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TODAY Monday 21 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Monday 21 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Don't Know Much About Conservation
Americans have been worrying about nature almost as long as they've been reducing it. Even in the 17th Century, when the modest hills of Worcester County seemed like a forbidding wilderness to the Puritans of eastern Massachusetts, we find evidence of public handwringing about the despoliation of the landscape (and the unjust treatment of Indians). It was a minority voice, to be sure, but you hear it clearly in the stories of frontier people uncomfortable with the spread of settlement and the disturbance of their new life in the woods. Those frontier people were invented, like Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer, and they were real, like Daniel Boone, who became so sick of crowding that he renounced his American citizenship and died in the West as a subject of the King of Spain.
Toward the middle of the 19th Century, the fast-growing republic had spawned a green counter-culture. Thoreau is best known on the literary side, but he was part of a larger constellation of American writers who found in undisturbed nature sources of inspiration and truth. In painting, the new aesthetic was given expression in the Hudson River School, later transmuted into the giant-scale Rocky Mountain landscapes of Church and Bierstadt.
So when the frontier finally closed, i.e. when white men had drawn a reliable grid upon the land and examined every square first-hand, there already flowed a deep current of American sentiment on the non-quantifiable value of nature. When this sentiment joined with the different-but-related sentiment that nature could be "managed" for human benefit, the American conservation movement gained irresistible political force. Yellowstone became the world's first nature reserve, Central Park became the world's first democratic urban expanse, and the national forests became the world's first experiment in the socialization of timber, minerals, and rangeland. The impulses behind Yellowstone evolved into a movement for more untrammeled American wilderness. The impulses behind the national forests evolved into a movement for subsidized private economic uses of public land, now overseen by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The two impulses were joined in a marriage of convenience at the beginning of this century (presided over by the Reverend Theodore Roosevelt), but the parties have squabbled incessantly and today you wonder what they ever saw in each other.(It's been the Central Park model -- artful shaping of natural elements to serve urban needs for recreation and tranquillity -- that has proven the most uncontroversial and popular.)
Both the wilderness partisans and the resource-use partisans can lay fair claim to the mantle of American conservationism. But a number of factors make their co-existence difficult today. The movement for wilderness is stronger than ever, supported by a combination of aesthetic orthodoxy (wild nature is beautiful, and therefore worth saving) and, ironically, cheap transportation (wild nature is accessible, and therefore personally meaningful). The movement for resource-use is strong and entrenched, but the value of its products (ore and timber and cattle) constitutes a much smaller fraction of the American economy than it once did. Moreover, there is much less confidence today among resource-users that their activities can utilize nature without diminishing it. As the sciences of ecology and conservation biology have matured, we've learned that reforesting a clear cut or re-grading and seeding an open-pit mine can look fine to the eye but still represent a dramatic loss of biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. The more we know, in sum, the less confident we become of our abilities to "manage."
There are signs that a new conservationist synthesis may be at hand. The concept of biodiversity may be its unifying principle. A desire to preserve biodiversity and its potential benefits to future human generations adds a politically-welcome element of utilitarianism to the movement for wilderness. And management regimes that prize the maximization of biodiversity add an equally-welcome element of ecological durability to resource-use, on both private and public lands. We are beginning to learn, for example, that a well-run cattle ranch is better for grassland ecosystems than either farming or second-home subdivisions. To enviros, at least, there's little question that Americans can and should expand the acreage in this country in which no economic activity is allowed, period. But the bigger challenge may be to find if we can fashion our laws -- particularly our tax laws -- to encourage economic uses that value biodiversity and summon individual self-interest to its protection.
TODAY ON THE SITE
It's saltwater week at Liberty Tree. Gerald Leape of Greenpeace weighs anchor with a new Capitol Hill Spy on the legislative struggle over keeping dolphins out of tuna nets. Soon he'll be joined by Vikki Spruill, the director of the Sea Web program in Washington, who contributes an Op-Ed where she calls for a new Jacques Cousteau figure to embody and dramatize the cause of the oceans.
Recent "Today" columns:
7/18: All Aboard
7/17: Downward and Outward Mobility
7/16: A Muggy Day on The Hill
7/15: Plug for Planet Ark
7/14: Follow Me
7/11: Blood Sports
7/10: Oil and Taxes
7/09: Mexico
7/08: By the Sea, By the Sea
7/07: Huddled Masses
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