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An article from the magazine Conservation In Practice, a publication of the Society for Conservation Biology, examines a sensitive subject: are the efforts of conservation organizations so lavishly funded by concerned donors effective? Are they actually doing conservation? No one knows and conservation organizations have no ways to find out. The standard requirements of every other sort of organization - from businesses to governments - for measuring, monitoring and auditing were entirely alien to conservation organizations. The only measurements they used were the magnitude of their budgets and the area of land that had somehow been 'saved' either by purchase or regulation; bucks and acres. They had no useful methods to measure whether they had actually done any good and their reporting consisted of little more than ill informed subjective responses to multiple choice questions - check the box that best applies: poor, fair, good.
The article recounts the changed practices that resulted from a request for donations by The Nature Conservancy of California of venture capitalist Seth Neiman. Neiman embarrassed them and profoundly altered their practices by making his donations contingent on performance. He wasn't interested in what he called vanity preservation, short term preservation in name only. He wanted results and that meant a level of measuring, monitoring and reporting that is dead common in business but unknown in conservation organizations. The value of auditing isn't just to keep the troops on their toes, it provides management information needed for policy formulation. You can't manage what you can't measure. It's science without experiments or peer review, solipsistic philosophy rather than useful conservation. Perhaps more importantly, measuring and monitoring are learning tools that lead to insight and improved methods that increase effectiveness, reduce waste and identify failing systems before they collapse.
Several previous posts here tell of environmental degradation either caused or allowed by the efforts of preservationists, damage that occurred over decades that would have alarmed everyone if results had actually been measured, reported and audited. Public debate is intentionally kept at a political and pseudo-moral level which conceals the dry details or only reports selected measures intended to bolster or refute political positions and ratchet up moral suasion to extract donations.
As primitive as the management controls of environmental organizations are there are even deeper lessons to be learned. The common business methods Neiman required of The Nature Conservancy will improve their effectiveness immensely but are limited in their potential. It's the proper course for the near term for such amateurish organizations but there is a fundamental flaw in their approach that will limit their long term success. The Demos publication The Long Game grapples with these issues.
...with the increased pace of technological advancement and the emergence of complex new economic, demographic and environmental problems, the goals of regulation have grown ever wider.Demos is concerned with the U.K. and is focused on business regulation but the problem they identify is universal. Several recent press releases from the magazine Conservation Biology, another publication of the Society for Conservation Biology, highlight these problems. One report notes that the threat of regulation motivates evasion:These new problems are less measurable, and have no ‘right’ answer or technical solution that can be derived from predefined criteria. They have proved difficult to incorporate into the existing paradigm.
The system has responded by going into greater detail, but this has resulted in a spiralling raft of rules that quickly become outdated by changing expectations and new market developments. It has also tended to suppress rather than manage complexity, ignoring alternative perspectives and focusing only on those aspects of problems amenable to technical solutions.
More than 90% of federally listed species live at least partly on nonfederal land and as many as half live entirely on nonfederal land, much of which is private. Anecdotal evidence suggests that listing endangered species may not help protect them on private property because landowners may wreck their habitat to avoid land-use restrictions.Same problem, different place:
Does shade coffee help or hinder conservation?Even more:
While shade coffee is promoted as protecting tropical forests and birds, conservationists are split on whether it actually works. The December issue of Conservation Biology has the latest on the debate: one side says shade coffee can give farmers a reason to preserve tropical biodiversity while the other side fears it can actually encourage farmers to clear more forest.
Despite the international ban on selling African elephant ivory, poaching is still widespread. Law enforcers may soon have a new tool for cracking down on elephant poachers: a genetic analysis of ivory can help show which part of Africa it came from.While conservation organizations truly do need to rise to existing levels of governance - measuring, monitoring and auditing - there is another level beyond that needs to be understood and prepared for, that should be an influence on current policies to allow graceful evolution to even better methods once the current massive disorder has been reduced. In Demos' words:
The regulatory state paradigm tried to deal with complexity, including the existence of multiple perspectives, by suppressing it. But in the long run, the effect of not taking complexity into account was actually to exacerbate it. The first and most obvious consequence is that many regulatory interventions will generate unintended consequences. These arise because the intervention or regulation is based on the presumption that the regulator can understand and predict the results of this intervention. But what if the regulated sector is sufficiently incomprehensible and unpredictable – or complex – that this assumption did not carry?The mess and muddle created by inept regulation, or preservation efforts done without useful controls, can be improved by attention to detail but is a limited, short term approach. Regulation is the wrong approach to complexity. Natural systems aren't machines, they aren't so simple that they can be regulated and attempting to do so degrades them, simplifies them, turns them into machines when possible, and destroys what was to be preserved.
The approach Demos advocates for business and economic regulation - regulated self-regulation, enlisting the efforts of those close to the issues and able to respond quickly, variously and appropriately - is the same one advocated for decades by enlightened environmentalists. This old Wendell Berry essay, Private Property and the Common Wealth, speaks directly to these issues:
"If in order to protect our forest land we designate it a commons or commonwealth separate from private ownership, then who will care for it? The absentee timber companies who see no reason to care about local consequences? The same government agencies and agents who are failing at present to take good care of our public forests? Is it credible that people inadequately skilled and inadequately motivated to care well for the land can be made to care well for it by public insistence that they do so?Conservation organizations such as The Nature Conservancy aren't exactly public institutions, they are private in a very limited sense, but they have exactly the same problem as state institutions when attempting to preserve environments. They operate environments by remote control with staff having no deep involvement with the lands. They don't live on and from the lands, they don't depend on them for their present or future survival. They don't have the deep tacit wisdom of someone native to a place. They have a sanitized relationship, a virtual relationship with places. Skilled and dedicated people can do much good this way but can't actually accomplish the desired objectives.The answer is obvious: you cannot get good care in the use of the land by demanding it from public officials. That you have the legal right to demand it does not at all improve the case. If one out of every two of us should become a public official, we would be no nearer to good land stewardship than we are now. The idea that a displaced people might take appropriate care of places is merely absurd: there is no sense in it and no hope. Our present ideas of conservation and of public stewardship are not enough. Duty is not enough. Sentiment is not enough. No mere law, divine or human, could conceivably be enough to protect the land while we are using it.
If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it. If-as the idea of commonwealth clearly implies-landowners and land users are accountable to their fellow citizens for their work, their products, and their stewardship, then these landowners and land users must be granted an equitable membership in the economy."