Participants in today’s clashes regarding land conservation—using land in its broadest ecological sense, to include not just soils but wildlife, water, ecological processes, and humans—tend to approach the battlegrounds from two quite different directions. Those who promote conservation typically respond to some inner longing to respect nature’s processes. They care about living creatures, often passionately, and want nature’s beauties and life forms near at hand. On their side, critics of conservation are prone to approach the issue from a felt need to protect individual liberty. They value the free exercise of entrepreneurial energies and prefer government to remain at bay. What neither side seems to deem necessary, as they debate and spar, is to consider conservation as a serious body of cultural and political thought.
Conservation advocates largely view this task as unnecessary. For them, a love of nature and the urge to conserve it provide sufficient motive and guidance for their work. Persistent critics of conservation avoid the task because it is unhelpful to them—and because, practically speaking, they can get away with it. It is easier to criticize conservation’s ill-considered fringe than it is to seek out and evaluate its intellectual core. Intellectual atrophy has been one result of this inattention. Fragmented and ineffective conservation has been another.
The conservation cause is under siege today in large part because the public has become confused about what it is trying to do and at what cost. As critics see it, land conservation is about protecting nature from people. It is driven by a wilderness ideal in which humans inevitably bring about degradation. Worse than that, according to critics, laws restricting development trample on private property rights, constrain liberty, and inhibit economic growth. Given these complaints— which are plausible enough on the surface—is it any wonder that conservation efforts have stalled?
A century ago, conservation’s main stem had a clear, publicly understood goal. It was to promote the efficient, productive management of natural resources—those parts of nature that were directly useful to people.1 That practical work has now largely passed to organized commercial interests such as Monsanto, Con-Agra, and Weyerhauser Paper. When conservationists today talk about resource flows it’s usually about the harms caused by their production and about such resource uses as recreation and wildlife protection, not about food, heat, and shelter. Conservation, so it appears, is about optional amenities rather than bread-and-butter basics. Laws protecting air and drinking water address essential human needs. But what about measures that preserve wildlands, free-flowing rivers, and rare species? How do they help people? How do they align with the values and dreams of ordinary Americans?
The conservation cause, I believe, is stymied less because of its disciplined opponents than because it lacks good overall direction. And it lacks this because it isn’t taking time to stand back—from its work, from society, and from the sweep of history—to think deeply about the larger questions. It is failing to attend seriously to its intellectual and ethical foundations and to ensure that its work and rhetoric build upon them. It isn’t considering how land conservation fits into America’s self-image as the land of opportunity and progress. If the conservation cause doesn’t take its own ideas seriously—and by many measures it doesn’t— why should anyone else? Good intentions, good values, even high energy are not enough in themselves.2
When taken seriously, as a vital strand of political and cultural thought, conservation poses a forceful challenge to elements of modern culture accepted as fundamental. It questions not merely specific land-use practices but our entrenched ways of seeing and valuing nature. It challenges our excessive faith in science and the capitalist market along with our exaggerated emphasis on individual autonomy. By situating humans within a value-infused natural order, the cause overlaps with religious traditions that honor the Creation. By emphasizing connections among people and between people and land, it promotes a community-centered perspective of life that contrasts with social views exalting individualism. In its call for citizens to broaden their moral and aesthetic sensibilities, it fits within America’s long heritage of progressive social reform.
Conservation’s intellectual core and intellectual leaders draw little attention save in the pages of academic journals. The public scarcely hears of them or from them. Among the thoughtful leaders are our environmental historians, who have been quietly telling us for years that land degradation is caused less by material factors—such as population, technology, and fossil fuel use—than by our outdated cultural values and assumptions, particularly our ingrained tendency to treat nature as a warehouse of market commodities.3 To succeed, conservation has to confront these cultural flaws and do so in ways that are orchestrated and deliberate, not haphazard and indirect.
Paradoxically, one sign of conservation’s current malaise is supplied by the strand of the movement that has flourished the most of late: the tract-by-tract preservation work performed by the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land, and hundreds of local land trusts.4 These groups protect valuable land parcels; their efforts, by and large, are useful. But piecemeal conservation work can come at high cost when it is not thoughtfully situated in a broader, grounded vision of people living harmoniously in an interconnected land. It can cause problems when it is not part of a well-considered challenge to business as usual in America.
