What We Talk About When We Talk About Protecting and Saving

This post originally appeared on The Green Skeptic in March 2008, when I was about to speak at the Aspen Environment Forum. It's reprinted here as I am on hiatus from writing the blog. I promise to be back at it soon. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this piece. --Scott

##


Everything we think about saving or protecting ecosystems and habitats is wrong.

This week, I'm at the Aspen Environment Forum, where tomorrow morning I'll be on a Panel called "Nature's Place: Saving Ecosystems and Habitats."

For the better part of 15 years I worked with The Nature Conservancy to save some of the world's "Last Great Places" around the world (I left in August; see my posts reflecting on my career at TNC
and here.

I consider myself a conservationist, not an environmentalist. What I mean by that is a conservative and prudent approach to our use of resources that requires us to manage them for the long-term -- for the benefit of people today and for future generations.

The Green Skeptic grew out of an increasing concern about our relationship to the natural world and how we protect it. I am a skeptic in the sense that I believe we need to constantly challenge the assumptions we have about "saving ecosystems and habitats."

In my view, we operate under four basic assumptions:

1. We can continue to "save" or "protect" ecosystems and habitats from harm in perpetuity;
2. We can ignore basic human needs and treat poverty alleviation as a separate issue from the environment;
3. We can entrust protection to governments and corporate NGOs;
4. We can't trust human ingenuity and community to manage its own resources.

First, I need to step back and look at the words we use. (I am a poet, so words matter to me.) Specifically, "protecting" and "saving."

Both imply we need to keep ecosystems and habitats from something. The American Heritage Dictionary defines protecting as "To keep from being damaged, attacked, stolen, or injured; guard." When we use the word protecting in terms of ecosystems and habitats, we are guarding nature from something or someone, presumably humans.

Saving is a little less problematic, as it implies a conservative approach to the future (as in saving seed corn for next year's sowing). Still, the AHD's first definition is "To rescue from harm, danger, or loss." It's not until definition number three that we get to the conservative impulse: "To avoid spending (e.g. money) so as to keep or accumulate it."

The question is not about what we should save, but how and for what purpose.

Is it hubris to assume we have protected or saved anything? We promote the fact that percentages of ecosystems or habitats are protected, but they continue to be encroached upon -- see the Amazon Rainforest for example.

What have we really saved if massive changes from climate change or the drive for much-needed economic development will have significant impact on the future status and makeup of places, habitats, and ecosystems?

Climate change will disrupt many ecosystems that exist today -- much as the Internet disrupted print media, the travel industry, TV, bookstores, you name it. It will change everything.

So the question is what are we really protecting when we talk about protecting ecosystems and habitat? Will the places we select for protection today be the same 10-20 years from now? Probably not.

Ecosystems are constantly changing, either from "external" (human) or "internal" (natural) forces. Change is inevitable and could, in the face of global warming, be dramatic.

Shouldn't we be preparing for the changes and begin to think about how we adapt to some of the most likely changes, those brought on by climate change or economic development or basic human needs, such as for food and energy?

Demand for energy and food will drive economic development for years to come and we can't continue to ignore these drivers to "save" the natural, non-human world.

This leads me to assumption two, which is about ignoring basic human needs. It's irrational for us to think that people in developing countries, many of whose basic human needs are not being met, will care deeply about the non-human natural world.

Yet, we continue to have blind faith in our cause and ignore the needs of real people.

I recently returned from India where the extreme poverty is evident almost everywhere you look. Also evident is a growing middle class that strives for the kind of lifestyle we have here in the west, specifically the US, with its inherent accelerated pace and impacts.

Who are we to say that people in developing countries have no right to the kind of lifestyle we have exported for decades? We can not convince, persuade or cajole or even pay people -- Americans as much as people in developing nations -- to "come around to our way of thinking," and yet this is what I hear whenever I talk to environmentalists.

And we can't ask poor people around the world to forgo the comforts of the lifestyle we have been living, and which they wish to copy, "for the sake of the planet" or to set aside their habitats and ecosystems for the sake of humanity. No country wants to become an ecological reserve for the world, especially if it means it cannot pursue economic prosperity.

Try floating this idea with people who go hungry every night for lack of food or money to buy food and see what kind of reaction you get.

In the end, poor people matter. And the governments of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and African countries must be concerned first and foremost with the well-being of their people. I'm not saying that human well-being isn't tied to ecosystem health; I'm a strong believer that economic growth is tied to those resources.

I believe we can no longer separate the issue of economic development and poverty alleviation from ecosystem health. We also can't expect that governments whose people aren't meeting basic needs to protect their habitats over the economic well-being of their people.

Which leads me to assumption three: increasingly, we are entrusting protection of habitats and ecosystems with the wrong people. Governments have a mandate to improve the economic health of their country and people.

Yet we continue to have faith that these governments will "do the right thing" and enforce laws protecting their forests or other ecosystems in the face of seemingly insurmountable economic obstacles.

Why do we think that is a good strategy? What indicators do we have that tell us this strategy will succeed where it hasn't in the past? Why do we think that the World Bank program to pay countries to "avoid deforestation" will be any more successful than their previous grand plans?

