Rocky Mountain National Park, near Nymph Lake. Photo by Christian Yonkers

The Problems With Conservation: Scenic Clickbait, External Costs, and Community

Most of us have the best of intentions to remediate the ecological trifecta of climate change, deforestation, and the general malaise of ecological degradation. But our conceptions of conservation and its marketed solutions are largely and dangerously infatuated with the scenic and the sexy.

Our settled urban and agricultural areas are left out of the mainstream conservation zeitgeist. The distilled narrative goes something like this: “Places with people have gone to hell. Let’s save the little bit of heaven on earth while we can.”

We vacation to beautiful places and scroll through endless images of mountainscapes and beach scenery. These places, we are convinced, remain the last vestigial hope of wilderness, and are thus more worthy of our attention.

The problem with this assertion is that it begins with the axiom that only things untouched have conservation potential. Consider this: In the U.S., privately owned lands make up 99% of the nation’s cropland, 61% of grassland/pasture, 56% of forests, and provide refuge for 75% of our endangered species.

Awareness of your community’s vast conservation potential (and your responsibility to it) is part of an intricate mosaic containing more wonder, beauty, biomass, potential, and healing than all the national parks combined. Your small scope will solve massive challenges.

If we derive just as much wonder and inspiration from a local ecosystem as we do from Yosemite or Yellowstone, how might we steward our communities where we have real power to make an impact?

Given the stats above, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that privately owned land holds massive conservation and sustainability potential. However, it’s these very places where we shrug our shoulders and look to the panacea of clickbait conservation as penance to our seemingly mundane urban and rural home fronts.

This mindset is woefully wrong, a type of conservation schizophrenia distracting us from massive sustainability potential.

Our obsession with the places that look good on Instagram feeds makes us neglect the extraordinary conservation potential of the places where we live and work. These mundane, everyday places are the battleground for the future of a sustainable planet and just communities. But to appreciate the magnitude of their potential, we need to redefine what conservation means.

According to my good friend Miriam-Webster, conservation is the careful preservation or protection of something. People tend to take care of things close to their loci of control, and they lose interest in things cast into the outfield of the public realm.

If we only pay attention to sexy conservation projects, we’re just prolonging inevitable wholesale degradation. By finding reasons to protect our communities, we will unleash the full conservation potential of our nation’s natural capital.

Sense of place, or “space attachment theory” in academia, refers to myriad factors that contribute to establishing belonging in our environments. Stronger or weaker attachment can occur for both “positive” and “negative” outcomes. For the sake of argument, I’m equating “positive” attachment as a deep sense of belonging, understanding, and respect for the place where a person lives, and “negative” as the exact opposite.

By developing a sense of place and actualizing the conservation potential of our settled communities, we’ll grasp the ridiculously massive power of “unscenic” places to drive sustainability and save the planet.

The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the hill; it’s greener where we water it.

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.” — James Oppenheim

The problems with conservation

There’s inherent danger relegating love of nature only to scenic places. As renowned naturalist and author Wendell Berry expounds in “Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community,”

“It is dangerous because it tends to exclude unscenic places from nature and from the respect that we sometimes accord to nature.”

The real problem of modern conservation, according to Berry, stems from two points:

• The ownership of lands and resources by people who don’t live there.
• Land and resource use is motivated by profit rather than the health of natural and human communities.

“We probably are not going to be able to conserve natural resources so long as our extraction and use of the goods of nature are wasteful and improperly scaled, or so long as these resources are owned or controlled by absentees, or so long as the standard of extraction and use is profitability rather than the health of natural and human communities,” writes Berry.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Consumerism and conservation are dependent on “out of sight, out of mind.”

American consumerism is rooted in the violent extraction of natural resources, culture, and human labor. The ways and means of extractive consumerism must remain as far from the consumer as possible, otherwise risking the upheaval of a populace finding the real cost of production untenable.

These practices are removed from civilized society because, let’s face it, if belching factories, sweatshops, and strip mines were in plain sight, no one would stand for it. The wealthiest business people don’t live where the goods their companies produce for a reason: It eliminates moral culpability.

“At the end of this transaction [modern consumerism] it’s easy to not eat responsibly because we see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. We bear no responsibility for our decisions because they’re out there somewhere. We don’t internalize our decisions because we’ve externalized our living.” — Joel Salatin

Because the problems caused by consumerism are “out of sight, out of mind,” so too are the available “solutions.” Like buying away anxiety on Amazon, we alleviate eco-anxiety by throwing dollars at people we’ve never met to fix places we’ve never visited. While well-meaning, it further pushes our responsibility into the foggy margins and blasphemes earth-healing by relegating it to a mere transaction.

