and well-crafted proposals to accommodate it.
Given our vast ignorance about nature, we ought to act cautiously when tampering with it. The idea could hardly be more simple. Look before you leap, the old wisdom had it (though we need to do more than just look). The United States, of course, has a longstanding habit of leaping without looking, or leaping after no more than a quick glance. Even our glances have been made through the distorting lens of hope, ambition, and greed. Still, as scientific knowledge has grown, so, too, has our awareness of how much we do not know. So many and extended are the ecological ripples flowing from even a single act that no person could conceivably trace them. Caution makes sense. Leaving room to correct mistakes makes sense.
Given the legalism of American culture these days, the conservation cause might best address this issue in the same way that lawyers do, in terms of burdens of proof about potential harms. Should those who alter nature be expected to show in advance that they will cause no harm? Or, instead, should critics bear the burden of showing that harm will likely ensue? Aside from who bears the burden, there is the question about what it should be. How much evidence must we have about a potential problem before deciding that remedial action is appropriate? In the normal civil trial, the case is won by the side that presents the greater amount (the preponderance) of the evidence. In criminal trials, we expect prosecutors to do much better than that—to offer proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Various other burden levels exist in the law, both higher and lower.
Within the scientific community there is considerable reluctance to give specific meaning to the idea of proof. Scientists prefer incontrovertible evidence but often settle for less because they must. More to the point, science (to reiterate) is merely a fact-finding and descriptive enterprise. Science as such gives no guidance on what we should do with our scientific data once we have compiled it. Nor can science tell us how much data we should assemble before taking action. When is the evidence about a possible problem sufficient to merit a response? That is a policy question, not a scientific one.
It is hard to know what policy stances would emerge if the conservation cause took time to study this issue carefully. We could decide that caution is variously appropriate, depending upon circumstantial factors. Differing burdens of proof might apply in different settings.
No conservation issue better highlights the confusion here than the various planetary alterations collectively known as global climate change. To the developed world generally, available evidence is more than adequate to demonstrate the existence of a severe problem meriting action. In the United States, however, the debate drones on. It does so not chiefly because scientific opinion is significantly divided, but because the debating parties employ such diverse presumptions about the amount of proof needed to decide that a problem in fact exists. How much evidence do we need before acting on an apparent problem? In dealing with terrorist threats we demand very little and we are willing to use any shreds of data that come our way. What should the corresponding standard be in the case of climate change?
Conservation and social justice. Conservative land use is complexly linked with questions of social justice and fair access to the material substances that support human life. In a world where true justice prevailed, conservation would be easier. Having said that, however, our environmental problems are too urgent to delay action until the distant day when social ills are gone. Conservation cannot wait. In any case, sound conservation work is very likely to improve social justice rather than the reverse. If that is so, then the need for conservation-social justice trade-offs is probably not very great.
The conservation cause urgently needs a coherent platform regarding social justice. That platform should include two components: (1) to address the ways conservation can improve social justice; and (2) to include specific remedial proposals that take effect when conservation measures do actually make social problems worse.
Conservation groups have come under attack for ignoring issues of environmental justice.18 The complaint is accurate insofar as it identifies a gap in the work of many groups. At the same time, it is often unfair in that it fails to recognize why conservation groups have spent their resources as they have. It is not enough for critics to show that social justice is important; they need to demonstrate why efforts to promote it deserve a higher priority than other work that environmental groups are now doing.
National groups have sufficient money to address only a handful of peculiarly local problems, and most environmental justice disputes are local. To residents of a particular neighborhood, success in an environmental dispute can come when a waste dump, toxic emitter, or other undesirable land use is pushed into someone else’s backyard. From a national perspective, this may hardly qualify as success at all. As national groups see things, it is better to use resources to stop the waste generation or pollution at its source. Then the bad land use will go nowhere.
The most acute social justice issue today is the growing inequality in income and wealth that characterizes America. Our tendency has been to address this inequality by growing the economic pie larger rather than changing the “free” market system. For conservation, this grow-the-pie approach is highly troublesome because it plays into the hands of opponents. So long as the nation has tens of millions of poor people, critics can discredit new conservation measures whenever they raise prices for food, transportation, or shelter. These worries about the poor can appear decidedly disingenuous when uttered by conservation opponents who apparently care about the poor only when they provide shields to protect business as usual. Still, the claims have merit. It is not a good outcome when conservation policies make life even harder for poor people.
