The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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Today the timber industry sued the closed-down federal government because — drumroll, please — it closed down.
The outcome of the lawsuit isn’t in doubt. What’s more fun is to speculate on whether it takes the Oregon judge longer than the 40 minutes it took the Chief Judge in Colorado to throw her case out. Corollary question: Will the federal courts shut-down before the case is decided?
Here’s an interesting essay on pay and working conditions — and a deficit of respect? — for federal wildland firefighters. It also mentions a proposed the Wildland Firefighter Protection Act. http://wp.me/a3AxwY-45f
By Lindon Pronto/Writers on the Range
Federal wildland firefighters make up the single largest professionally trained firefighting force in the world. We staff fire engines and earthmovers, work from helicopters and jump from planes, and move as 20-person, well-coordinated crews of “ground pounders.” We also put together incident management teams to manage many kinds of relief efforts.
Our teams have dealt with emergencies like Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But on paper — for bureaucratic reasons — we are not called “firefighters.” Instead, we are called forestry and range “technicians.”
To us, that distinction is a longstanding joke that’s not remotely funny. The failure to recognize who we are and what we do comes at a great price.
Few Americans see a green fire engine for what it is, have any idea what hotshot crews face on the fireline, or have even heard of helitack. Even those closest to us may not fully grasp the long shifts we endure or the risks we take. But we love what we do; anyone who doesn’t soon decides that the commitments are too many and the sacrifices are too great.
The dangerous conditions encountered in wildland firefighting, combined with the rush of adrenaline and a sense of duty and brotherhood, are exactly the reasons we love our jobs. We not only accept these aspects of our work, we live for them! There are, however, other aspects of the job that are harder to accept, particularly for those who rely on the work to support families. Few Americans realize this, but federal firefighters are treated and paid considerably less well than our counterparts in private, city and state agencies.
For example, many non-federal firefighters are guaranteed hotel rooms and 24-hour pay when they’re working away from home. Federal firefighters, though, usually sleep in the dirt, like convict crews, and we are not paid for more than 16 hours per day on incidents.
Federal firefighters regularly work 112-hour workweeks for two or three weeks at a time, yet we are not compensated for at least one-third of that time. The nickel-and-diming we face goes further: Firefighters are often required to staff fires overnight without pay, and lunch breaks are seldom paid. On prescribed fires, hazard pay is not given even though we are required to carry emergency fire shelters with us.
These and other discrepancies in treatment and pay contribute to dismal retention rates among federal agencies. Millions of dollars are wasted annually to hire and train new firefighters, though many will leave as soon as they’re offered fire jobs with better hours, benefits, pay and pensions.
Federal firefighters are generally hidden from public view. We are stationed in the outdoors, and we are (happily) grimy, dirty, smelly and hairy during those 16-hour shifts on the fireline. The media are seldom permitted to enter our hazardous work zones. Unfortunately, this low profile means that our job is easily misrepresented and misunderstood. The public remains ignorant about who we are and what we do. As wildland firefighters, our faces and stories rarely make the news — unless we die on the job.
The problems we face should be illuminated, but constructive dialogue is hampered by the old-school “can-do” work ethic — coupled with the “shut-up-and-do-your-job” mentality. The lack of public awareness means that our working conditions remain the same, and the problems I’ve described here go unreported, and therefore unresolved.
Still, some stalwart supporters and lobbyists have fought for decades to improve our pay and working conditions. This year, for the first time, seasonal firefighters were given access to health benefits. A recent bill introduced in Congress would address some of the other issues I’ve described, but the Wildland Firefighter Protection Act (H.R.2858) is unlikely to be signed into law if no one knows about it. That’s why I’m breaking my silence on the subject: I hope that public pressure and support for federal firefighters will carry this proposed legislation into law. Here’s a way to stand with federal firefighters: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/wildland-firefighter/?source=search
It hurts not to be recognized for the hard work we do, and to be denied the benefits and financial support systems that other “real” firefighters automatically receive. We have no shortage of personal pride in our work, but that pride often appears to be unshared by our own government, elected officials and the public we serve.
