Conversation Connection

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

By Melanie Stein

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-This week, the Jackson Hole Land Trust brought to the valley Dr. M. Sanjayan – a prominent thinker in the conservation field and lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy – to meet with conservation and community leaders and share his vision of the future of conservation in the world.

Originally from Sri Lanka, Sanjayan was raised in Sierra Leone and the U.S. and currently resides in Missoula, Mont. Sanjayan spent time at the World Bank prior to joining The Nature Conservancy. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and occasionally teaches at the University of Montana at Missoula.

Sanjayan’s research has ranged from wildlife corridors and connectivity to the impacts of AIDS on wildlife conservation, helping to make clear the strong connections between people and nature, wildlife and the landscape, actions and effects.

In his interview with the Planet, Sanjayan outlines the complex links between poverty and conservation, explaining how, especially in the developing world, people continue to rely heavily on nature’s bounty – water, food and forest – for survival. He discusses the interconnectedness of healthy environments and healthy communities and how environments that are unhealthy for wildlife can eventually lead to environments that are unhealthy for humans.

Sanjayan hosts a public luncheon at noon today at the Rendezvous Bistro. Tickets cost $25 and include lunch.

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Planet Jackson Hole: I understand that this will be your first visit, at least professionally, to Jackson Hole and I’m curious why you decided to come to Jackson Hole now and why you feel this region is particularly important ecologically and in terms of community?

Sanjayan: Wyoming, like many Western states, [and] particularly Jackson Hole, Wyo., like some of the other towns in Montana, some towns in Idaho, etc., is going through a lot of change. The economy is in transition. The state is going from a completely natural resource-based economy to one that’s much more diversified.

Jared Diamond, in his book “Collapse,” spends the first 60 pages of his book in Missoula, Mont. I moved to Missoula, Mont., after reading those 60 pages … because I’m very much interested in looking at alternate futures for communities and looking at which path will lead to sustainable development and which path will lead to the exhaustion of the very things we all so care about …

And the third reason is the obvious one. This is one of the richest counties, maybe the richest county, in the United States and therefore on the planet, and the people who live there are enormously influential throughout the world. … I mean what we’re learning about Jackson Hole and what we’re learning about conservation in Wyoming can be applied around the globe. The folks you have there are some of the champions that can make that happen.

PJH: Much of your work has focused on wildlife corridors and connectivity. Take a minute and explain that for folks who maybe don’t know what the significance of those things are and why it’s important, especially for us here in Jackson Hole.

S: The number one reason why wildlife goes extinct is because of habitat destruction. Even when you think of climate change, the real impact on wildlife comes with habitat change or habitat alteration. Now if you go back 5,000 years, wildlife had plenty of room to move. If climate changed or conditions changed, they could find other ways of adapting just by moving to a more suitable location. That doesn’t really happen today because so much of our land is either under cultivation or is developed.

The pinch point happens in these wildlife corridors, which really are areas in which wildlife absolutely need for moving between ranges or moving between migration or to find resources or to act in some other way. And if those corridors go … it’s going to create a lot of trouble in terms of persistence of wildlife in the long run. … And in rapidly changing communities that you find in Jackson Hole, for example, it becomes incredibly important.

A lot of people who live there, live there for the wildlife values. Yet exactly those values are being rubbed to death in some ways. So how do you maintain those critical linkages that allow animals to move through what is becoming a tamed and somewhat urbanized landscape becomes a big, big challenge.

PJH: How do you think that our wildlife is coping and what do we need to do differently here to help them continue to survive?

S: There’s good news and bad news. The good news is American wildlife – particularly American Western wildlife, particularly the big, charismatic species – have actually done pretty well in the last few decades. You know, we have far more elk today than we did, let’s say, 1000 years ago … People are becoming far more aware of it. Hunters, fishermen, people who go to national parks, people who support wildlife, have really put that money to use …

The bad news is that right now they are facing threats at a very, very big scale, and that’s going to be much more challenging to deal with. Rapid urbanization, people moving to places because they love those places and loving them to death is a real challenge. In the short term, the next 20 years, that’s going to be the big thing: keeping corridors open, keeping enough wild spaces available that options are available.