One response is to point out that market prices are notoriously inaccurate as indicators of true cost. Sticker prices on products are routinely low because they discount the land’s degradation, downplay human health, and ignore the future. A conservation measure that forces producers to consider these costs, thereby raising the sticker price of a commodity, can nonetheless make the overall true costs of producing the commodity go down. But this answer is not enough. When conservation measures do make basic commodities more expensive at the cash register, they need to be accompanied by mechanisms that offset the higher prices.
Ways of achieving this kind of economic equalization are not hard to identify. Higher commodity prices can be joined with changes in government programs (taxation or welfare schemes, for instance) so as to offset the costs for poor people while still providing incentive to conserve. For instance, a dollar-per-gallon gas tax might be accompanied by removing an employee’s Social Security tax on the first $5,000 of earned income, with the gas revenues then added to the Social Security fund. Similar adjustments in other programs could also be made, in ways that are tax neutral and do not undercut conservation gains. In some instances it might be possible for the economic gains that conservation generates to be used directly to counterbalance the losses (for instance, land preservation measures that significantly raise values of surrounding lands; these land-value gains could be captured and turned over to those who suffer losses). In any case, it is not particularly hard to devise tax-neutral ways to offset higher prices for the poor. The hard part is to muster the political will. Many equalization tools would be politically inconceivable today. Still, conservationists would be wise to propose the measures, just to make clear that, if we choose, we can promote conservation without making social problems worse.
The conservation community needs to develop an overall position on this issue. It needs a platform that recognizes justice concerns and explains how we can address them. To a large extent (and this point bears repeating), environmental laws correct defects in market pricing. What the cash register displays as an increase in prices is often better explained as the elimination of an unfair, destructive subsidy—the kind of subsidy that comes when a commodity producer is legally allowed to impose costs on people downwind, downstream, or in the future. To end a subsidy (and a right to pollute is plainly a subsidy) is to improve the market’s functioning.
History and environmental change. When Americans argue about history, it is largely because something vital is at stake. History relates how we got to where we are today as a people. It is the narrative and explanatory tale of our collective successes and failures. Inevitably, history books reflect the eras when they were written and the personal leanings of the authors. True objectivity is not possible. At worst, history can be positively distorted to promote a historian’s personal agenda. A historian who claims that good historical outcomes were caused by particular public policies and historical forces necessarily implies that we ought to continue those policies and forces if we wish to enjoy even more of the good results. In the same way, for a historian to explain why American society has failed in the past is to assert that we ought to reform the cultural elements or public policies that led to our failures.
The conservation cause has paid little attention to history, including the history of conservation efforts themselves. Busy with daily work, it has made little effort to promote sound histories and shows no particular interest in challenging bad ones. And bad ones, alas, abound.
As conservation’s market-oriented critics tell the story, our nation’s environmental progress has had little or nothing to do either with government regulation or with the work of environmental organizations. Progress has come about instead largely through the invisible hand of the market. As the country has gotten wealthier, it has been able to afford a better environment, which is, critics assert, mostly just another commodity or service to be chosen from among the market’s many offerings.19 Also bringing environmental improvement has been the miracle known as private property.20 When nature is put in private hands (it is said), people take care of what they own. As property rights are more precisely defined and as more of nature becomes privately owned, our environmental condition improves even more. An embarrassing fact here, for proponents of this view, is that American businesses often have rather abysmal environmental records when they operate overseas, free of American laws. Not an issue, though, according to conservation’s critics. It merely shows that America is wealthier, and because of our wealth we insist in our country that businesses clean up their acts.
This is an interesting narrative but not at all well supported. To be sure, there is a rough correlation in industrialized and industrializing countries between wealth and environmental condition. But correlation and causation are entirely different matters. Probably a stronger correlation exists between two other factors: environmental conditions in a country and its level of liberal democracy. The United States has had periods of conspicuous income growth when environmental conditions rapidly worsened (the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, to cite two examples).21 Economic growth, it would seem, improves the environment only when the new wealth is used to curtail environmentally degrading practices. But why would businesses spend their wealth that way? Why would individuals do so in their daily lives? It is not enough to say that people in a wealthier country demand healthier, more beautiful surroundings. Some of them do; many of them do not. But even for those who do, how do they make their demands known and how does environmental change come about?
