The New Conservationists

This would be a replay of history. From roughly 1890 to 1965, the conservation movement was the major political force shaping natural resource policy. Consisting of forest, wildlife, and other resource managers; biologists and other resource scientists; hunters, fishers, and other wildlife lovers; and a variety of other public land users, the conservation movement believed in wise use of natural resources. Scientific research in many fields supported the notion that natural resources benefitted from human management.

At the same time, a smaller preservation movement was sometimes an ally and sometimes an antagonist to the conservationists. Made up of hikers, wilderness lovers, and some national park supporters, the preservationists believed that some areas should be left unmanaged for anything except primitive recreation. Their slogan was "nature knows best" and they tended to believe that human management was generally harmful to natural resources.

The increasing awareness of pollution, pesticides, overpopulation, and endangered species in the late 1960s gave the preservationists a major boost and left the conservationists with a black eye for failing to anticipate and solve many environmental problems. Encouraged by a tolerance for different views within the environmental community, many conservation allies, including fish and wildlife groups, younger foresters and other professionals, and ecologists and other scientists, in effect defected to the preservationist view. Research in ecology, fisheries, soils, and other areas seemed to support the preservationist claim that "nature knows best."

The strengthened preservationists convinced Congress to set aside large areas of public lands as wilderness in the 1970s and early 1980s. The era climaxed in the early 1990s with the protection of millions of acres of Douglas-fir old-growth timber. Meanwhile, once highly respected conservation agencies such as the Forest Service were villified as land despoilers and seemed to lose their focus.

Two trends in the 1990s conspire to undo the preservationist dominance over the conservationists. First, recent research in ecology and conservation biology is challenging the nature-knows-best philosophy.

• Researchers increasingly recognize that North American land has been managed for 10,000 years by Native Americans who set fires, hunted wildlife, and used other practices. Ending these practices produced plant communities far different from any that have ever been seen in pre-Columbian times.
• Activities by Europeans settlers, including fire suppression, elimination of predators, and management of lands outside wilderness have so changed even the largest parks and wilderness areas that management activities such as prescribed burning and control of wildlife populations are needed to maintain healthy ecosystems.
• Endangered species specialists realized that parks and wilderness areas are simply not large enough to recover diminishing species. This means that recovery efforts must involve private landowners and public land users to insure that their practices protect wildlife habitat.

One group, for example, promoted the idea of ending all timber cutting in the national forests--the "zero-cut option." Rather than go the standard route of lobbying Congress, this group focused on lobbying other environmental groups, demonizing any group that did not support its position. The tactic of attacking other environmentalists was used by an increasing number of groups in the early 1990s. A 1990 Greenpeace policy called for a "grassroots revolution against compromise and pragmatism."

This revolution has apparently succeeded. By 1996, numerous groups, including the Sierra Club and Oregon Natural Resources Council, had adopted the zero-cut policy and other extreme views. Such groups more or less excommunicated environmentalists, such as Michael Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund and members of the Quincy Library Group, who dared to negotiate with industry or managers.

The simplicity of the zero-cut, cattle-free, and other no-management messages allowed environmentalists to rally their ardent supporters and flood Congress with messages calling for central planning and prescriptive regulation. Yet many of the allies that the preservationists developed during the 1970s and 1980s, including biologists and other scientists, wildlife groups, and foresters, are not likely to support this extreme preservation view. The movement is once again fragmenting into its pre-1970 form of conservationists and preservationists.

The new conservationists are unlike the old ones in many ways. Many view commodity extraction as a tool, not a goal, of land management. Their aims, such as biodiversity, ecosystem health, and sustainability, are often nebulous compared with the firm output goals of the old conservationists. But they share with the old conservationists a belief, backed by the latest scientific research, in the need for managing land, even wilderness, rather than just leaving it alone.

Meanwhile, the new preservationists are much more ambitious than their predecessors. Where the old preservationists simply wanted to preserve a cross-section of parks and wilderness areas, the new ones want to close all federal lands to further development and to strictly regulate private land use.

This schism offers people who care about natural resources a clear choice.

• The nature-knows-best preservationists demand federal control and central planning because any concession to local control increases the likelihood of management and greater commodity extraction from public lands.
• The new conservationists recognize that local knowledge is far superior to the filtered and simplified knowledge that reaches central planners and place more faith in incentives than in federal control.