When land is "preserved" by meddlers a common result is accelerated degradation.

. . . in 1872 Ulysses Grant set aside Yellowstone as the first formal nature preserve in the world. More than 2 million acres, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. John Muir was pleased when he visited in 1885, noting that under the care of the Department of the Interior, Yellowstone was protected from "the blind, ruthless destruction that is going on in adjoining regions." . . .

But Yellowstone was not preserved. On the contrary, it was altered beyond repair in a matter of years. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that "white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone." . . .

What they didn't say was that the park service was solely responsible for the disappearances. Park rangers had been shooting animals for decades, even though that was illegal under the Lacey Act of 1894. But they thought they knew better. They thought their environmental concerns trumped any mere law.

What actually happened at Yellowstone is a cascade of ego and error. But to understand it, we have to go back to the 1890s. Back then it was believed that elk were becoming extinct, and so these animals were fed and encouraged. Over the next few years the numbers of elk in the park exploded. . .

Antelope and deer began to decline, overgrazing changed the flora, aspen and willows were being eaten heavily and did not regenerate. In an effort to stem the loss of animals, the park rangers began to kill predators, which they did without public knowledge. . .

They eliminated the wolf and cougar and were well on their way to getting rid of the coyote. Then a national scandal broke out; studies showed that it wasn’t predators that were killing the other animals. It was overgrazing from too many elk. The management policy of killing predators had only made things worse.

Meanwhile the environment continued to change. Aspen trees, once plentiful in the park, where virtually destroyed by the enormous herds of hungry elk.

With the aspen gone, the beaver had no trees to make dams, so they disappeared. Beaver were essential to the water management of the park; without dams, the meadows dried hard in summer, and still more animals vanished. Situation worsened. It became increasingly inconvenient that all the predators had been killed off by 1930. So in the 1960s, there was a sigh of relief when new sightings by rangers suggested that wolves were returning.

There were also persistent rumors that rangers were trucking them in; but in any case, the wolves vanished soon after; they needed a diet of beaver and other small rodents, and the beaver had gone.

Pretty soon the park service initiated a PR campaign to prove that excessive numbers of elk were not responsible for the park’s problems, even though they were. This campaign went on for a decade, during which time the bighorn sheep virtually disappeared.

Now we come to the 1970s, when bears are starting to be recognized as a growing problem. They used to be considered fun-loving creatures, and their close association with human beings was encouraged within the park:

But now it seemed there were more bears and many more lawyers, and thus more threat of litigation. So the rangers moved the grizzlies away to remote regions of the park. The grizzlies promptly became endangered; their formerly growing numbers shrank. The park service refused to let scientists study them. But once the animals were declared endangered, the scientists could go in.

And by now we are about ready to reap the rewards of our forty-year policy of fire suppression, Smokey the Bear, all that. The Indians used to burn forest regularly, and lightning causes natural fires every summer. But when these fires are suppressed, the branches that drop to cover the ground make conditions for a very hot, low fire that sterilizes the soil. And in 1988, Yellowstone burned. All in all, 1.2 million acres were scorched, and 800,000 acres, one third of the park, burned.

Then, having killed the wolves, and having tried to sneak them back in, the park service officially brought the wolves back, and the local ranchers screamed. And on, and on.

As the story unfolds, it becomes impossible to overlook the cold truth that when it comes to managing 2.2 million acres of wilderness, nobody since the Indians has had the faintest idea how to do it. And nobody asked the Indians, because the Indians managed the land very intrusively. The Indians started fires, burned trees and grasses, hunted the large animals, elk and moose, to the edge of extinction. White men refused to follow that practice, and made things worse.

To solve that embarrassment, everybody pretended that the Indians had never altered the landscape. These “pioneer ecologists,” as Steward Udall called them, did not do anything to manipulate the land. But now academic opinion is shifting again, and the wisdom of the Indian land management practices is being discovered anew. Whether we will follow their practices remains to be seen.

This isn't quite true. White men learned from the indians and emulated them in many places. It's the eastern establishment - the federal government and those who live in that detached fantasy world - that refused to use natural management techniques. Archaeological records in my neighborhood show that the Indians managed the land for eons, mostly using fire and selective predation, and that the European ranchers that came after the Indians did the same - maybe even a little bit better and more aggressively - until the land was confiscated by the government. It has steadily degraded since then and is now a disaster waiting to happen. Every summer and fall parts of it burn to the ground in intense fires fueled by decades of accumulated trash that ought to have burned long ago but wasn't allowed to do so. "White men" aren't the problem, it is the eastern and urban mindset of meddlers that is the problem.

The author of the essay, Michael Crichton, goes on to recommend that the simple minded command and control approach, the ego and error system of the past, be replaced by a more robust understanding of the complexity of natural systems. He provides many examples of how descriptions and analyses of such systems have been grossly simplified by activists and environmentalists for instrumental reasons. Unfortunately once the simple minded ideas are expressed the activists come to believe them, and act as if their cartoon versions of reality were sophisticated maps that could be used to develop policy.

Crichton is partially correct. It is necessary to refute the past - especially the miscreants who have become icons of the environmental movement such as Ehrlich, Meadows, Carson, Club of Rome etc., etc. - to make way for a new generation that is free of the dead hand of that mistaken past. Approaching natural systems with humility, recognizing that complex systems can't be controlled though they can be managed after a fashion if you are agile and responsive, will improve the likelihood of preservation.