The stories told by conservation’s critics typically display an astonishing confusion of cause and effect. Indeed, to the extent that there is a causal relationship between wealth and environmental improvement, it could just as well work in the opposite direction in the United States today. It is environmental improvement that causes the wealth, not the reverse. Surely there is a causal connection between improvements in sanitation and clean drinking water and increases in worker productivity. When soil is fertile and uncontaminated, it is likely to yield crops of greater nutritional value, thereby improving individual health and worker strength.
The conservation movement ought to be taking on these issues vigorously. It should seek out accurate historical accounts about how we have come to where we are in environmental terms. Sound accounts are likely to note the importance of collective action in public and private spheres.22 Pollution control, surely, has occurred largely because polluters have been forced to cut back by government mandate, which in turn has resulted from citizen action. Those who doubt this fact need only look at where the laws are in effect today and where the pollution still takes place. Pollution goes down when laws mandate it. Pollution largely continues when no law is imposed or no strong social norm is brought to bear. Water pollution illustrates the point. Starting three decades ago, federal pollution law told point-source water polluters to cut back, while it left other pollution sources (polluted runoff from land uses) largely to discretionary programs of the states. The result today: point-source pollution has dramatically declined, while non-point-source pollution continues apace. But even such evidence would seem unneeded. One only needs to study the political arenas and watch polluters and land developers as they fight tooth and nail to avoid curtailing their nature-degrading activities. If market processes alone are leading them to ever-higher levels of environmental responsibility, then why do they resist? If greater wealth automatically leads to healthier land, why do our wetlands, barrier islands, and riparian corridors keep disappearing the more our economy grows? If greater wealth is good for the environment, why do we keep adding species to the endangered list and why do we spend money on deathbed recovery plans? And what about the potent pesticides that were killing birds and other creatures wholesale in the 1950s and 1960s? Plainly, the wealthier we got, the more birds that were killed—until new laws, pushed by citizens, brought about change. Perhaps it is democracy that produces good environmental outcomes, and wealth is important chiefly to the extent that it promotes citizen governance.
In thinking about environmental change, it is unwise to discount the nonlegal tools that have brought about environmental improvement. Laws have not done everything. Social norms and public expectations have played a role. But here, too, the work of conservation organizations is visibly present. If public pressure leads a Ford Motor Company to improve its gas mileage ratings, can we tell the full story without mentioning the conservation groups that raised the issue, day after day, and insisted repeatedly that the company clean up its act? It is simple nonsense to presume that Ford Motor Company acted on its own or that it was merely the market’s invisible hand at work.23
One final story line also deserves attention. Here again, first-class history would help. When homes are flooded, when crops are destroyed by drought, and when shifting sands and sliding hillsides crack foundations, our cultural tendency is to blame nature. Natural disasters, we call them—acts of God. When a river fails to provide enough water to drink, it is apparently the river’s fault, or so our rhetoric presumes.
How different our stories would be if we put the blame where it typically belongs, not on the gusty winds but on the three little pigs that failed to build a sturdy house. When homes are built in a floodplain, the flood damage realistically is caused by the home-builder, not nature. (The homebuilder might properly share blame with landowners upstream, whose drains and levees exacerbated the problem.) When crops wither in semiarid lands, it is mostly the result of a farmer taking a land-use gamble. Concrete foundations have no place on unstable soils. When tilled hillsides wash away in the heavy rain, surely it is the tiller’s fault, not the rainmaker’s.24
These six elements are the lead intellectual challenges that the conservation cause now faces. They are as important, if not more so, than the particular problems now being addressed. Good resolutions of them would aid efforts to deal with the full range of environmental ills.
One missing element remains to be taken up, and that is the desirability of linking the work of conservation to America’s evolving story of itself: to our nation’s explanation of where we have been, where we are heading, and what we are now called to do.
It is a trite complaint that modern culture exalts the individual self and equates the good life with material gratification. The criticism is overdrawn; if everyone were self-indulgent, the conservation cause would have withered. Still, the lament has substance. It provides both a frustration and an opportunity for conservationists looking ahead.
It is a frustration because only the sensitive few really link their personal happiness with a life that sustains good land in an ecological sense. It is an opportunity because far more people yearn to feel that their lives are woven into a narrative larger and more important than themselves. People long for a sense that they are participants in a sweeping, morally charged experiment. New England Puritans and other settlers sensed their participation in a vital religious mission, structured by God and guided by his hand. They were called to align their lives with God’s firm instruction, for their own welfare and the world’s salvation. That sense of mission diminished over time, yet it remains alive among many people today. It wells up in the resurgence of evangelical Christianity and other religious movements.
