Transcript: TOM BUTLER on the Complexities of Large-Scale Conservation /218
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Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’ll be speaking to writer and conservation activist, Tom Butler.
Tom Butler All of these ‘isms’ deserve scrutiny, but the ultimate one that we have to drill down to again is this question of anthropocentrism, human-centeredness, of human supremacy and all the systems political, economic, cultural, that privilege one species over all the other perhaps 10 million others on the Earth.
Ayana Young Tom Butler is author, volume editor, or co editor of more than a dozen books including Wildlands Philanthropy, Plundering Appalachia, and Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, and ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth. Formerly the Vice President for Conservation Advocacy at Tompkins Conservation, he now serves as a board member of that NGO and has just assumed the new role of Senior Fellow at Northeast Wilderness Trust, a regional land trust.
Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining me today in conversation. This is something I've been looking forward to for a long time. So welcome.
Tom Butler I'm looking forward to it very much. And I very much appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.
Ayana Young Preparing for this interview, reminded me of For The Wild’s origins...following my participation in Occupy, I went from Zuccotti Park to the breathtaking region of Patagonia, and some people know my story, I had never camped a day in my life and here I was in this place that was so wild and rugged, and it was this experience that really birthed For The Wild and a tremendous love for all that the wild encompasses, so this is really an important conversation for me, but before we discuss conservation and rewilding, I wonder if you can speak to what wildland philanthropy has both preserved and brought back in the Chacabuco Valley through Tompkins Conservation’s gradual acquisition of land, and eventually the largest public/private national park donation?
Tom Butler Well, let me try to paint a little bit of a word picture of the Chacabuco Valley for listeners who've never been to that wild and windswept region at the bottom of the Americas. So if you had a bird's eye view and flying through across the east west oriented Chacabuco Valley, you'd be looking down on this little river braided channel, gravel bars of the Chacabuco River, it would look not dissimilar to similar sized rivers you would see in Alaska or Canada and then along the edges of the river, you'd see little patches of riparian forest, but the dominant ecosystem type there is this Patagonia steppe grassland full of bunch grasses and shrubby prickly plants. And it would seem remarkably similar to parts of Montana or Idaho or Wyoming. In fact, the first time I got a chance to fly down there, I flew into the airport at Balmaceda, and then had a six hour drive along a gravel southern highway, the Carretera Austral, to get to the Chacabuco Valley. But when I got to the airport, I realized it smells like Wyoming, like it was like the same smell as Casper, Wyoming, you know, and that’s because it's that same kind of Western bunchgrass type habitat, it [Chacabuco Valley] doesn't have sagebrush, it's a different kind of suite of shrubby plants, but it really is remarkably similar to parts of the American West.
But a few dissimilarities, those big herds of grazing animals that you'd see throughout the Chacabuco Valley, are not elk, they're not bison, it's guanacos, the wild camel of South America, and the big birds you’d see soaring overhead are not Golden Eagles, but Andean condors soaring over the mountains. So it is an absolutely glorious and wild and wondrous country that has been the epicenter of a colonization story, that's not again dissimilar to what happened in the North American west, but just came later to the Americas. So does that give you kind of a bit of an idea of what this landscape is now?
Well, let me tell you what it was in 2004, when one of the philanthropies associated with Douglas and Kristine Tompkins acquired the bulk of the Chacabuco Valley, it was one of the largest, if not the largest private ranch or estancia in that region, it was called the Estancia Valle Chacabuco, and it was close to 200,000 acres and there were 50,000 sheep, and there were hundreds of miles of fencing and there were very, very few guanacos and every mountain lion that could be hunted, shot, poison, trapped, persecuted would be so. And the land had been, in effect sort of bound up, colonized for agricultural production, since the imposition of the frontier culture that got to that part of Chile really only only about 100 years ago. So it's a very recent era of colonization, but the result of it was dramatic degradation of the grassland and persecution of the wildlife, soil loss through erosion, and the imposition, you know, of this domestic agenda on an extraordinary, and previously wild, place. So what happened in those intervening years from 2004 to now was this remarkable story of rebirth and rewilding, as people tried to help nature heal in one particular place.
