Desde la primera reforma económica ocurrida en 1978 hasta la liberalización de inversiones extranjeras y el desarrollo del sector privado que se dio entre mediados de la década de 1980 hasta la actualidad, las principales reformas económicas de China han tenido como prioridad lograr una alta tasa de crecimiento económico. Estas políticas funcionaron tan bien que el PIB per cápita en dólares constantes en China aumentó cerca de un 10 por ciento anual de 1980 a 2010. Este rendimiento en el crecimiento no tiene precedentes en un país de grandes dimensiones, pero ha sido acompañado por incontables costos, tales como la transformación estructural de la economía, el ajuste social y las migraciones y la degradación medioambiental. En un nuevo libro del Instituto Lincoln titulado China’s Environmental Policy and Urban Development (La política medioambiental y el desarrollo urbano en China), editado por Joyce Yanyun Man, se trata el último de estos temas. Según este libro, de acuerdo con las estimaciones realizadas por agencias gubernamentales, los costos medioambientales sin documentar asociados a la producción económica fueron del 9,7 por ciento del PIB en 1999 al 3 por ciento en 2004.

El crecimiento económico en países de bajos ingresos por lo general viene acompañado de costos medioambientales. Este trueque se ve plasmado en la “curva medioambiental de Kuznets”, según la cual la calidad medioambiental se deteriora con el crecimiento económico en los niveles de bajos ingresos y luego mejora con el crecimiento económico en los niveles de ingresos más altos. Según lo indicado en este libro, las estimaciones de la curva medioambiental de Kuznets para las ciudades chinas entre 1997 y 2007 muestran que, durante dicho período, los índices de contaminación industrial en China se redujeron a medida que aumentaron los ingresos, lo que indica que las ciudades con ingresos más altos experimentaron mejoras en estos índices de calidad medioambiental conforme aumentaron sus ingresos.

Varios de los autores de los capítulos de este libro afirman que las políticas medioambientales de China y su rendimiento se encuentran en una etapa de transición. Los indicadores medioambientales están mejorando en respuesta a las nuevas políticas y reglamentaciones, mientras que el crecimiento económico continúa. Al mismo tiempo, China también ha sufrido reveses en este sentido. Por ejemplo, ciertos eventos de gravedad extrema, como la combinación de un clima extremadamente frío con inversiones atmosféricas que se dio este invierno en Beijing, produjeron niveles muy altos de concentraciones de partículas en dicha ciudad.

La lógica detrás de la curva medioambiental de Kuznets implica diferentes elementos, tanto de demanda como de oferta. En cuanto a la demanda, las poblaciones con ingresos más altos demuestran apreciar cada vez más los servicios que tienen que ver con el medio ambiente, por lo que defienden las mejoras medioambientales. Con respecto a la oferta, las inversiones en nuevas capacidades hacen uso de equipos modernos con procesos que respetan el medio ambiente y tecnologías de control más accesibles económicamente. Las últimas mejoras medioambientales en China también derivan del fortalecimiento de los entes de regulación ambiental. En 1982, la función que tenía la Agencia de Protección Medioambiental era principalmente de asesoramiento. No obstante, en 1988 se transformó en una agencia nacional; en 1998 se convirtió en un ente más independiente, la Agencia Estatal de Protección Medioambiental; y posteriormente, en 2008, se elevó la jerarquía del ente para convertirse en el Ministerio de Protección Ambiental.

La creciente influencia de las agencias de protección medioambiental centrales se vio acompañada por un cambio en el estilo de las reglamentaciones. El antiguo énfasis que se daba a las normas de orden y control (tales como las normas sobre emisiones) se reemplazó en forma parcial por instrumentos basados en incentivos económicos (tales como los impuestos sobre insumos y el nuevo impuesto sobre emisiones de carbono). Según las investigaciones realizadas, a la fecha la aplicación de las normas de orden y control ha arrojado mejores resultados.

Mientras que las agencias centrales establecieron normas nacionales, la responsabilidad de monitorear y velar por el cumplimiento de dichas normas se descentralizó en gran medida hacia las agencias medioambientales municipales o metropolitanas. El rendimiento de los gerentes municipales se revisa todos los años según criterios que hacen hincapié en el crecimiento económico. Otras mejoras en los resultados medioambientales pueden darse solamente cuando dichos criterios dan un mayor peso a las mejoras medioambientales. Por ejemplo, como consecuencia de haber incluido la reducción de las emisiones de sulfuro como criterio de rendimiento anual, se produjo un rápido aumento en el control de las emisiones de dióxido de sulfuro de las centrales de energía.

Aun cuando a China le resta mucho por hacer para reducir la contaminación del aire urbano, limpiar los ríos y lagos y mejorar la eficiencia en el uso de la energía, estos objetivos están cobrando mucha más importancia para los ciudadanos. La creciente disponibilidad de datos relacionados con los indicadores medioambientales está promoviendo un diálogo nacional respecto de la calidad medioambiental. El nuevo libro de la profesora Man representa un aporte a este diálogo, ya que informa sobre el progreso realizado, identifica los desafíos inmediatos y evalúa las nuevas políticas y enfoques normativos para las mejoras medioambientales.

El Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo se ha asociado con un equipo de organizaciones sin fines de lucro y agencias federales para patrocinar el Taller Nacional de Conservación de Grandes Paisajes (NWLLC, por su sigla en inglés) el 23 y 24 de octubre de 2014 en el Edificio Ronald Reagan de Washington, DC. La reunión contó con la presencia de aproximadamente 700 participantes, quienes consideraron cómo, trabajando a través de los sectores públicos, privados, cívicos (ONG) y académicos; a través de disciplinas; y a través de parcelas, pueblos, condados, estados e incluso límites internacionales, los practicantes de la conservación de grandes paisajes podrían alcanzar resultados concebidos creativamente, estratégicamente significativos, mensurablemente efectivos, transferibles y duraderos en el suelo, en esta era de cambio climático.

Las políticas, prácticas y estudios de casos discutidos en el NWLLC ofrecieron un amplio espectro de soluciones y trayectorias promete-doras para mejorar los esfuerzos de conservación de la vida silvestre a nivel regional; aumentar sustancialmente la calidad y cantidad del agua a través de grandes cuencas; alcanzar una producción sostenible de alimentos, fibra y energía; y proteger los recursos culturales y recreativos significativos a nivel internacional. Los organizadores de la conferencia apreciaron enormemente las contribuciones productivas de todos los participantes, desde la Secretaria del Interior Sally Jewell, el líder iroqués Sid Jamieson y el Presidente de la Federación Nacional de Vida Silvestre Collin O’Mara, hasta los gestores del suelo sobre el terreno, científicos y coordinadores de proyectos desde el Estrecho de Bering en Alaska hasta los Cayos de Florida.

Una versión de este artículo apareció originalmente en Expanding Horizons: Highlights from the National Workshop on Large Landscape Conservation (Expansión de horizontes: Aspectos destacados del Taller Nacional sobre Conservación de Grandes Paisajes), el informe completo del NWLLC. Este informe, preparado por el Instituto Lincoln y tres socios de la conferencia –el Instituto de Administración del Servicio de Parques Nacionales, la Fundación Quebec-Labrador/Centro Atlántico para el Medio Ambiente y la Red de Practicantes de la Conservación de Grandes Paisajes–se puede leer en el sitio web de la Red de Practicantes, www.largelandscapenetwork.org.

—James N. Levitt
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Harvard Forest, Harvard University

En el primer Taller Nacional sobre Conservación de Grandes Paisajes cayeron en cascada grandes ideas sobre la naturaleza y la gente, y una nueva metodología de conservación. Pasaron tantas cosas y con tanta rapidez, que las frases usuales que se usan para describir sucesos alentadores y vivificantes no tienen siquiera cabida.

¿Un parteaguas? Más bien fue como bajar en balsa por las Cataratas del Niágara o a lo largo de una inundación en la Edad de Hielo.

¿Una mayoría de edad? Quizá, si se piensa en el crecimiento vertiginoso de un pino de hoja larga: el árbol puede pasar años sin que parezca más que una mata de pasto, aunque de manera invisible haya estado enterrando su raíz principal en la profundidad; después, en una sola temporada, asciende cuatro pies hacia el cielo, quedando fuera del alcance de los incendios forestales rastreros.

¿Variedad de opiniones? El rey medieval de España Alfonso X el Sabio es recordado por haber dicho que si hubiera estado presente en la Creación, habría dado algunas indicaciones útiles. Pero en el Taller de Grandes Paisajes, cuya inscripción excedió el cupo de vacantes, se tuvieron que comprimir 117 horas de experiencia, asesoramiento y datos en siete series de sesiones simultáneas que ocuparon la mayoría de las 17 horas de la conferencia. Hubo pláticas y paneles bien pensados, e informes y presentaciones cuidadosamente preparadas por 269 presentadores de cascos urbanos, remotas cumbres rocosas, islas lejanas, y paisajes de todo tipo a lo largo de los Estados Unidos, con conexiones con Canadá y México.