For a good many Americans, it is essential that the Universe contain or fit within a moral order, one that includes them and situates them, along with other faithful people, in an exalted if demanding position.25 Creationism is one sign of this yearning. So are a number of other fundamentalist religious beliefs. What many critics of the creationist impulse fail to see is that creationism is not chiefly about opposing science. It is about a widely felt discomfort with a view of the world as nothing more than physical substance, devoid of moral value. Is the world meaningless or meaningful in a moral sense? Is it just physical stuff, cleverly arranged, or is there some inherent meaning and value embedded with it? That is the issue on which creationists weigh in so passionately. And it is a fair and legitimate question. Between the two options, which view of things is more likely to produce respect toward nature? Should we view nature as merely atoms, bumping around complexly with no intrinsic value or meaning whatsoever, or should we view it as something more and other than that? Before answering, we might keep in mind that science places humans at the same amoral level as rocks. From the perspective of natural and physical scientists, humans and rocks are just so much physical stuff. The idea that humans possess moral value is entirely a product of human convention. Indeed, the claim that humans possess natural rights has exactly as much scientific support as does the claim that God has guided all evolution. According to environmental historians, science’s purely mechanistic view of the planet has aided and abetted our abuse of it. When nature is just physical stuff, valuable only insofar as we want it to be valuable, degradation becomes easy.
By the early years of the nineteenth century, America’s sense of religious mission had faded considerably. Its decline left room for the emergence of a new sense of national mission, one linked to the nation’s role in promoting liberty and democracy worldwide and to its westward continental expansion. Abraham Lincoln gave this new mission its most eloquent voice.26 The United States, Lincoln told us, was the last, best hope of democracy. It was a claim easy to believe in the mid-nineteenth century, when nearly every European democracy was tumbling under revolt or invasion. America was one of the few democracies still holding on. It was the beckoning home of freedom and opportunity, the place where the world’s poor could begin life anew. It was a grand story that Mr. Lincoln had to tell, and it became grander still as the nation gained in wealth and stature. By the beginning of the next century a reoriented, morally charged United States stood ready to cross an ocean and to shed blood to make the world safe—not for Christian salvation, but for liberty and democracy.
This new national story, though, also began to fray at the edges after a time, despite the punctuated victories over totalitarianism near mid-century. The disappointing aftermath of World War I, the Depression, the scares of the 1950s, the turmoil of the 1960s, Vietnam, and Watergate—these and other events all helped bring it down. Given these setbacks and embarrassments, it became harder to feel that our lives were made meaningful simply because we were Americans and lived in our city on a hill, inexorably guiding the world to a freer, better place.
We find ourselves today, as historian Andrew Delbanco has observed, treading water.27 We await the rise of some new narrative, some new moral order to replace what we have lost. In the meantime, the individual self has gained ascendancy. We labor away mostly to grow our economy and feed the insatiable self. Immediately after the terrorist acts of September 11, President Bush could think of little to say (aside from vows to get tough) other than to encourage Americans to keep shopping. We live smaller lives, Delbanco relates, fearful that we shall die, as we lived, in a morally empty world that took no note of us.28
New narratives, though, do not emerge on a blank slate. They build on the old ones that they replace. They rise up by steps, visibly retaining parts of the old, just as Abraham Lincoln’s narrative made conspicuous use of biblical references and religious adages. An earlier vision of Christian redemption became, through Lincoln, a new vision of America as redeemer nation.
Faded though it is, our sense of national exceptionalism still lives on, modestly strengthened by the Soviet Union’s collapse and by military successes overseas, including crusades to liberate Kuwait and bring democracy to Iraq. When Americans express patriotism, we implicitly assert that we are more and better than citizens of other nations. We Americans do not merely defend ourselves against attack; even trivial nations display patriotism of that garden-variety sort. Our patriotism is different and higher because the United States is different and higher. It is raised up by a noble purpose: to spread freedom, democracy, and economic opportunity around the globe.
Conservation has had its own narratives of national development, negative ones mostly. They have been tales of declension, involving English-speaking settlers who arrived on a beautiful continent, cut the trees, eroded the soils, polluted the waters, and otherwise degraded the fertile land. A less harsh conservation tale about America’s history accepts the propriety of our national enterprise up until industrialism began to take things too far. At that point, sometime around the early twentieth century, perhaps, we shifted from taming the land to abusing it. Our national campaign to settle the land became something else, something more selfish and destructive.