The same goes for NGOs. NGOs are basically corporations that serve a set of shareholders (donors in this case) who subscribe to a specific idea of Nature and a specific set of outcomes, outcomes that may not necessarily be shared by all stakeholders.

This idea of Nature has for a long time discounted the needs of people both today and in the future. To illustrate this, one only need look at the environmental community's approach to government debt.

Conservation groups (my old employers among them) have promoted using a country's debt as leverage to gain conservation protection. The debt-for-nature swap was an innovation of the past couple of decades and a noble one. But it was also painfully ignorant of the true nature of that debt -- in many cases "dictator debt" incurred by regimes that did not have its people's best interests in mind.

Now that we have a more clear understanding of how that debt was derived, and can no longer ignore its immoral origins, we need to give up or adjust the debt-for-nature swap concept and join the call for debt forgiveness. That will free some countries from having to exploit their natural resources to pay down that debt.

Yet, many in the environmental community continue to push the debt-for-nature strategy, because they can't let go of a good thing that advances their agenda.

How is this different from any corporation -- a sector many environmentalists attack -- that advances its agenda at the expense of people here and abroad? Can we really trust ecosystems and habitats to big government or big international non-governmental corporations?

In the end, wouldn't a better approach be to put our trust in the people and the communities where these ecosystems and habitats are found? They have the most at stake in managing these resources, as their needs and livelihoods are most closely tied to the lands and waters.

I believe human beings are basically good. I also believe that, given the opportunity, communities will manage their common interests and keep each other in check. This is the open-source community approach one finds in social networks and in business models such as eBay.

I also believe that human beings are the most creative and adaptable species on the planet -- just look at the variety of habitats, climates, and conditions we inhabit. Our resilience as a species is astounding. I argue that we need to embrace this resourcefulness and apply it to overcoming ecological shifts, climate change, and loss of ecosystems and habitats.

We need to unleash the power of human creativity to find new ways to "save" those places for future use by both human and non-human species.

Unleashing this human capacity will require suspending our assumptions. We will need to focus more on community-based or "commons-based" management (as Jonathan Rowe of the West Marin Commons in California calls it in a recent essay in The State of the World 2008).

We need a people-centered conservation that addresses the real needs of real people, and to empower individual entrepreneurs and communities to manage their resources cooperatively rather than impose grand plans from Washington.

We need to clearly draw the lines connecting economic prosperity with ecological health and human well-being.

And, finally, we need to unleash human creativity to find new technological solutions as well as new ways of living with nature.

This may, in the end, be our only hope to really save habitat and ecosystems – and, ultimately, to save ourselves.

Green Skeptic Friday LinkFest - 04/22/11

CREDIT: NASA via Ron Garan/Astro_Ron

Earth Day edition of the Green Skeptic LinkFest.

When I worked for The Nature Conservancy every day was Earth Day.  So this day was just like any other. Now it is Earth Day and it seems a tad precious, a bit outdated.

Not to my daughter, who reminded me this morning that it was Earth Day and that it's a good thing we recycle. (I didn't have the heart to tell her what I learned from the folks at Glass Recycling Technologies: that of the 12 million tons of glass in the US waste stream annually, over 9 million tons end up in landfills.)

Here are my links for this week:

GreenBiz.com asked 13 corporate executives to answer the question: What's your company doing for Earth Day? 

Stephanie Pappas on "Why You Won’t Read This Earth Day Article (And Why That Doesn’t Matter)". 

Cortney Fielding of GigaOm suggests that "As Cleantech Matures, So Does Approach to Funding."

David Chen of Equilibrium Capital posits "Invest in B Corps; Invest in Our Future."

One year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, The Economist offers a reading list for those interested in the catastrophe. 

Not on The Economist list (but it should be) is my pal Wes Leckrone, who writes The American Partnership blog, on  "Federalism and the Gulf Oil Spill."

A spill of a different sort happened on the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon: Pennsylvania Natural Gas Blowout Spills Thousands of Gallons of Toxic Wastewater into Local Community. 

Meanwhile, the US gives green light to Cape Wind project. 

D.R. Tucker of Notes from D.R. and The Urban Right has a compelling post in FrumForum: Confessions of a Climate Change Convert.

Another conservative voice, Jim DiPeso, (The Green Conservative) writes about The Erosion of Conservation as a Conservative Value.

  

Have a great weekend everyone. (And try not to trash Mother Earth this Earth Day; she may just give you a dope slap.)

A Sheep in Hawk's Clothing? Why "Climate Hawk" Doesn't Soar.

We need less hawking, more doing.

My post last week about Climate Skeptics garnered some interesting responses, including this one from my friend David Connell of The Nature Conservancy on Planet Change.

I agree with Dave that it's time for a big tent.  I also agree that environmentalists are guilty of, as he says, being "suspicious of groups that agree with us on climate change but who disagree with us on other social and political issues." 

I've pointed this out before, specifically in the spring of 2005, when Evangelicals caught hell from Environmentalists for weighing in on climate change.  (See my posts here and here.)

