Aldo Leopold reminded us in his 1939 essay The Farmer as Conservationist, “When land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer, we do not.”
This formula for integrating human livelihoods with the environment has too often been forgotten by mainstream conservation efforts that work to segregate people from nature. Five and a half decades after Leopold wrote those words, another Wisconsin resident, historian William Cronon reiterated the need for such integrative efforts in his seminal essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” The fundamental challenge to conservation in the modern world, Cronon reminded us, is “the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world- not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.” Cronon reminds conservationists that Leopold’s ethic of personal responsibility for living, working landscapes has been sidelined by an increasingly tunneled focus on protectionism and top-down regulation.
Parks, Regulations, and “10%” Solutions
For decades, mainstream environmentalism has relied on a dual strategy of “preservation” which excluded human activity and “regulation” which penalized people’s use of lands and resources. Both strategies can be credited for limited successes. Both, however, are inherently limited in reach. An article in the journal Nature (April 2004) concluded that attaining 11% of the planet within the global network of protected areas was “far from complete, and demonstrated the inadequacy of uniform – that is, ‘one size fits all’ – conservation strategies.” At the same time, the U.S. Endangered Species Act has few clear-cut successful de-listing examples. In fact in the 30 years since enactment 1820 species have been listed [986 endangered – 276 threatened, 1262 in the US and Mexico]. There have been only 37 species de-listed – 7 because they went extinct – 15 because of technical mistakes in the listing – and 15 because of legitimate recovery. At the same time there is growing anecdotal evidence that the ESA encourages habitat depletion in potential endangered species range. Protectionist and regulatory policies for conservation both tend to alienate conservation’s most powerful ally: landholders. Landholders are severed from a mutually beneficial relationship with land resources while benefits are distributed so broadly as to become virtually meaningless.
As necessary as private landowner conservation is globally, public policy support through meaningful devolution of resource rights and application of direct incentives is slow in coming. Despite the slow pace and obstacles throughout the U.S., landowners are finding ways to practice conservation from which they and their communities accrue benefit. For example, in Texas where 98 percent of the land is privately owned, neighboring landowners are forming Wildlife Cooperatives and marketing their combined landscape for hunting and eco-tourism. The Menominee Tribe in central Wisconsin has assertively managed white-tailed deer on the Reservation with a six-month hunting season (as opposed to Wisconsin’s customary nine-day hunting season). As a result, the Menominee managed forest has had significantly higher rates of tree growth than surrounding public and private forest lands. The Tribe has thereby maintained a reliable and autonomous forestry enterprise with economic and wildlife benefits for tribal members, while also maintaining a large block of ecologically important hardwood forest.
Community Based Conservation (CBC) has become the recognized trademark of what many claim is a "new conservation" unfolding around the world. In response to the recognized failure of top-down approaches to development and ecological limits of protectionist ("fortress") conservation, "the community" has become a leading alternative for effective conservation and development. CBC shifts the focus of conservation from nature as protected through exclusive state control to nature as managed through inclusive, participatory, locally based practices.
The Community Based Conservation Network® operates from the practical position that linking adjacent landholders’ livelihoods to park resources will result in better stewardship and less destructive exploitation of the designated public lands. No matter how well or poorly managed the “protected areas,” the use decisions on surrounding land directly impacts the functioning of the overall ecosystem; just as the land use decisions made on public lands impacts neighboring people. In nearly all cases, a truly cooperative spirit among public land agencies manifest practically through the proper incentives, can reduce conflict and vastly expand the productivity of the landscape.
Economic Realities
Traditional conservation strategies are running afoul of economic realities on a number of fronts. First, both in this country and in developing nations government simply cannot buy enough land and water to conserve species populations and ecosystem functioning at the landscape scale. Nor can government consistently afford to properly manage the resources already under their purview. Second, land prices across North America are growing at a pace that makes future acquisition strategies unlikely. Third, globalization is exerting pressure on traditional rural commodities markets. Centralized market protection schemes tend to undermine nascent local market adjustment strategies and only delay and worsen their inevitable collapse. These economic challenges to traditional conservation strategies require new approaches that: (1) reduce the demands on government treasuries, (2) capture local benefits from higher land and resource values, and (3) explore enterprises and markets that can complement or replace low-value commodities.
Democracy and Conservation
Since the late 1980s, there has been a global resurgence of democracy. People of different countries and cultures increasingly employ democratic principles and practices. The adoption of broad and inclusive national constitutions and the extension of the rule of law have become guiding principles of governance and major steps in the democratization of previously undemocratic countries. These have created new political space for marginalized rural constituencies. There remains, however, significant weakness in effectiveness, accountability, and responsiveness of both governments and political parties.
In addition to these worldwide trends, countries are under mounting pressure to be more inclusive and to increase their responsiveness to the claims of marginalized people. Across North America, rural communities are beginning to organize for self-determination in response to outside interest groups and government agencies to regulate resource use. Similarly, indigenous and aboriginal people continue to press for their claims on resources through landmark court decisions and adjudicated treaty rights. These and other political factors require an alternative framework for resource conservation and management – a framework reflective of democracy, rights, and local self-determination.
The Sand County Foundation recognizes that conservation is fundamentally about the economic, ecological, and political values that natural resources provide to people’s lives and the ability of local communities to make decisions about the uses of these resources. This link between the land the people living on it was at the heart of Aldo Leopold’s conservation ethic, and it is at the heart of Sand County Foundation’s Community Based Conservation Network®.