Here are opposing viewpoints by Andy Kerr — mentioned in an earlier comment by Larry — and by Jim Geisinger, long-time head of Associated Oregon Loggers. I have known of both men for nearly 25 years and have sat through presentations and had conversations with each. I will admit to a strong bias here, based partly on the positions of each person, but mostly what I perceive to be their character. Jim I have always found to be truthful, straightforward, honest, and humble; my experiences with Kerr have been mostly the opposite and one of the key reasons I have had little to do with him (except read some of his stuff occasionally or read the captions under his picture in the newspaper) for the past two decades. Also, I really dislike very much that he presents himself as a “conservationist” when he is far more an “obstructionist” than anything else. Regular readers here have heard my Animal Farm thoughts on the preservationists who hi-jacked the conservation label several years ago (Andy being a leader in that department, too), but Kerr isn’t even a preservationist — more like an opportunist with his eye out for photographers and loose change. Based on personal experience, I don’t think he is a very honest or ethical person either, and will leave it at that. With that being said (I know several of you here are not big fans of logging either), please try and keep an open mind when considering these two opinions. BZ
Andy Kerr’s memory of the events leading to the downsizing of Oregon’s forest products industry and his vision for its future could benefit from a strong dose of truth and reality.
First, the principal cause of the industry’s downsizing over the past two decades is the reduction of timber coming from our federal forests, plain and simple. Timber harvest levels in Oregon have been reduced by half as a result of the efforts of Mr. Kerr and his colleagues in the environmental movement. Nearly all of the reduction has occurred from federal forest lands. The industry is half the size it once was. The math is pretty simple.
What would happen to our high tech industry if we reduced its supply of silicon by half? What would happen to Nike if its supply of rubber was cut in half? What would happen to agriculture if we took away half of its farmland? Take away an industry’s basic raw material needs, and it won’t exist anymore.
Second, Mr. Kerr believes the sole motivation for our industry existing is that nasty goal of making a profit. Well, last I checked, most American homes are made of wood. In fact, almost every human being on the face of the earth uses a wood product every day in some shape or form. People use and demand the products the industry makes. But back to Mr. Kerr’s point, the reason most businesses exist is to make a profit. I don’t think I have met a business person whose goal is to lose money. Businesses that make money pay taxes to fund our government. Those that lose money don’t pay taxes. It is a novel system.
Third, Mr. Kerr is just flat out wrong in his assumptions about the future of the logging industry. While tremendous advances have been made in logging technology and the use of mechanized systems to harvest timber in the safety of an enclose cab, this is technology that is applicable to gentle slopes. The fact is that the mountainous terrain, so prevalent in our state, will always require the use of yarders and the crew necessary to run them. Including workers setting chokers and chasing logs in the brush. The demand for loggers with yarder capacity is higher today than ever.
Associated Oregon Loggers, Inc. represents 1,000 logging companies and businesses associated with the industry (yup, there are that many left). They are exclusively small family-owned businesses typically managed by the second, third or fourth generation of family owners. They are largely located in rural communities. They are certainly part of our state’s history, but they are also an important part of its future.
Mr. Kerr’s credentials as an environmental activist are beyond reproach. But his self-anointed credibility as an expert on the complexities of the forest products industry, its history and its future is not. The net result of his and his follower’s activities over the past two decades has been the demise of half the forest products industry due to our federal forests being placed off-limits to forest management; the destruction of rural communities across the state; the insolvency of many counties; and the increase in catastrophic wildfire on federal forests. Perhaps it is time to give credit where credit is due.
Jim Geisinger is Executive Vice President of Associated Oregon Loggers, a statewide trade association representing some 1,000 member companies engaged in the harvest and sustainable forest management of Oregon’s 30 million acres of forestland. He can be reached at [email protected]
Not by those pesky conservationists (I was one) who back in the day said clear-cutting two square miles per week of Oregon’s ancient forests had to stop, but by some politicians seeking a political solution for the Oregon timber industry of the past rather than that of today, let alone the timber industry of the future.
Let’s examine evidence from 1995 (the first full year of the Northwest Forest Plan, which ended the timber wars as we had known them) and 2012 (the last year for which comparable data is available):
• Oregon softwood lumber mills — 94 in 1995, 54 in 2012, a decline of 43%.
• Oregon wood products jobs — 46,200 in 1995, 25,500 in 2012, a decline of 45%.
