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Managing Public Land: Adaptive Management

"As recently as 1950 Earth’s old-growth woodland occupied 50 million square kilometers, or nearly 40 percent of the ice-free surface of the land. Today its cover is only 34 million square kilometers and is shrinking fast. Half of that surviving has already been degraded, much of it severely. The loss of forest during the past half-century is one of the most profound and rapid environmental changes in the history of the planet.”1

Forests all over the world have been logged for lumber to support economic development and to clear land for agriculture and cattle grazing. In the United States the debate about logging forests on public land has been cast into a conflict between conservation and preservation, although the commonsense meaning of these two words is much the same. The reason is history. 

At the beginning of the twentieth century US Forest Service policy required conservation of forests in order to provide the best use of natural resources for the public good. Head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, relied on this argument to support the Hetch Hetchy dam, which now provides water for San Francisco. He was opposed by John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, who argued for wilderness preservation. Near the end of the twentieth century defenders of these conflicting views have fought over the policy of adaptive management. 

We will consider some of these arguments involving forests and parks, and also the restoration of deserts and wetlands. In addition, we will look briefly at the use of public lands in Asia and Africa, where reserves to protect wildlife have been established.

CONSERVATIONISTS VERSUS PRESERVATIONISTS

Pinchot believed that the object of US forest policy “is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful . . . or because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness.”2 His view was utilitarian: “Forestry is the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man.”3 For Pinchot, the goal of conservation was “a planned and orderly scheme for national efficiency, based on the elimination of waste, and directed toward the best use of all we have for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time.”4

Preservationists have offered two counter arguments. First, a character argument identifying forests as places of beauty and peace that inspire us to be better persons. Second, a duty argument asserting we should preserve wilderness, because it has intrinsic worth for itself. Thus, the struggle between conservationists and preservationists is a dispute that pits a utilitarian point of view against two ways of affirming the intrinsic value of nature.

Sustainable Yield

Early in the twentieth century, the conservationist position was supported by political groups that were resisting the inequities of wealth and land ownership in American society. “Pinchot’s conservation was part of a more general progressive movement fighting the laissez-faire, monopolistic social Darwinism characteristic of much of nineteenth-century American economic life. Along with President Roosevelt and other progressives, Pinchot held that natural resources should benefit all citizens, not just the wealthy few who privately owned vast amounts of property. Government policy should serve this goal by preventing waste, limiting monopolistic control, providing economic opportunity for the many, and keeping prices low.”5

In the 1930s the US forestry policy concerned “sustainable yield,” and because of the high demand for lumber for construction after World War II the emphasis was on yield. The Sustained-yield Forest Management Act of 1944 made “community stability” an official goal of the US Forest Service, and in practice this meant that forests were to be regulated in order to “provide a steady flow of wood in a sustained and predictable fashion.”6

At the same time highway construction and a greater use of the automobile brought more people into the forests for recreation. The Multiple Use- Sustained Yield Act of 1960 reflects the growing importance of recreational use of the forests and also reaffirms the emphasis on producing lumber.7

Those supporting preservation were generally unable to prevent the use of the forests for logging and recreation, but in 1964 they secured passage of the Wilderness Act that protects some forest areas from roads. In the 1980s, however, forestry began to respond to the new environmental movement in the United States by embracing the idea of environmental sustainability.

Adaptive Management

In 1993 President Clinton ordered the use of ecosystem management (EM) for public land.8 “Regulatory negotiation, which actively involves a broad range of stakeholders in the specification and implementation of regulations, has become more widely used for federal pollution control programs. The EPA has developed the Common Sense Initiative (CSI) in league with corporate America, state regulators, national environmentalists, and locally based environmental justice groups. The goal is to encourage innovation by providing flexibility in the use of a place-by-place approach to achieving pollution control standards.”9

The Clinton administration promoted land-use adaptive management that is:

·        Ecologically sustainable—“directing public lands toward a desired future condition which embodies the complexity of ecosystem interrelationships . . . ,”

·        Economically feasible—“meeting societal demands for the myriad products of forests and public lands at a cost that does not exceed the priced and unpriced benefits gained,”

·        Socially acceptable—“reflecting a sensitivity toward recreational, aesthetic, spiritual, and other noncommodity values of public lands.”10

This shift emphasizes a local process. “It depends upon local constraints, the present state of local institutions, and the personalities of key people. Any attempt to manage adaptively should transfer knowledge and understanding to local individuals, but it must do more than that. It must also develop institutional flexibility by encouraging the formation of networks of individuals that bridge institutional boundaries. These groups of individuals can act as agents of reform within their institutions, and [as] the nucleus around with new institutions can form.”11

Forestry policy is crucial worldwide, as “governments own almost 80 percent of the remaining intact forests in developing countries.”12 Too often, timber concessions “have been granted at below market rates and without safeguards of requirements for good management. Government subsidization of projects like road building has further fueled both timber booms and large-scale settlement. Another favorite policy of forest-rich countries is to promote agricultural development and ranching in previously forested areas, often with government subsidies so deep that the enterprises would be totally uneconomical without them.”13

At times, international intervention has made things worse. “Critics of globalization charge that economic globalization and the World Trade Organization are magnifying the trend toward expanded logging by encouraging high levels of foreign investment, weaker domestic regulation in the face of international competition, and loss of local community controls.”14

Yet, logging can be both sustainable and profitable. The Menominee tribe in Wisconsin has logged its reservation for over a century, cutting “only the weaker trees, leaving the strong mother trees and enough of the upper canopy for squirrels and other arboreal animals to continuously inhabit.”15 The logging has provided a steady income, and the 1.3 billion standing board feet of timber in 1870 has grown to 1.7 billion standing board feet.

