Conservation 2.0

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

By Brooke Williams

This past week, Jonathan Schecter of the Charture Institute, and Jason Wilmot and his team at Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, hosted Conservation 2.0 at Spring Creek Ranch. The two-day meeting was designed to attract conservationists  throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The purpose of the meeting was to assess the current status of the conservation movement. They were then asked to figure how to make the thousands of people working in hundreds of organizations throughout the region more effective with the millions of dollars being spent to protect the environment in the region.

I’ve been to a lot of meetings in a lot of pretty places, but this one had unusual urgency and grit. Of dozens of great presentations, two stand out in bold relief:

1. Story Clark, a consultant, writer and 30-year veteran of conservation at local and international levels, called for region-sized thinking. She suggested if we’re going to have the impact necessary to deal with current problems, we need to band together in a giant effort. It needs to be a region-wide collaboration, wherein each organization is tasked with what they do best, where competition for funding is minimized and the replication of strategies and programming is eliminated.

She cited examples of situations where the political power is at odds with best ecological thinking and logic.

Clark quoteed a recent speech by the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson, during which he called for the government to abandon the idea of multiple use and to start by turning all National Forests into National Parks, protecting our resource for perhaps its single and best use: wildness. Otherwise, most of our public lands could become, by default, another single use: energy development.

Many other presenters, Jonathan Schecter and Michael Scott of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in particular, supported many of Clark’s ideas.

2. In his Thursday keynote address, Jack Turner, local author, philosopher and climber, called us all to task, first paraphrasing Thoreau that we’re dealing with “all the branches but not the root.” He challenged us to continually ask ourselves, “What is at stake in the Greater Yellowstone?” Turner reminded us that Thoreau and the other transcendentalists were truly radical, breaking the laws and going to jail if that’s what it took to shine a light on justice. He asked us if love is the reason we’re involved in conservation.

And if love is at the root of why we care, then, given current conditions wouldn’t the “appropriate emotional response” be anger? If we love and if because of that love, we’re angry, then why aren’t we fighting? Turner then went on to remind us that for the first time, every resident living in the Greater Yellowstone now has a common enemy - the energy corporations

“They have the power. They’re the bullies,” he said.

But they’re also people. “Fighting” this power may be as simple as finding out who the people are behind these corporations. Turner, a Buddhist, believes that attention is the main source of meaning in our lives. He expands the idea beyond the constant and simple act of paying attention to bringing attention to the “bullies.”

Together, Turner believes, we can “make the bullies blink.”
I noticed some squirming in the audience during both Turner’s and Clark’s presentations. But based on the number of times others made reference to them, I realized how we’d been touched in a hidden place and felt the truth.

Now, the question is what we’ll do with that truth.
PERMALINK:
Conservation 2.0 | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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