On the face of it, the "climate hawk" movement purports to set up a bigger tent, be more inclusive, and not be about environmentalism with a capital "E."

Yet, I'm not sure one can hide standard issue environmentalism behind a "turn of phrase that is all at once American, forward leaning, tough and – because it borrows from a Republican foreign-policy stance – non-partisan," Dave says, and as was suggested by the term's coiner, David Roberts of Grist.org. 

To me, "climate hawks" feels a bit disingenuous.  It feels – and perhaps this is why they're not seeing the term gain traction beyond the already converted – like the old liberal agenda dressed up in misappropriated Republican clothes. 

(I found myself wondering what Frank Luntz would say about it.  I reached out to him for comment late last week, but as of this posting have not heard back.)

Even the logo is a sheep in hawk's clothing. 

As its designer Joe Immen explained to Co.Design.com, "I also wanted it to stand out and be visible from a distance, so I used bold colors inspired by the Obama campaign.  This whole notion of 'hawkish' references the military and patriotism, which are concepts that have become disassociated from the idea of taking climate change seriously."

Immen concludes, "So the hawk is about making environmentalism seem like it has some toughness behind it, that it’s grounded in reality."  No starry eyed dreamer this hope hawk!

(I'm not even going to comment on some of what Immen says here; it wouldn't be fair. Suffice it to say it is unclear to me how using the colors of the Obama campaign is meant to make those on the right want to be part of it.) 

Alas, as Dave Connell points out, the "few people who do use the term are the same people who have been talking about climate change all along."

So, I'm left with a few questions:

What if more we spent more energy on building the economic arguments for a reasonable, more inclusive approach to energy development? 

What if we focused on the economic arguments for a competitive economic future?

What if we focused on the positive benefits to health care costs of doing something about pollution? 

What if we focused on the positive benefits of the next energy transition -- to society, the economy, and people everywhere?

What if we stopped debating climate change and started to do something?

In other words, less hawking, more doing.  

The Nature Conservancy : Vote for your favorite nature photo

Cherie Palmer
Nelson, New Zealand

Jewelled Gecko, Otaga, New Zealand

"People who care conserve; people who don't know don't care," wrote biologist Robert Michael Pyle.

One of the best ways to connect to and learn about nature is through photography.  Great nature photography inspires people to go out and appreciate wild places or to just take a closer look at what's right in their own backyards.

From now until noon on Monday, February 7th, you have a great opportunity to choose the winner of The Nature Conservancy's 5th Annual Digital Photo Contest.

Which photograph inspires you?

The Nature Conservancy : You Be the Judge
.
 

On Energy Transition, US Military Leads

Photo Credit: US Army

As Tom Friedman points out in his column yesterday, "the U.S. military loses one person, killed or wounded, for every 24 fuel convoys it runs in Afghanistan."

Soldiers and others are put in harm's way as part of convoys, hundreds and hundreds of them, needed to transport fuel to run air conditioners and diesel generators in remote bases all over that country.

But what if the "U.S. Navy and Marines could replace those generators with renewable power and more energy efficient buildings, and run its ships on nuclear energy, biofuels and hybrid engines, and fly its jets with bio-fuels"?  One out-come, Friedman argues, would be to "out-green the Taliban."

The military is making a strategic move to alternative energy and energy efficiency, in part because it recognizes the national security issues associated with dependence on fossil fuel energy and the potential impacts of climate change. 

In its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report, the Department of Defense (DoD) found that climate change "may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

This threat, coupled with an energy budget of $20 billion, has led the DoD to take steps to reduce is dependence on fossil fuels, strive for energy efficiency, and reduce its carbon emissions by developing and deploying clean tech innovations.

They have also recognized the potential threats from so-called "peak oil," warning last spring "that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact," according to a report from the US Joint Forces Command.

The US military has long been a leader in biodiversity conservation as well, with partnerships with organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, NatureServe, and others around the US.  The DoD even has a special "Conservation Conveyance," which allows closed military bases to be transferred into permanent conservation status.

It should come as no surprise that the US military is becoming a leader in green tech innovation.  Defense led much of the global technological innovation of the last half of the 20th Century after the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958. 

ARPA, or DARPA, as it is known today, developed the weapons that transformed warfeare in the last century, but also led to the electronic computer, robotics, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the Internet.

The new green economy may in fact be led by a green revolution in the military, giving new meaning to DoD's mission of deterring war and protecting the security of the US.

As Friedman points out, the green innovations being fostered by the military "could save lives, money and the planet, and might even help us win — or avoid — the next war."

Review: Design for a Living World at the Cooper-Hewitt

Imagine sending 10 top designers out into the world to make something. Now imagine you give them just three criteria: it has to be wonderful, desirable, and...sustainable.

That's exactly what the Nature Conservancy did to create what is now an exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt museum in New York.

The designers, ranging from Yves Behar and Isaac Mizrahi to Maya Lin and Paulina Reyes from Kate Spade in New York were sent out to Nature Conservancy project sites from Maine to Alaska and from China to Bolivia. Each designer used materials found in the place and even employed local people to help fashion such useful objects as handbags, furniture, rugs, and jewelry.