¿Impulso ininterrumpido? Ben Franklin dijo el último día de la Convención Constitucional de los EE.UU., realizada en 1787 en Filadelfia, que después de haber pasado tres meses escuchando el debate de ida y vuelta, y observando diariamente el resplandor dorado del respaldo de la silla del presidente, finalmente tuvo la alegría de saber que estaba presenciando la alborada, no el crepúsculo. Pero la Secretaria del Interior Sally Jewell, uno de los dos miembros del gabinete que habló a la audiencia del NWLLC y aplaudió sus esfuerzos, dijo en una sesión plenaria a la hora del almuerzo el primer día: “Esta sala está reventada de visión. Ustedes serán los pioneros de la comprensión a nivel de paisaje, como Teddy Roosevelt fue el pionero de la conservación hace ya un siglo. ¡Hagámoslo realidad!”

Conservación a nivel de paisaje: El término es todavía reciente, y se refiere a una nueva manera de comprender el mundo, de evaluar y nutrir su salud. Supera la práctica loable pero limitada del siglo XX de designar zonas de reserva y limpiar la contaminación. Con una lente gran angular y a la distancia, observa cada paisaje, ya sea designado o no, como una red intrincadamente conectada de seres vivos, sostenida por una amplia comunidad de gente. La conservación a nivel de paisaje ha estado inyectando nueva energía y ampliando el movimiento medioambiental. Y a medida que se adopte su perspectiva, lo primero que crece no es necesariamente el tamaño de la propiedad a proteger, sino la posibilidad de tomar medidas, algunas grandes y otras pequeñas, que marcarán una diferencia perdurable en el futuro de la biósfera y sus habitantes, incluida la humanidad.

Muchos de estos proyectos inaugurales fueron mostrados en las presentaciones del taller y en los 34 posters que adornaron el vasto atrio del Edificio Reagan. A veces el taller daba la impresión de ser un enorme bazar en el que se presentaban programas, conceptos, resultados de investigación, exploraciones, acuerdos cooperativos y otros éxitos preliminares, como también preguntas sobre las que reflexionar. Joyas inesperadas, esfuerzos hasta ahora sólo conocidos por pequeños grupos, resplandecían en los rincones para que todos los pudieran ver libremente.

Yellowstone to Yukón, conocido como “Y2Y’, es quizá el abuelo de los proyectos de grandes paisajes generados por la ciudadanía: una idea para crear un corredor conectado, binacional, de suelo silvestre de 3.200 kilómetros de largo, desde el Parque Nacional Yellowstone hasta la frontera con Alaska, a lo largo del último ecosistema montañoso intacto del mundo. En el NWLLC, Y2Y estaba llegando literalmente a la mayoría de edad, ya que celebraba su vigesimoprimer cumpleaños. En 1993, sólo el 12 por ciento de este territorio de 130 millones de hectáreas había sido conservado, pero para 2013 el total ascendía al 52 por ciento.

Las Áreas de Patrimonio Nacional, que rinden homenaje a la historia y los logros de este país, están aún más establecidas: el programa abarca decenas de millones de hectáreas, entre ellas el estado completo de Tennessee. Y ha cumplido 30 años recientemente.

Y2Y ha inspirado los planes de ‘H2H’, un corredor de suelo de 80 kilómetros de longitud identificado como “paisaje resiliente”, apenas alejado de los alrededores de los suburbios del norte de la Ciudad de Nueva York, que se extiende desde el Río Housatonic en Connecticut hasta el Río Hudson en Nueva York. Una vez protegido, podría reducir drásticamente los efectos del cambio climático.

La Staying Connected Initiative (Iniciativa Permanecer Conectados), una coalición de canadienses y estadounidenses que colaboran a través de 32 millones de hectáreas de bosques y suelos forestales en cuatro provincias y cuatro estados anclados en el norte de Nueva Inglaterra (un paisaje del tamaño de Alemania), se llama a sí misma “el primo más pequeño de Y2Y al que dentro de 15 años se le llamará su equivalente del noreste”.

Poco después de haber comenzado el taller, una agencia de alcantarillado de un condado de Oregón comenzó a agregar árboles y arbustos en las orillas sinuosas del Río Tualatin, de 130 km de longitud, al oeste de Portland, para mantener frescos a los peces del río. Para el 5 de junio de 2015, Día Mundial del Medio Ambiente, habrá plantado un millón de unidades.

El efecto, según me comentaron los participantes durante los descansos (hubo algunos) fue a la vez estimulante y aleccionador. La conservación a nivel de paisaje es alimentada por la esperanza, en vez de ser acelerada por el miedo. Es un grupo que se une ante las graves amenazas medioambientales de extinción y degradación. Al expandir nuestros horizontes, el foco se desplaza de operaciones de rescate a una increíble cantidad de cosas que se pueden y deben llevar a cabo para restaurar, reponer, salvaguardar, proteger y celebrar la integridad a largo plazo del sorprendente patrimonio natural y cultural de este continente gigante.

Cuando nuestros antecesores humanos se irguieron por primera vez hace millones de años, y observaron más allá de los pastos altos de la sabana de África Oriental, su mundo pasó instantáneamente de abarcar entre 5 y 10 metros de ancho a algo así como 5 a 10 kilómetros. Esto redefinió lo que era práctico, necesario y posible pensar. Similarmente, la expansión o aceleración de nuestra propia conciencia de conservación a nivel de paisaje es una manera útil de confrontar las complejidades que proliferan en el mundo moderno de los Estados Unidos, un país de 320 millones de habitantes que dentro de medio siglo tendrá 400 millones.

Es un país donde, según los conocimientos científicos adquiridos en el último medio siglo, los métodos de conservación existentes no bastan para proteger estos lugares de manera adecuada, en parte porque las plantas y los animales atraviesan los límites delineados en el mapa y porque, a medida que estos lugares se van aislando cada vez más, los habitantes anteriores no pueden volver, ya sea para residir en forma ocasional o permanente. Incluso los chorlitos de alto vuelo de Alaska, que pasan el invierno en México o China o Nueva Zelanda, encuentran obstáculos en sus viajes debido a los derrames de petróleo en la Bahía de San Francisco y los manglares invasivos de Nueva Zelanda. Tom Tidwell, jefe del Servicio Forestal de los Estados Unidos, llama a los pájaros, murciélagos y mariposas los “mensajeros alados” de la conservación a nivel de paisaje. En años recientes también hemos visto que, si bien los mapas y designaciones de suelo se mantienen estáticas, los lugares pueden estar transformándose por completo, a medida que el cambio climático desplaza un ecosistema y atrae otro.

Quizás la cartografía propiamente dicha esté ingresando en una fase no euclidiana o posjeffersoniana. Durante casi 230 años, desde 1785, cuando Thomas Jefferson, aun antes de la Convención Constituyente, sugirió que la geometría debería primar sobre la topografía para relevar lo que en ese entonces se llamaban los “suelos vacantes” al oeste de los Apalaches, hemos heredado la “cuadrícula jeffersoniana”, visión ineludible desde las ventanillas de cualquier vuelo transcontinental por la forma en que están delineados los caminos y los campos. Esta cuadrícula usó las líneas, en este caso invisibles (y sólo recientemente calculadas), de longitud y latitud que dividían el paisaje en “secciones” de kilómetros cuadrados para delimitar las propiedades que ignoraban los ecosistemas, las cuencas y hasta las cadenas montañosas. Creó una realidad de ángulos rectos para los colonos que se desplazaban hacia el oeste a fundar pueblos, sin que les importara lo que estaban heredando: la organización natural del paisaje y las tradiciones y conocimientos de sus habitantes humanos anteriores.

Causa común. Si el trabajo en una perspectiva mayor del suelo es una consecuencia de haberse dado cuenta de que hay más en el suelo (y debajo y encima de él), la nueva ecuación de conservación pone tanto énfasis en quién hace el trabajo como en qué consiste el mismo. En desviación de las prácticas tradicionales, también crece la cantidad y tipo de gente que se alinea detrás de cualquier proyecto a escala de paisaje.Todo el proceso, dijo Dan Ashe, director del Servicio de Pesca y Vida Silvestre de los EE.UU., depende de una “colaboración épica”, que se convirtió en la frase más repetida del taller. El término “épico” tuvo resonancia porque hablaba de llegar a través de tantas barreras de separación. Otra palabra popular del taller fue “descarrilador”:

Terratenientes privados en alianza con administradores de suelos públicos. La ruta migratoria de la antilocapra americana, que atraviesa tanto suelo público como privado, ha sido protegida, pero este es el último de siete corredores que existían anteriormente; los demás fueron suprimidos. La Iniciativa del Urogallo de las Artemisas del Servicio de Conservación de Recursos Naturales, trabajando con 953 ganaderos de 11 estados del Oeste, ha movido o marcado con etiquetas blancas de plástico 537 millas de alambrado de púas, para que estos pájaros de vuelo rasante no queden clavados en ellas. “Trabajo con los que tienen esperanza, no odio”, dijo un ganadero.

Los terratenientes privados se asocian con sus próximos propietarios. Decenas de millones de hectáreas de campos agrícolas y ganaderos cambiarán de manos en los próximos 20 años, junto con más de 80 millones de hectáreas de “bosques de familia”. La edad promedio de un propietario de un bosque es 62,5 años y la “afinidad con el suelo”, como apuntó un comentarista, “puede ser más difícil de transferir que una escritura legal”.