Out in the field, tract-by-tract work competes for dollars and support with other conservation efforts. When its practitioners focus only on specific parcels, not on larger landscapes, they inevitably weaken conservation’s emphasis on ecological interdependence. Unless particularly careful in word and deed, they can also muddle the movement’s cultural criticisms, especially of free market capitalism and of our excessive individualism. We might consider, as a leading example of this conflict, the challenge of promoting conservation on privately owned lands. When one element of the conservation cause pays landowners to conserve (by buying easements or development rights or by endorsing government payment programs), how can another element contend that good land use ought to be a minimum obligation of citizen-owners, enforceable by legal sticks rather than financial carrots?
In the flush of successfully protecting the individual parcel, it has become too easy to forget about the larger landscape, about the plight of taxpayers, and about the unceasing, econo-techno-juggernaut that land-trust work often diverts but never really slows.
Perhaps the most damning evidence of conservation’s current plight is the public’s tendency to label it a “liberal” cause. Categorized as such, conservation is viewed suspiciously by religious and conservative elements of society through a form of guilt-by-association reasoning. The schism is as dismaying as it is unnecessary. And it has arisen, just as other problems have, because conservation’s intellectual core has become lost to the public view. In ways that religious conservatives could come to applaud, conservation’s leading voices bemoan public irresponsibility, eroding senses of community, and capitalism’s assault on cultural values. No cause takes more seriously the call to respect God’s Creation. Conservation is about living a responsible, moral life; about caring for neighbors and children; about vesting moral worth in future generations.
So long as conservation lacks an encompassing ecological vision, the public is unlikely to see how protecting nature’s parts helps the larger integrated whole. And so long as the cause represses its criticisms of market capitalism and self-centered behavior, conservationists are unlikely to forge working alliances with other social reformers.
Conservation’s critics have deliberately heightened the divide between conservation and moral conservatism by unfairly labeling the cause as elitist or misanthropic. Yet, conservationists have added to their own woes. In the day-to-day flurry we’ve lost track of our central values and visions. We’ve become too content to work within the system instead of pushing for change. By settling for small victories and trying to appear more “reasonable,” we have not simply pulled back from the larger fight but confused the public about the kind of healthy, vibrant world we want to bring about. In the name of liberal inclusiveness, many conservation groups now honor a multiplicity of voices. But multiple voices should be the input, not the public output. When conservation speaks with multiple voices, the results inevitably are fragmentation, public confusion, and a compromised ability to deflect critics.
When it first gained steam a century ago, organized conservation was less liberal than society as a whole. Classical liberalism honors individuals as such, respecting their free choices, liberating them from constraints, and using government to level the playing field. Conservation, instead, was about holding individuals accountable, about standing up for communities under assault from the wasteful excesses of freewheeling business. It was a reaction against individualism that had gone too far.5
These days, the cause appears in a much different light, at least to outsiders. Conservation is viewed as using government to interfere with private life rather than to protect families and communities. It comes across as antibusiness and antigrowth, not procommunity and promorality. When a group such as the Nature Conservancy enters the market to buy land, grabbing tracts away from waiting developers, it can appear as merely another market participant with its own special (albeit altruistic) aims. Because land parcels set aside for conservation so rarely provide food or shelter, the cause seems to ignore basic human needs. It is easily accused of fostering elitist aims through meddlesome means.
Is it any wonder that the public resists, despite its fondness for nature and its worries about where we’re heading in our treatment of it?
This book is a plea to fellow conservationists to take our cause more seriously in intellectual and moral terms. It is a call for us collectively to stand back and think intently about our overarching aims, what it will take to accomplish them, and how we can best communicate them. It is also an appeal to think big in terms of how we might effect social and cultural change, not merely be content with rearguard victories. As for readers who are not committed conservationists, my aim is to describe the landscape, intellectually and morally, and to identify the most promising paths.
Chapter 1 considers the cultural wars now raging in America. Conservationists have been drawn into them—and we’re not fighting very well. I take as my point of departure an essay by Wendell Berry, in which he divides society into two factions: the pro-conservation party of “the local community” and the opposing, ascendant party of “the global economy.” It’s a useful dichotomy, but perhaps not as accurate as another one: that between the supporters of communities of all sizes and those who exalt ardent individualism and the unfettered market. Conservation is being successfully attacked by claims that it clashes with key cultural values, liberty and private property most of all. We require a far more thoughtful, coherent defense on these issues.
Sound intellectual work is particularly needed in engaging with the capitalist market, which is at once a powerful engine of economic creation and the main cause of declining lands. We urgently need a probing study of the market, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. Given the market’s preeminent role in shaping landscapes, it is shocking how little we understand about its workings. Conservationists could help in this task. What does the market do well, what does it do poorly, and what constraints should we impose upon it?