Forests have to be managed now, because the adverse impact of humans on forests is unavoidable.16 The Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC), an international NGO, certifies “that a forest is responsibly managed. The certification process requires third-party auditing to ensure international standards are met for the rights of indigenous groups and workers, biodiversity conservation, the protection of ecologically important areas, and a range of other environmental, social, and economic criteria.”17

FSC does not certify clear cutting, but examples on its website confirm that sustainable logging is profitable.18 Rainforest Alliance, an NGO active in forest preservation, affirms: “FSC certification has helped strengthen business structures, fire prevention measures, and low-impact harvesting practices.”19

NATIONAL FORESTS AND PARKS

Bruce Babbitt, US secretary of the Interior from 1993 to 2001, played a crucial role in applying adaptive management to public land use. He took office soon after a federal judge in Seattle ruled that enforcing the Endangered Species Act, in order to protect the northern spotted owl, would require a halt to logging in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest. After a public meeting in Portland, Oregon, which President Clinton attended, Babbitt was charged with forging a plan that would protect the owl and its habitat and also allow sufficient logging to be economically feasible and socially acceptable.  

Babbitt enlisted more than two hundred geologists, hydrologists, biologists, zoologists, and land planners to figure out what area to protect as the owl’s habitat.  In 1995 the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) exercised its authority under a 1982 amendment to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which allowed it to accept a “habitat conservation plan,” and negotiated an agreement with Weyerhaeuser, one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies, to maintain “areas of forest large enough to sustain groups of spotted owls and close enough to one another to allow movement of the owls among the forested areas.”20

Babbitt was unsuccessful, however, in persuading Congress to support a bill that would require the process of conducting a “biological survey” in conjunction with enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Opponents, fearing that more endangered species would be identified, argued that the federal government should stay out of land-use planning. Clearly, however, the federal government has an enormous impact on land use. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation have opened lands for development by building floodcontrol projects and damming rivers. Moreover, the interstate highway program funded by the federal government has directly affected the growth of cities and suburbs.

Babbitt argues that: “Throughout our history land use planning has been a one-way street down which we relentlessly race toward government-subsidized exploitation of every resource. The question we now face is whether and how to create a parallel process that includes a broader consideration of the public interest in our land and resources.”21 Adaptive management is an effort to combine the science of ecology with the realization of intrinsic values. Foresters, who have long seen their work as an applied science, now need to explain their reasoning to communities of interest (industry, local people, environmentalists, and recreation users).

Adaptive Management Areas

Adaptive management areas (AMAs) were created in the Northwest to resolve conflicts concerning logging and the northern spotted owl. “The underlying premise of adaptive management is that knowledge of the ecological system is not only incomplete, but also elusive. Thus, the experience of management itself is a source of learning. Adaptive management includes not only the use of scientific or expert knowledge in decision-making, but also the knowledge and values of stakeholders in an area.”22

A 1995 statement for the Cispus AMA in Washington State explains that adaptive management is “a continuing process of action-based planning, monitoring, researching, evaluating, and adjusting; with the objective of improving implementation and achieving the goals that have been identified. In forest management, our limited understanding of ecosystem behavior leads to uncertainty about the effects of management activities.”23 Adaptive management is “a strategy for dealing with uncertainty by explicitly designing management activities as experiments and opportunities for learning.”24

By 1997 a long-range plan for the Cispus AMA was adopted by a committee including staff from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the EPA, the National Marine Fisheries Service, industry leaders, elected officials, and citizens. “What we had here was true citizen partnerships with government. A variety of perspectives came to the table and we all generally walked away agreeing with a common vision for the future,” said David Jennings of the Black Hills Audubon Society. “The path we have set with this decision focuses on protecting the remnants of our native forests while at the same time learning how to sustain logging on public lands.”25

The Bush Administration

In 2002 the administration of President George W. Bush began to revise the ethical presumptions of forest management by proposing rule changes, which the Wilderness Society argues “erode fundamental safeguards for our forests.”26 In 2005 the Bush administration dropped several regulations from the forest planning rules, including the requirements to sustain viable populations of plants and animals across their natural range,27 and to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) when a forest plan is significantly amended or revised.28

In December 2006 the Forest Service released a statement saying that the rules proposed in 2005 would go into effect.29 Critics, who claimed this change would allow the Forest Service to ignore the planning requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),30 found support for their position in March 2007 when a federal judge prohibited the use of the 2005 planning rules on the grounds that these changes were not in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act.31

The Bush administration also promoted the Healthy Forests Initiative (HFI), which was created by the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 “to reduce the risks severe wildfires pose to people, communities, and the environment.”32 The HFI categorically excludes some decisions from the review provisions of the NEPA, and also creates an exception to the Endangered Species Act, which requires federal agencies to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to ensure that an action “will not jeopardize the continued existence of listed species, or adversely modify their designated critical habitat.”33

The HFI is administered by the US Forest Service and also by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which exercises authority over 30 percent of federal public land. The BLM has added provisions for administering the HFI that make wildfire management decisions effective immediately, if the BLM “determines that vegetation, soil, or other resources on public lands are at substantial risk of wildfire due to drought, fuels buildup, or other reasons, or when public lands are at immediate risk of erosion or other damage due to wildfire.”34