Los administradores de suelos públicos colaboran con otros administradores de suelos públicos. Demasiadas agencias hermanas tienen el hábito arraigado de tratarse entre sí como hermanastras desdeñadas, o funcionan como las Grayas de la mitología griega, que compartían un solo ojo. En los últimos 30 años, la Oficina de Administración de Suelo (BLM) ha desarrollado un sistema de Gestión de Recursos Visuales (VRM) para evaluar intrusiones en los suelos del Oeste, que también cuenta con una lista de calidades paisajistas a varias distancias de Puntos de Observación Claves (KOP). Pero los métodos del VRM no se han propagado todavía hacia el Este, donde la Comisión Federal de Regulación de Energía tiende a aprobar sin hacer preguntas todas las propuestas para corredores de gasoductos nuevos y de transmisión eléctrica, aunque afecten las vistas de hitos históricos nacionales, como Montpelier, la hacienda de Virginia rodeada de bosques primarios donde James Madison escribió un borrador de la Constitución de los EE.UU.

Otras disparidades que aún tienen que resolverse. El ochenta y cinco por ciento de los estadounidenses vive en áreas urbanas, dando paso a una generación de jóvenes que han “caminado sólo sobre asfalto”. En este taller, la mayoría de los presentadores eran hombres, comprometidos con la “hombrexplicación”, como dijo una mujer. Otro participante quedó sorprendido de que la conferencia fuera tan “abrumadoramente blanca”. La Dra. Mamie Parker, subdirectora retirada del Servicio de Pesca y Vida Silvestre (la primera mujer afronorteamericana en ese puesto) fue oradora plenaria, y recibió una prolongada ovación, sólo igualada por la dedicada a la Secretaria Jewell. “Por muchos años”, dijo la Dra. Parker, “hemos estado atascados, frenados y asustados de hacer alianzas no tradicionales. El miedo nos ha impedido comunicarnos con otra gente que quiere sentirse respetada, quiere saber que ellos también son miembros valiosos de nuestro equipo”.

“El cambio se produce al ritmo de la confianza”, dijo uno de los participantes.”No creo que hayamos probado la confianza todavía”, dijo otro. Queda claro que, de ahora en adelante, para lograr éxito en la conservación se va a necesitar de gran éxito en los diálogos, muchos de los cuales pueden ser incómodos al principio. Va a ser una travesía plena de desafíos. Nuestros antecesores humanos se sintieron incómodos cuando se pusieron de pie por primera vez; todavía estamos trabajando para lograr un sentimiento de pertenencia a otras tribus.

City People (Gente urbana), un libro pionero del historiador Gunther Barth, demostró cómo las ciudades norteamericanas del siglo XX se convirtieron en lugares cohesivos gracias a las invenciones de finales del siglo XIX: Millones de estadounidenses de pueblos pequeños e inmigrantes de Europa Oriental aprendieron a vivir y trabajar juntos gracias a las casas de apartamentos, los grandes almacenes, los periódicos (que les proporcionaban la misma información de partida) y los campos de béisbol (que les enseñaban reglas para competir y cooperar). También podemos agregar las bibliotecas y los parques públicos a la lista.

Masonville Cove, en Baltimore, primera asociación urbana de refugio de vida silvestre del país, fundada en 2013, es quizá un nuevo tipo de biblioteca pública para la era de grandes paisajes. El Área de Conservación de Vida Silvestre Urbana de Masonville Cove, un barrio costero en la parte más meridional de la ciudad, destruido después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial para construir un túnel de paso hacia el puerto, y plagado de zonas industriales abandonadas que se han regenerado y han sido descubiertas nuevamente por 52 especies de pájaros, ahora ofrece clases dictadas por el personal del Acuario Nacional sobre la Bahía de Chesapeake y su cuenca de 165.000 km2 (18,5 veces más grande que Yellowstone). También hay excursiones, sendas peatonales, plataformas de lanzamiento de kayaks y oportunidades para ayudar a retirar los escombros carbonizados, que pueden remontarse al gran incendio de Baltimore de 1904.

A escala nacional, la conservación a nivel de paisajes tiene un comité directivo informal y extraoficial: la Red de Practicantes de Conservación de Grandes Paisajes, una alianza de administradores de suelos gubernamentales, fideicomisos de suelo, académicos, ciudadanos y organizaciones nacionales sin fines de lucro que salvan suelos y protegen las especies. Y oficialmente, como resultado de una iniciativa temprana de la administración Obama, existe ahora un apuntalamiento nacional para este trabajo: una red de investigadores y convocantes federales, organizada como 22 Cooperativas de Conservación del Paisaje (LCC). Las LCC no son propietarias de nada ni administran nada, ni tampoco promulgan normas, pero generan y compilan datos científicos confiables sobre todos los paisajes del país (y muchos paisajes adyacentes en Canadá y México), creando así una base de datos de información compartida. Por necesidad cubren mucho territorio y agua (una de las LCC abarca tanto Hawái como Samoa Americana, 6.500 kilómetros al oeste). Y reúnen a mucha gente; cada LCC tiene por lo menos 30 socios que representan agencias independientes del gobierno, organizaciones sin fines de lucro y gobiernos tribales.

¿Y ahora qué? Esa era la pregunta que todos se hacían una y otra vez, con emoción y urgencia, en los pasillos de este edificio extenso, del tamaño de un centro comercial. Estaban aquellos animados por una encuesta reciente que revelaba que los estadounidenses creen que el 50 por ciento del planeta debe ser protegido para otras especies (los brasileños creen que se debe proteger el 70 por ciento). Algunos vislumbran un sistema continental ininterrumpido de grandes paisajes interconectados, y el establecimiento de un parque internacional de la paz en la frontera entre los EE.UU. y México, para complementar el que se estableció en 1932 en la frontera entre los EE.UU. y Canadá. Por otro lado, estaban aquellos que se mostraban angustiados porque ven que los todos los esfuerzos se están quedando cortos, confinando a los norteamericanos a un continente con más desarrollo, menos biodiversidad y menos lobos, salmones y búhos manchados. Estaban aquellos que pensaban que en el próximo taller nacional las alianzas deberían formar parte oficial del programa, integradas en la planificación de sesiones, en las presentaciones y en as discusiones e iniciativas posteriores.

Realmente, ¿y ahora qué? La gente necesita tomarse un poco de tiempo para asimilar el ascenso de una nueva visión, una expansión permanente en la percepción de los paisajes. No más de “No en mi patio trasero”; hay un único patio trasero, y existe para nuestro cuidado y deleite, nuestra herencia y responsabilidad.

Cuando uno adquiere una nueva capacidad, ¿hacia dónde dirige su mirada? Si alguien le da un telescopio, ¿dónde mirará primero?

Sobre el autor

Tony Hiss fue miembro de la redacción de la revista New Yorker durante más de 30 años, y ahora es un académico visitante en la Universidad de Nueva York. Es autor de 13 libros, entre los que se incluyen The Experience of Place (La experiencia del lugar) y, recientemente, In Motion: The Experience of Travel (En movimiento: la experiencia de viajar).

Cities in Latin America, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe are being virtually transformed by inflows of capital in ways that urban land use planners never thought possible. These cities desperately need to develop and implement urban land management systems to maximize the social as well as private benefits of globalization. This article looks at globalization trends, identifies urban land management issues and opportunities, and discusses how Buenos Aires, as a case example, could strengthen its urban land management systems to better accommodate globalization-induced economic growth.

Globalization Trends

Over the past 20 years the world economy has become more and more integrated. International trade and investment have increased and the spatial distribution of industrial activities has become more diffused. Advances in communications, computer technology and logistics have revolutionized how business is conducted and how financial capital is invested. Many cities and regions that were once off the beaten track are now on the world’s main street, and those that once dominated certain markets, such as Glasgow in shipbuilding, Birmingham in textiles and Pittsburgh in steel, have lost ground.

Globalization, that is the international integration of product, service and financial markets, poses enormous opportunities and challenges. In the best of circumstances, globalization can lead to significant increases in non-agricultural employment, increasing wages, improved living conditions and better environmental quality. In other cases it may mean plant closures, unemployment, declining incomes and worsened living conditions

Because globalization requires foreign direct investment in plants and facilities, the internationalization of industrial activities is profoundly altering the world’s urban economic landscape. Over the past two decades, cities benefiting from global structuring have grown rapidly, while less economically competitive cities have stagnated. Given their plentiful supplies of cheap labor and permissive regulatory environments, cities in developing countries have become important actors in global manufacturing.

Multinational manufacturing corporations have been the principal driving force of globalization. These firms have increasingly shifted production from developed to developing countries to exploit the advantages of inexpensive labor. As they restructure their networks of production, they invest in plants and equipment in the host countries and generate significant increases in employment. According to the World Bank, five of the eight million jobs created by multinationals between 1985 and 1992 were generated in developing countries. The total number of jobs created by multinationals in developing countries stands at 12 million, but when subcontracting is included the true total is likely to be 24 million jobs. Multinationals account for more than 20 percent of the total manufacturing employment in such countries as Argentina, Barbados, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

Urban Land Management Issues and Opportunities

As cities strive to become centers of global production, trade and development, they are increasingly concerned with improving their attractiveness for foreign direct investment and employment generation. For example, cities must have efficient spatial structures, adequate infrastructure and urban services, affordable housing and healthy environments. Effective urban land management is required to promote urban regeneration and development of new industrial and commercial districts, investments to upgrade and expand critical infrastructure systems, programs to enhance and protect the environment, and initiatives to upgrade social overhead capital (housing, education, healthcare).

To implement these initiatives globalizing cities need to develop urban land management strategies to provide land for industrial and commercial development, to facilitate the formation of public-private partnerships, and to finance the provision of infrastructure and social overhead capital investments. Unfortunately, in many cities around the world such strategies do not exist and foreign investment is either stifled or, if it does take place, causes significant adverse side effects. Several examples highlight the consequences of poor urban land management.

