Conservation on The Ground

I fear conservation has become the mastodon that Aldo Leopold predicted. Modern environmental conservation is:

“the protection, preservation, and sustainable management of natural resources such as land, water, air, plants, animals, and ecosystems to ensure their long-term availability in the future.” “ It involves actively managing human use of resources to maintain biodiversity, protect habitats, and preserve ecological balance. Conservation efforts focus on using resources responsibly, preventing their destruction or depletion, and restoring damaged ecosystems.”

It is a big assignment for any conservation department and gets bigger every day as human uses increase with populations and their needs not only in recreation but also in resources for modern living. Our own state conservation department mission statement has both the mission of preserving the resources and providing recreational opportunities. In these times of great social divisions there also seems to a greater extent also in conservation … recreational opportunities are taking a front seat to preservation of our resources.

Is this expected in an age when we constantly spending more time away from the Aldo Leopold’s “land”? He understood there was a system of connections to all of nature and as humans we must understand our role as part of it. So since then, we roll with this definition above and created a positive outlook with words and terms like “sustainability, biodiversity, and ecological balance.” We have actively created laws for protection of our resources, but our resources continue to be harmed or exploited whether they are on or beneath the ground or invisibly in the air. Are recreational and economic growth opportunities more important than the conservation of the land?

Planning for a future whether it be at the landscape level, an individual public property level, or a single specie level seems to be a path conservation has followed. Conservation effort for over 125 years has been to purchase land and either preserve it or restrict access or activities on it. We are at a time when this purchased land for conservation is not being trended on lightly.

Ecological modeling in the last 50 years has created a wider view of the landscape using data bases of vegetation, geology, and geography to become one phase of planning. In the new conservationist mind this is how we need to think about preservation in view of climate change, fragmentation, and a plethora exotic species effecting habitat on both land and water.

Individual public properties from parks, forest, waterways, or scientific area purchased in the past for preservation have individual management strategies that are altered occasionally because of public use pressures. These are changes for adjustment to recreational use not to a plan focused on preservation or restoration.

If we add the individual species management planning on both land and water and the time and cost of conservation of these species from fish to wildlife, to invasives, it is especially important to note that these efforts are losing the conservation battle.

We need to reevaluate our methods of conservation to remove the redundancies we have made in managing public lands and look at the management of the whole that preserves the ecology of the landscape on both sides of both private and public land. It is time to focus on maintaining healthy habitats with the knowledge of science we have gained over the last one hundred years. At the same time plan to restore land degraded by human development with the same knowledge and new knowledge of science. It is time for Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic to become practiced by all and the fruits of our environmental education efforts to ripen.