Critics of the HFI warn that “the law will lead to more cutting of mature and old-growth forests, further damage to wildlife habitat, greater risk of destructive fires, and little additional assistance to communities.”35 The Sierra Club says that HFI is “is based on the false assumption that landscape-wide logging will decrease forest fires.”36 President George W. Bush argues: “[I]n order to have a healthy economy, we’ve got to have a healthy forest policy. . . . After all, the fires that have devastated the West create a drag on the economy. It costs money to fight these fires. It means people lose property.”37

The president also claims that thinning is needed to reduce the danger of fire and to prevent lawsuits against the government. “We need to thin, we need to make our forests healthy by using some common sense,” he says. “[P]lus, there’s just too many lawsuits, just endless litigation . . . there’s a fine line between people expressing themselves and their opinions and using litigation to keep the United States of America from enacting common sense forest policy.”38

Zander Evans, research director of the Forest Guild, an association of more than six hundred professional foresters, disagrees with the president and supports National Forests and Parks adaptive management: “Based on available data, early and substantial public participation is a much more effective tool for facilitating fuel reduction projects than are administrative attempts to curtail litigation.”39

Resistance by the Bush administration to the adaptive management approach extends beyond forestry regulations to environmental rules concerning coal mining and wetlands. In September 2007, however, a survey “conducted by the Civil Society Institute found that 65 percent of Americans oppose the Bush Administration’s proposal ‘to ease environmental regulations to permit wider use of mountain top removal [MTR] coal mining in the US.’ The study also found that 74 percent of Americans are opposed to the expansion of MTR coal mining in general, and that 90 percent of Americans agree that more mining should be permitted only after the United States government has assessed its impacts on safety and the environment.”40

In 2008 the Bureau of Land Management wrote new rules for wilderness areas to allow off-road vehicles use of about fifteen thousand miles of designated trails. “The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group, points out that many of these routes have been lifted straight from maps provided by the off-road vehicle associations and have not been independently surveyed to assess their potential damage to the soil, animal habitat and archaeological sites.”41

By the end of 2008, however, Congress plans to put about two million acres of land under federal control as protected wilderness. “A confluence of factors is driving this wilderness renaissance: the shift in Congress from Republican to Democratic control; environmentalists’ decision to take a more pragmatic approach in which they enlist local support for their proposals by making concessions to opposing interests; and some communities’ recognition that intact ecosystems can often offer a greater economic payoff than extractive industries.”42

RESTORING DESERTS AND WETLANDS

Many criticize the idea of restoring environments,43 but Andrew Light believes “that philosophers can make constructive contributions to ecological restoration and to environmental issues in general by helping to articulate the normative foundations for environmental policies in ways . . . that resonate with the moral intuitions most people carry around with them every day.”44

Perhaps the “relationship between humans and nature imbues restoration with a positive value” even though fully restoring a natural environment is generally impossible: “When we engage in acts of benevolent restoration, we are bound by nature in the sense that we are obligated to respect what it once was attempting to realize before we interfered with it. In addition to the substantial personal and social benefits that accrue to people who engage in benevolent forms of restoration, we can also say that restoration restores the human connection to nature by restoring the part of culture that has historically contained a connection to nature.”45

Deserts

Under Babbitt, the Department of the Interior wielded federal authority to try to restore and protect desert and wetland environments. In 1993 the US Fish and Wildlife Service recommended that the California gnatcatcher be listed as an endangered species, because its population had shrunk to less than three thousand birds. Listing the gnatcatcher, however, put a land-use moratorium over hundreds of thousands of acres of land between San Diego and Los Angeles. 

The political conflict seemed intractable, but federal action under the Endangered Species Act helped the governor enforce the Natural Communities Conservation Program, a 1992 California law giving local communities new powers to draft comprehensive plans in order to preserve open space. It was also helpful that in Orange County a single landowner held title to a hundred thousand acres of coastal plain, and he preferred to negotiate rather than go to court. 

In San Diego County, however, there was no single large landowner to work with. The preserves had “to be stitched together from thousands of landholdings through careful use of zoning incentives to protect sufficient area while freeing less critical land for development. On smaller tracts and as a condition of developing them, landowners could opt to purchase other land designated for protection as mitigation. And in some areas outright purchases by the county” were necessary.46

After the San Diego Zoo campaigned for community support, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress began to secure federal grants to help pay for the planning process. By 1998 thirty thousand acres in Orange County had been set aside as two permanent reserves, to provide a habitat for the gnatcatcher and thirty-two other species under threat, and both the city of San Diego and San Diego County had approved significant habitat preserves.

“The plans took in nearly two hundred thousand acres of crucial sage habitats, stream corridors, and vernal pools throughout the county, protecting essential habitat for more than one hundred species, including the least Bell’s vireo, the ship-tailed lizard, a number of invertebrates, a long list of plants endemic to the region, and of course the gnatcatcher. These plans demonstrated that the Endangered Species Act could be made to work even on complex, partially developed landscapes with highly fragmented ownership.”47 A habitat was not only protected, but “restored” at least in part, by changing land-use patterns over a large portion of the southern California coastal plain. 