Among my favorites from the exhibit: Maya Lin's red maple Terra Bench, Abbott Miller's FSC-certified wood chair, Mizrahi's salmon leather dress and matching shoes, Reyes'/Spade's wooden tiled handbag, and Ezri Tarazi's bamboo-totem wine racks and speaker tubes.

I also rather liked Hella Jongerius's failed experiment to find a design application for chicle latex from the Maya Forest of Mexico. You've got to admire her valiant efforts to transform this material, once the basis for most chewing gums, into a surface design element or even bonding material.

The exhibit is on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York through January 4, 2010.

For more information, visit nature.org/design or Cooper-Hewitt.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Awe-Inspiring, Sustainable Designs for a Living World (Slideshow) (treehugger.com)
• Design for a Living World now open at the Cooper-Hewitt (core77.com)
• Sneak Peek: Cooper Hewitt to Showcase Design Innovations with Local Materials (treehugger.com)
• Secret, Sexy Bamboo Speakers And More Hot Green Design (huffingtonpost.com)
• Design for a living world (ethanzuckerman.com)

Career-Man vs. Entrepreneur-Man, a personal dilemma

Image via Wikipedia Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Okay, that's a bit dramatic. But, really, it is the first day of the next phase on my path, which I see as more of a bend in the boardwalk than a fork in the trail.

My path began in publishing. I worked as a scout for an international agency and as an editor at Viking/Penguin, but prior to that I founded Rockstop! Magazine, back in the early 80s.

I have always started things. As a media entrepreneur, I was one of the founders of the web-based literary journal Ducky Magazine and founded this web log in 2004.

But for the past 16 years I have been basically a company man, most of that time with The Nature Conservancy, where I held various management positions and, most recently, with Ashoka, the global association of leading social entrepreneurs.

Part of what attracted me to Ashoka was the opportunity to meet social entrepreneurs around the world who were developing business models -- some non-profit and some for-profit -- with the goal of changing the world, flipping a system, or addressing a market failure.

What interested Ashoka in me was my combination of expertise and entrepreneurship. Well, the entrepreneurial itch overtook me recently and I've now left Ashoka to scratch it.

I'm developing a green energy investing platform to reduce the barriers to entry for small retail investors who want to catch the wave of the new green economy. It's in the very nascent stages and probably too premature to talk about, which is both exciting and daunting.

Daunting because the "Career-Man" in me is struggling mightily with this new phase, with his alter ego "Entrepreneur-Man."

You see, I've always created things on the side. Now I'm starting from scratch and spending more time on it than just nights and weekends.

Career-Man excels at crafting a vision, building teams, and management, and he's a pretty good at marketing and raising money. Entrepreneur-Man loves starting things.

But this start-up stuff has got Career-Man all tied up in knots. He's used to having the framework in which to operate, while Entrepreneur-Man likes to build an entirely new framework. Therein lays the struggle.

I tweeted about this earlier today, which generated a few comments from followers and friends.

One wrote, "As a note of encouragement, a job is one thing, your work is another. Now you simply have more ability to focus your energies without navigating so many distractions."

Another wrote, "When you figure out how to keep Career-Man at bay, let me know!"

And finally, another friend was reminded of one excellent line in an otherwise forgettable Tommy Lee Jones-Cate Blanchett film, "The Missing."

In the film, Blanchett plays a young woman alone in the wilderness, who must reunite with her estranged father (Jones) to track the mystical, psychopathic killer known as Chidin (Eric Schweig). Chidin and his brutal pack of army deserters have kidnapped a collection of teenage girls, and have taken Maggie's daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) as their most recent prize.

My friend wrote, Jones' "nemesis says something like, 'The wolf and the good dog within you fight. I wonder which one will win.'"

To which Jones replies, "Whichever one I feed the most."

I must keep feeding the Entrepreneur-Man, because a job is one thing, and my work is something completely different. No doubt the path will be bumpy, but the rewards will be the journey.

Conservation: Mark Burget Leaves TNC for Climate Works

Mark Burget, Chief Conservation Programs Officer of the Nature Conservancy announced his departure last Friday. It came as a surprise to me, as it may have to others, because, frankly, Mark is one of those people who personifies the Conservancy.

The core values of TNC are integrity beyond reproach, respect for people, community, and culture, and commitment to tangible, lasting results; all of these can be used to describe Mark. Oh, and one other: "One Conservancy," which was John Sawhill's way of saying a collaborative spirit that works for the whole of the organization, not just its parts.

In fact, Mark always kept the whole of conservation in mind when he set strategy, whether as program director for the Upper Colorado River Basin, state director in Colorado and California, or in his more global responsibilities over the past few years.

And I gather it is this consideration of the whole that is once again in his mind as he decided to leave TNC. He is heading to ClimateWorks, a San Francisco-based non-profit that is focused, as Mark put it in his letter to colleagues, "on the most pressing environmental issue of our time: the need to dramatically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten to disrupt and destroy the miracle of life and the human experience on Earth."