• Total Oregon jobs — 1,428,200 in 1995, 1,638,300 in 2012, an increase of 15%.
• Oregon logging and milling jobs — 3.23% of all Oregon jobs in 1995, 1.56% of all Oregon jobs in 2012, a decrease of 52%.
• Logging and milling jobs per million board feet of logs cut — 2.04 logging and 7.91 milling jobs in 1995, 1.52 logging and 3.52 milling jobs in 2012, declines of 26% and55% respectively.
• Milling capacity of Oregon softwood sawmills — 5,842 million board feet of lumber in 1995, 7,237 million board feet of lumber in 2012, an increase of 24% (with 43% fewer mills).
Counting facilities and jobs, the Oregon timber industry is about half as big today as it was when the Northwest Forest Plan went into effect. Counting milling capacity (appetite for logs), the Oregon timber industry is about a quarter larger today than in 1995.
Automation will continue to take its toll on both the number of mills and jobs. To the timber industry, jobs are just a cost of doing business; the reason it does business is profit.
What workers there are in the more-automated Oregon lumber mills of the future will more likely be wearing a technician’s white coat than a blue-collared shirt. In the woods, automation means more workers operating joysticks inside air-conditioned cabs than setting chokers.
More of the remaining 54 mills will close. Nine remaining Oregon lumber mills have a business model that requires the milling of large logs from large trees that come from old forests. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Reps. Peter DeFazio and Greg Walden all oppose logging such forests and agree the social license no longer exists to log older forests on federal public forestlands.
The evidence is clear: The Oregon timber industry of the future will have an increasing appetite for logs but provide fewer jobs to help people put food on their tables. In both absolute and relative terms, the Oregon timber industry is declining as compared to the rest of the Oregon economy.
Yet many Oregon politicians want to dramatically increase clear-cut logging on federal public forestlands. It doesn’t make sense to throw more tax monies and public assets at an industry in inevitable transition.
Today it takes five acres (about five football fields) of clear-cuts per year to produce one timber job. As industry automation (pronounced “innovation”) continues, it will take even more clear-cutting to produce each of a smaller number of wood products jobs.
What about those current and future Oregon jobs that depend on clean water, abundant wildlife, and scenic beauty?
Andy Kerr (www.andykerr.net) consults for conservation organizations across the West that seek to protect wildlands, wild waters and wildlife. He received more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame (or infamy) during the Oregon Timber War I. He splits his time between Ashland, Ore., and Washington, D.C.
FILE 2013: A doe deer returns to its home range along the Cherry Lake Road in the Rim Fire area near Yosemite National Park. (AP Photo/U.S. Forest Service)
The industry has about a two-year window to remove the trees before they succumb to rot and insect damage and become commercially worthless, timber officials say. “The first tragedy to the forest has already happened,” said Mike Albrecht, president of Sierra Resource Management Inc., a logging company in Jamestown, Calif., now doing salvage work on private lands. “The second tragedy would be not to salvage it.”
If approved, the logging would be the biggest salvage-removal job in the Sierra in decades, which the industry says would boost local counties and the state’s timber industry. Mr. Albrecht said he would likely have to increase his 10-person logging crew to 15, while the total number of salvage loads hauled out of the forest would rise to 250 a day from 160 a day now.
Those jobs would go to people like Don Fulton, an 80-year-old who runs a family-owned crew in Tuolumne County. He has had little business in recent years because of environmental rules on logging and other factors, and last year the company worked for just six months, said his daughter, Tammy Power. If salvage logging were approved, “he will go 24-7 until that salvage is out,” Power said.
For bigger companies like Sierra Pacific, logging healthy trees versus dead ones is more of a wash, said Mark Luster, spokesman for the Anderson, Calif., timber giant. “We are mainly shifting from green [logging] to salvage,” Luster said. Another limitation of the economic benefit, other industry officials say, is that there are only enough mills to process about half the available timber, or 500 million board feet of lumber.
But officials in the rural counties affected by the fire, which started Aug. 17 from an undetermined cause and was 95% contained as of Friday, said the logging would give them a boost. “We will have to import trucks and labor, so certainly it will help our county,” said Karl Rodefer, a supervisor in Tuolumne County, where the Rim Fire was concentrated. He added that removal of the dead trees would also keep them from acting as more fuel in a future fire.