Here’s Berry again:

“The dilemma of our private economic responsibility … is that we have allowed our suppliers to enlarge our economic boundaries so far that we cannot be responsible for our effects on the world. The only remedy for this that I can see is to draw in our economic boundaries, shorten our supply lines, so as to permit us literally to know where we are economically.”

We’ve removed ourselves from production, so the only marketed recourse to solving its woes is to throw dollars at an external organization. Because we prioritize “scenic” places like national parks, the systems of production in our communities are free to fall into extractive practices at their leisure, because we pay no attention to the “unscenic” places where their production occurs.

Conservation as a tragedy of the commons: public vs. personal solutions

In our current system, external costs are usually not passed down to the consumer at the store. The public eventually pays for them by way of healthcare costs, farm subsidies, and the tragedy of the commons. Likewise, we don’t “pay” to conserve our iconic landmarks directly. But we do pay in the form of taxes, entrance fees, and occasional donations to our favorite environmental charities. The necessary cost of effective conservation is disproportionately redirected to these external, publicly diffused solutions which nearly eliminate personal responsibility.

Public law is mostly unconcerned with individual morality. And unlike morality, public law is enforced by violence and compartmentalized force. “Public” spaces, as beautiful as they are, are the least common denominator in conservation. The public preserves them because it deems them so, and can be unpreserved just as quickly, often with political and physical violence.

Moral law is enacted by community consciousness and accountability. Community spaces prioritize the well-being of those who live within them and are more resilient to trauma and change.

And yet we sacrifice the lion’s share of our nation’s natural capital to less-than-scrupulous marketers eager to sweep the soul of our lands away from an unwary public, loading their RVs for a trip to Yosemite.

A fundamental distinction between public and community spaces is the prerogative to engage the land. A public space delineates recreation and work, meaning all human activities therein must adhere to strict understandings of recreational behavior barring things like farming.

For a sustainable community, work and pleasure are not separated because the land’s redemptive work is a joy and a vocation.

Private life is where change happens, where we find a sense of place, or space attachment, and discover our power to preserve and protect our communities and environment.

As Masterson et al. write in an article for Ecology and Society,

“[R]esearch on place attachment has shown that place attachment can indeed contribute to protective and restorative stewardship actions in dynamic SES [socio-ecological systems]. [S]trong attachment is associated with care and action … Attachment is based on meanings: We become attached to a landscape as embodying a certain set of meanings, and it is those meanings we seek to preserve.”

To conserve the vast majority of land now overlooked, we must rewrite apathetic and hostile meanings we attach to them. But it’ll take more than changing narratives to establish a sense of place: We must create meaning that is intrinsic, palpable, real. To create local spaces worth fighting for, we need to add value to our communities, making them beautiful places to live and worthy of stewarding.

For rural areas, this could be beautiful forests and land easements intertwined between arable land. For urban areas, this could be community gardens, green space, and biophilic buildings.

“Sustainability is about defining and working toward creating a tenable place for humanity to live. Whether place refers to one’s backyard or the planet as a whole, understanding how people relate to places is key for sustainable development” (Masterson et al.).

Rightful placement of the conservation imperative on overlooked rural and urban areas is the linchpin for creating a sustainable world driven not only by top-down policy but also by grassroots, vested interest in the places we work and live. By caring for, and conserving, the overlooked places we live and work, we will add massive conservation value to the efforts already assigned to scenic public spaces.

Space attachment exists anywhere someone finds meaning in the community. But space attachment does more than just indicate a person’s sense of belonging or loyalty to a locale: It also correlates to how likely the person is to engage in conservation and sustainable practices.

To paraphrase Aristotle, people take better care of things when they own them. But when it comes to real conservation and sustainability, I believe people are more likely to care for something if they feel connected to a place, based on three pillars:

1. Practical connection: The person derives direct and traceable benefit from her/his community, including but not limited to local production of food, shelter, materials, transportation, clothing, energy, etc.
2. Aesthetic connection: Attachment drawn from the visual appeal of surroundings, including natural and artificial landscapes.
3. Spiritual/moral connection: This whopper includes everything that binds a person to a place apart from the practical and aesthetic (though it can, and often does, draw from them). This can include (not at all exhaustively): Faith/religion, familial ties, tradition/heritage, promises, bequests, etc.

The greater these three attachments, the more likely a person is to care deeply about where they live. Imagine each of the attachments as a leg in a three-legged stool. If they’re proportionately applied, the stool sits evenly. If the legs are uneven or non-existent, the stool will tilt towards it’s weakest leg, or cease to be a stool.

The latter two scenarios are where most of us find ourselves concerning our own communities.

The answer to building a sustainable conservation ethic is to increase the three legs of place attachment. But how does this happen? We’ll get to that.