The Endangered Species Act was also helpful in preserving the habitat of the desert tortoise. This required restricting development around Las Vegas on “the sandy, gently sloping alluvial fans extending outward from the mountains.”48 Business leaders, politicians, and environmentalists collaborated to end grazing on public land and to purchase sufficient private land to create a preserve. (In this case “restoration” meant buying grazing rights so the desert terrain could recover.) The costs for implementing this plan were assessed to the developers in Las Vegas, who agreed to pay a $565 fee for each new subdivision lot they developed.49

The Endangered Species Act has been crucial in the southern and western parts of the country, where many species are endangered, whereas few such species exist in the northeast. Babbitt has urged that the act be amended “to include not just endangered species, but to promote the protection of open space and important watersheds, forests and other threatened ecosystems—before the downward spiral to extinction begins.”50 This would mean applying the precautionary principle by shifting the ethical presumption of protection from an endangered species to an endangered ecosystem.

Wetlands

In the 1940s the state of Florida petitioned Congress to help control flooding, and after legislation was passed in 1948 the Army Corps of Engineers in collaboration with the South Florida Water Management District constructed an elaborate system that divided the ecosystem into three parts: “a third to be drained for the sugar plantations, a third to store water for the cities, and a third for nature.”51

The Everglades is not only a swamp but a river, miles wide and inches deep, that flows slowly on land with a slope of about two inches per mile.52 Under the 1948 plan the canals below Lake Okeechobee, which lead southward and eastward to the Atlantic, were enlarged and pumping plants were installed to irrigate the sugar cane fields directly from Lake Okeechobee in times of drought.  These changes expanded agricultural land to more than a million acres.

South of this area the plan reserved a million acres for water storage to refill underground aquifers, and the corps built earthen dikes to store water on the surface at a depth of five to six feet. This system was also designed to capture irrigation water draining from the sugar plantations, and all this water was designated for the growing cities on the Atlantic coast. The national park in the southern part of the watershed was to receive the rest of the water. The Florida legislature created the South Florida Water Management Agency to oversee this water system, and its costs were to be split between the federal and state governments. 

As development spread in the area south of Lake Okeechobee, more land was drained and the flow of water to the park in the south declined. By the 1990s it became clear that the park could not survive unless the entire eco system from Lake Okeechobee to the park was at least partially restored, so water could flow through the region as it once had.

“To restore adequate flows meant taking water back from existing agricultural uses, filling in drainage canals, and allowing some farms to revert to swamp land.  And it would be necessary to halt further encroachment by purchasing or condemning thousands of undeveloped subdivision lots within the natural floodways that bring water into the park.”53

Babbitt learned that the Army Corps of Engineers was open to restoring the Everglades watershed and that Florida officials would support a feasibility study.  However, the problems could not be resolved without restricting both housing development and the use of water by the sugar plantations. A federal lawsuit filed against the plantation owners in 1989 for phosphorus pollution in the watershed gave the Department of the Interior leverage.

“The obvious solution was to regulate sugar growers and other farms to meet the ten parts per billion discharge standard recommended by scientists as necessary for protection of these waters. Under the complex provisions of the federal Clean Water Act, the state had to be a part to the agreement; that would require legislation, and to get action from the Florida legislature we had to demonstrate that requiring compliance would be economically feasible.”54

The solution involved reducing by more than half the quantity of fertilizer being used by the sugar growers, as studies revealed this lower level would produce the same yield. In addition, scientists calculated that dedicating about 4 percent of the sugar fields on the downstream side to cattail planting would provide a “filter” and thus reduce the phosphorus moving downstream to acceptable levels. When the federal government agreed to drop the lawsuit and the federal and state governments agreed to share the costs of the changes with the sugar growers, the growers accepted the necessary 4 percent dedication of their land to cattails.

Finally, subdivisions in the watershed area had to be recovered. Congress agreed to help buy out these landowners, and by 1999 the Park Service had purchased or condemned more than two thousand swampland lots for inclusion in the expanded park boundaries. In 2000, as part of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) was approved, covering sixteen counties and an area of eighteen thousand square miles.55

Restoring the entire ecosystem of southern Florida continues to be a struggle, economically and politically.56 Implementing CERP will require more than thirty years of collaborative decision-making and will cost at least $8 billion.57 The success of CERP is needed to protect fifteen endangered species and at least eight distinct habitats.58 In 2007 President Bush vetoed a bill that included funding for CERP, but Congress overrode the veto.59 CERP is not the plan most environmentalists wanted, but it did shift the ethical and legal presumption from using water for development and agriculture to restoring and protecting the ecosystem.60

After a Supreme Court ruling in 2006 extended the protection of the Clean Water Act of 1972 to wetlands and small streams, the Bush administration fought back by writing new regulations that make such federal intervention less likely.61 “The EPA will now have to prove on a case-by-case basis a ‘significant nexus’ between intermittent streams and nearby navigable waterways.”62 This undermines the precautionary principle and puts the burden of proof on those who assert that wetlands are threatened by economic development.

WILDLIFE RESERVES IN ASIA AND AFRICA

International NGOs, such as WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have lobbied governments and raised funds to support the creation of wildlife reserves in Asian and African countries. Surprisingly, some of these efforts to preserve wildlife and biodiversity in endangered habitats have been criticized by local environmentalists in Asia and Africa. 

The problem, as Ramachandra Guha sees it, derives from American history, which defines a utilitarian notion of conservation over wilderness preservation.  He argues that preserving wildlife habitats in Asia and Africa requires allowing access for local communities that rely on these natural areas for food and other resources.