From the Washington Post today….
Despite the warnings, they still make some stunts look pretty cool. Some folks, it seems, have a problem with a new TV commercial that they say promotes off-roading on federal lands, which is a distinct no-no.
A new ad for the 2014 Range Rover Sport shows the rugged-yet-luxurious SUV scaling the snow-crusted Pike’s Peak, which is part of the National Forest system. Up the paved roads of the mountain the truck goes. And then — as a group of impressed guys who look like a pit crew, wearing matching Range Rover jackets and hats, look on — the vehicle appears to go over the top and down the other, unpaved side.
“It clearly goes against the basic philosophy of ethical attitudes and proper driver behavior for using OHV’s [off-highway vehicles] anywhere, let alone on NFS lands,” Jack Gregory, a retired Forest Service officer, wrote to the Forest Service. (Jeff Ruch, the head of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, shared the missive with us.)
Forest Service spokesman Leo Kay, one of the few employees of the agency still in the office during the government shutdown, tells the Loop that the car did not actually go off-road on Forest Service land during filming, though it appeared to through the wonders of modern film-making.
And he says he’s unsure of the precise wording of the permit that the car company got to film the commercial there. The folks who handle those are furloughed.
“It’s kind of a ghost town around here,” he says.
But precedent exists for curtailing how film crews portray public land. When the Forest Service issues permits for crews to film in wilderness areas, for example, the agency requires them to “keep within the spirit” of the 1964 Wilderness Act, Kay explains. That might mean that they wouldn’t be allowed to depict, say, littering or tossing lit matches around.
The Forest Service isn’t up in arms over the commercial. It’s not protesting the way the National Park Service did in 2003, when a Metamucil commercial depicted a Park Service Ranger pouring some of the regularity-inducing product into Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser.
“This advertisement goes against all of the National Park Service’s efforts to encourage people not to put foreign objects into the thermal features,” NPS sniffed at the time.
In a statement, Range Rover tells the Loop that viewers needn’t take what they see so literally. “As is typical in much of advertising, there are scenes that are realistic but not meant to be taken literally, including both racing up the mountain, as well as driving off road back down, though the vehicle is more than capable of both.”
The government slimdown has shuttered the Forest Service’s homepage, which is now missing most national program links. But the Forest Service is still “paying” server costs for the missing information because the web pages themselves have not been removed, only the links to them.
Here, then, are active links to some of the content I use regularly:
FS Employee Email and Phone Number Directory
Forest Service Manuals and Handbooks
BTW, the Department of Interior is more convincingly shutdown. All DOI links are now pointed to DOI’s shutdown page. Which is silly, as everyone knows the data, which require no maintenance, are still on DOI’s servers.
This passage stands out:
Jewell’s overture comes as a key House Republican today pledged to hold hearings to discuss how to facilitate more state and local authority over national parks. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the chairman of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation, said that the Obama administration has shuttered parks in an “overly political manner” and that states and localities could manage them better.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Governors in Arizona, Utah and South Dakota this month have offered state funds to reopen national parks including Zion, Arches, Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore, where government-shutdown-caused closures have harmed gateway communities.
“Responding to the economic impacts that the park closures are having on many communities and local businesses, Secretary Jewell will consider agreements with governors who indicate an interest and ability to fully fund National Park Service personnel to re-open national parks in their states,” Interior spokesman Blake Androff said in a statement. “The Interior Department will begin conversations about how to proceed as expeditiously as current limited resources allow.”
It’s likely to come as a relief to gateway communities that thrive on the business visitors to the nation’s 401 park units bring to hotels, restaurants, outfitters and gas stations.
Jewell’s overture comes as a key House Republican today pledged to hold hearings to discuss how to facilitate more state and local authority over national parks. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the chairman of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation, said that the Obama administration has shuttered parks in an “overly political manner” and that states and localities could manage them better.
The Obama administration has said it is unwilling to cede control over federal lands to states, and conservationists have summarily rejected the idea.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) this week said the government shutdown was costing Utah — home to Zion, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef and Canyonlands national parks, among other units — about $100 million.
“It is within the power and authority of the executive branch to allow the national parks and monuments to be reopened,” Herbert said in a Tuesday letter to President Obama. “We have a solution in place. We just need, literally, the keys to the gates. I cannot overstate that time is of the essence.”