TNC will miss Mark's leadership, vision, and sheer brilliance -- he is one of the most thoughtful and strategic thinkers in the field of conservation. But Mark would not have made this decision without a whole lotta soul-searching. I applaud Mark's decision and will look forward to his success at ClimateWorks.

Mark Burget joined the Conservancy in 1992 as the Program Director for the Upper Colorado River Basin. He earned both his J.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Virginia and his BA in Government from Dartmouth College. Since joining the Conservancy, Mark has held several leadership positions including Director of the Colorado Program, Director of the Global Priorities Group, and most recently Director of the California Program. Mark assumed his current position as Chief Conservation Program Officer in 2007 and leads the Conservancy’s eight conservation regions worldwide.

Review: Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg

I remember the day when I was no longer at the top of the food chain.

I was flying into Lower Talarik Creek in southwestern Alaska with nothing but a fly rod, a note book, a sleeping bag, and hubris. As we circled the lagoon, the float plane pilot pointed out 10 or 12 brown bears that had already secured the fishing hole.

We landed anyway and the bears disappeared. The low brush was barely enough to hide them. They were gone, but they were out there.

Until you've experienced the fear, adrenaline rush, and deep respect you feel in close proximity with a large predator, you haven't really lived.

As a species we have a complex relationship with predators, whether large cats, bears, wolves, sharks, or killer whales. It's a mixture of deep-seated fear and loathing, along with time-honored respect and admiration. Some of it goes back so far in our DNA that it is no longer top-of-mind. Most of us don't have to worry about it, safely ensconced in our cities, towns, and bedroom communities.

But Will Stolzenburg worries about it plenty. So do the biologists, activists, ranchers and others he writes about in Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators, being published this month by Bloomsbury.

Stolzenburg, a former colleague at the Nature Conservancy and a writer for Science News, Conservation, and Nature Conservancy magazine, admits he is biased in favor of big predators. But he also understands the complexity of the psychology around their interaction with Homo sapiens.

"Over the thousands of millennia that our own lineage has spent in the company of killing beasts," Stolzenburg writes. "Competing with them for food and running from them as food -- the great meat-eaters have quite naturally etched themselves into the human persona."

Stolzenburg has written a compelling book, a short history of our relationship with predator species, which uses scientists and their stories to tell the story of that relationship and of the importance of predators on land and sea.

His story starts with an unlikely hero, the starfish (Pisaster ochraceous), which prevents mussels such as Myltilus californianus from crowding other species off rock habitats. Who amongst us would classify the sea star among the big charismatic megafauna? But they play an important role.

As do sea otters, which keep sea urchin populations down and minimizes their destruction of kelp forests. And then there are the usual suspects: wolves, coyotes and big cats that maintain a check on populations of smaller mammals and other species to avoid cascading, sometimes catastrophic changes.

Stolzenburg reviews the arguments surrounding the importance of predators to their habitats as well as the various attempts to extirpate them and to bring them back from the brink.

"The great predators are great barometers of our maturity as a species," he concludes. "If we can live with an animal that could just as soon eat us as an apple, if we can make room for an animal that traverses entire states looking for a mate, how better to define the art of compassion"

He follows the major thought leaders in conservation biology of the past 40 years on their journeys of discovery, enlightenment, and sometimes ridicule. The stories are fascinating and Stolzenburg makes the tales come to life in an almost Scott Turow novel way. (If you think scientist-researchers and field biologists lead boring lives in the academe, Stolzenburg will convince you otherwise.)

Equally fascinating are some of the depictions and explorations of the predators themselves, especially the chapters on killer whales and on "the loneliest predator," man. Fascinating, too, how recent some of the thinking is about species interaction and interdependency, until you realize that conservation biology as a field is relatively young.

Will Stolzenburg knows how to tell a story and his narrative is a good read. Part history, part mystery, part philosophical treatise, Where the Wild Things Were is an important book in the field of conservation, but also as a history of our species and our relationship with the others with which we share the planet.

Conservation: What We Talk About When We Talk About Protecting and Saving Ecosystems and Habitats

Everything we think about saving or protecting ecosystems and habitats is wrong.

This week, I'm at the Aspen Environment Forum, where tomorrow morning I'll be on a Panel called "Nature's Place: Saving Ecosystems and Habitats."

For the better part of 15 years I worked with The Nature Conservancy to save some of the world's "Last Great Places" around the world (I left in August; see my posts reflecting on my career at TNC).

I consider myself a conservationist, not an environmentalist. What I mean by that is a conservative and prudent approach to our use of resources that requires us to manage them for the long-term -- for the benefit of people today and for future generations.

The Green Skeptic grew out of an increasing concern about our relationship to the natural world and how we protect it. I am a skeptic in the sense that I believe we need to constantly challenge the assumptions we have about "saving ecosystems and habitats."

In my view, we operate under four basic assumptions:

1. We can continue to "save" or "protect" ecosystems and habitats from harm in perpetuity;
2. We can ignore basic human needs and treat poverty alleviation as a separate issue from the environment;
3. We can entrust protection to governments and corporate NGOs;
4. We can't trust human ingenuity and community to manage its own resources.