Hundreds of people have been part of that story over that time period. And the result is this remarkable, remarkable recovery of wildness, hundreds of miles of ranch fencing torn out, the quick recovery of the grasslands not total, I mean, it'll be a long period of time, but a faster recovery of the grasslands than was expected. And the recovery of wildlife populations, especially guanacos coasts and the conservation and protection of the apex predator region of the region to the mountain lion or Puma, instead of its persecution. It's an amazing story. I like to think that one little place is sort of like downpayment, one down payment on the rewilding of the world.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that with us and starting us off like that. And, yeah, I've been learning more and more about large scale conservation projects. And what really stands out to me, is that securing protection for vast swaths of land, is no easy feat...It is incredibly easy to criticize this process and recognize the shortcomings of “capital C” conservation and exclusionary conservation as it has historically displaced many populations and distressed communities that have relied upon pasture and forest for their livelihoods...Yet, as we find ourselves trying to protect some of the last vestiges of land, it is undeniable that large scale conservation is a tool that we have, so I wonder if you could share, how do you see the park system in Patagonia as an example of wildlands philanthropy that coalesces the powers of private ownership and government control to rewild precarious places? How have you worked through some of these complexities and sought to balance the necessity of large scale conservation, while also acknowledging the social impacts?
Tom Butler Wow, there's a whole lot there to chew on. We could tease out pretty much each of those questions and spend an hour just on them. But I, I acknowledge, of course, you're precisely right, that large scale conservation is complicated. It's nuanced. It's controversial. It's difficult at times. The particular tool that we're talking about here, of conservation philanthropy, wild lands, philanthropy of, of private individuals or organizations, acquiring private property, for nature protection purposes, and in this case, repatriating it to the public, as well as to the creatures that call that place home. That is how I define that wildlands philanthropy and that is a very important but limited tool in conservation history.
In this place, it was applicable because this gigantic ranch that was being hammered, was for sale. It was in the context of a society where there is kind of rule of law, private property ownership is possible, and also relatively durable and enforceable. So it was a tool that was possible to use. And the people involved here, kind of the heroes of this story, Doug and Kristine Tompkins, had the means, the private capital to do that. Now, this, this idea is not a new one. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Wildlands Philanthropy, and there are all kinds of stories in that book from Grand Teton National Park to Acadia National Park, to the Smokies. Some of these most iconic public natural areas, Muir Woods, outside of San Francisco, some of the most iconic public natural areas that we revere in the US are the result of people using their wealth, their influence and their energy, their passion, to buy and save land, and in all those cases to assure that it would remain in the public domain, as opposed to keeping it as a private reserve.
So in the context of Douglas and Kristine Tompkins, for those people who don't know those names, they were very successful. Or Kris Tompkins was the former CEO of the Patagonia clothing company, one of the first employees under the owners of that company. And Doug Tompkins was a very successful American business person. He founded The North Face when it was just a little ski shop in San Francisco, sold that, and then was extremely successful with his first wife in growing the Esprit fashion company into a really a global powerhouse in the 1980s, of fashion, and all the while was becoming more and more disgruntled with consumerism and particularly with the fashion industry that he realized as he later described it that he was inculcating desire. At one point in the 1980s, you couldn't, you know, walk through an American town without seeing a teenager with an Esprit t-shirt on, he was creating a desire for something that really was unnecessary, he was helping to create consumerism. And when he had his ecological epiphany, he decided to essentially spend the last quarter of his life, the last 25 years of his life, as he used to say “paying his rent for living on the planet”. And in a bit of capitalist jujitsu, after he'd sold his half of the Esprit company, he took his his great wealth endowed the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and then several other related family foundations and nonprofits, and began both granting to scrappy biocentric and wilderness protection type NGOs, as well as started buying private land in the south, where he had mostly resettled, within Chile and Argentina. And Doug, over the succeeding decades, Doug and Kris through these philanthropies acquired roughly 2 million acres, and then incrementally began donating it to the park systems of Chile and Argentina. And the result of that donation is now the, the tally sheet is that they've helped create through the kind of suite of Tompkins Conservation foundations in entities have helped create 13 new national parks and in total protecting more than 14 and a half million acres. So just to make that real, that's, that's like the state I'm sitting in Vermont, plus New Hampshire, plus a couple of Delaware's all protected permanently in the in the National Park systems of Chile and Argentina now, due to the catalyst of private funding and initiative, then triggering public action through governmental decree.