A spokeswoman said Herbert spoke with Jewell by phone this afternoon.
“We’ve had a breakthrough and are working out details now,” said Ally Isom, Herbert’s deputy chief of staff.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) late last week sent a similar letter, arguing that Interior allowed the Grand Canyon to be reopened during the government shutdown in 1995 using state and private donations and has accepted similar overtures from private groups to reopen visitors centers closed as a result of the federal sequester cuts.
A spokesman for Brewer did not say whether the governor had requested funding from the state Legislature, and if so, how much.
This week, a food bank is delivering food boxes to thousands of Grand Canyon employees who are stranded without work or pay during the government shutdown (Greenwire, Oct. 9).
South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) said last week that he is willing to raise private funds to light Mount Rushmore and use state personnel to provide security.
John Garder, a budget expert with the National Parks Conservation Association, said legal agreements need to be in place before the Park Service can accept nonfederal funds or resources to operate a park. He said it took lengthy talks in 1995 to reopen only a small portion of the Grand Canyon.
“The Park Service has diverse legal requirements and arrangements unseen by the public that can impact why certain facilities are closed while others are not,” he wrote earlier this week on the group’s website. “We know the Park Service is receiving many requests related to the shutdown, but a key challenge is that they are trying to do so with only a tiny fraction of their normal staff.”
Jewell’s consideration of nonfederal funding sources is an apparent break from the Park Service’s initial response to states.
NPS spokesman Michael Litterst on Tuesday cited possible “legal constraints” involved in operating parks during the shutdown and said “it would not be appropriate or feasible to open some parks or some parts of parks while other parts of the National Park System remain closed to the public.”
The Park Service is under intense pressure from Republicans to open parks they argue require little day-to-day maintenance or supervision. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus in a televised media appearance last week offered to pay security expenses to maintain operation of Washington, D.C.’s National World War II Memorial, a site that has become a symbol of the partisan rancor surrounding the closure of parks.
Reporter Elana Schor contributed.
What do you think? Is this a political stunt, or a reasonable reaction by the Park Service?
National Forests are open to visitors, though offices are closed and most employees are furloughed. I cut firewood (with a valid permit) on the Mt. Hood NF last weekend and saw lots of folks on bikes or in cars, and lots of cars parked at trailheads. Also saw two USFS law enforcement folks. So in National Forests are open to hikers, woodcutters, and others, why not National Parks?
Steve
From Greenwire:
The National Park Service issued citations to nearly two dozen people entering Grand Canyon National Park amid the government shutdown.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office will handle all citations, which Grand Canyon Chief Ranger Bill Wright said were given to some people spotted at the South Rim on trails, attempting rim-to-rim hikes or attempting to sneak into the park via dirt roads.
Law enforcement is patrolling the park, but most other park workers are furloughed, Wright said (AP/New York Times, Oct. 9).
Yellowstone and Grand Teton national park officials also have cited visitors attempting to sneak in.
“We have issued nine citations,” Grand Teton spokeswoman Jenny Anzelmo-Sarles said earlier this week.
Yellowstone National Park spokesman Al Nash said there have not been “widespread” issues as a result of the closures. “I know a few citations have been written,” Nash said. “We do have a fairly robust boundary patrol in conjunction with hunting season on land surrounding the park.”
In all, about 510 National Park Service workers in both parks were furloughed (AP/Billings Gazette, Oct. 8). — WW
The Clean Water Act requires states (or EPA if a state refuses to play ball) to set water quality standards for each stream sufficient to protect the purposes, e.g., fish, drinking, and swimming, for which the water is used. The Act also bans dumping pollutants from a pipe into a stream without a permit. Permits set limits on the amount of each pollutant that can be dumped. The pollution allowance must ensure that the water quality standards are met throughout the stream.
But, many pollutants, like turbidity, come from other sources than pipes, such as run-off from farms and forests. Congress has been unable to agree upon a regulatory tactic for dealing comprehensively with these so-called non-point pollution sources. Instead, the Clean Water Act requires states to do planning.
