Why Conservation is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground by Eric T. Freyfogle

Author:Eric T. Freyfogle [Freyfogle, Eric T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-10-23T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Conservation’s Core Tasks

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

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