It’s not the Earth that needs saving
Our Co-Founder and CEO Steve McCormick reflects on his decades dedicated to conservation and natural systems management, and connects to today’s charged opportunity for AI and earth data.
Through the arc of my almost fifty-year career in conservation my personal ethic around what I’ll call the “conservation imperative” has changed profoundly.
I was imbued at an early age with the ethic of conserving pristine nature. I spent days roaming the hills and woodlands near where I lived, and on excursions into the Sierra Nevada. I was moved by the works of John Muir and others who wrote evocatively and inspiringly about the glories of nature, and who passionately advocated for the creation of parks to preserve the unique and untouched landscapes — the “crown jewels” — of North America. It was a radical ideal at the time. After a long obsession with “manifest destiny” — the conviction that white settlers should conquer the frontier (nature) and the native peoples who had lived there for thousands of years — a new belief emerged — that the country had a moral obligation to protect at least a few prime natural landscapes from being conquered. Nature had inherent, immeasurable value and deserved to be preserved for its own sake.
In the 20th Century the idea took off, not only with the creation of the National Parks Service, but with park systems in every state, formation of the National Wildlife Refuge System, designation of millions of acres as National Wilderness Areas. Pulitzer prize-winning author Wallace Stegner called it “America’s best idea.” The rest of the world took note. Today, virtually every country has, at least on paper, a system of designated national protected areas.
Wanting to devote my life to this vision of conservation, I had the good fortune of getting a job shortly out of law school with The Nature Conservancy (TNC). I was fully committed to its mission: “to preserve the plants, animals, and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.”
Over the next twenty years I was involved in dozens of efforts to create protected areas, from small sites harboring rare plants to large landscape-scale assemblages, some of which became National Monuments or Wildlife Refuges. In every case, the Conservancy’s mission was our guide star: protect lands and waters for the sole purpose of preserving biological diversity.
Driven by this mission when I became President of TNC in 2000, one of my priorities was to expand our efforts globally, particularly to biodiversity “hot spots,” a preponderance of which are in what were then called developing countries (now more commonly referred to as the Global South). I was naively taken by surprise when my advocacy for our work — expressed as “saving,” “preserving,” “protecting,” “setting aside” nature — was not just unpersuasive but immensely off-putting to many audiences, especially indigenous communities who all too often had been forced off ancestral lands when new national parks were created. The mission and vision of TNC came across as confiscatory, arrogant, and insensitive. What I perceived as a noble, even selfless, mission was regarded as wholly incompatible with basic human needs.
Sobered, I began to reexamine long-held orthodoxies, to widen the rationale for conserving nature. I found new meaning in the values espoused by George Perkins Marsh who, in his 1864 book “Man and Nature” argued that the stability of human societies was dependent on wise management — that is, conservation — of natural resources. Almost one hundred years later Aldo Leopold published A Sand County Almanac, articulating the concept of a land ethic, by which the relationships between people and the land are intertwined; care for people cannot be separated from care for the land.
Leopold was an ardent believer in preserving nature for its own sake; among other contributions, he was a founder of the Wilderness Society, but he understood that there is an imperative in moving beyond relying solely on “fortress conservation.”
These ideas were profoundly reinforced with the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) by the United Nations in 2003. It declared that “everyone in the world depends on the benefits of natural systems to provide the conditions for a decent, healthy, and secure life” [emphasis mine. The MEA impelled me to advocate for a more capacious understanding of our mission: to move beyond saving nature from people, to conserving natural systems as the wellspring of human well-being. Environmentalists have long argued that we must “save the Earth.” But the Earth will be just fine. Over billions of years it has undergone cataclysmic changes, including five major extinction events. Earth will abide. It’s the future of humanity that needs to be secured. The undeniable fact is that life-sustaining systems continue to be degraded or used unsustainably, a trend that, unless systematically addressed, will substantially and irreversibly diminish human well-being and prosperity.
Fortunately, leaders in all sectors are increasingly voicing concerns, and I believe are genuinely committed to advancing the sustainable management of natural systems at a global scale. I am heartened by the increasing momentum behind still-emerging concepts like “ecosystem services,” “natural capital,” and “nature-based solutions.” While I was President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, I heard widespread demand for better information and insight to guide decisions and actions around these concepts. Corporate members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development universally expressed the need for data-driven, context specific decision support tools to reveal options and the costs and benefits of those options for sustainable development. Conservation NGOs were increasingly eager to find better, faster capabilities to detect harmful, often illegal, land use activities. Social impact investors were seeking promising opportunities in sustainable development. And philanthropists were looking to support development at the nexus of conservation and the well-being of indigenous communities. Almost everyone agreed that the key to these disparate needs was in existing and accumulating data. But despite increasingly massive data on natural systems, that data was not being translated into useful, easily accessible, usable and affordable information or analytics that would enable better decision-making and more rational use of natural resources.
It was this critical need that compelled me to create Earth Genome, and reveal the possible. This team builds with AI and earth data, in deep collaboration with scientists, policy makers, journalists, community leaders, educators, and technologists. This work will accelerate sustainable management of natural systems, enable decision-makers to avert environmental harms, and adopt practices that reflect the full value of natural systems for humanity.
I still passionately believe in the incalculable value of parks and protected areas. Last spring I visited the Carrizo Plains National Monument, a vast landscape preserving unique habitats and species of interior California that I helped assemble in the 1980s. It was a “super bloom” year, with endless horizons of brilliantly colored wildflowers, embraced by graceful emerald green foothills. It was a glorious reminder that pristine natural areas are an essential part of our humanity and heritage. Driving east to the Kern River Preserve, another protected area I helped create, I learned that an irrigation district in the San Joaquin Valley was acquiring a substantial stretch of riparian habitat to add to the preserve because it would enhance the quality of water the district was entitled to take from the Kern miles to the west. Ecosystem service!
Many years ago, I wrote an op ed, concluding with this observation: “in the end, we as a society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.” I made that statement in support of establishing more parks and protected areas. Today I still believe in the same formulation, but with much broader, more robust implications. At the time of great peril for humanity, we also see the greatest advances in data technology, science, and earth observation. I don’t take this as a coincidence, but an opportunity that must not be missed.