India

India is a densely populated country with agrarian populations that have a longstanding and balanced relationship with nature. Designating tiger reserves, such as the Project Tiger,63 has displaced local communities, and thus has generated strong opposition. The effect, Guha asserts, of setting aside wilderness areas for Project Tiger is a direct transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. Identifying environmental action with preservation has meant neglecting “environmental problems that impinge far more directly on the lives of the poor—e.g., fuel, fodder, water shortages, soil erosion, and air and water pollution.”64

Ecological battles in Asia and Africa involve a “conflict over nature between the subsistence and largely rural sector and the vastly more powerful commercial industrial sector.”65 In India those most affected by environmental degradation—poor and landless peasants, women, and tribals—are mainly concerned with survival. They only support environmental policies that lead to a more equitable distribution of economic and political power and protection for their human rights.66

Third world critics of the American preservationist movement see the distinction between the use and preservation of nature as not only abstract, but as reflecting a lack of awareness among Americans to their “use” of the wilderness areas that they are preserving. Historian Samuel Hays has noted that interest in wilderness is “not a throwback to the primitive, but an integral part of the modern standard of living as people . . . add new ‘amenity’ and ‘aesthetic’ goals and desires to their earlier preoccupation with necessities and conveniences.”67

Despite the harm to the natural environment caused by the automobile, Guha points out that “for most Americans it is perfectly consistent to drive a thousand miles to spend a holiday in a national park.”68 Moreover, he finds support for a critical view of the American preservationist movement among German environmentalists, who argue that “economic growth in the West has historically rested on the economic and ecological exploitation of the Third World.”69 In this analysis the ecological crisis is a result of disproportionate consumption by industrialized societies and the urban elite in less developed societies.70

Because adaptive management emphasizes local involvement in environmental decision-making, it addresses much of this problem. For adaptive management does not describe the ethical issue as a choice between conservation and preservation, but as a process involving local communities that both preserves wildlife habits and allows for human uses of the natural resources in these habits.

Africa

To consider environmental issues in Africa we must appreciate that: “People were once an island in a sea of wildlife. Now wildlife survives in parks that are islands in an ocean of people.”71 This means that: “[T]he hard choice in southern Africa is not so much between people and wildlife as between a pragmatic humanism that benefits both and an idealistic environmentalism that benefits neither.”72

In the 1970s international environmentalists supported bans on hunting and the sale of wildlife products in an effort to prevent the loss of endangered animal populations. Kenya adopted these policies, but the results were unexpected.  Ranchers, who had sold licenses for hunting zebra, had to raise more cattle to make up for the loss of income due to the ban on hunting. They also had to cull more zebras to keep the population down, in order to have room for more cattle.73

Also, poaching increased after hunting was banned. Countries that authorized rangers to kill poachers soon discovered that despite many human deaths the number of animals lost to poaching increased, because many rangers were involved in poaching.74 Tanzania banned hunting in 1973, but rescinded the ban in 1985. “During that twelve year moratorium on hunting, the wildlife virtually disappeared. Why? Without licensed hunters to keep poachers in line, poachers ran amok.”75

Poachers hunt with snares, which is extremely wasteful. Animals that poachers don’t want are caught, and animals in snares may be eaten by vultures or hyena before a poacher returns. After 1985 hunters began to pay local people to pick up snares and turn them in, and this incentive strategy has been effective.76

In 1990 Kenya began to distribute a quarter of the tourist fees for visiting wildlife reserves to local Masai tribes so the Masai would have an incentive to help protect migratory wildlife. In Zambia, companies involved in tourism distribute a percentage of their profits in equal shares among their entire staff including janitors and maids. In Botswana tribal chiefs administer a game reserve and limit licenses for doing business in the reserve to five years. Young people being employed in the tourism industry are also being educated abroad, so they soon will be able to run it.77

In Zimbabwe, the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), which was established in 1989 in the northwestern area of Zimbabwe known as Nyaminyami, has involved more than a quarter of a million people in managing wildlife. Local communities benefit by selling photographic or hunting concessions to wildlife tour operators, in consultation with the wildlife department, or by culling animal populations.

CAMPFIRE is a community empowerment initiative, not an environmental project. Nonetheless, as communal lands surround wildlife preserves established by the national government, the care and management of wildlife by CAMPFIRE also protects the animals in the preserves.78 In 1989 twelve rangers were hired to oversee the reserves, using the funds gained by culling impala. “On their daily patrols the rangers pick up snares that have been laid along the animal trails, and their presence deters would-be poachers of elephants and rhinos.”79

The CAMPFIRE ethical presumption is: “He who bears the costs gets the benefits.”80 Instead of the benefits going largely to the national government, which has been the downfall of preservation programs in Africa, the benefits should go to local communities. In CAMPFIRE this means selling culled impala meat to local people below market price, distributing profits from hunting and tourism to ward councils, and providing compensation to households for any loss due to wild animals (lions killing goats, or elephants entering the fields of the villagers).81

Hunting also creates local jobs. By 1993 more than a third of the households in the village of Masoka in Zimbabwe were receiving their primary income from work related to the safari camps, and this increase in income from hunting has meant that villages are turning their land over to wildlife rather than cattle grazing.82

When culling is required to prevent an animal population from outgrowing the environment available to it, hunting may be the best option. In the Lowveld areas of South Africa where the Kruger National Park is located, elephants share the environment with other keystone species including baobab trees and knobthorn trees, both of which shelter small animals and provide them with food.  These trees, however, are eaten by elephants, and when there are too many elephants they destroy these trees in their attempt to satisfy their hunger. 