First, I need to step back and look at the words we use. (I am a poet, so words matter to me.) Specifically, "protecting" and "saving."

Both imply we need to keep ecosystems and habitats from something. The American Heritage Dictionary defines protecting as "To keep from being damaged, attacked, stolen, or injured; guard." When we use the word protecting in terms of ecosystems and habitats, we are guarding nature from something or someone, presumably humans.

Saving is a little less problematic, as it implies a conservative approach to the future (as in saving seed corn for next year's sowing). Still, the AHD's first definition is "To rescue from harm, danger, or loss." It's not until definition number three that we get to the conservative impulse: "To avoid spending (e.g. money) so as to keep or accumulate it."

The question is not about what we should save, but how and for what purpose.

Is it hubris to assume we have protected or saved anything? We promote the fact that percentages of ecosystems or habitats are protected, but they continue to be encroached upon -- see the Amazon Rainforest for example.

What have we really saved if massive changes from climate change or the drive for much-needed economic development will have significant impact on the future status and makeup of places, habitats, and ecosystems?

Climate change will disrupt many ecosystems that exist today -- much as the Internet disrupted print media, the travel industry, TV, bookstores, you name it. It will change everything.

So the question is what are we really protecting when we talk about protecting ecosystems and habitat? Will the places we select for protection today be the same 10-20 years from now? Probably not.

Ecosystems are constantly changing, either from "external" (human) or "internal" (natural) forces. Change is inevitable and could, in the face of global warming, be dramatic.

Shouldn't we be preparing for the changes and begin to think about how we adapt to some of the most likely changes, those brought on by climate change or economic development or basic human needs, such as for food and energy?

Demand for energy and food will drive economic development for years to come and we can't continue to ignore these drivers to "save" the natural, non-human world.

This leads me to assumption two, which is about ignoring basic human needs. It's irrational for us to think that people in developing countries, many of whose basic human needs are not being met, will care deeply about the non-human natural world.

Yet, we continue to have blind faith in our cause and ignore the needs of real people.

I recently returned from India where the extreme poverty is evident almost everywhere you look. Also evident is a growing middle class that strives for the kind of lifestyle we have here in the west, specifically the US, with its inherent accelerated pace and impacts.

Who are we to say that people in developing countries have no right to the kind of lifestyle we have exported for decades? We can not convince, persuade or cajole or even pay people -- Americans as much as people in developing nations -- to "come around to our way of thinking," and yet this is what I hear whenever I talk to environmentalists.

And we can't ask poor people around the world to forgo the comforts of the lifestyle we have been living, and which they wish to copy, "for the sake of the planet" or to set aside their habitats and ecosystems for the sake of humanity. No country wants to become an ecological reserve for the world, especially if it means it cannot pursue economic prosperity.

Try floating this idea with people who go hungry every night for lack of food or money to buy food and see what kind of reaction you get.

In the end, poor people matter. And the governments of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and African countries must be concerned first and foremost with the well-being of their people. I'm not saying that human well-being isn't tied to ecosystem health; I'm a strong believer that economic growth is tied to those resources.

I believe we can no longer separate the issue of economic development and poverty alleviation from ecosystem health. We also can't expect that governments whose people aren't meeting basic needs to protect their habitats over the economic well-being of their people.

Which leads me to assumption three: increasingly, we are entrusting protection of habitats and ecosystems with the wrong people. Governments have a mandate to improve the economic health of their country and people.

Yet we continue to have faith that these governments will "do the right thing" and enforce laws protecting their forests or other ecosystems in the face of seemingly insurmountable economic obstacles.

Why do we think that is a good strategy? What indicators do we have that tell us this strategy will succeed where it hasn't in the past? Why do we think that the World Bank program to pay countries to "avoid deforestation" will be any more successful than their previous grand plans?

The same goes for NGOs. NGOs are basically corporations that serve a set of shareholders (donors in this case) who subscribe to a specific idea of Nature and a specific set of outcomes, outcomes that may not necessarily be shared by all stakeholders.

This idea of Nature has for a long time discounted the needs of people both today and in the future. To illustrate this, one only need look at the environmental community's approach to government debt.

Conservation groups (my old employers among them) have promoted using a country's debt as leverage to gain conservation protection. The debt-for-nature swap was an innovation of the past couple of decades and a noble one. But it was also painfully ignorant of the true nature of that debt -- in many cases "dictator debt" incurred by regimes that did not have its people's best interests in mind.

Now that we have a more clear understanding of how that debt was derived, and can no longer ignore its immoral origins, we need to give up or adjust the debt-for-nature swap concept and join the call for debt forgiveness. That will free some countries from having to exploit their natural resources to pay down that debt.

Yet, many in the environmental community continue to push the debt-for-nature strategy, because they can't let go of a good thing that advances their agenda.

How is this different from any corporation -- a sector many environmentalists attack -- that advances its agenda at the expense of people here and abroad? Can we really trust ecosystems and habitats to big government or big international non-governmental corporations?