Modern America awaits the emergence of a new moral narrative. A well-composed narrative would draw from the past, with clear reminders of our religious and national senses of purpose. It would attend to our self-understanding as a free people, while displaying memories of frontier days when we labored to carve farms and cities out of the wilderness. A new narrative would look forward more than it looked back, dangling before us a vision of a better future. And it would encourage Americans to do what we have done so well in the past: to serve as model for the rest of the world, a model not of extravagant living (though we have done that) but of justice and morality. It would call us, in short, to continue our exceptional work.
It is hard to imagine an American president standing up and doing for the land what Abraham Lincoln did for the union and for slaves. But it is not out of the question for the conservation community to designate a leader who is looked to for guidance. If the conservation community could collectively address its various intellectual tasks, perhaps it could also elevate one or more public figures, leaders who could attract the public’s attention and who, in interviews and speeches, could introduce new rhetoric and a new national narrative. What if the twenty or fifty or (better still) one hundred largest conservation groups in the country formed a working coalition? What if they chose a statesman-leader, and then used their publicity powers to accentuate what the leader had to say, as part of a larger package of conservation messages?
Whether or not such a leader will emerge, it seems instructive to compose a talk for that leader to give: a talk intended not to inform audiences about specific environmental problems but to help situate conservation within America’s story of itself. A good many Americans might just listen, for there is a thirst for something more worthy than military operations overseas. Among the audiences for such a talk would be conservation groups themselves. They need help in knowing how best to communicate their work. They, too, need help in understanding what conservation is about.
Our nation was founded over two centuries ago as a land of freedom and opportunity, a beacon to the oppressed of the world. Since then, Americans have played a variety of special roles in the history of the world. We were a political anomaly at birth, the only nation that thought it possible or even desirable to give sovereign power to the people, rather than to a king or aristocracy. By our success we showed that the people could handle this power. And not just handle it, but exercise sovereign power more wisely than could any other political form.
We founded our nation on principles of freedom that gave people unprecedented opportunities. We also strived for, and sometimes achieved, extraordinary levels of justice, while fostering an economic system whose prosperity has been the envy of the world. We’ve crossed our borders to help people elsewhere overcome tyrants. And we’ve shed our blood, so that freedom and democracy could grow around the world.
As we’ve done this, though, we’ve been mindful of our blessings. High among them has been the blessing of our fertile, productive land. We can credit our farmers with exceptional aptitude and energy, but they’d be the first to admit that nature plays the bigger role. No sooner had the first English settlers stepped ashore in Virginia and Massachusetts than they paused to give thanks for this unearned natural bonanza. The settlers knew just how fortunate they were to arrive in a land where forests and fertile plains spread beyond the horizon.
The North American continent was occupied by native peoples, of course. And our treatment of them too often brought us shame. Indeed, looking back, we are prone to shake our heads at how long it took to widen our senses of community to include native Indians as full-fledged members. But step-by-step we have done that, or tried to. We have taken seriously the lofty principles with which our nation began.
The American continent was a divinely inspired place for these first European settlers, just as it was morally infused for the native Indians. The land was God’s Creation, so our ancestors said, and so many of us still say today. One of our strongest duties as a people has been to respect that Creation. We stood as a city upon a hill, with the eyes of the world upon us. Would we tend this land with care? Would we form here a more inclusive, morally guided community? Would we be a place where peace, justice, and prosperity could all reside?
As a people we’ve made our mistakes, plenty of them. And we’ve professed commitments to moral standards that we weren’t ready to fulfill. Still, we’ve been mature enough to admit our errors and strong enough to keep striving. When we’ve had to, we’ve made great sacrifices. We’ve tightened our belts and gone without. We’ve shed our blood, lots of it, not just to protect our prosperity but to stand up for our principles. A pioneering, can-do spirit runs in our veins.
Over the generations our population has risen and our technological prowess has expanded, so much so that we’ve found ourselves, many times, pushing nature too hard. We have cut into the land’s principal, and not just lived off the income. We’ve driven away too many wild species, drained too many rivers, and disrupted natural processes that keep the land fertile. The truth is, we’ve been harvesting more than the land produces, year by year. We’ve been drawing down our bank balance with nature. Today we face a new challenge, to find ways to keep the land healthy, to maintain the land’s fertility, diversity, and beauty. And to accomplish this not for one generation but for many.