The “Total Maximum Daily Load” planning process has three steps. First, states identify streams where water quality standards are not being met. Second, for these “water quality limited” streams, the state calculates a ceiling on the amount of each problem pollutant that can enter the stream. Third, the state gives each source, both point and non-point, a pollution allocation, the sum of which must be less than the ceiling. Fourth, the state writes up a “TMDL report” for EPA’s approval. The report must explain the activities the state will carry out to reasonably ensure that the TMDL allocations are not exceeded. These actions can include clamping down on point-source discharges, imposing “best management practices” on non-point source activities, land use restrictions, or the writing of more plans.
The TMDL planning process is rife with fascinating politics and backroom dealings. Point-source polluters, such as factories and sewage treatment plants, know that their pollution is measured and the limits enforceable in federal court by the state (or private citizens if the state or EPA fails to do so). But most non-point source polluters face no such regulatory hammers because most states have few, if any, mechanisms to enforce best management practices, and EPA has none.
This imbalance in regulatory enforcement means that point-source polluters take the hindmost. For example, if a stream is already at its maximum load for temperature, it will be almost impossible for a new power plant, such as a biomass boiler, to be built if it discharges hot water to the stream. If a stream is at its limit for E. coli bacteria, it will be very tough for an animal feed lot to renew its permit to discharge manure-laden waste water, which will force the feedlot to find other disposal strategies such as spraying its cow crap on cropland (note that the non-point source run-off from cropland is not as tightly regulated and not subject to Clean Water Act citizen suits).
The TMDL process goes on unnoticed by the general public and is of interest to only a handful of citizen-based organizations. But the process is tightly scrutinized by point-source polluters who lobby for better BMPs so that more pollution load can be allocated to new factories, while non-point polluters (primarily farmers, ranchers and timberland owners) seek to keep BMPs lax.
Conservation Biology, October 2013
Volume 27, No. 5, 895-897
(c) 2013 Society for Conservation Biology
DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12147
Editorial: The “New Conservation”
By Dr. Michael Soule
A powerful but chimeric movement is rapidly gaining recognition and supporters. Christened the “new conservation,” it promotes economic development, poverty alleviation, and corporate partnerships as surrogates or substitutes for endangered species listings, protected areas, and other mainstream conservation tools. Its proponents claim that helping economically disadvantaged people to achieve a higher standard of living will kindle their sympathy and affection for nature. Because its goal is to supplant the biological diversity-based model of traditional conservation with something entirely different, namely an economic growth-based or humanitarian movement, it does not deserve to be labeled conservation.
Institutional allies and supporters of the new conservation include the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, and the social-justice organization The Breakthrough Institute (Nordaus & Shellenberger 2011). The latter write – in the style of the Enlightenment – that, “We must open our eyes to the joy and excitement experienced by the newly prosperous and increasingly free [persons]. We must create a world where every human can not only realize her material needs, but also her higher needs.”
The manifesto of the new conservation movement is “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility” (Lalasz et al. 2011; see also Kareiva 2012). In the latter document, the authors assert that the mission of conservation ought to be primarily humanitarian, not nature (or biological diversity) protection: “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor” ). In light of its humanitarian agenda and in conformity with Foreman’s (2012) distinction between environmentalism (a movement that historically aims to improve human well-being, mostly by reducing air and water pollution and ensuring food safety) and conservation, both the terms new and conservation are inappropriate.
Proponents declare that their new conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers. Underlying this radically humanitarian vision is the belief that nature protection for its own sake is a dysfunctional, antihuman anachronism. To emphasize its radical departure from conservation, the characters of older conservation icons, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Edward Abbey, are de-famed as hypocrites and misanthropes and contemporary conservation leaders and writers are ignored entirely (Lalasz et al. 2011).
The new conservationists assume biological diversity conservation is out of touch with the economic realities of ordinary people, even though this is manifestly false. Since its inception, the Society for Conservation Biology has included scores of progressive social scientists among its editors and authors (see also letters in BioScience, April 2012, volume 63, number 4: 242-243). The new conservationists also assert that national parks and protected areas serve only the elite, but a poll conducted by the nonpartisan National Parks Conservation Association and the National Park Hospitality Association estimates that 95% of voters in America want continued government support for parks (National Parks Conservation Association 2012). Furthermore, Lalasz et al. (2011) argue that it should be a goal of conservation to spur economic growth in habitat-eradicating sectors, such as forestry, fossil-fuel exploration and extraction, and agriculture.