In the end, wouldn't a better approach be to put our trust in the people and the communities where these ecosystems and habitats are found? They have the most at stake in managing these resources, as their needs and livelihoods are most closely tied to the lands and waters.

I believe human beings are basically good. I also believe that, given the opportunity, communities will manage their common interests and keep each other in check. This is the open-source community approach one finds in social networks and in business models such as eBay.

I also believe that human beings are the most creative and adaptable species on the planet -- just look at the variety of habitats, climates, and conditions we inhabit. Our resilience as a species is astounding. I argue that we need to embrace this resourcefulness and apply it to overcoming ecological shifts, climate change, and loss of ecosystems and habitats.

We need to unleash the power of human creativity to find new ways to "save" those places for future use by both human and non-human species.

Unleashing this human capacity will require suspending our assumptions. We will need to focus more on community-based or "commons-based" management (as Jonathan Rowe of the West Marin Commons in California calls it in a recent essay in The State of the World 2008).

We need a people-centered conservation that addresses the real needs of real people, and to empower individual entrepreneurs and communities to manage their resources cooperatively rather than impose grand plans from Washington.

We need to clearly draw the lines connecting economic prosperity with ecological health and human well-being.

And, finally, we need to unleash human creativity to find new technological solutions as well as new ways of living with nature.

This may, in the end, be our only hope to really save habitat and ecosystems – and, ultimately, to save ourselves.

Global Climate Change: At Bali, Everyone Blinked; Bumpy Road Ahead

Compromise is necessary in any negotiation, but in Bali, where delegates from 187 countries met to begin framing a new global warming treaty, the US and EU were holding a staring contest. In the end, everyone blinked.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Senate settled for a compromise energy bill instead of one that sets out a clear path to a cleaner energy future.

The Bali delegates agreed to negotiate by 2009 a new and more comprehensive global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

The countries pledged to address deforestation, which accounts for one-fifth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. There was also a vague offering from China, likely to assume the lead as a producer of greenhouse gas emissions, that they will pursue "measurable, reportable and verifiable" emissions reductions.

The US delegate pledged only to participate in the forthcoming negotiations, but they rejected setting provisional targets for greenhouse gas cuts, and they flat-out refused to commit to reducing their own emissions.

"The Bali road map sets out a process but it doesn't tell us where we'll wind up," head of The Nature Conservancy delegation Andrew Deutz told Asia Times. "The science should have given us a clear picture of where we need to go. But the agreement doesn't paint a picture of the destination."

Indeed, it seems a bumpy road from Bali to Copenhagen, where the final deal will be sealed in 2009.

Despite the drama of extending the meeting by a day, the hard-line stand of the US -- its refusal to accept a target of 25-to-40 percent cuts in GHG emissions by 2020 -- was the headline grabber. It points to a bumpy road ahead, as the US continues to assert its muscle and insists on doing things its way.

White House Council on Environmental Quality chairman James Connaughton is quoted in Asia Times, saying, "The US will lead, and we will continue to lead, but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow."

Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy two-year ride.

Update: download the Bali Action Plan here.

Global Climate Change: Bali Yields REDD, a Deal on Forest Conservation

Reuters reports that the Bali talks have achieved at least one positive outcome, and it has greens seeing REDD:

Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) is an indicator of the sense of urgency felt by developing nations in the face of global warming.

"The breakthrough might eventually allow poor but forested nations to turn conservation into a tradeable commodity, with the potential to earn billions of dollars selling carbon credits," according to the Reuters article.

"But," Reuters reports, "one of the scheme's key architects warned that, if successful, it will create such large emissions reductions that carbon markets could collapse unless rich nations take on more stringent reductions targets."

Forest destruction produces about 20 percent of human generated carbon dioxide emissions, and groups such as The Nature Conservancy have long argued that forest conservation, also known as "avoided deforestation," is central to reducing emissions globally.

"Deforestation had been left out of previous climate deals," such as Kyoto, "because of concerns about how to work out which trees were threatened, and that any scheme would reward countries destroying forests rather than those protecting their resources."

"'Forests have been the elephants in the corner of the climate change process,' said Andrew Mitchell, executive director of Global Canopy Programme, adding that markets were the only way to find the billions of dollars a year needed to protect forests.

"'We cannot expect philanthropy or governments to come up with this amount of money sustainably,' he said."

read the full story: Reuters

(Full disclosure: While with The Nature Conservancy, I was part of its Climate Change Strategy Team, which developed the strategy linked to above. I am no longer employed by the Conservancy.)

Conservation: Steve McCormick's Departure from The Nature Conservancy, Questions and Appreciation

The emails started hitting my inbox shortly after 11 yesterday morning. From all over the world, colleagues and alumni alike were sending me the news: Steve McCormick resigned from the top of The Nature Conservancy.

"After almost seven years in my role as President," his email to staff began, "and a total of thirty years with The Nature Conservancy, I've concluded that I've contributed all I can to help the organization improve its ability to fulfill the mission. I've decided, therefore, to resign, and will vacate my role immediately."