Over the long run, climate change, and climate’s impact on habitat is tenuous. It is going to have an impact on habitat. It will. I don’t want to say whether it’s negative or positive, but the truth is, it just will have an impact. And making sure there’s enough room for wildlife and people to adapt to that change is going to be critical.

PJH: So you wouldn’t say that it’s too late in a place like this where we really have doubled, tripled our size in such a short amount of time …

S: I never think it’s too late, but that’s partly who I am. Look, let’s put this in context here. I went last year to the poorest country on Earth, the exact opposite of Jackson Hole, Wyo., and I found hope there for conservation and wildlife.

Now you tell me the richest county in the United States can’t find a way to balance human needs with balancing the needs of wildlife … I think there’s a tremendous opportunity there …

PJH: One of the things you are going to be talking about while you are here is the connection between a healthy environment and a healthy community. It seems implicit to most people that clean air and water will lead to a healthy community, but people may not think about the relationship between a healthy community and healthy wildlife populations.

Would you say that if we’re making our environment unhealthy for wildlife we’re also making it unhealthy for humans?

S: I think over the long run what you said is completely true. … At least for humans who desire a certain quality of life. The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment – a big study that was done over five years by over 1,200 scientists around the world – looked at 23 different services that nature currently provides for free. Water, for example, is one of those services – right?

And they found that … 16 of 23 were in serious decline. I think that’s going to have a huge impact on the quality of life for people. I think to some extent that the richer communities, the more affluent communities, will be able to mitigate it over the short run. I think the poorest of the poor will bear the brunt of it … but eventually it’s going to catch up even with wealthy communities that can replace services that are lost. If the river stops flowing in my town in Missoula, we won’t just immediately die, we can get water from bottles – right? But eventually over the long run that will create too many problems ...

PJH: Can you elaborate a little bit more about this connection between healthy environments and healthy communities and how you think that that relationship works today?

S: I went to Asia after the tsunami hit … to do an environmental assessment of the coastline, and I found, for example, that many of the communities that got worst impacted were the ones where the coral reefs were heavily degraded. … Places that managed to protect mangroves, coral reefs, sand dunes also ended up surviving the tsunami better. The tsunami was in point a rapid fast-forward of what a sea level rise would look like in a lot of places.

What we saw with Hurricane Katrina was a similar though less clear story. Coastal marshes played a big important role in mitigating the force of nature for humans. … So that’s one level in which healthy communities work.

The other level is just in terms of provision of services. Turns out that people still depend on nature for an awful lot of things. New York City gets the majority of its water from a watershed that the city decided to protect as opposed to building a $6 billion plant to purify water. That was a clear case where they looked at the cost-benefit analysis of building a water treatment plant … They decided, “Well protecting a watershed is actually cheaper for us to do.”

Around the globe you’ll find things like that over and over again. Ranching communities: They need healthy grassland for forage. When we lose those grasslands we lose not only habitat for wildlife but we also lose forage for our farms. So the connections are there and they might be more easily seen in the developing world just because people are living so much hand-to-mouth and so close to nature. Even in developed countries like the United States you can still see them, you just have to dig one or two steps deeper than that …

PJH: I’m curious about your current work and the nexus between poverty and conservation. Tell me a little bit more about where you’re doing research and where this interest came from and what you’ve discovered so far.

S: The two big great challenges of our generation are, one, the fact that one-sixth of the planet lives on less than a dollar a day, and [two] that species are going extinct at a rapid rate, which will not only make us poorer but all future generations poorer forever. People for the longest time have been dealing with these two issues … as separate issues. In fact the two camps have come to view each other as the enemy.

Conservationists think keeping poor people out of national parks is the only way to save the parks. And those who are … pro-poverty alleviation think if only we had access to that forest over there, these people would not be hungry.