In Ho Chi Minh City, planners have not carefully assessed the land use and transportation impacts of foreign investment. The city administration has approved dozens of high-rise office projects in the Central District but they have not adequately assessed the traffic and infrastructure impacts of these projects. As a result traffic congestion and infrastructure problems with the water supply and sewerage treatment are mounting. To make matters worse, planners have approved the development of Saigon South, a massive 3,000-hectare commercial, industrial and residential project, without assessing its impacts on the city’s transportation system.

Getting access to land for factories and commercial facilities is problematic, particularly in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Decades of inefficient allocation of land for industrial uses have literally blighted inner-city areas in Warsaw, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Derelict industrial belts that desperately need regeneration surround these cities. Unfortunately, a lack of clarity over land rights, corruption and bureaucratic inertia are impeding redevelopment. To compound matters, land use plans in many transition economy cities have not been adjusted to reflect the new land use requirements necessary to support post-industrial development.

The globalization of economic activity is literally transforming the urban landscapes of developing countries. To effectively exploit the benefits of inward investment flows and to insure that social and environmental goals are met, the public sector needs to take the lead in planning and formulating urban land management strategies to promote sustainable urban economic development.

The Case of Buenos Aires

A recent Lincoln Institute seminar in Buenos Aires offered some ideas on what actions are needed to more effectively manage the challenges of globalization-induced investment and urban economic development in that city. Participants agreed that Buenos Aires needs to strengthen its land management and economic development capabilities. The city should foster the formation of agglomeration economies and define and strengthen its comparative advantage in the global marketplace. The public sector should also foster the formation of social overhead capital and facilitate the development of critical infrastructure, social services and other investments that cannot be provided by the private sector.

Government needs to remove market imperfections and internalize externalities so that the social benefits of urban development are maximized and social costs minimized. This requires having in place sound and appropriate land use and environmental planning controls and regulations. Government should also provide information about the city’s demographic and economic projections and its land and property market so that developers and investors are well informed about urban development trends. This effort includes developing an inventory and assessment of public land holdings that can be used to foster strategic planning objectives.

At the same time, government should work with community and business leaders to improve social equity in real estate market transactions by increasing the supply of affordable housing and seeing that infrastructure and urban services are provided to all neighborhoods regardless of social or economic status. This may include preparing a capital budget for critical infrastructure and real estate development projects, as well as strategies for financing these investments.

The private sector is challenged with developing the city by providing businesses and residents with shops, offices, factories and housing. To the fullest extent possible, the government should enable the private sector to develop real estate to match the changing requirements of households and businesses. In some cases, such activities require partnerships between the public and private sector. For its part, the private sector needs to be more cautious and systematic about the formation and promotion of real estate projects by paying more attention to land market research on occupancy demand and supply for offices, retail, industrial and residential sectors.

To facilitate the implementation of these actions, the seminar participants encouraged Buenos Aires officials to build awareness about the linkages between globalization, urban land management and economic development. One important step would be to form a partnership with the private sector to develop a land market database of real estate transactions in the city. In addition, the participants identified the need for training courses on such topics as strategic planning; public-private partnerships; financing urban development and infrastructure; developing affordable housing; linking urban land management with economic development; and promoting urban revitalization and regeneration.

David E. Dowall is professor of city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

In their new book, Land Use in America, copublished by the Lincoln Institute and Island Press, Henry L. Diamond and Patrick F. Noonan propose a 10-point agenda to help America’s communities accommodate future growth in more environmentally sound and fiscally responsible ways.

Diamond is a partner in the law firm of Beveridge & Diamond in Washington, D.C., and Noonan is founder and chairman of The Conservation Fund in Arlington, Virginia. Together they founded the Sustainable Use of Land Project, from which the book is derived. Their research examined land use practices and trends over the past two decades. They report that while substantial gains have been made in many environmental areas, such as air and water quality, land use remains a highly emotional and complex topic.

The first part of the book presents Diamond and Noonan’s synthesis of the issues, numerous case studies and their agenda for community action. The second part includes the following papers contributed by leading figures in government, business, academia and the nongovernmental arena:

“Growth Management Plans”

Howard Dean, Governor of Vermont

“Ecosystem Management: An Organizing Principle for Land Use” Douglas P. Wheeler, Secretary, California Resources Agency

“Transportation: A Key Element in Sustainable Communities” James Lighthizer, Former Secretary, Maryland Department of Transportation

“Across the Barricades” William K. Reilly, Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

“Metropolitan Development Trends of the Late 1990s: Social and Environmental Implications” Christopher B. Leinberger, Managing Partner, Robert Charles Lesser & Company

“Our Critical Forest Resources” John A. Georges, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, International Paper Company

“Land Use Planning: A Farmer’s Perspective” Kenneth Buelt, Past President, Washington County Farm Bureau

“Patience, Problem Solving and Private Initiative: Local Groups Chart a New Course for Land Conservation” Jean W. Hocker, President/Executive Director, Land Trust Alliance

“Sustainability and Social Justice: The Changing Face of Land Use and Environmentalism” Charles Jordan, Director, Bureau of Parks and Recreation, Portland, Oregon

“Science and the Sustainable Use of Land” Norman L. Christensen, Jr., Dean, School of the Environment, Duke University

“Private Property Rights, Government Regulation and the Constitution: Searching for Balance” Jerold S. Kayden, Professor, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

“An Economic Perspective on the Sustainable Use of Land” John A. Baden, Chairman, Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment

Conference to Explore the Sustainable Use of Land

In conjunction with publication of this book, the Lincoln Institute is presenting a conference on June 12 in Washington, D.C. Participants will discuss varied perspectives on the important political and jurisdictional issues raised by the authors and contributors. Some of these questions may be addressed:

How might the 10 agenda recommendations be implemented in the current climate of popular reaction against federal and state government regulation of local policymaking?

What is the political feasibility of developing broad-based and long-term land use plans, especially in pro-property rights states in the South and West?

Given the likelihood of decreased federal financial support, how can states and localities be encouraged to take the initiative in future land use planning?

How can private landowners and corporate entities with large holdings be motivated to engage in regional conservation plans and provide environmentally sensitive stewardship in the face of economic pressures for development of their land?

A Land Use Agenda for 21st Century America

Item 1.

Local governments must take the lead role in securing good land use. Initiatives in land use planning and growth management need to be anchored in a community-based process that develops a vision for the future.

Item 2.

State governments must help local governments by establishing reasonable ground rules and planning requirements, assisting small and rural areas, and providing leadership on matters that affect more than one local jurisdiction.

Item 3.

The rules governing land development need to be overhauled. They need to be more efficient and more flexible, encouraging–not hindering–new approaches to land development and conservation.

Item 4.

Landowners must be treated fairly and oppressive regulations fixed. But making government pay in order to apply environmental safeguards for the common good is a bad idea.

Item 5.

Many government policies and actions–agricultural, highway, and environmental programs–impact land use. If they are not better coordinated, they will continue to result in land use policy by accident.

Item 6.

In selective situations, public land acquisition is needed, and a reliable source of funds must be available to pay for it.

Item 7.

Older areas in cities and suburbs must become a focus for renewal. Government policies should help fill in vacant land in already built-up areas and renew older properties rather than promote unplanned expansion at the urban fringe.

Item 8. As most land is privately held, private landowners must be galvanized to assure a healthy land base. Corporate and individual stewardship must be encouraged by providing education, tax incentives and other benefits.

Item 9. A constituency for better land use is needed based on new partnerships that reach beyond traditional alliances to bring together conservationists, social justice advocates and economic development interests. These partnerships can be mobilized around natural and cultural resources that people value.

Item 10. New tools are required to meet the new challenges of land use. Land use disputes should be solved through negotiation or mediation rather than through confrontation and litigation. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other advances in technology also offer new opportunities for improving land use decision making.

The content of the Institute’s work program has evolved significantly over the past two years, and its annual activities have increased by about half since 2004. Reflecting this evolution and growth, the Institute’s programs and staffing are also changing.

The former Department of Planning and Development has been replaced by two new departments. The Department of Planning and Urban Form, headed by Armando Carbonell, addresses planning and its relation to the form of the built environment with a focus on three themes: spatial externalities and multijurisdictional governance issues; the interplay of public and private interests in the use of land; and land policy, land conservation, and the environment. The Department of Economic and Community Development, headed by Rosalind Greenstein, connects planning to development and fiscal issues with a focus on four themes: the city, land, and the university; neighborhood planning and development; fiscal dimensions of planning; and urban economics and revitalization.

The Department of Valuation and Taxation, headed by Joan Youngman, continues its focus on land taxation, property taxation, and the valuation process within an expanded program. The main activities of the Department of International Studies continue to be its programs in Latin America and in China focusing on land and tax policy issues. Other international activities include work in Eastern Europe on administration of market value based property taxation, in South Africa on property taxation and land markets, and in Taiwan on infrastructure development and planning.

This year the Institute established a new position, Manager of Public Affairs, and Anthony Flint took up this work in late July. He will be responsible for disseminating information about the Institute’s products, findings, and activities, particularly with the media and through the Internet. He will develop the Institute’s Web site as an outreach tool, writing regular columns, making the site more interactive, and strengthening its capacity as a key Internet portal for those interested in land policy.