What is surprising is the abrupt manner in which this was done. It begs the question, "Why now?" The harsh ring of "vacate my role immediately" begs another set of questions. It's not surprising that he stepped down; many of us had speculated that Steve was weary of the top job. And who could blame him?

His first year as president and CEO was marked by an unfair three-part investigative series by the Washington Post. The reporters put Steve -- who was not in charge when many of the alleged discretions were made -- under the spot light; chiefly for the no-interest loan the Conservancy had given him to lure him from California to northern Virginia.

I argued at the time that it was the lack of disclosure and not the loan itself that should have been questioned. I don't see any problem with trying to lure talent to your top position with such incentives. And his salary and Fairfax County home, which were also disclosed, the latter even pictured in the series, were neither extravagant nor lavish.

The Post series, much of which was based on conjecture and a too strict interpretation of what constitutes an "insider," led to two letters of inquiry from the Senate Finance Committee. Even as Steve took the heat most directly, he led the charge for transparency and cooperation, and marshaled all staff to work on the response from whatever corner of the organization they sat.

In the end, the committee in its review called the Conservancy a "model institution" and recommended it as an example of how non-profit organizations should be governed.

During this time Steve was seemingly unflappable. But this belied another struggle he was undertaking: transforming the organization to realize its mission: "to protect the diversity of life on Earth" (emphasis mine), by making it more of a global institution.

In his first 90 days, Steve told staff that the Conservancy needed to act on our global mission and that we couldn't fulfill that promise by spending 80 percent of our resources in the United States, where 20 percent (or less) of the biodiversity was found. We need to flip that ratio and we needed to do it soon -- time was our worst enemy.

Some early advice from ill-considered consultants who misread the organization's appetite for change, led to push-back from many parts of the organization. Much of the Conservancy was ill-prepared to move in this direction or to move as quickly as Steve wanted; some are not there still. Steve's reaction to that push back -- to scale down his tone and rhetoric --- was appropriate, but it eroded his leadership.

The fact is the Conservancy was not ready to do a 180 or even a 90-degree shift. Over 55 years (56 in a few weeks), the Conservancy built a strong infrastructure around a state-based model, and attracted staff, donors, and trustees to make it the largest and most effective conservation organization around.

With that strength and history, however, came responsibility. At times, I've likened this dilemma to a mid-life crisis: the Conservancy has a strong, 55-year marriage and it's faced with the fast-car/trophy spouse of global conservation. To be honest, I'm not convinced Steve's closest advisers at the time were doing him good service. We should have listened to the pulse of the organization, understood how to go about this change in a more strategic, methodical manner.

The Conservancy's brand was so tied up in its history that it seemed intractable. I know about this because my team there was intimately involved with trying to change the perception of that brand, from "We Buy Land" to protecting Nature for life; from "Saving the Last Great Places to words articulating a vision that Steve used in his email to staff: that our vision was not about "protecting lands and waters from people, but conserving them for people."

Truth be told, there were many among us who felt the Conservancy wasn't going far enough and fast enough. The last few years have been characterized by too much planning and process and not enough action. In my mind, some of that leads directly back to Steve's early charge and retreat. Once people got a sense they could push back, they did -- and heavily at times. I don't think Steve's presidency ever fully recovered from that early stumbling.

Ultimately, however, Steve has brought the Conservancy forward towards realizing its potential and his legacy. Much of the organization now better articulates the connections between biodiversity conservation and human well-being; there is a groundswell of recognition of the need to be a global institution, even if it is intellectual and not yet operational; and they now have a more clear strategy for its reaction to the major environmental issue of our time, climate change.

I got to know Steve first when he was California State Director and I was in Alaska. We shared some trustees between our two programs and I always heard about how good Steve was at managing their relationship to the organization. I was also intimately involved in helping shape the conversation on biodiversity/human well-being, going global, and developing the climate change strategy as part of the working group Steve chartered last winter.

At times, he frustrated me; like the Annual Meeting in Monterrey a few years back, right after we had made it through the Senate Finance Committee hearings, when I wanted him to acknowledge our painful journey and how we emerged stronger and better, and now could put it all behind us. I wanted him to take charge, lead the troops, rally all of us towards the ambitious goal we'd set for ourselves. Instead, he told stories that made you scratch your head and had none of the fire of his passion he carries within.

Yet, when Steve was on message, he was on fire, and his tenure as president of The Nature Conservancy should be weighed by the progress the organization made under his leadership. I think the late John Sawhill, whom Steve “replaced,” would be proud of him.

In the end, I left the Conservancy because of a need to explore alternative models, to find a way to catalyze entrepreneurial ideas and approaches that were beyond what the Conservancy could foster. There’s too much of an air of mystery surrounding his abrupt departure (and attempts to reach him have proved futile); I need to know more and why the accelerated timeframe?

I still consider Steve a colleague and am proud to have helped in my small way to move things forward with him. (Would that I could have done more early on to help him navigate the treacherous path he undertook.) I wish the best for him in his next endeavor -- and I hope he does turn his attention to global warming, as he told the Post he may.

For more on Steve McCormick's resignation, see: nature.org