You'll note that I rambled on there for a moment, but I did not segue into your more difficult question about large scale conservation and the social potential impacts of that social effects, which can be positive and negative. Do you want to go there?
Ayana Young I would love to go there. Yes, please take us there.
Tom Butler Again, it's tricky. In the case of the landscapes where the Tompkins Conservation projects have been located, and there have been many of them, but the three flagship parks are Pumalin Park in the Valdivian coastal temperate rainforest region of Chile, Patagonia National Park in the Chacabuco Valley, that we already discussed farther to the south, and the Iberá National Park in northern Argentina, which is centered on one of South America's largest freshwater ecosystems, the Iberá marshlands. And there are many other parks that have been, you know, in that 13 successes, but those three flagships are ones that most closely embody the idea of this particular toolkit, private wealth deployed into land acquisition, creation of related park infrastructure, so for public access, and then a donation to a national government to a federal system of protected areas. In the case of Argentina that's into the national parks administration and into Chile, it's into a national park system, which is much, much weaker and much less funded. It's very much underfunded for, for a system of what are extraordinary ecological jewels. And of course, the hope is that over time, the public institutions, the institutional capacity to sustain and protect and conserve those ecological jewels will grow.
Ayana Young The downpour here in Washington has started and so I've listening to you, as I'm watching the rain pour outside thinking of these forests here on the Olympic Peninsula that have been so colonized and tortured over the past 100-150 years, and to imagine what it would be like to rewild this place, and so many places that have been so highly, just, a lot of words, but destroyed. And I want to talk a bit more about rewilding, and you know rewilding has been adopted in different ways according to different societal understandings, to begin, I wonder if you’d share how you define rewilding and how and where you think this has been successfully done?
Tom Butler I define rewilding very simply, at its most basic, rewilding is helping nature heal. it's an extremely simple concept to communicate, I think, if you lead with that, though, arguably the largest and most dramatic example of rewilding, if you think about rewilding as land that is growing more wild, of the land community regaining wildness, the Adirondack Park of upstate New York, the eastern Northeastern, temperate forest.
If you looked at the last 150 years, if you could sort of watch over time and see how temperate forests have been shrinking all over the Earth, where's the one place or one significant place where that story has been reversed? It's the northeastern U.S. temperate forest, as it's been expanding, as that land was essentially colonized, then sort of abandoned for agricultural clearing, as the soils played out. And then the idea of organized conservation in this part of the country really kind of accelerated in the late 1800s with the formation of the Adirondack Park, the largest protected area in the lower 48. The adoption of the forever wild clause in the New York State Constitution, which protects those public forest lands within the Adirondack Forest Preserve as forever wild, at the strongest protection of any giant land use designation in the country, even stronger than federal Wilderness Area protection. So there's an example of the first component of an overarching rewilding approach, which I think is three pronged rewilding can occur when one, you protect particular places, using the existing tools of protected areas designation, and protect those places for their wildness, not as, as places of sustainable timber production or forage production, for livestock, talking essentially about wild lands or wilderness areas.
So protect places, that's the first part and make sure that that protection, at least within the current kind of socio political context is as durable as possible. There are a whole, you know, a lot of tools to do that. But public natural areas, including national parks are arguably the most loved and most durable tool. And that's exactly why Doug and Kris Tompkins use that tool in the South with their projects.
