Rich J. and I were discussing the likelihood of finding common ground based on different ways of approaching a problem or issue. It reminded me of an ethics panel I was on at University of British Columbia with a fellow from a hospital ethics committee. He told me that while people disagreed philosophically, when it came to real cases at the hospital they tended to agree.
Which reminded me of the year I taught Environmental Ethics at Virginia Tech (their NOVA branch), and teaching from the book Environmental Ethics by Joseph R. Des Jardin. Most of my students were practicing natural resource professionals and were naturally attracted to pragmatism over other philosophical views. Are pragmatists naturally attracted to resource professions, compared, say, to the legal profession or academia, or.. even.. politics? Or does the work itself form our philosophical views?
I haven’t found a good way to convert photos to text, so I just added the photos to the post. Please let me know if you can’t read on your device and I will try something else.. Des Jardins starts with “over the first few years, I was a member of a local task force appointed by our mayor and charged with drafting an environmental ordinance to govern economic development and the preservation of environmentally sensitive natural areas.”
It sounds a bit like forest planning without NFMA..or planning rules. And like forest collaboratives in general. What strikes me about it, though, in our federal world, is the power of non-local groups to have the final say, either via executive, legislative and judicial branches. Which is and has been an ongoing tension between the good of the country (as landowners) and the good of the local people (who, of course, don’t necessarily agree either).
Here’s what he wrote.
Thanks! Good information.
I certainly agree that the best way to achive an agreement among different parties (in any setting, including the natural resource management setting) is to try to come up with a solution that does not force any of them to yield on what they believe are fundamental principles. And I also agree that this is usually best done in the context of a specific decision where the debating parties are all very familiar with the local landscape (in every sense of that word). I also agree, and have previously argued here, that the Forest Service (and other land management agencies) should give greater priority to hiring and promoting employees with good negotiating skills, and then letting those employees stay in one place for a long time (perhaps by constructing new career ladders), so that they can in effect become members of the community rather than be seen as “outsiders.”
Where I think things can get trickier is in trying to attach expected negotiating prowess to specific classes of people, whether it’s locals vs. outsiders or differentiating by profession. I would say, without having done any sort of systematic review, that pragmatism and idealism (or pick your preferred antonym) in my experience have been distributed more or less randomly among these various classes.
Ultimately pragmatism can succeed only where the significant actors are – or can without exorbitant cost be made – pragmatic. I don’t think there is an easy formula to identify in advance where this is this case, although my guess is many land managers have a pretty good idea of where they have effective room to manuever and where one or more actors (external or internal) severely constrain their decision space. I have long thought the land management agencies should, consistent with their legal responsibilities, reinforce success by prioritizing support of collaborative efforts that have already shown some achievements on the ground (acknowledging the dangers inherent in defining “collaborative” – but this is already a long comment!).
In most land management Agencies, there is no local designated negotiating power over the rules, laws and policies. I guess some folks could ‘bargain’ with some potential litigators but, only to limit court actions.
We need ‘salesmen’ to pitch individual projects, showing that there are some shared desires on both sides. We’ve seen reduced litigation in the Sierra Nevada National Forests, and commercial thinning projects have been proceeding without lawsuits. Of course, the USFS had to give up some things to get to this point. (Of course, some will claim that current forest management is terrible, there, but…. science is always more complicated than rhetoric)
Miles, what has the FS given up to not have litigation in the Sierra? Doesn’t the John Muir project still litigate some projects? I think the Save Our Canyons folks are doing that (pitching projects) for the Big Cottonwood Canyon project in the previous post.. do groups involved in collaboration do that work (pitching projects) in the Sierra? If you’d like to write a post about all this, it would be welcome.
This left me wondering how strongly the ongoing development pressure was the reason for pragmatism, which might not transfer too well to federal lands. Although perceived fire risk might be playing that role to some extent. (I’d also point out that, in the example, a “planning process” was the answer.)