Your Letters and Comments
January-March 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 1)
Appearances Can Be Deceiving
After reading “A Garden Gone to Seed” (Conservation In Practice, July-Sept 2005), I was troubled by the assumption that Mayan traditions will be compatible with conserving significant tracts of biologically diverse forests. In my opinion, the author has confused diversity that is a result of small- scale disturbance created by today’s Mayan farmers with a traditional management plan aimed at promoting biodiversity. The Maya manipulate the forest to meet their needs. They regularly alter the forest to their benefit at the expense of the other creatures occupying these same lands. Although the mosaic they create can actually be more diverse than the original forest, none of the created habitats is as diverse as the original forest. The question becomes one of scale. At some point, the mosaic created by human disturbance becomes dominated by regrowth. This manmade habitat may suit humans, but it is biologically poorer, i.e., less diverse. History tells us that the Maya, after thousands of years of acquaintance with these forests, crossed the line from a diverse to an impoverished mosaic and ultimate societal collapse. With so much at stake, I would be reluctant to rely on Mayan traditions alone to maintain a disturbance regime or mosaic that is compatible with biodiversity conservation.
WILLIAM H. THOMAS
Montclair State University
Montclair, New Jersey
What Can the Public Really Do?
Jared Diamond’s call to public action is welcome but is seriously naive and simplistic in placing “ultimate responsibility for business practices on the public” (Conservation In Practice, Oct-Dec 2005). In order for “the public” to effectively shape business practices, several things must happen. People must know what’s going on. They must understand what is in their interest—e.g., not endless growth. They must have a vision of an alternative. They must have the resources and will to reach out to others to organize politically. They must understand how decision-making institutions—social, cultural, economic, and political—work: where to bring the pressure and when. They must craft effective strategies, take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, and constantly innovate at the tactical level. And they must be able to bring sufficient pressure over the long haul while fending off attacks that range from slander to physical repression.
The economic entities causing so many problems are not just sitting around waiting for people to organize to influence them. They are actively engaged in undermining such efforts to blunt their effects. Modern social movements have been able to organize and win important concessions. But they have not been able to fundamentally alter the nature of existing hierarchical systems. It’s still a few that make decisions, and mostly in their own interest. Diamond should know this after researching his most recent book. Since hierarchy emerged 10,000 years ago, people have resisted it. But it has only become more ingrained and entrenched, driven by increasing human numbers, increasing consumption, and competition for power and wealth.
My goal is not to depress readers into inaction or to throw rocks at Diamond, who has written brilliantly and worked hard on behalf of conservation. It is to remind conservationists that the task of change is difficult and not simple. Political power and resources are unevenly distributed. Democratic forms do not equal democracy. People are easy to manipulate. Conservationists must be realistic and hard-nosed about the nature of politics. Winning battles against the powerful requires a strong and focused political movement, not some amorphous public whose sense of justice is vaguely offended. Indeed, there is no “public” in any meaningful sense. There are groups of people who must be carefully identified based on their capacity to affect conservation policy, and then mobilized for political action. It is behavior that counts.
DAVID JOHNS
McMinnville, Oregon
Dissatisfying and Dangerous
Once again Jared Diamond has enlightened us with graceful writing and insights into the dynamics of human systems. Certainly, businesses ought to follow the laws that govern them, and Diamond reminds us how fiduciary responsibility (responsibility to shareholders) can actually prevent companies from being good stewards.
But as a lesson for achieving the amazing progress in the environmental behaviour of corporations that Diamond reports, “Oil Change” (Conservation In Practice, Oct-Dec 2005) is both dissatisfying and dangerous. It is dissatisfying because “the public”—to whom Diamond assigns ultimate responsibility for reforming corporations—is too diffuse, so fails to assign appropriate credit or responsibility for social progress. The public is everyone, undistinguished. Successes in modifying corporate behaviour are certainly not because of a shift in everyone’s attitudes and actions. Rather, such successes arise because of the strategic actions of a few concerned and knowledgeable individuals who manage to eke out power in a social system that increasingly empowers corporations.
Marketing to the public is marketing to no one at all. You cannot simultaneously reach everyone because different people respond to different messages. And you never need to reach everyone. For example, when Home Depot caved to “public pressure” regarding old-growth tropical timber in their lumber supply, only a tiny fraction of the public knew anything about the issues involved. And yet, Rainforest Action Network’s (RAN) strategic actions eventually resulted in Home Depot’s making great changes to huge volumes of wood, protecting huge tracts of forest. RAN did not attempt to reach the entire public: they identified key social actors (customers of Home Depot) and reached them when they were empowered to act (shopping at Home Depot).
It will always be thus: the public will never be well informed on all issues. I can’t keep up on human rights, violence in the Middle East, or poverty. I push governments to align corporate profits with social well-being and rely on NGOs to keep me informed about the most egregious abuses and to ensure that my actions leverage change.
Diamond’s message is dangerous because, by removing responsibility from companies, it risks diminishing outrage at companies for socially damaging behaviour. Only properly channelled outrage will make companies incorporate the social costs that are invisible to or otherwise ignored by economic markets.
Ultimately, I agree with Diamond but wish to elaborate. Yes, positive social change is happening, even through Big Oil; but such change occurs because concerned individuals have leveraged it by disaggregating the public and targeting strategically.
KAI M. A. CHAN
IRES, University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia
Testing the Mettle
I was disappointed to read Jim Robbins’ article this month (Conservation In Practice, Oct-Dec 2005). I felt that the premise of the article—active management of predators and its increasing necessity and prevalence—was timely. But the editorializing ruined the reporting. It is simply wrong to infer that “the reality of the predator-prey relationship can test the mettle of even the most ardent wolf supporters” from Andie McDowell’s decision to become a less- vocal supporter when one of her dogs was killed by a wolf. As David Baron’s extraordinary reporting on cougars in Boulder, Colorado, recently demonstrated, even people in suburbia are willing to change their ways to provide a future with these animals in it. Nor is it accurate to say that we don’t devote to “any other animal in North America” the energy we devote to wolf recovery. The gray wolf and Florida panther are only at the top of a growing list of predators that Americans are striving to restore. If Ed Bangs or Jim Robbins thinks active predator management is “ridiculous,” then it is our great good fortune that the public has other leaders to point it in the right direction.
JAMISON COLBURN
Western New England College
Springfield, Massachusetts
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