This new challenge is one that we cannot ignore. It is no less important than any that we have faced in the past. To meet it, we’ll need to adjust our world-leading civilization so that we take better care of the nature around us. The land is our home, this grand Creation. We occupy it together, often close together. As our scientists remind us regularly, nature is an intricate, interconnected web of life. What we do to nature in one place can have ripple effects that show up far away. The health and happiness of one family is linked to the activities of neighbors, both near and far.
The time has come to make our landscapes, our homes, as healthy, beautiful, and pleasing as they can be. This is one of the tasks of our time. We need to elevate the quality and health of our lands and of our lives, not just the quantity of our belongings.
Benjamin Franklin put the point this way to his fellow Revolutionaries: we either hang together, or we shall all hang separately. The Revolutionaries were in it together, and so are we today. The social fabric of our nation forms an interwoven whole. Injustice to one of us is injustice to our collective whole. So, too, with our lands, our neighborhoods, our communities, and our wild places. Ill health in one place means ill health in the home that we all inhabit.
When the world looks to the United States today—holding us to high standards, as it has and should—a number of questions are being implicitly asked. Having achieved this great prosperity, can America now maintain it? Can we live prosperously without degrading our soils, without fouling our waters and air, and without diminishing our vast biological riches? Can this world-leading nation feed, clothe, and shelter its people, all of them, without slowly degrading the fertile continent that it occupies?
Good questions, all of them. Yet, if we remember where we have been as a nation and what our predecessors accomplished over the past four centuries, the answers should be plain. Yes, we can rise to these challenges. We can indeed show the world that prosperity and healthy lands can go hand in hand. We can indeed demonstrate that freedom, private property, and individual initiative can all be sustained, even as we work collectively to make our homeland healthier, more beautiful, and more supportive of good life. We share our land with one another and with an incredibly diverse array of other life forms. In an important sense we do not own it. We are merely stewards and tenants of it. We shoulder a duty to care for nature for the benefit of our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
What I’ve been talking about is a new kind of progress, a new, broader vision of community, one that includes all life and future generations. America at its founding represented what was then a new kind of progress in terms of individual human rights. Since then, we’ve revised and expanded our definition of progress, generation by generation. We’ve also expanded the boundaries of our communities, reaching out and drawing in new members, peoples of different colors and backgrounds and languages. What I am talking about now is a continuation of this world-respected work. I am talking about changing our ways of living on the land—our farms, forests, pastures, towns, deserts, mountains, suburbs, cities—so that we respect the fundamental, creative forces of nature.
Some among us would ask: Haven’t we done enough already? We’ve made progress in addressing our environmental ills. Can’t we declare victory and get on with the business of living?
Our answer, I believe, should be this. Yes, we have made progress, but not enough. We’ve had successes, but there’s more to be done. We need to press on, so that our air everywhere is clean and our waters are clear and free flowing. We need to do more to protect our wildlife and biological communities. Wild creatures are not just sources of joy and instruction. They help sustain the land’s health and productivity, in ways that we are still trying to unravel. Our major rivers aren’t just highways for ships and barges, they are vital parts of nature’s fabric, essential to the health of landscapes. And then we have the soil itself, the foundation of all life on land, as farmers and gardeners well know. Even small soil losses and invisible forms of degradation can mount up over time. We need to gain our daily bread in ways that make the soil better, not worse.
Some among us again would ask: What about our individual liberties, what about our private property rights? Won’t these be at risk if we really get serious about promoting land health?
If we do our work right, they will not be at risk. If we each do our fair share, if we each refrain from causing harm, the burdens will be spread among us evenly, right along with the many, many benefits that come from healthy, beautiful lands. Freedom doesn’t mean license or profligate living, and it never has. We know that. Freedom in America has meant a responsible kind of individualism. Land ownership, too, is about responsibility. It doesn’t include the right to degrade the Earth or to drag down the health and beauty of surrounding lands. Responsibility is the key. Being a good citizen, a good community member, a responsible landowner is the key. We’ve known this for a long time.
What lies ahead for us, then, is a chance to continue our successful settlement of this continent, by making our homes, farms, forests, and cities all more healthy and habitable. We need to do this not just for future generations but, frankly, for ourselves, so that our own lives can be better. We don’t need to look to outer space for challenges. We have them right here at home. They are in the forests and mountains, on the plains and deserts, in our suburbs and cities, and along the rivers and shores that make up our shared inheritance. And we are poised to meet them.