But that isn't the true problem. Humans did just fine managing such systems in the past without our modern complexity theories. It may be that some mapping can be made between indigenous knowledge and beliefs, and current theories, but there is a far more important issue: in the past the land managers paid for their mistakes and profited from their successes. In some cases they even paid with their lives. You will never get good results from civil servants who face no consequences. Ehrlich et. al. have not been stripped of their credentials, drummed out of their professions or imprisoned though they have caused needless suffering and even deaths. Indeed, they profited from their false predictions and mistaken prescriptions. It is in their interests to exploit fear, the natural risk aversion of society, even when their ideas are complete nonsense, as has been the case. This is immoral and arguably criminal.

[P]eople don’t fully appreciate the risks and dangers of poor reasoning. Everyone knows the danger of intentional evil; but few fully appreciate the real risks and untold damage wrought by apparently upstanding folk who embrace and act on bad epistemological principles. Such people don’t look dangerous. But they are.

To get good management, to truly preserve complex natural systems, we need good reasoning but also the bracing clarity that comes with personal responsibility. That's what the Indians and early ranchers had that the rangers at Yellowstone lacked. Consider this current example:

"We still think we're the best option out there," said Rick Moore, director of the Kane and Two Mile ranch program for the trust. "For a traditional permit-holder, the tendency might be to graze more cows. We can do the opposite. We're driven by ecological needs, not economic. We can put money back into the land because we're not trying to put kids through college." . . .

The trust and the Virginia-based Conservation Fund raised $4.5 million from sources as diverse as Wal-Mart and purchased the ranch from California conservationist David Gelbaum, who bought it years ago with similar plans to reduce stress on the land. . .

Ethan Aumack, the restoration director for the trust, is a scientist who sees the Kane and Two Mile ranches as a giant laboratory. He has already helped to create 750 "data points" from which he and his co-workers will glean details about forest and range conditions that have never been available.

"The issue of public-lands grazing in the West can be contentious politically," he said. "We can use science as a common language. This is a tremendously valuable place."

The trust established a science advisory council from the start, seeking regular input from ecologists, soil scientists, biologists and others. With their guidance, Aumack launched the baseline assessment of the ranch properties, using a computer to plot the data points on a map and a team of researchers to visit every point and leave behind remote sensing equipment. . .

"We don't necessarily know if livestock grazing can happen in an ecologically viable manner in this area," Aumack said. "To a certain degree we want to let the data speak for itself." . . .

Warren said conservationists have found they have more in common with ranchers than they thought. Studies have found that some of the best surviving grassland areas in the Southwest are on traditional ranches, where land owners and managers have a strong interest in keeping their resource productive.

"One of the biggest threats to grasslands is losing ranches, having the land sold off and subdivided and developed," he said.

What a muddled mess. They seem to think that real ranchers will exploit land to "put kids through college", but also that "the best surviving grassland areas in the Southwest are on traditional ranches". This is exceedingly poor reasoning. If they actually valued the land they could have simply subsidized the ranchers to relieve some of the economic pressures caused by government programs such as subsidies for grain growers - which make grain cheaper than grass and puts graziers at a competitive disadvantage though they have a real natural advantage. This is just the current version of the Yellowstone rangers, Smokey the Bear and the long sordid history of meddlers who don't face the consequences of their acts. It isn't their money, it's donations from confused suckers back east.

If these pseudo-environmentalists with bags of donated money actually cared about the environment they wouldn't be seeking to take over land and set up muddled and amateurish management operations, they'd be trying to help the existing land owners and operators overcome the disincentives of the system. If the ranchers were paid for good management, given cash awards for measurable ecological improvements, and financing for major projects, more could be done for less costs while preserving communities and social structures that provide long term management of the land.

Perhaps things could be made more sensible if such efforts were done for profit. The "angels" that provide the capital and operating funds should expect an eventual return, like a venture capitalist or, as Charlie Stross fictionally calls them, a venture altruist. This might be easier if the tax code was altered to eliminate tax breaks for donations but encourage venture altruism.

Some progress seems to be occuring in forest management.

DARBY, Mont. - Five years ago, intense forest fires around this logging and tourist town burned more than 350,000 acres of forest. Today huge swaths of charred trees cover the mountainsides.

Partly in response to these fires and others on national forest land elsewhere in the West, President Bush introduced the Healthy Forest Initiative in 2002 to reduce the wildfire threat to towns surrounded by publicly owned forests. As work crews thin stands of trees, as called for in the initiative, one result has been a glut of logs smaller than eight inches in diameter.

Until recently, most small trees were collected in piles and burned, but now businesses and the Forest Service have begun looking for uses for the tiny trees. . .

Slowly, however, the small-diameter movement, helped along by federal grants and Forest Service research, is helping to find new uses for smaller trees, like heating schools and hospitals and construction materials, including particle board, flooring and laminated beams. . .

For the moment, environmentalists are watching the small-diameter movement warily.

Environmentalists? These aren't environmentalists, they are merely pious greens who have a religion of sorts replete with taboos and supernatural beings. While they have a right to their religion we need to protect the environment from them. We need to do sensible management of public lands for long term health. Understanding forests as complex systems that require management rather than negligence to remain anything like what we expect and desire is one part of the solution. The other is that people who live and work locally are the ones best suited to do the management, the ones with the knowledge and incentive to do it well.

Public lands and lands recently purchased by trusts aren't being preserved. They may have snaked the land out from under developers, but they are just ruining it another way. See this old post, Mouse Based Monitoring, for more about that. The lands are merely neglected fire hazards, left to deteriorate and provide habitat for invasive species.

There is a body of knowledge about how to manage land developed for private properties. Much of it is merely updated old knowledge, the sort of wisdom that developed over long time periods, and that knowledge scales up to the requirements of huge public holdings. There is no excuse for the mismanagement and degradation we see on public lands and trust lands. It is a direct result of bad management and simple minded neglect resulting from uninformed policies that serve a naive philosophy and for which there is no accountability.