A note on public lands

The National Park system exists solely on compartmentalization: “This place is suitable for exploitation and profits; you can recreate over there.” But that mindset fails to recognize the immeasurable value of belonging to the locale by which we draw inspiration. We work, exploit, and pinch pennies with eager hopes to visit the Grand Canyon next year, see the glaciers before they melt, or buy a retirement home with a life of cloistered, protected scenery. I know when I advocate for or donate to conservation projects, the act is tainted with pessimistic defeatism. As my dollars and efforts are whisked away to help save the Amazon or protect the Tongas National Forest, they’re accompanied by the winds of a faint, disheartened whisper: “Quick! Stay beautiful. Don’t become like the place the rest of us live.”

But this scenery will disappear as the communities we flee from are ravaged unrestrained. We are creatures of place, and if we stop being so, we will cease to create, and exist to destroy.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

“If conservation is to have a hope of succeeding, then conservationists, while continuing their efforts to change public life, are going to have to begin the effort to change private life as well.” — Berry

We shouldn’t abandon public solutions. God help us from stripping the Department of the Interior of funding all to save a few bucks for a community garden. If anything, the DOI is in dire need of some financial lovin’. But, theoretically, we could have our cake and eat it, too by reducing externalities and pumping the savings into national conservation projects and local conservation-production. For the U.S., these savings would be more than enough to go around, somewhere to the tune of $214.5 billion annually (this is in no way exhaustive, so give an extra several billion here or there, but likely little take). Put in perspective, the cumulative 2021 budget for the Department of the Interior is $12.8 billion. The DOI includes federal agencies responsible for conservation, including the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, and 16 other agencies and departments.

But the hole dug by dollars can’t be escaped by filling it with dollars. Similarly, our souls’ destruction can’t be ameliorated by looking to “scenic” places as our only remaining Eden. We can find solutions (and salvation) by establishing a sense of place. Solutions entail getting to know what your locale is all about, what it can produce that it currently isn’t, what’s hurting there, and what abhorrent practices are going on in places where our food and goods come from that you’d never want to happen in your community. By embedding external costs into the community, we know how and why we produce our products and become personally vested in change when we aren’t happy with the process.

This is impossible with our current system of production and conservation.

What do sustainable communities look like?

Conservation will reach its fullest potential when we value the dynamic health of both the “scenic” and the “unscenic.” The key will be to redeem public diffusion of responsibility back to where it can genuinely make a difference: Responsibility for the communities in which we live, and their means of production and consumption.

Localizing the actual cost of production forces us to address anything unsustainable. NIMBY is a decisive factor at work here: Few think twice about a KFC dinner bucket’s social and environmental costs, but would take to the streets if a poultry farm and processing plant set up shop in the neighborhood.

• We must build a strong sense of place by building lovable, livable communities.
• We must reduce externality costs of production and invest those savings into community and public conservation projects.
• We must produce as much as we can in our communities through meaningful, space-based work, and strip away the hidden externalities of production and incorporate them locally so the community can see it for what it is.
• Communities need the power and efficacy to change their production and conservation systems when production costs become too high, thus spurring grassroots sustainability owned by the community.

This is real conservation: Communities producing as much as they can, as sustainably as they can, as close to home as they can, and the willingness to be honest with themselves when equilibrium goes out of balance. This concept is impossible with extractive production that relies on external costs being distributed unfairly throughout society and ecology.

When local/community lands are degraded, the community is culpable. The land and community that belong to it (and the resulting damage which all suffer) are close at hand and mutually shared. Conversely, damage to public space is absorbed without feeling by the public. But loss to a community space is felt immediately among its members and avoided at all costs.

Internalizing social and environmental costs of production strengthens community resiliency and safeguards against unsustainable external costs of production. In the case of conservation, prevention is the best medicine. And degradation is best prevented when you live in a place where you produce what you consume.

Local conservation-based production is self-regulating because it accounts for all external costs — environmental, social, and economic — generated by creating a product. In this way, a conservation-production community stays within its means.

Declaring public and scenic spaces alone as worthy of conservation stymies real conservation work and diffuses blame of mismanagement. In such a case, conservation is, at best, a statistic and, at worst, diffused responsibility.

If we’re serious about redeeming the conservation potential of all lands, we need to invest in local projects that build place attachment, create opportunities to engage in productive work with embedded externalities, and continue to allocate funds into meaningful protection of public spaces.

A call to action here would be too banal. Multi-faceted problems require multi-faceted solutions. The tools for building place-based conservation are as wildly varied as the communities they need to be built in. Anything and everything you can do to bring what you consume closer to home, fall in love with where you live, and find reasons to protect it all, is worth it’s weight in gold.

“[Environmental] protections are left to the community, for they can be protected only by affection and by intimate knowledge, which are beyond the capacities of the public and beyond the power of the private citizen.” — Berry

There’s enough ingenuity, love, and money to go around. We just need to fall in love with where we live.

I guess my call to action is this: Go love your place.