To preserve both elephants and biodiversity, the park is now divided into high elephant-impact zones (where there is no management of elephants) and low elephant-impact zones (where the elephant population is limited by translocations or culling). When the damage to the environment in the high elephant impact zones reaches a “Threshold of Potential Concern,” the management of the zones is switched so the highly impacted zone can recover.83

The long-term management of this elephant reserve will almost certainly involve culling by shooting elephants, as only a few elephants can be relocated and the cost of practicing contraception on elephants is prohibitive. Using drugs to kill an elephant contaminates the meat, making it unsafe for animal or human consumption, or causes suffering, because when elephants are paralyzed they suffocate to death while fully conscious.

As an elephant population grows by about 6 percent annually, the number of elephants to be culled will depend on the size of the herd.84 Therefore, to minimize culling in a wildlife reserve, which is committed to preserving both elephants and the biodiversity of the ecosystem, it would seem best to keep the elephant population smaller rather than allowing elephant herds to grow to the maximum size that a habitat can support.

None of these environmental decisions, however, can be made ethically without adaptive management systems, which take into account the ecosystems and also the livelihoods and human rights of those living in these ecosystems. This is as true in Asia and Africa for managing wildlife reserves, as it is in the United States for managing forests, deserts, and wetlands.

ETHICAL AND LEGAL PRESUMPTIONS

United States policy for forests and wildlife has shifted from a best-use approach to an adaptive management policy emphasizing environmental sustainability and local involvement in decision-making. The best-use position puts the burden of proof on those who argue against a utilitarian calculation. Adaptive management affirms ethical and legal presumptions, such as the Endangered Species Act, that support the precautionary principle and shift the burden of proof to potential users of an environment.

Under the Clinton administration pragmatic decisions were made to restore and preserve diverse ecosystems while allowing various uses of public land. The Bush administration has tried to return to the moral and legal presumptions of a best-use policy, which would mean setting aside the precautionary principle and shifting the burden of proof back to advocates of preserving public land.  The struggle continues in politics and in the courts.

In Asia and Africa, those committed to preserving wildlife in nature reserves also support social justice for local communities living beside these reserves.  On these continents adaptive management means preserving ecosystems and endangered species by ensuring that local people are involved in the decision-making process and are fairly compensated for sharing the responsibilities of preserving wildlife.

Hunting and tourism are generally allowed in nature reserves, but are constrained by moral and legal presumptions. The burden of proof is on those proposing to intervene in a wildlife habitat for economic gain. They must ensure protection for endangered species, and also protect the rights of local people to participate in making decisions and to benefit equitably from the use of wildlife habitats.

NOTES

1.   Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, 58. A summary of Wilson’s recommendations are at 160–164.

2.   Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 41–42, quoted in Joseph R. DesJardins, Environmental Ethics, 48.

3.   Gifford Pinchot, The Training of a Forester (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1914), 13, quoted in Joseph R. DesJardins, Environmental Ethics, 48.

4.   Ibid., 50.

5.   Joseph R. DesJardins, Environmental Ethics, 49.

6.   Solange Nadeau, Bruce A. Shinkler, and Christina Kakoyannis, “Beyond the Economic Model: Assessing Sustainability in Forest Communities,” in Bruce A. Shindler, Thomas M. Beckley, and Mary Carmel Finley, eds., Two Paths towards Sustainable Forests: Public Values in Canada and the United States (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 62.

7.   An economic criticism of the US Forest Service is that it “subsidizes logging by selling timber at prices way below its own costs of timber marketing as well as by providing other subsidies, such as the $811 million in tax breaks that the forest industry enjoyed in 1991.” Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, Perverse Subsidies, 170.

8.   Jack W. Thomas, “Are there lessons for Canadian foresters lurking south of the border?”

Forestry Chronicle 78, no. 3 (2002): 382–387, in Peter N. Duinker, Gary Z. Bull, and Bruce Shindler, “Sustainable Forestry in Canada and the United States: Developments and Prospects,” in Bruce A. Shindler, Thomas M. Beckley, and Mary Carmel Finley, eds., Two Paths towards Sustainable Forests, 38.

9.   Brent S. Steel and Edward Weber, “Ecosystem Management and Public Opinion in the United States,” in Bruce A. Shindler, Thomas M. Beckley, and Mary Carmel Finley, eds., Two Paths towards Sustainable Forests, 78.

10.  Ibid., 80. The Clinton administration signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which has a similar emphasis on ecosystem management. “The ecosystem approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Application of the ecosystem approach will help to reach a balance of the three objectives of the Convention. It is based on the application of appropriate scientific methodologies focused on levels of biological organization which encompass the essential processes, functions and interactions among organisms and their environment. It recognizes that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of ecosystems.” Online at http://www.cbd.int/ecosystem. The Clinton administration expected that the Senate would ratify this treaty, but the opposition was so strong that the convention was never put to a vote. See “How the Convention on Biodiversity was Defeated,” online at http://www.sovereignty.net/p/ land/biotreatystop.htm.

11.  Garry Peterson, “Using Ecological Dynamics to Move toward an Adaptive Architecture,” in Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy, eds., Construction Ecology, 139.

12.  James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 39.

13.  Ibid. Forests in Brazil are being logged to plant sugar cane that will be used to produce ethanol. See Sabrina Vale, “Losing Forests to Fuel Cars,” The Washington Post (Jul. 31, 2007), D01, online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073001484.html. In Niger, however, trees are being planted. See Lydia Polygren, “In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert,” The New York Times (Feb. 11, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/world/africa/11niger.html.