Anthony covered transportation, planning and development, architecture, and urban design as a reporter for the Boston Globe from 1989 to 2005. For the past year, he was Smart Growth Education Director at the Massachusetts Office of Commonwealth Development. While a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), he wrote the book This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) on the forces influencing urban growth in the United States. Anthony became familiar with the Institute as a Loeb Fellow at the GSD in 2000 and has since contributed to the Institute’s annual journalists program and authored an Institute working paper on density. A graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Anthony will continue to do research and writing.

The Institute also has been adapting its training programs to take advantage of the capabilities of the Internet. Several of the Institute’s basic courses have been made available for distance education and Internet-based instruction. These typically involve videotaped presentations that can be downloaded from the Internet or a CD. Examples include the introductory courses on conservation easements, mediation of land use disputes, and planning fundamentals. This shift has freed up resources for new classroom courses, such as one based on the book The Humane Metropolis, published this fall by University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Institute.

The Latin American Program has developed several Internet-based courses offered live with real-time instructor feedback on the students’ work. These courses on urban land policy and property taxation topics are presented in Spanish and Portuguese to participants in Latin America.

Finally, the Institute will soon launch a program of evaluations of land policy programs in the United States. One of the first of these will assess the performance of smart growth policies that have been applied to different degrees in many states. This work is part of a new Institute initiative to improve our knowledge of what works and why in land policy.

Accumulating evidence indicates that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, are raising average temperatures, acidifying and raising the level of oceans, and accelerating natural rates of carbon dioxide emissions. Uncertainties abound, but the carbon dioxide concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has risen by 31 percent since 1850 and now exceeds levels experienced over the past 420,000 years. Recent estimates from North America (for 2003) indicate that its anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (mainly from burning fossil fuels) were about 1856 million metric tons per year, or about a quarter of all such global emissions.

The current state of global urban development is unsettling and plagued with man-made and natural disasters. In many developing countries, the government does not have the fiscal and institutional capacity to build affordable housing and basic infrastructure for the growing urban population, resulting in a proliferation of informal settlements and slums. At the same time, natural disasters in some of these distressed regions have destroyed homes, roads, water and sewage systems, and other public facilities, exacerbating the already limited basic services available to the urban poor.

In response to these problems, many international aid agencies such as UN-HABITAT and the World Bank, as well as governments, scholars, and practitioners, are looking for new ideas or repackaging existing ways to rebuild cities. This article discusses a long-established land management tool that has attracted recent attention—land readjustment (LR)—and describes how selected elements of this tool are being adopted to assist post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in Chile.

The LR approach emphasizes the integration of the urban economy, city planning, law, and governance with land management to form a comprehensive urban development or upgrading strategy. It requires an interdisciplinary team of experts with different perspectives to work on a concrete land development project. Although many scholars such as Doebele (1982) and Hong and Needham (2007) have emphasized the importance of this integrated approach, some practitioners perceive it as merely a tool to facilitate land transactions. This narrow view has limited opportunities in some developing countries to resolve urban upgrading and development problems in a more comprehensive way.

The recent resurgence of interest in LR is due to the recognition of the importance of coordinating economic, legal, political, and social institutions in the design and implementation of urban (re)development plans. Practitioners are also contemplating the possibility of extending LR from management of peri-urbanization and post-disaster reconstruction to slum upgrading, for example in some rapidly urbanizing African cities. The application of this LR approach to countries where the technique has never been used is still at an experimental stage. Potential pilot projects are being designed, but have not been fully implemented, so further research is needed to test the validity of assertions about this approach.

Challenges of Urbanization

In 2010, about 50.7 percent of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) lived in urban areas (World Bank 2011). The percentage is expected to increase to 70 percent by 2050, mostly in the periphery of secondary cities in developing countries. According to UN-HABITAT (2011), one-third of the urban population in developing countries (1.2 billion people) lives in slums and, despite substandard living conditions, these populations are increasing, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of slum dwellers increased by six million annually (Cities Alliance 2011).

Unfortunately, infrastructure and basic service development in most African countries have not increased at the same rate. Cities where sanitation, roads, water, and other services were already underdeveloped have limited fiscal resources and struggle with accommodating the unprecedented increase in population. Two major problems that hinder urban upgrading are holdouts in land assembly and lack of public funds to finance infrastructure—issues to which we will return.

Natural disasters also have taken a toll on urban populations. According to a United Nations estimate, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, and volcano eruptions caused economic damage totaling $109 billion in 2010, three times more than in 2009 (Reuters 2011). Cities in developing countries with poor infrastructure and fiscal health are particularly vulnerable and are facing increasing price tags for both post-disaster reconstruction and adaptation to future calamities. Again, solving the problems associated with land assembly and infrastructure financing are crucial.

Conventional solutions for dealing with land assembly problems, such as compulsory purchase (eminent domain) and market transactions, are onerous. With increasing global demands for democratic governance and the realization of human rights to adequate housing, secure tenure, and protection from forced eviction, the traditional approach of relying on coercive measures that take land from owners or occupants for urban expansion and redevelopment is encountering strong legal opposition and public protests (table 1).

Using the market to facilitate voluntary land transfers is also problematic. Holdouts by individual landowners could thwart the redevelopment project and increase compensation costs for land acquisition. In some African countries where market mechanisms are not yet fully developed, unequal access to information has led to land grabs and speculation by local elites. As a result, the urban poor were either forced out or bought out from their neighborhoods and were relocated to remote areas where access to employment, public transportation, and basic services are limited.

To make matters worse, the fiscal outlook for cities in developing countries is bleak, and the opportunities to speed up the construction or repair of housing and basic infrastructure are limited. The 2008 subprime mortgage market meltdown in the United States has had adverse repercussions for municipal finances around the world. The decline in demand for imports in industrialized nations and the tightening of liquidity in the financial markets has slowed global economic growth. As exports to developed countries decrease, income-tax and value-added-tax collections in less developed nations also drop. The reduction in tax revenues exacerbates the already tight local budgets and further undermines the ability of municipalities to repair disaster-damaged infrastructure or build new facilities to accommodate rapid population growth.

Land Readjustment as an Alternative

LR has been practiced in many countries to achieve policy goals ranging from farmland consolidation to inner-city revitalization (Doebele 1982; Hong and Needham 2007). Its basic principle is to organize landowners to act collectively—in cooperation with a municipality and/or private developer—to pool their land in order to accomplish a redevelopment project.

LR is often used to re-parcel land when existing parcel boundaries are in conflict with the current land use plan. One important outcome is that a portion of the readjusted land can be retained by the development agency for construction of necessary infrastructure and basic services. If LR is not used, this land would have to be acquired by the local government, which could entail a huge upfront cost.

In return for the owners’ or occupants’ land contribution to the project, each participant receives, upon completion of the program, a new parcel proportionate in size or value to the original one. The size of the parcel may be smaller, but the value is greater due to land improvements and infrastructure created by the project. In this way, LR generates desirable urban development patterns, increases land values, allocates these increments to the involved parties, and limits displacement.

What is important about the recent interest in LR is its renewed emphasis as a mechanism for building legal and social institutions to govern urban development. The major goal is to combine job creation, land use planning, urban densification, public-private partnerships, and value capture for public infrastructure financing in one comprehensive policy package.

Potential Advantages and Disadvantages

Different elements of this unified goal can be emphasized depending on the context. For instance, in the design of a LR project for urban upgrading in an African city where residents do not have legal property rights, policy makers can legitimatize the occupants’ claims to land and allow them to exercise their right to participate in the project. After land is pooled, readjusted, and serviced, the residents will be invited back to the neighborhood to rebuild their homes or receive an apartment unit with legal title. This is a win-win approach because it allows squatters to improve their living conditions and tenure security, and it increases development densities to enable the city to obtain much-needed land for urban expansion.

LR can also help implement citywide land use regulation incrementally. To ensure that individual LR projects add up to a coherent whole, they must be conducted as part of a comprehensive urban planning process. In situations where local governments lack the capacity to execute a large-scale master plan, related LR projects can be implemented in an orderly sequence and at a manageable scale to put into action a coordinated, long-term development strategy.

In addition, LR can engender democratic governance. The core principle of LR is to build consensus and cooperation among the parties involved in land development. These parties include formal landowners, informal landholders, renters, NGOs, national government agencies, city officials, and private developers. The process entails grassroots mobilization by giving the urban poor real bargaining power to approve LR proposals. Agreement from the supermajority of landowners and renters is required before LR can proceed, thus ensuring that the government (or a private organizing agency) will pay special attention to the needs of the underprivileged groups and avoid confrontation caused by the threat of forced eviction at the very beginning of the project.

Finally, LR can facilitate land value capture for financing local infrastructure and social services. In readjusting the land boundaries, land space is created by increasing development densities. This land space can then be sold in the market to raise funds to defray a portion of the infrastructure costs. This technique creates a clear connection between the development benefits received by landholders and the price that they need to pay to make the program financially viable.

Despite these potential advantages of LR over conventional land assembly methods, it is hardly quick or uncomplicated. LR is particularly difficult to implement in developing countries where public participation is not integrated into urban planning or where there is limited capacity to maintain ownership records and resolve competing land claims. When property owners do not recognize their obligation to pay for basic infrastructure and services, requests to give up a portion of their land to cover the project costs will be strongly resisted.

