The Trouble With Conservationists

sheril...

thanks for the important daylighting of this issue... but you paint a somewhat incomplete picture... close to 85% of all conservation funding available (land and sea) is gobbled-up by the BiNGOs (Gig NGOs)... WWF, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, WCS... corportae structures, massive overhead and adminstrative costs, exhorbitant salaries for execs, big egos... i could go on... while size sometimes has it's advantages capacity wise, it's only one way to get conservation goals met...

the remaining 15% of available conservation dollars is indeed under intense competition... by small NGOs (both local and international) that have to demonstrate that niche approaches (specializing in a particular avenues of conservation) has value... small NGOs are quite often happy to partner with the BiNGOs, but as you might expect there's the "800 pound gorilla effect" that comes into play all too many times...

i fear that until conservation funders are more willing to spread the "wealth" in a bit more egalitarian fashion, the problem of communication breakdowns and some duplication of effort is inevitable... what i'd like to see are more fora that bring together funders with the conservation organizations for some real strategic planning that seeks to identify (and avoid) duplication and encourages meaningful collaboration...

Sheril,
Sometimes the allegiance to a cause works - but it often pretty difficult to get everyone to play nicely in the sandbox. Take a look at Great Lakes United, which provides the "glu" holding together a lot of NGOs dedicated to preserving our greatest national treasure. They do a lot of great work - trying to coordinate the messages coming from myriad groups interested in the Lakes. But they also recognize that having such a diversity of groups is very important - each can concentrate on raising awareness about a specific cause while also contributing to the larger push for conservation and restoration. While in a perfect world it may be possible to present "a unified voice and message," in reality there are many pieces and interests to incorporate and trying to go beyond a general message like "Thank you ocean" does a disservice by cutting out the very people who can provide all of the legwork needed.

So yes, I agree that uniting around a physical entity like the Great Lakes, ocean, or national parks can provide a firm base, but I am leery of too much unification beyond that point - after all, having a diversity of partners means that as a whole those working on the issue will be more likely to create and communicate using a greater number of frames.

I'd like to raise yet another issue --- not about organizations, not about budgets.

Little pockets of undeveloped land.

Like many older people, I own some parcels of property, not "wilderness" but not "empty lots" -- that I've left alone, kept up, enjoyed, and hoped to preserve because they can keep turning out plants and fungi and birds and bugs and other wildlife forever, if let be.

They used to be "nothing in particular" parcels.

Thoreau wrote that the measure of our wealth is what we can afford to leave alone.

Now some of what I've left alone is, locally, unique, surrounded by development.

That means it's doing more to turn out conservationists -- the kids who can bicycle or walk to there, duck into the woods, and be, in their own minds, in wildlands, wilderness, seeing nature as it is.

My old college ecology teacher has a parcel like this in the North Woods by a lake. Other classmates and teachers of mine from the 1960s have their old family parcels, or the bits of wildland they bought as they could during the 1970s and 1980s.

Please ask at your meeting, what the people there know about this kind of concern.

Here's the hook -- I don't want to just give it to the Nature Conservancy, they'd sell it. (Well, they might put a conservation easement on it and sell it to someone, that'd be okay, but then it could still end up fenced off from the kids who are learning from it).

I might give it to the ministers I know who want hermitage type retreats and would be willing to keep up a botanical inventory over the years.

I might sell it to someone who wants ten acres of big trees near Sequim, the last ones that big near town, who'd convince me they want to keep it alive instead of stripping it for timber, or give it to the local land trust if they had some way to manage it.

I'm just using me as an example.

Conservationists come out of the woods --- usually the woods they could walk or bicycle to as children.

Right? Ask around.

So many of us older coots have chunks of wildland like this, that can be kept going (see Malcolm Margolin's wonderful book The Earth Manual -- How To Work On Wild Land Without Taming It (Heyday Press)).

And hell, we've got enough money to donate nicely to the people who do need help funding NGOs, doing the big projects, we do already.

But focus, folks, ask around your local area and think please about the little tiny bits of wildland that are still a whole world to a bird, a bug, a reptile, or a small mammal like a human kid.

Hank - Thanks for bringing up these "tiny bits" of land. My mom has just such a parcel that she bought over in western Michigan, up the road a piece from Muskegon and near some government forest land. She and her friends camped there when they were younger (college and soon after), but I've never been there, so that means its been at least 27 years its been there as just "nothing in particular." Over the years, researchers from the University of Wisconsin have studied reforestation patterns on the land, and its quite likely that deer hunters, hikers, and others have wandered in. A few months ago, she got a letter from the "neighborhood association" up that way about paving the road - turns out that the backwoods is now turning into ex-exurbs for Chicago, with folks doing the 200 mile commute down, working 3 or 4 days of very long hours, and then the 200 mile commute back to enjoy long weekends in nature. The person that called her the discuss the issue used to live down in Chicago, but wanted somewhere that his kids could go fishing and explore the woods. Others in the area perhaps don't make quite the commute, but have similar wishes for their kids and grandkids (and for themselves, I imagine). I used to wonder why my mom hung onto that land for so long, but over time I've come to appreciate the philosophy that Hank so eloquently describes above, and it's nice to think about the ways in which her tiny bit might be making a modest bit of difference.

Who says conservationists need to agree politically?

The important thing is an ethic that places people within nature rather than as masters of nature. From that shared assumption, people can and do have many proposed paths and policies to achieve important goals.

Even Newt Gingrich has a book set for November called A Contract With The Earth. I have major disagreements with his approach (click my name for more), but I am glad to see the book coming out as it will move the debate from arguing over the science of environmental issues (including global warming/climate change) to arguing over political approaches and policies to deal with the environmental problems we are facing.