So the second part of rewilding is, once you have that landscape, that stage for natural processes, it's helping natural processes recover, restoring wild processes and native species to the extent that is possible, or to the extent that is necessary from active intervention. And then the third kind of wing of this triad of a rewilding approach to conservation is ourselves. It's rewilding hearts and minds, because the only way that we ultimately will move toward this nature needs halfm or half Earth, vision for the planet, where we can imagine this future time when all the earth is wrapped in these beautiful blue and green ribbons of wildness when protected areas protected incrementally, but knit up, place by place and group by group and project by project into these ribbons of wildness around the Earth, and on land and the oceans. The only way you get to that vision of at least half the Earth protected for wild nature to flourish is if people's minds and hearts change. And that's the rewilding ourselves component, which is, of course, central to the work that you do through your Podcast and other initiatives.
Ayana Young I'd like to discuss the differences between restoration and rewilding, because restoration, which has really gained a lot of traction in the United States has, in my mind really been, or what I've seen, been co-opted by extractive industry, and is now doing a great deal of damage. For instance, in the Pacific Northwest, in the United States, I see a lot of greenwashing of restoration. And a lot of times restoration projects are given a lot of grant money to basically just reopen roads for more logging. Or, you know, there's so many, I could really go on a monologue here about what I've seen the damage that “restoration” has done here. So I'm wondering, do you think rewilding is a better way to restore? Or have you seen these issues come up around restoration versus rewilding and your experience?
Tom Butler Yeah, first of all, I acknowledge and I share your fears and your sort of general take on thi, because there is, I think it's your point . These terms, and methods can be co=opted for dangerous ends. The idea why I think rewilding is at least more powerful as an overarching meme, is because we're talking about not just sites, individual sites that have been trashed, need to be restored, which is noble, you know, if the ends are, are good, but to systems, were talking about nature, natural processes being able to be reasserted across vast swaths of the landscape. So with some kind of restoration projects, you have a managerial mindset. It's just you know, the tools or tactics may be different, but it's still putting people and manipulation in the driver's seat, as opposed to looking at an ecological wound and saying, “how can we best serve the inherent intrinsic healing powers of nature here? So that the natural of metaphor here or analogy, would be medicine. You know, when you go to the hospital and talk to your doctor, and she gives you a treatment course of action, whether it's mild or highly interventionist, your doctor is counting on the body's intrinsic healing power. You know, and the medicine, or the surgery or whatever it is, if it's more aggressive intervention is there to serve that, but not to sort of require ongoing manipulation, at least one hopes, one hopes that one will get better and feel better and be vibrant, and whole and healthy again.
And so it is with biological systems, the goal of intervention should be to do the minimum, at least in my view, the minimum amount of intervention that is necessary for those systems, again, to be whole and healthy and intact, and flourishing, and not to require ongoing intervention. And certainly not the sort of greenwashing for destructive activities, because oh, well, we're gonna trash this place, but then we'll call in the restoration, so we'll fix it right up. That way gets you the ecologically depauperate miserable places that are the blasted off mountaintops of Appalachia that have supposedly been reclaimed. And in fact, what is there is, it will never be, and not for 1000 years be that beautiful, intact, diverse, hardwood forest of Southern Appalachia again.
Ayana Young This makes me think about shifting baselines of, you know, the restoration, it's always trying to get back to something like a pre colonial landscape, where I feel like rewilding is a bit different than this, trying to get back to something. And then I think about, of course, climate change, and conservation, like everything else, is also impacted by climate change. And I would imagine rewilding, as well, especially because conservation requires a physical delineation of place in our understanding of place, is becoming more and more uncertain. So how do you factor Ecological Research and climate change into conservation? And what does conservation for moving ecosystems look like?
Tom Butler Well, again, there's a whole lot to chew on there and since I'm not trained as a scientist, I'm sure other people could give you a more astute and informed answer. But nonetheless, in my superficial way, I'll take a stab at it. And I'll do that by giving you two kind of contrasting examples of land conservation organizations trying to practice in their day-to-day tangible conservation work, this idea of rewilding.
Okay, well, so let's, let's start with something at the small scale and then go back to Tompkins Conservation working at a really large scale. Almost two decades ago, as a volunteer I helped found a regional land trust in the northeast, it's called the Northeast Wilderness Trust. And the current board president is the scientist Mark Anderson, who works with The Nature Conservancy and is a brilliant guy and a wonderful man, who is really the guru of climate resilience modeling related to land conservation targets, and this gets to your sort of the latter part question about the idea that no place is static in its assemblage of species.