Another concern is that LR reduces plot sizes, causing problems in many informal settlements where people often rely on extra space to earn rental income or conduct agricultural and business activities. In some cases, urban legislation is often too rigid for facilitating LR. Furthermore, different stakeholders may value real assets in diverse ways, making consensus building difficult. Some see possible improvements in living conditions, neighborhood amenities, social networks, and cohesiveness of community as the predominant factors. Others may make their decision based solely on monetary gains.

The integrated LR approach is designed to target all of these issues by focusing on institutional design and development. It emphasizes learning from past LR experiences to illustrate the importance of local context and enhancing this tool to accommodate a wide range of variables and situations. In addition, future adoption of the technique will search for a good fit rather than a single best practice. Most fundamentally, the design of LR projects must be based on multiple perspectives ranging from political economy and anthropological approaches to legal investigation.

Designing Land Readjustment in Chile

On February 27, 2010, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed a large part of Central Chile. Three regions—O’Higgins, Maule, and Bio-Bio—comprising 5 major cities and 45 small towns were seriously damaged; more than 80,000 homes were destroyed, and about 108,000 units were severely damaged (figure 1).

In response to this unprecedented disaster, the Chilean government expanded its National Reconstruction Plan to include new mandates and more flexible policies to speed up its post-earthquake reconstruction efforts. This plan offers four types of assistance in the form of vouchers to affected families: (1) US$24,144 for rebuilding a new home on existing land; (2) US$19,083 for buying a new home in another neighborhood; (3) US$3,761 for repairing houses that were partially destroyed; and (4) a special bonus of US$4,200 if the destroyed house is located in a heritage zone (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development 2011).

Despite this financial assistance from the government, affected property owners are facing two major problems. First, because the reconstruction program gives priority to low-income households, the money provided by the state to middle-income families is insufficient for them to rebuild homes of the same size and quality or in the same neighborhood. Property owners without insurance coverage who want to build a similar house must sell their land and move to another neighborhood where the land price is lower. Those who live in tsunami-damaged areas now considered unsafe for redevelopment must resettle further inland, yet that may limit their access to jobs and public services.

Second, selling their land to finance reconstruction may not be a viable option for all affected residents. Some landowners refuse to sell to private developers who offer a low price because the property is so badly damaged. Others who are unable to sell their land may not have sufficient financial resources to rebuild. This persistence of unlivable houses and vacant lots covered with debris further dampens the private incentive to reinvest in the neighborhood.

To assist the post-earthquake reconstruction effort, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the ProUrbana Program in the Public Policy Center at the Catholic University of Chile (the team) put forward a joint proposal to the Chilean government to experiment with LR.

The Pilot Project: Las Heras, Talca

The team decided to conduct its first pilot in the Las Heras neighborhood in Talca for four reasons.

First, Las Heras was ripe for redevelopment even before the earthquake. It is a middle-class neighborhood with large old houses and a beautiful main square. Good social networks exist among its residents, organized by the church and local NGOs, although its development had stagnated for many years due to economic restructuring of the Chilean economy. The central government was offering Las Heras assistance in developing affordable housing through the national voucher program, and these housing subsidies later became an important potential funding source for the proposed LR project.

Second, the Public Policy Center has another program called Puentes (Bridges) that conducts collaborative research projects with local municipalities, including a preexisting work agreement with Talca, which facilitated prompt support and cooperation from city officials.

Third, Talca has a master plan that allowed the team to design a series of related LR projects to be implemented step-by-step, so it could fulfill the city’s long-term development plan. Preliminary land ownership and demographic information, land use data, and property damage assessments in different neighborhoods are also available.

Fourth, the local government and private developers in Talca were interested in increasing urban densities. Densification provided the much-needed profit incentive for the private sector to redevelop damaged sites, and it could help the local government achieve its objective of increasing and upgrading the housing supply.

Buy-In from All Involved Parties

Following the integrated LR approach, the team recognized the importance of gaining support from the central government. It organized a seminar in Santiago in May 2010 to present the concept of LR and exchange views with top officials from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MHUD). After several rounds of follow-up discussions, the director of the National Program of Housing Reconstruction agreed to purchase reserved land generated from the proposed LR project, thus providing a guarantee for one of the funding sources, and agreed to go to Talca with the team to encourage property owners to participate.

To obtain critical local government involvement, the team travelled to Talca in September 2010 to present the LR ideas to city officials. The team also met with selected property landowners to determine if they might be interested in contributing all or part of their land as capital to finance the reconstruction of their homes and neighborhood. In another visit, some team members also met with school and community leaders, emphasizing the need for broad community support for the project’s success.

The team next began to gather detailed data about the area by conducting a survey of residents in eight blocks comprising 217 lots near the main plaza of Las Heras (figure 2). Team members completed 135 questionnaires over the telephone and then interviewed selected residents. The survey results indicated that 77 percent of the respondents trusted their neighbors, and the majority of them (65 percent) wanted to stay in the neighborhood and were willing to work with their neighbors to rebuild the community. Only 12 percent of respondents planned to sell their property and relocate to another area. This information revealed that organizing property owners for LR was feasible.

Project Design

Because the majority of residents in Las Heras are unfamiliar with the concept of LR, the strategy started with a small pilot project to demonstrate the applicability of this method. The team chose a block near the plaza and proposed three scenarios for combining 8 to 12 sites for LR. The number of lots included in the proposed project would depend on the levels of difficulty involved in negotiating with affected property owners. To facilitate the participation process, the team prepared visual images of what the neighborhood environment might look like after the project (figure 3).

The team also conducted detailed financial and legal feasibility studies for the project. A tentative plan for financing the pilot included a careful calculation of the amount of land that each owner would need to contribute based on the availability of government subsidies, estimated building costs, compensation for temporary relocation, and a projected land price at the completion date of the project. The financial study also revealed that constructing housing units at an estimated future price of US$46,000 per unit would allow the project to be self-financing and provide the developer with a 10 percent profit margin—under the assumption that MHUD would purchase the reserved land to build affordable housing for low- and low-to-middle-income households after LR. It was also estimated that 24 percent of the housing units within the block would be affordable for low-income households. This would help the MHUD attain its policy goal of social integration through the provision of subsidized housing.

The Real Estate Co-ownership Law in Chile requires all participating owners of the LR project to sign a legal document specifying their rights and liabilities. For example, any sale of land held by the designated organizing agency would require the consensus of all participating owners. A legal contract signed by the agency and each participating owner would specify explicitly the number of housing units that the owner would receive at the end of the project and the date of the delivery. The contract would also guarantee compliance by requiring the agency to pay compensation to owners in case of failure to transfer properties in a timely manner and of acceptable quality. The agency also needs to submit the proposed plan to the city. The Municipal Works Department would review the project, approve the building plan, and authorize the transfer of land. The approved plan would then be recorded by the registrar.

Although the research conducted by the team shows that LR is feasible in Las Heras, progress in convincing landowners to participate has been slow due to five key challenges.

First, most property owners are unfamiliar with LR, and there is no existing example in Chile to show how the idea could work. The lack of precedents makes community organizing difficult.

Second, city officials have not provided sufficient support in organizing community meetings or interacting with property owners directly about the proposed project.

Third, many affected property owners who received assistance from their extended families or friends have already relocated to other areas. These owners are in no hurry to rebuild their homes and are delaying the transfer of their land until they receive a higher offer from a private developer or the government. In Chile, there is no LR law that can force these owners to transfer their real assets.

Fourth, not all buildings in the neighborhood were destroyed by the earthquake, and the owners of the unaffected homes are not willing to give up their existing plots for a neighborhood-wide redevelopment.

Fifth, although the survey shows that many owners are willing to work on rebuilding with their neighbors, solving local problems through collective action is not a social norm in Chile. Some property owners have a strong sense of entitlement to receive public resettlement assistance, which contradicts the idea of community self-help.

Interim Assessment

Although the LR approach in Las Heras is still a work-in-progress and it is too soon to predict if the team will be able to overcome local challenges, the project has already generated several observable impacts on Chile’s post-earthquake reconstruction policy (Public Policy Center 2011).

First, LR gives property owners in Las Heras an additional option for reconstructing their homes. Before the proposal, they had to either sell their properties to a private developer and move to another area or take the government’s subsidies and rebuild a house of smaller size and lower quality. LR provides residents with the opportunity to remain in the neighborhood and to attain the highest possible living standard by using their land as capital for home reconstruction.

Second, LR opens a new channel for the central government to work with local communities on reconstruction projects. The main reasons that the LR proposal for Las Heras could go forward are MHUD’s willingness to buy land, provide assistance in encouraging landowners to participate in LR, and give participating landowners the first priority to receive government housing vouchers to finance reconstruction.

Third, the introduction of LR has influenced the government’s overall post-earthquake reconstruction strategy. Through this holistic approach, public officials are designing a comprehensive reconstruction plan to rebuild the entire neighborhood coherently, rather than giving subsidies to individual homeowners to rebuild their houses separately. The MHUD has also invited the team to assist its reconstruction effort in the earthquake-damaged city of Constitución, indicating that the government has taken LR seriously as a viable option for other projects.

Fourth, all discussions among the central and local governments, landowners, NGOs, developers, scholars, and urban designers about LR have engendered an environment of mutual learning and understanding, which in turn is reshaping the governance structure for post-earthquake reconstruction. The involved parties have begun to realize that neither a top-down nor a bottom-up approach is sufficient to generate satisfactory solutions. Cooperation among all interested parties is paramount. The LR experiment has fostered a social discourse that helps all segments of society learn how to solve their problems collectively.