The key assertion of the new conservation is that affection for nature will grow in step with income growth. The problem is that evidence for this theory is lacking. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction, in part because increasing incomes affect growth in per capita ecological footprint (Soule 1995; Oates 1999).
Other nettlesome issues are ignored, including which kinds of species will persist and which will not if the new economic-growth agenda replaces long-term protection in secure protected areas?
Related questions include:
Would the creation of designated wilderness areas be terminated? Would the funds to support the new conservation projects be skimmed from the dwindling conservation budgets of nongovernmental and government agencies? Is conservation destined to become a zero-sum game, pitting the lifestyles and prosperity of human beings against the millions of other life forms? Is it ethical to convert the shrinking remnants of wild nature into farms and gardens beautified with non-native species, following the prescription of writer Marris (2011)? Will these garden-like reserves designed to benefit human communities admit inconvenient, bellicose beasts such as lions, elephants, bears, jaguars, wolves, crocodiles, and sharks-the keystone species that maintain much of the wild’s biological diversity (Terborgh & Estes 2010; Estes et al. 2011)?
The new conservationists assume the benefits of economic development will trickle down and protect biological diversity. Even if that assumption were borne out, I doubt that children growing up in such a garden world will be attuned to nature or that the hoped-for leap in humanity’s love for the wild will occur once per capita consumption reaches a particular threshold.
Most shocking is the dismissal by the new conservationists of current ecological knowledge. The best current research is solidly supportive of the connection between species diversity and the stability of ecosystems. It has firmly established that species richness and genetic diversity enhance many ecological qualities, including productivity and stability of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, resistance to invasion by weedy species, and agricultural productivity; furthermore, research shows that greater species and genetic diversity reduces transmission rates of disease among species (Tilman 2012).
In contrast, implementation of the new conservation would inevitably exclude the keystone species whose behaviors stabilize and regulate ecological processes and enhance ecological resistance to disturbance, including climate change (Terborgh & Estes 2010). For these reasons and others, conservationists and citizens alike ought to be alarmed by a scheme that replaces wild places and national parks with domesticated landscapes containing only nonthreatening, convenient plants and animals.
The globalization of intensive economic activity has ac- celerated the frenzied rush for energy and raw materials and is devouring the last remnants of the wild, largely to serve the expanding, affluent, consumer classes in industrialized and developing nations. At current rates of deforestation, dam construction, extraction of fossil fuels, land clearing, water withdrawal, and anthropogenic climate change, it is expected that the 2 major refugia for biological diversity on the globe–the wet, tropical forests of the Amazon, and Congo Basin– will be gone by the end of this century (Mackey et al. 2013).
Is the sacrifice of so much natural productivity, beauty, and diversity prudent, even if some human communities and companies might be enriched? No. The worth of nature is beyond question and our obligation to minimize its gratuitous degradation is no less.
There is no evidence for the proposition that people are kinder to nature when they are more affluent, if only because their ecological footprints increase roughly in proportion to their consumption. We also know that the richer nations may protect local forests and other natural systems, but they do so at the expense of those ecosystems elsewhere in less affluent places. A third thing we know is that anthropogenic climate change is probably the greatest threat to civilization (Gleick et al. 2010).
I must conclude that the new conservation, if implemented, would hasten ecological collapse globally, eradicating thousands of kinds of plants and animals and causing inestimable harm to humankind in the long run.
Finally, I believe that those who donate to conservation organizations do so in full confidence that their gifts will benefit wild creatures and their habitats. The central issue is whether monies donated to the Nature Conservancy and other conservation nonprofit organizations should be spent for nature protection or should be diverted to humanitarian, economic-development projects such as those proffered by the new conservation on the dubious theory that such expenditures may indirectly benefit biological diversity in the long run.
Traditional conservationists do not demand that humanitarians stop helping the poor and underprivileged, but the humanitarian-driven new conservationists demand that nature not be protected for its own sake but that it be protected only if it materially benefits human beings.
A more literary version of this essay that highlights the intrinsic value of biological diversity can be accessed at www.michaelsoule.com.
Literature Cited
Estes, J. A., et al. 2011. Trophic downgrading of plant earth. Science 333:301-306.
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