They’re both false …
When I’ve gone out and traveled into developing countries and in rural communities in the United States, I have found that link between the poor and the resources they depend on in nature very, very strong. Why can’t we exploit this link that is inherent already in creating programs that cannot only help alleviate poverty but also conserve?
The way to do that is to focus on some basic ecosystem services, basic nature services that I think both wildlife and people need for survival. Water is definitely one of them.

 … Forest products would be another one. If you save the forest, you save animals living in the forest, but you also then provide fuel wood that people need. … How do we manage to do conservation without exhausting the resources that these people need to survive? How do we do development without exhausting those resources that people need to survive?

The great tragedy about the development of the United States: Ask yourself – did we really have to lose wolves from almost every state in the union in order for this nation to be great? Did we actually have to make the passenger pigeon extinct in order for us to be a First World power? I don’t think so. And you would not want other countries who are on the path of development and who rightfully want to live a better life – they want the same things we do, of course. You don’t want them to make the same mistakes on their path to development …

PJH: Here in Jackson, we have an extremely wealthy community where many people are willing to put significant sums of their incomes toward local conservation groups or national, regional conservation groups, yet we are still a significant part of the problem in that we are building homes in an elk migration corridor or in a pronghorn antelope corridor. Why is this different? We think more about wanting to live in that place than that connection to nature and needing to protect it.

S: You’re asking a fundamental question about why people want things. … It’s really hard to live life in a good way. It’s much harder than you’d think. I’m sitting down having a pizza and I look at the box and it’s made in China and the cheese came from California and the cows are probably farm-raised in Wisconsin.

I mean, it’s a tough thing sometimes to do, even if we’re not in the ultra-rich category. What they do is probably no different than what any of us do – it’s just magnified, and therefore conspicuous. …

We all are sharing in the problem in some way or another. That said, I think the thing people who have wealth have the ability to do is that they have more freedom in being able to pick and choose options. Sometimes we just have to do something because we have to do it, whereas if you are wealthy you might have more options to do it. And maybe the only thing I can say to that is, you have to be really thoughtful about which options you exercise.

PJH: I read several of your recent columns on The Nature Conservancy Web site … and in one of them you talk about winning the conservation fight and whether talking about conservation or environmental protection with war or battle terminology is a good thing. In another you talk about conservationists’ tendency to be pessimistic in tone. Do you think it’s important that we shift that terminology and the paradigm to one of hope?

S: Well, absolutely, yes. I think we should shift our tone. But the word I don’t use is hope. I think hope is too passive. I like to use optimism. I like people who are optimistic because they’re the ones that tend to make the biggest changes.

No big battle, no great war was ever won by pessimists. I don’t know any movement that has managed to succeed that way. I think what conservation has done for a long time is say all the things that have gone wrong and how much worse they’ll get. It tends to paralyze people. … What we need to do is give people alternate scenarios of what life would look like under this scenario versus that scenario and allow them to make decisions. …

Conservationists in general need to be better at being able to predict the future and then put that in an alternate scenario. Let me give you an example: You can go tell people they can’t do anything about climate change, it’s going to happen and it’s going to cost a lot of money. Or you can say, “The cost of dealing with climate change today is about the equivalent of a couple of lattes, soy milk lattes, a week. [Laughs] If you wait ‘til your children are your age, it’ll probably cost you $80 a week.” That’s how much difference it will make for acting today versus acting in the future.

Now you and I might disagree about how quickly it’s going to happen, or whether it’s going to happen or how bad it’s going to be, but the truth of the matter is, it’s like an insurance policy – you don’t think your house is going to burn, but you still invest a little bit just in case. That’s what we’re asking you to do with climate change.

That’s a much more palatable, acceptable message that doesn’t make people collapse in “I don’t even want to hear about this because it’s too big a deal” to one where “OK, I sort of get it. He’s saying maybe a couple of lattes a week is all it would take for me to sacrifice in order to make sure that my kid doesn’t have a huge headache.”

Photo by Erica Nortemann
Sanjayan speaks at noon today at the Bistro.


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