Though my comments here are mostly meant to chide conservation’s faults as a working reform effort—to issue a plea to leaders and activists—the academy is not without its own shortcomings. On this problem I turn to the literature in my own academic field, environmental law, outlining in chapter 2 how scholarly writing so often conceals its underlying cultural assumptions. Normative views on environmental law differ sharply, with policy recommendations that openly clash. Yet, the true disagreements among scholars mostly reside well beneath the surface, in the undiscussed but influential values that scholars carry with them to their opening pages. Conservation needs to identify and confront these assumptions, which are too often ill considered and miscast. A steady stream of sunlight could clear away some fog. Environmental law is merely one of many relevant academic fields, but it is in the legal arena where so many cultural battles take place and policy choices are made. In this setting, perhaps more than any other, we need to identify clearly what is at stake.
Chapter 3 turns to one of the disturbing trends in conservation today: its tendency, in an effort to appear more accommodating, to water down its criticisms and landscape visions into some variant of merely being-nice-to-nature. Here my point of departure is Michael Pollan’s engaging meditation on humans and the garden, Second Nature. As a guiding light, I contend, Pollan’s prominent book is evocative but distinctly unsatisfying. It represents an across-the-board retreat from where conservation has been and ought to be. Its popularity despite its deficiencies (and that of similar writings) carries troubling implications.
Chapter 4 digs into what passes as the heart of conservation for many people, the idea of sustainability. As an overall goal, I suggest, sustainability is sorely lacking, and not merely because it is so vague about what is being sustained (a frequent complaint). To rally around sustainability is to turn our backs on a good many conservation lessons accumulated over the past century at high cost. Merely to catalogue the leading lessons of the past century—a worthwhile task, for those who haven’t done it—is to see how vacuous sustainability really is. As a guiding vision sustainability is uninspiring and blurred; its popularity a sign of intellectual amnesia. We can do far better.
Chapter 5 shifts gears, moving from firm but friendly criticism to the task of reconstruction. If conservation is not about sustainability, what, then, is its purpose? To address that question, I turn to the challenge of land management, trying to determine what constitutes good land use. The relevant factors, it turns out, are many, and as we dissect them the subject becomes increasingly complex. Once the pieces are teased apart and labeled, it is possible to isolate the role that science properly plays and to specify how utility, ethics, aesthetics, and human ignorance all fit into the mix. To take an all-things-considered look at good land use is to see how intellectually demanding conservation really is. It is also to see why well-considered strategies and aims, linked to cultural change, are essential.
In chapter 6 I propose six core tasks for the conservation cause to address, starting with the call for a clearer overall goal. I conclude, looking ahead, with “A Conservation Message to the American People.”
At the end of the book is an annotated bibliography of writings on conservation’s critique of modern culture. My reading recommendations, inevitably idiosyncratic, center around twelve books by leading conservation voices. To engage with these books is to perceive in a whole new light not only land conservation but America’s history and culture. The conservation cause does have good ideas and serious minds. We need to use them with greater deliberation and with greater courage.
Early in the book I draw on the writings of two twentieth-century giants in conservation, Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry. I do this because they are important, because conservation needs acknowledged leaders, and because both have so powerfully borne witness to the essential task of fostering change. Leopold and Berry, of course, are hardly the only writers who deserve study. But if we do not know these two—and in their subtle complexity, few of us probably do—then they provide logical places to start. They are invaluable polestars for anyone who would take conservation seriously.
If I am right in asserting that conservationists are too busy or otherwise disinclined to think seriously about core ideas, I invite the reader’s challenge: Why write a book on a topic that few people are likely to read? Serious conservation volumes rarely draw sizeable audiences. This one will likely fare little better, deliberately small though it is. But audiences are as important for their quality as well their size. A few thousand readers—indeed, even a few hundred, seriously engaged—are enough to change the tenor of the cause, to infuse it with new ways to think and talk.
As for the usual excuses—that working conservationists are already too busy, that their rhetoric needs to reach ordinary people where they are—they are true enough but not persuasive. Not every conservationist needs to study thoroughly the underpinnings of the movement. But some do. And those who do then need to help others understand conservation’s ecological, historical, moral, and philosophical foundations. The truth is, conservation is a highly complex undertaking. Pieces of it are easily grasped, but the whole of it emphatically is not. We should be led by amateurs—those who labor out of love. But love is no substitute for probing thought and well-crafted strategies. As for the rhetoric, it does need to remain simple and sensible. But a variety of messages meet that test, some better aimed than others. It’s the aiming that has been the problem.
Ideas have consequences. To secure good consequences, we need good ideas. To produce good ideas, we need to lean harder at the wheel.