14.  James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 40.

15.  William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 88.

16.  For example, “Except for a few isolated patches, the 31 million acres of California forests, indeed all the forests in the Western United States, have been changed in some way by humans.” Peter Fimrite, “Bringing Forests Up to Date,” San Francisco Chronicle (Feb. 29, 2008), W-2, online at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/29/BAJ5UNM1N.DTL.

17.  Haider Rizvi, “Local Control Saves Forests—Report,” OneWorld.net (Mar. 27, 2008), online at http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/159182/1. The largest private landowner in California, Sierra Pacific Industries, relies on the active forest management guidelines of the Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI), which represents timber and paper interests. Jonathon Curiel, “Getting Clear with Sierra Pacific Industries,” San Francisco Chronicle (Feb. 29, 2008), W-8, online at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/29/BAE7UTPD6.DTL. See Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), online at http://www.aboutsfi.org.

18.  Forestry Stewardship Council, “FSC’s Case Studies,” online at http://www.fsc.org/en/ about/case_studies. The European version of FSC is the Programme for the Endorsement Forest Certification (PEFC) in the UK, online at http://www.pefc.org/internet/html.

19.  Haider Rizvi, “Local Control Saves Forests—Report,” OneWorld.net (Mar. 27, 2008), online at http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/159182/1.

20.  “Northern Spotted Owl,” Endangered, online at http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/Endangered/owl/owl.html.

21.  Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 61.

22.  Clare M, Ryan, “The Ecosystem Experiment in British Columbia and Washington State,” in Bruce A. Shindler, Thomas M. Beckley, and Mary Carmel Finley, eds., Two Paths towards Sustainable Forests, 196.

23.  “AMA Strategies—Executive Summary,” online at http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/forest/research/ama/strategy/frmain.shtml.

24.  Ibid.

25.  “Press Release Threatened Ancient Forests Gain Reprieve,” Northwest Ecosystem Alliance (Jul. 24, 1997), online at http://www.crcwater.org/issues2/gifford072497.html.

26.  “Attacks on Forest Management Regulations,” The Wilderness Society, online at http:// www.wilderness.org/OurIssues/Forests/regulations.cfm?TopLevel=Regulations.

27.  “Forest Management Plans,” Conservation Northwest, online at http://www.conservationnw.org/oldgrowth/forest-management-plans.

28.  “Final National Forest Regulations Take Step Backwards,” The Wilderness Society, online at http://www.wilderness.org/OurIssues/Forests/nfma.cfm.

29.  Release No. FS- 0627s, “Finalized Forest Service Rule Improves the Forest Planning Process and Increases Public Involvement,” USDA Forest Service, online at http://www.fs.fed.us/news/2006/releases/12/ce-statement.shtml.

30.  Brodie Farquhar, “New Forest Plan Rule Nukes NEPA,” Truthout.org, online at http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/67/24496.

31.  Dan Berman, “Judge Forbids Forest Service from Using 2005 Planning Regs,” E&E News (Mar. 30, 2007), online at http://www.redlodgeclearinghouse.org/news/03_30_07_judge.html.

32.  “What Is the Healthy Forests Initiative?,” Healthy Forests Initiative, online at http://www.healthyforests.gov/initiative/introduction.html.

33.  “HFI Administrative Reforms,” Health Forests, online at http://www.healthyforests.gov/initiative/admin_actions.html.

34.  Ibid.

35.  “‘Healthy Forests Initiative’: A Campaign of Severe Policy Rollbacks,” The Environmental Protection Information Center,” online at http://www.wildcalifornia.org/publications/article-57.

36.  The Sierra Club argues that the HFI will:

·         Limit environmental analysis and limit public participation by excluding environmental analysis for any site-specific project the Forest Service and BLM claim will reduce hazardous fuels, including post-fire salvage projects; and by limiting public participation by allowing “hazardous fuels reduction projects” to be categorically excluded and suspends citizen’s rights to appeal projects.

·         Accelerate aggressive “thinning” across millions of acres of backcountry forests miles away from communities at risk to forest fires.

·         Use “Goods for services” as the Funding Mechanism by (a) allowing the Forest Service and BLM to give away trees to logging companies as payment for any management activity, including logging on public lands; and (b) creating a powerful new incentive to log large fire-resistant trees, old growth, and other commercially valuable forests.

“Forest Protection & Restoration: Debunking the ‘Healthy Forests Initiative,’” The Sierra Club, online at http://www.sierraclub.org/forests/fires/healthyforests_initiative.asp.

37.  Brant Short and Dale C. Hardy-Short, “‘Physicians of the Forest’: A Rhetorical Critique of the Bush Healthy Forest Initiative,” Electronic Green Journal, 19 (Dec. 2003), online at http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu/egj19/short1.html.

38.  Ibid.

39.  “Forest Guild Analysis of Wildfire Risk Reduction on Federal Lands,” The Forest Guild, http://forestguild.org/fuel_reduction_evaluation.html.

40.  “Mountain Top Removal,” online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal.

See also John M. Broder, “Rule to Expand Mountaintop Coal Mining,” The New York Times (Aug. 23, 2008), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/us/23coal.html.

41.  “Nature Overrun,” The New York Times (Jan. 8, 2008), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08tue1.html. See also Felicity Barringer and William Yardley, “Surge in Off-Roading Stirs Dust and Debate in West,” The New York Times (Dec. 30, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/us/301ands.html.