Conclusion

Like all policy experiments, the current proposals to test the integrated LR approach for urban upgrading and post-disaster reconstruction in countries where the idea is new will face uncertainties and challenges. Yet, given the mixed outcomes of conventional land assembly methods in many (re)development situations, LR could offer another option for policy makers, practitioners, and other interested parties to consider.

About the Authors

Yu-Hung Hong is a senior fellow of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a visiting assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Isabel Brain, a sociologist, coordinates the ProUrbana Program (Program of Urban and Land Policy) at the Public Policy Center, Catholic University of Chile in Santiago.

References

Cities Alliance. 2011. World statistics day: A look at urbanisation. Washington, DC. http://www.citiesalliance.org/ca/node/2195

Doebele, William A. 1982. Land readjustment: A different approach to financing urbanization. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Hong, Yu-Hung, and Barrie Needham. 2007. Analyzing land readjustment: Economics, law, and collective action. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, Government of Chile. 2011. Reconstruction Plan (English version). Santiago, Chile: Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.

Public Policy Center. 2011. Land readjustment project, second report. Santiago: Catholic University of Chile. May.

Reuters. 2011. Cost of natural disasters $109 billion in 2010. January 24. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/24/us-disasters-un-idUSTRE70N26K2…

UN-HABITAT. 2011. State of the world’s cities 2010/2011–Cities for all: Bridging the urban divide. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Human Settlements Program.

World Bank. 2011. Data: Urban population. Washington, DC. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the other members of the LR project team for their contributions to this article: Armando Carbonell, Department of Planning and Urban Form, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Pia Mora, ProUrbana, Public Policy Center, Catholic University of Chile; Julio Poblete, DUPLA/Urban Design and Planning; Alejandra Rasse, Catholic University of Maule; Francisco Sabatini, Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies, Catholic University of Chile; and Martim Smolka, Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

From its initial economic reform in 1978 through its liberalization of foreign investment and private sector development from the mid-1980s to the present, China’s major economic reforms have given priority to achieving a high rate of economic growth. The policies worked so well that China’s constant dollar GDP per capita grew nearly 10 percent a year from 1980 to 2010. This growth performance is unparalleled for a large country, but it has been accompanied by unaccounted-for costs, including the structural transformation of the economy, social adjustment and migration, and environmental degradation. A new Lincoln Institute book, China’s Environmental Policy and Urban Development, edited by Joyce Yanyun Man, addresses the last of these topics. It reports estimates from governmental agencies of undocumented environmental costs associated with economic production ranging from 9.7 percent of GDP in 1999 to 3 percent in 2004.

Economic growth in low-income countries is typically accompanied by environmental costs. This tradeoff is embodied in the “environmental Kuznets curve,” which postulates that environmental quality deteriorates with economic growth at low income levels and then improves with growth at higher income levels. Estimates of the environmental Kuznets curve for Chinese cities over the years 1997 to 2007 as reported in this book show that measures of industrial pollution in China declined as incomes increased over this period, indicating that cities with higher incomes experienced improvements in these measures of environmental quality as their incomes grew.

Several chapter authors argue that China’s environmental policies and performance are in transition. Environmental indicators are improving in response to new policies and regulations while economic growth continues. At the same time, there have been setbacks. For example, extreme events, such as this winter’s combination of extremely cold weather and atmospheric inversions in Beijing, produced very high levels of particulate concentrations in that city.

The logic behind the environmental Kuznets curve involves elements of both demand and supply. On the demand side, higher income populations have a growing appreciation for environmental amenities, and they advocate for environmental improvements. On the supply side, investment in new capacity uses modern equipment with more environmentally friendly processes and more affordable control technologies. China’s recent environmental improvements also stem from its strengthened environmental regulatory institutions. In 1982 the role of the Environmental Protection Agency was mainly advisory. It was transformed into a national agency in 1988, became the more independent State Environmental Protection Agency in 1998, and then was elevated as the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2008.

The growing influence of central environmental agencies has been accompanied by a change in the style of regulation. The earlier emphasis on command-and-control regulations (such as emission standards) was partially replaced by instruments based on economic incentives (such as taxes on inputs and a newly announced tax on carbon emissions). Research indicates that to date the commandand-control regulations generally have been more effective.

While central agencies set national standards, the responsibility for monitoring and enforcement was largely decentralized to municipal or metropolitan environmental bureaus. The performance of local managers is reviewed annually based on criteria that emphasize economic growth. Additional improvements in environmental outcomes may occur only when these criteria give greater weight to environmental improvements. For example, a rapid increase in the control of sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants followed the inclusion of reduced sulfur emissions as an annual performance criterion.

While China has much to do to reduce urban air pollution, clean up rivers and lakes, and improve energy efficiency, these objectives are becoming more important to its citizens. The increased availability of data on environmental indicators is stimulating the national dialogue on environmental quality. Professor Man’s new volume contributes to this dialogue by reporting on progress, identifying immediate challenges, and assessing new policies and regulatory approaches to environmental improvement.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy partnered with a team of nonprofit organizations and federal agencies to host the National Workshop on Large Landscape Conservation (NWLLC) on October 23 and 24, 2014, at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC. The meeting drew some 700 participants to consider how—working across the public, private, civic (NGO), and academic sectors; across disciplines; and across parcel, town, county, state, and even international boundaries—large landscape conservation practitioners could achieve creatively conceived, strategically significant, measurably effective, transferable, and enduring results on the land in this era of climate change.

The policies, practices, and case studies discussed at the NWLLC offered a broad spectrum of solutions and promising paths for enhancing wildlife conservation efforts on a regional level; substantially improving water quality and quantity across large watersheds; achieving sustainable production of food, fiber, and energy; and protecting internationally significant cultural and recreational resources. The conference organizers greatly appreciate the productive contributions of all participants—ranging from Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, Iroquois elder Sid Jamieson, and National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara, to on-the-ground land managers, scientists, and project coordinators from Alaska’s Bering Strait to the Florida Keys.

A version of this article originally appeared in Expanding Horizons: Highlights from the National Workshop on Large Landscape Conservation, the complete NWLLC report. Prepared by the Lincoln Institute and three conference partners—the National Park Service Stewardship Institute, the Quebec-Labrador Foundation/Atlantic Center for the Environment, and the Practitioners’ Network for Large Landscape Conservation—the full report is available on the Practitioners’ Network website (www.largelandscapenetwork.org)

—James N. Levitt
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Harvard Forest, Harvard University

Big ideas about nature and people and a new approach to conservation cascaded through the first-ever National Workshop on Large Landscape Conservation. So much happened so quickly that the usual phrases for describing heartening and enlivening events don’t fit.

A watershed event? It felt more like white-water rafting down Niagara Falls or along an Ice-Age Flood.

A coming of age? Perhaps, if what you’re thinking about is the “rocket stage” in the growth of a longleaf pine tree: the tree can spend years looking like no more than a clump of grass, although it’s been invisibly sinking a deep taproot; then, in a single season, it leaps four feet toward the sky, putting it past the reach of ground-hugging wildfires.

Variety of input? The medieval Spanish king, Alfonso the Wise, is remembered for saying that if he’d been present at the Creation, he could’ve offered some useful hints. But at the oversubscribed Large Landscape Workshop, 117 hours of experience, advice, and data had to be packed into seven sets of concurrent sessions that occupied most of the 17 hours of the conference. There were thoughtful talks and panels and carefully prepared reports and slideshows by 269 presenters from inner cities, remote rocky heights, far-flung islands, and landscapes of all types across the United States, with connections to Canada and Mexico.

Continuing momentum? Ben Franklin said on the last day of the U.S. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 that, after spending three months listening to back-and-forth debate and looking daily at a gilded sunburst on the back of the president’s chair, he finally had the happiness of knowing he was seeing a rising sun, not a setting one. But Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, one of two cabinet members to address the NWLLC audience and applaud its efforts, told a lunchtime plenary session on the very first day: “This room is bursting with vision. You will be pioneers of landscape-level understanding, as Teddy Roosevelt was of conservation a century ago. Let’s make it happen!”

Landscape-level conservation—the term is still relatively new—is a different way of making sense of the world, and of assessing and nurturing its health. It steps beyond the laudable but limited 20th-century practice of designating reserves and cleaning up pollution. Taking a wide-angle, big-picture view of things, it sees every landscape, designated or not, as an intricately connected network of living beings sustained by a wide-ranging community of people. Landscape-level conservation has been reenergizing and broadening the environmental movement. And as its perspective is adopted, the first thing that grows is not necessarily the size of the property to be protected, but the possibility for actions, some large, some small, that will make a lasting difference for the future of the biosphere and its inhabitants, including humanity.

Many of these inaugural projects were on display in the workshop presentations and in the 34 posters that adorned the vast Reagan Building atrium. At times, the workshop felt like an enormous bazaar, displaying programs, concepts, research findings, explorations, cooperative agreements, and other early successes, as well as questions to ponder. Unexpected jewels, efforts hitherto known only to small groups, gleamed brightly in corners and were freely offered to all.

Yellowstone-to-Yukon, known as “Y2Y,” is perhaps the granddaddy of citizen-generated large-landscape projects—an idea for a connected, binational wildland corridor 2,000 miles long, from Yellowstone National Park north to the Alaskan border along the world’s last intact mountain ecosystem. At the NWLLC, Y2Y was literally coming of age, celebrating its 21st birthday. In 1993, only 12 percent of this 321-million-acre landscape had been conserved, but by 2013 the total had surged to 52 percent.

