Creative Conservation: Reflections on a Way to the Future (Land Lines Article)

Author(s): Bendick, Bob
Publication Date: October 2012

4 pages; Inventory ID LLA121003; English

FREE DOWNLOADS BELOW


Creative Conservation: Reflections on a Way to the Future	PDF	221 KB

Article

Maintain fair and consistent environmental laws.

Environmental and land use regulatory processes and economic incentives and disincentives can and should be restructured in ways that will establish a more consistent and flexible framework for shaping the future and bring a positive environmental influence to the operation of markets. But regulatory standards must be maintained to ensure a level playing field and to protect the environment and human health while enabling long-term economic growth. The broad use of the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimize, compensate) can be helpful here. This approach to the siting of infrastructure and development can enable investment and economic growth while providing net benefits for nature.

Do more to ensure the involvement of citizens and diverse stakeholders in planning for the future.

If our society is not simply protecting nature, but creating a future world, then all of us have an even greater right--and I would say a responsibility--to be involved in setting those goals. We no longer live in a mainframe society. Most decisions are driven by networked individual actions, and citizens need a renewed sense of empowerment in determining the character of the places where they, live, work, and recreate. Conservation, too, will become a more decentralized, from-the-bottom-up process. The engagement of young people is particularly important, and environmental issues must be made relevant to the diverse residents of the nation's metropolitan areas where the great majority of Americans live.

Identify, train, and mentor a new generation of local conservation leaders.

A new generation of conservationists skilled at working with diverse interests will be able to create a future that brings together environmental and long-term economic needs.

Shared Problem Solving

Of course, doing these things could put creative conservation in the crossfire between those for whom nature is irrelevant and those who are fearful that changing anything about environmental regulation or protection of public lands will open the door to cataclysmic change. But these steps can advance practical solutions to the nation's growing political impasse on conservation and the environment. At the heart of this impasse is the shared belief that we have lost control over the future of our families and communities, and that we have become victims of the actions of distant forces.

Done right, creative conservation can give all of us significant roles in shaping the future of the places most important to us--our home ranges. It also offers two benefits that can have powerful political traction--the opportunity for better places to live, work, and visit that provide tangible benefits to our lives, and the sense of respect and self-worth implicit in helping to determine the future of the places we love.

Such an approach might move the environmental politics of both conservatives and liberals toward shared problem solving. For conservatives--is it planning for the future they oppose, or just planning by those with whom they disagree? Are they willing to include the hopes of citizens for their own communities as a legitimate part of the less government and more market-driven future they would like to see? For liberals--are they willing to trust people who work on the land to make more decisions about the fate of our land and water, or are they, too, really more interested in centralized control to achieve their own vision of what should be? Can the opportunity to work together to create good futures for the real places that surround our lives be the literal and symbolic common ground that can heal some of our society's divisions?

The stone arch at the North Entrance to Yellowstone was erected to commemorate the creation of the park and is inscribed "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People." Theodore Roosevelt put the cornerstone of the arch in place when he visited Yellowstone in 1904, at a time when Americans increasingly saw government as a protector of the common good. Yellowstone was an example of that spirit.

But now, in the twenty-first century, it seems to me that the gateway arch also has an important message about looking outward from the park, down Paradise Valley where the Yellowstone River heads toward the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico. The conservation challenge before us, against all odds and whether we like it or not, is to create a future for the benefit of the people, based on a respect for and understanding of the multiple values of nature in many more places across America.

If approached place-by-place in this way, Americans with diverse points of view can rally to the cause of conservation as not just something to think about on vacation, not just a luxury, but as a durable foundation for healthy, safe, more prosperous and more spiritually rewarding lives for all of our children and grandchildren.

About the Author

Bob Bendick is director of U.S. Government Relations at The Nature Conservancy in Washington, DC. Contact: rbendick@tnc.org

References

Leopold, Aldo. 1966 [1949]. A Sand County almanac: With essays on conservation from Round River. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marris, Emma. 2011. Rambunctious garden: Saving nature in a post-wild world. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Go to Page 1 2 3