Sunday, October 12, 2008
Conservation: a dying cause
From the RoundTable blog
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Michael Lawler Smith
Smith is a freelance outdoor writer residing in Lexington and a retired federal employee who served as deputy assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
There's an election issue so subtle and inconspicuous almost no one recognizes it.
The issue, succinctly, is what has become of our 650 million acres of federal public lands -- and as they slip further toward ruin, what becomes of conservation itself in this country?
The numbers suggest the scope of the problem. Right now maintenance backlogs for national wildlife refuges exceed $3 billion; national parks, $7 billion and forest service, $8 billion. And that last figure is just for roads.
This plight results not just because of one administration (though the current one hasn't helped much). It has grown over decades. Neither party can claim political advantage. In fact, both bear responsibility for the neglect.
What's at stake goes beyond mere physical repairs. The dire state strongly suggests deeper problems for the very future of conservation in America.
Over the past five decades, Congress has passed many remarkable conservation laws: the Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act of 1960, Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to note only a few. These laws brought about significant protections for America's living resources.
They reflected our collective values as a people and mirrored our recognition that there were species and habitats whose values we were only beginning to fathom. They suggested we are (or were) a society recognizing limits and seeing what interconnected life systems represented for our species' future. That was then, as they say. This is now.
What happened? Why did our public lands reach such disrepair? And how did good conservation laws become mere fodder for some political hacks and jingoists?
For brevity, the causes reside beneath three headings: arrogance, inattention and insularity. Think of them as three overlapping circles:
Arrogance: Congress prides itself on new legislation. Maintenance is boring and doesn't win elections. Thus, public land maintenance has been on near-starvation funding for decades. True, every so often noble-sounding initiatives promise to fix things, but such efforts rarely slow infrastructure decay.
Had Congress consistently and realistically funded the Endangered Species Act, for example, both for listing and recovery, from 1974 onward, almost all the train wrecks attributed to it would have been averted. Indeed, the ESA's record strongly suggests Congress never wanted to fully fund it nor ever get too serious about realistic revisions.
So what happens instead? An administration appointed a civil engineer for key decisions in endangered species listing processes -- definitively the task for a trained (and very seasoned) biologist. The predictable result was a demoralized field force of competent scientists. The inescapable conclusion is that the administration either possessed little aptitude to implement the act or lacked the political courage to seek its change. It satisfied itself simply with vandalizing the act -- until it was caught.
Inattention: The public used to love its national parks. It was the iconic vacation for midcentury American families. But as we became a nation of couch potatoes, pretty televised images of parks and critters (now in HD!) seem to suffice very nicely. That Congress even had to consider a law this summer titled the "No Child Left Inside Act," to reverse public estrangement from its own outdoors, should have been our clarion wake-up call. Unless citizens rediscover their public estate and call for better care, the plausibility of corporate "sponsorship" is, alas, not far-fetched (even in troubled economic times). But the implications are disturbing.
Insularity: This may prove the most toxic -- maybe lethal -- ingredient abetting the slow demise of our public lands and conservation legacy. Insularity is when executive branch resource agencies speak only through the Federal Register. Insularity is the biologist who "just wants to do science" and avoids the public at all costs. Insularity is the senior executive service manager who stifles initiative "to save money" -- when the intent is increased chances for the big SES bonus. Insularity is the proliferation of federal acronyms -- making it still easier for feds to continue to talk only to and among themselves. Resulting in, and returning us to: public inattention, that perfect Petri dish for culturing congressional and administration arrogance.
Twentieth-century American conservation initiatives brought extraordinary changes for the public good. But our conservation infrastructure is now in dire disrepair. As it crumbles, important conservation laws, attitudes and beliefs may irrevocably slip away with it, leaving future generations the poorer for it.
If that's not a compelling campaign issue, I don't know what is.