National Heritage Areas, honoring this country’s history and achievements, are even more well-established: the program embraces tens of millions of acres, including the entire state of Tennessee. It has just turned 30.

Y2Y has inspired plans for “H2H”—a 50-mile corridor of land that has been identified as a “resilient landscape,” just beyond the affluent northern suburbs of New York City, stretching from the Housatonic River, in Connecticut, to the Hudson River, in New York. Once protected, it could dramatically slow the effects of climate change.

The Staying Connected Initiative—a coalition of Canadians and Americans working across 80 million acres of forested land in four provinces and four states anchored by northern New England (a landscape the size of Germany)—calls itself “the very young cousin to Y2Y that, 15 years from now, they’ll call its northeast equivalent.”

Shortly before the workshop began, an Oregon county sewerage agency began adding trees and shrubs to the meandering banks of the 80-mile-long Tualatin River west of Portland, Oregon, to keep the fish in the river cool; it will have planted a million of them by World Environment Day on June 5, 2015.

The effect, workshop participants told me during breaks (there were a few), was somehow both exhilarating and sobering. Landscape-level conservation is hope-propelled rather than fear-accelerated. It’s a banding together in the face of grave environmental threats of extinctions and degradation. By widening our horizons, the focus shifts from salvage operations to the astounding number of things that can and need to be undertaken to restore, replenish, safeguard, protect, and celebrate the long-term integrity of this gigantic continent’s astonishing natural and cultural heritage.

When human ancestors first stood upright millions of years ago and could see over the tall savanna grasses of East Africa, their world went in an instant from being about 20-to-30 feet wide to something like 20-to-30 miles wide. This redefined what was practical, necessary, and possible to think about. In a similar fashion, scaling up or accelerating our own awareness of conservation to the landscape level is a useful way of dealing with the ever-proliferating complexities of modern America, a country of 320 million people that within half a century will have 400 million.

It’s a country where, the last half-century of science tells us, existing conservation methods aren’t enough to protect these places properly—in part because plants and animals move across lines drawn on a map and because, as these places become more isolated, former inhabitants can’t move back in again, either for full-time or part-time residence. Even high-flying Alaskan shorebirds, which winter in Mexico or China or New Zealand, are finding their round-trips impeded by oil spills in San Francisco Bay and invasive mangroves in New Zealand; Tom Tidwell, chief of the United States Forest Service, calls birds, bats, and butterflies the “winged messengers” of landscape-scale conservation. In recent years, we’ve also seen that, though maps and land designations remain stationary, places may soon be on the move in their entirety, as climate change nudges one ecosystem aside and draws in another.

Perhaps mapping itself is finally entering a non-Euclidean, or post-Jeffersonian, phase. For almost 230 years—ever since 1785, when Thomas Jefferson, even before the Constitutional Convention, suggested that geometry should trump topography for surveying what were called the “vacant lands” west of the Appalachians—we’ve had the “Jeffersonian grid,” still inescapably seen from the windows of any transcontinental flight in the way roads and fields are laid out. This grid used the otherwise invisible (and only recently computed) lines of longitude and latitude to partition the landscape into square-mile “sections” for property lines that ignored ecosystems, watersheds, and even mountain chains. It created a right-angled reality for settlers moving west to set up towns, unencumbered by what they were inheriting—the natural organization of the landscape and the age-old ways and knowledge of its previous human inhabitants.

Banding together. If working across more of the land is something that follows the realization that there’s more to the land (and beneath it and above it), the new conservation equation places as much emphasis on the who part of the work as it does on the what of it. In yet another departure from traditional practices, another thing to grow is the number and kinds of people who need to get behind any landscape-scale project. The entire process, said Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, relies on “epic collaboration,” which became the workshop’s most frequently repeated phrase. Epic resonated because it spoke of reaching across so many divides. “De-railers” was another popular workshop word:

Private landowners partnering with public-land managers. The migration path of the pronghorn antelope, which traverses both public and private land, has been protected, but it’s the last of what were seven such corridors, and the others have all been expunged. Working with 953 ranchers across 11 Western states, the National Resources Conservation Service’s Sage Grouse Initiative has moved or marked with white plastic tags 537 miles of barbed-wire fences, so these low-flying birds won’t impale themselves. “I work with the hopefuls, not the hatefuls,” one rancher said.

Private landowners partnering with their next owners. Tens of millions of acres of farms and ranches will change hands within the next 20 years, along with more than 200 million acres of “family forests.” The average age of a forest landowner is 62½, and “affinity to the land,” one commentator pointed out, “can be harder to pass along than a legal deed.”

Public-land managers working with other public-land managers. Too many sister agencies have longstanding habits of treating each other as disdained step-sisters, or they function like the three Gray Sisters in Greek myths, sharing a single eye. Over the last 30 years, the Bureau of Land Management has developed a Visual Resource Management (VRM) system for evaluating intrusions on lands in the West that includes listing scenic qualities at various distances from Key Observation Points (KOPs). But VRM methods have not yet made it back East, where the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission tends to approve without question all proposals for new gas pipelines and electric-transmission corridors, even if they might affect views from a National Historic Landmark such as Montpelier, the Virginia estate surrounded by old-growth forest where James Madison drafted an outline for the U.S. Constitution.

Other disparities yet to be bridged. Eighty-five percent of Americans live in urban areas, leading to a generation of kids who have “walked only on asphalt.” Within the workshop, most presenters were male—engaged in “mansplaining,” as one woman said. Another participant was shocked to find the conference so “overwhelmingly white.” Dr. Mamie Parker, retired assistant director of the Fish and Wildlife Service (the first African-American woman in that position), was a plenary speaker who got a sustained ovation equaled only by Secretary Jewell’s. “For many years,” Dr. Parker said, “we’ve been stuck, stalled, and scared of nontraditional partnerships. Fear has kept us from reaching out to people who want to feel respected, to know that they’re a valued member of the team.”

“Change happens at the rate of trust,” said one workshop participant. “I don’t think we’ve tested the trust yet,” said another. It’s abundantly clear that, from here on out, successful conservation is going to need a lot of successful conversations, many of which might be awkward at first. It will be a challenging stretch—standing upright brought human ancestors out of their comfort zone; a sense of belonging to other tribes is something we’re still working on.

City People, a groundbreaking book by the historian Gunther Barth, showed how 20th-century American cities became cohesive places because of late-19th-century inventions: millions of small-town Americans and Eastern European immigrants learned how to live and work together thanks to apartment houses, department stores, newspapers (which gave them the same information base), and baseball parks (which taught them the rules of competition and cooperation). Public libraries and public parks could be added to the list.

Baltimore’s Masonville Cove, the country’s first Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership, launched in 2013, is perhaps a new kind of public library for the large-landscape era. A waterfront neighborhood in the southernmost part of town—torn up after World War II for a harbor tunnel thruway, and littered with abandoned industrial sites that have regenerated and then been rediscovered by 52 species of birds—the Masonville Cove Urban Wilderness Conservation Area now offers classes taught by staffers from the National Aquarium about the Chesapeake Bay and its 64,000 square-mile watershed (the size of 18½ Yellowstones). There are also field trips, walking trails, a kayak launch, and opportunities to help clean up charred debris, which may date back to the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

Nationally, landscape-scale conservation has an informal and unofficial steering committee—the Practitioners’ Network for Large Landscape Conservation, an alliance of government land managers, land trusts, academics, citizens, and national nonprofits who save lands and protect species. And officially, as the result of an early Obama administration initiative, there’s now a nationwide underpinning to the work: a network of federal fact-finders and conveners, organized as 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives. The LCCs don’t own anything or run anything, nor do they issue regulations, but they generate and compile reliable scientific data about all of the country’s landscapes (and many of the adjoining landscapes in Canada and Mexico), creating a shared information base. They necessarily cover a lot of ground and water (one LCC takes in both Hawaii and American Samoa, 4,000 miles to the west). And they bring a lot of people together; each LCC has at least 30 partners who represent separate government agencies, nonprofits, and tribal governments.

What’s next? That was the question asked over and over, with excitement and urgency, in the building’s sprawling, mall-length hallways. There were those buoyed by a recent survey showing that Americans think 50 percent of the planet should be protected for other species (Brazilians say 70 percent). Some foresee a seamless continental system of interlocked large landscapes, and the establishment of an international peace park on the U.S.–Mexico border to complement the one set up in 1932 across the U.S.–Canada boundary. There were, on the other hand, those in anguish who see all efforts falling short, confining North Americans to a continent with more development, less biodiversity, and fewer wolves, salmon, and spotted owls. There were those who thought that, at the next national workshop, partnership must be made an official part of the proceedings, built into the planning of sessions, into their presentations, and into follow-up discussions and initiatives.

What is next? People may need to take some time to assimilate the ascendancy of a new insight, a permanent expansion in the perception of landscapes. No more NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”); there’s only one backyard (OBY), and it’s our care and delight, our inheritance and responsibility.

When you gain a new capacity, where will you set your sights? If someone gives you a telescope, what will you look at first?

About the Author

Tony Hiss was a New Yorker staff writer for more than 30 years and is now a visiting scholar at New York University. He is the author of 13 books, including The Experience of Place and, most recently, In Motion: The Experience of Travel.