42.  Juliet Eilperin, “Congress Pushes to Keep Land Untamed,” The Washington Post (Jun. 16, 2008), A01, online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/15/AR2008061502137.html.

43.  Two of the best known essays are Robert Elliot, “Faking Nature,” and Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics.

44.  Andrew Light, “Ecological Restoration and the Culture of Nature: A Pragmatic Perspective,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, eds., Environmental Ethics, 399–400.

45.  Ibid., 406–409. Restoration, Light concludes, “is an obligation exercised in the interests of forming a positive community with nature and thus is well within the boundaries of a positive, pragmatic environmental philosophy.”

46.  Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the Wilderness, 72.

47.  Ibid., 73–74.

48.  Ibid., 82.

49.  Ibid.

50.  Ibid., 93.

51.  Ibid., 24.

52.  Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was one of the first to warn of the threats to the Everglades in her famous book, The Everglades: Rivers of Grass (Rinehart: 1947).

53.  Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the Wilderness, 17.

54.  Ibid., 34.

55.  The CERP goal is: “to capture fresh water that now flows unused to the ocean and the gulf and redirect it to areas that need it most. The majority of the water will be devoted to environmental restoration, reviving a dying ecosystem. The remaining water will benefit cities and farmers by enhancing water supplies for the south Florida economy.” “About CERP: Brief Overview,” Everglades Restoration, online at http://www.evergladesplan.org/about/about_cerp_brief.aspx.  “In fact, the Everglades Restoration Plan is a kind of blueprint for what a managed planet will look like.” James Trefil, Human Nature, 229.

56.  In June 2008 the governor of Florida proposed that the state buy out one of the two largest sugar cane growers in order to protect the restoration project. It is not clear, however, that this purchase would provide the protection that the Everglades needs. Mary Williams Walsh, “Florida Deal for Everglades May Help Big Sugar,” The New York Times (Sep. 13, 200), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/business/14fanjul.html.

57.  “CERP: The Plan in Depth,” Everglades Restoration, online at http://www.evergladesplan.org/about/rest_plan_pt_01.aspx .

58.  Everglades National Park, online at http://www.everglades.national-park.com/info.htm#his.

59.  Ibid.

60.  Efforts to restore a marshland that purifies Lake Tahoe are also encouraging. Peter Fimrite, “Healing the Lake,” San Francisco Chronicle (Sep. 5, 2007), online at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/05/MNLLRLVHU.DTL.

61.  John M. Broder, “After Lobbying, Wetlands Rules are Narrowed,” The New York Times (Jul. 6, 2007), online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/washington/06wetlands.html.

62.  “New EPA Wetland Regulations a Victory for Private PropertyOwners,” E-Team: Providing Accurate Information on Energy & Environment Issues (Jun. 6, 2007), online at http://eteam.ncpa.org/news/new-epa-wetland-regulations-a-victory-for-private-property-owners.

63.  Ministry of Environment & Forests (Government of India), The Official Website of Project Tiger, online at http://projecttiger.nic.in.

64.  Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 288.

65. Ibid., 291.

66.  In the words of an Indian activist, “environmental protection per se is of least concern to most of these groups. Their main concern is about the use of the environment and who should benefit from it.” Anil Agarwal, “Human-Nature Interactions in a Third World Country,” The Environmentalist 6, no. 3 (1986): 167, quoted in Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 291.

67.  Samuel Hayes, “From Conservation to Environment: Environmental Politics in the United States since World War Two,” Environmental Review 6 (1982): 21, quoted in Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 290.

68.  Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation:

A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–83, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 290.

69.  Ibid., 291.

70.  Ibid., 292. “Both German and Indian environmental traditions allow for a greater integration of ecological concerns with livelihood and work. They also place a greater emphasis on equity and social justice . . . [And] they have escaped the preoccupation with wilderness preservation so characteristic of American cultural and environmental history.”

71.  Raymond Bonner, At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 8, in David Schmidtz, “When Preservationism Doesn’t Preserve,” Environmental Values, 6 (1997): 327–39, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 322.

72.  David Schmidtz, “When Preservationism Doesn’t Preserve,” Environmental Values, 6 (1997): 327–39, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 323.

73.  Ibid., 321.

74.  Ibid., 322.

75.  Ibid., 325.

76.  Ibid.

77.  Ibid., 324.

78.  Online at http://freespace.virgin.net/jake.madders/Detailed%20info/living%20with%20wildlife.htm. The Nyaminyami district council recently decided to use zoning to designate:

·         A conservation corridor to allow animals to move safely between two parks.

·         Sites on the shore of Lake Kariba for small rustic camps for nature tourists.

·         Unique stands of vegetation and habitats for crocodile breeding as conservation areas.

·         Most of the rest of the land for safari hunting.

      Online at http://freespace.virgin.net/jake.madders/campfire%20info.htm.

79.  Raymond Bonner, “At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife,” in Raymond Bonner, At the Hand of Man, 253–78, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 315.

80.  Ibid., 317.

81.  Ibid., 315–319.

82.  David Schmidtz, “When Preservationism Doesn’t Preserve,” Environmental Values, 6 (1997): 327–339, in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 326.

83.  Ian J. Whyte, “Headaches and Heartaches: The Elephant Management Dilemma,” in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics, 303–304.

84.  Ibid., 305.

Chapter 13, Doing Environmental Ethics (2009).