And with the acceleration of climate chaos, some places are going to fare better than other places, to maintain wildness, to maintain ecological diversity, to be productive habitat for the creatures that call that place home, then other places will. So if you're in the land conservation business, whether you're a local land trust, or a regional group like Northeast Wilderness Trust or a huge international behemoth like The Nature Conservancy, as you decide which projects to work on, you better be incorporating as one criterion, this idea of resilience. Is that landscape or seascape, is that area of the planet, that you're likely to target your conservation efforts going to be more or less resilient in the face of climate chaos? So Northeast Wilderness Trust, even though it's a relatively small, regional, or NGO, incorporates that modeling every time the team there is deciding on a particular we will we want to work on this project in the eastern Adirondacks or this project in Maine, it's being run through those models is one screen to help determine whether that is the best place to put organizational efforts.
On the other scale, with Tompkins Conservation, it's really interesting. If you look at the 30 year history of Tompkins Conservation, this extraordinary track record, you know, of more than 14 million acres protected. There was initially almost no science brought to it in terms of, you know, they didn't bring in, Doug Tompkins didn't bring in teams of consulting biologists to look at the land around what became Pumalin Park. No, he flew over it in his little airplane, this little Husky or Cessna, and saw one of the great last intact wild temperate rainforests left on the planet. And he could buy it for 25 bucks an acre. And he had hundreds, you know, millions of dollars sitting in his bank account, or in his foundation, you know, in Dallas, and he started doing that. He started buying large swaths of intact temperate Valdivian rainforest, and ultimately assembled, you know, 700 plus 1000 acres, and donated it in this parklands package ultimately, after he had died, under the leadership of Kris Tompkins, to become a national park, other federal public lands were incorporated. And now it's basically a million acre wildlife sanctuary, and one of the greatest reservoirs of intact carbon on the planet. And it didn't, it had nothing to do with people going in and analyzing its ecological diversity and say, “Well, this was a good place to have a national park”. It was really based on conservation by opportunity. And the huge vision that Doug had, for what he might do for a cent, you know, again, sort of using the private wealth that capitalism had brought to him. And in this kind of act again of capitalist jujitsu, then redeploying that wealth in a way that was antithetical to the capitalist mindset, which is to commodify everything, turn flip that on its head, ecosystems are going to be shifting, but the more intact and the more heterogeneity across elevational gradients, the more they are going to be resilient. And with Pumalin Park, you have a million acres they are protected forever owned in common by the people, the nation of Chile, but open to everyone and, and protected for the creatures that again, they call that place home. And it runs from the Pacific from sea, you know, the sea, literally sea level, up to the crest of the Andes across these elevational gradients. So it may be one, not only one of the great carbon reservoirs, it is likely to be one of the most ecologically resilient places of any protected area on Earth, because they have that ability for ecosystems to migrate uphill as temperatures warm
Ayana Young I do want to bring into the conversation this book Keeping The Wild: Against The Domestication of Earth, the connection between big conservation names and big business is often alluded to; for example, The Nature Conservancy maintains strong connections to corporations like Goldman Sachs & Co, Alibaba, Duke Energy, and Hewlett Packard. How does, what you and others describe as, “new conservation” lean towards economic development and why is this a cause for concern?
Tom Butler Large institutions have large budgets, large budgets, require large donors, and not just in their physical girth, but in the, you know, the circumference of their checkbooks. That is just the socio-economic system that we are operating in now. When we, through the Foundation for Deep Ecology publishing program, helped develop and published that Anthology, which is published by Island Press, called Keeping The Wild, it was to react and we, you know, sought the voices of some of the leading conservation thinkers in North America to react to that trend, that tendency of the, or the trend of, of some of the largest conservation organizations to be developing a worldview in which conservation was less and less focused on the central problem, which is stopping the biodiversity crisis, stopping the sixth great extinction starting this sort of great spasm of contraction of Earth's diversity. And where conservation was then sort of being reoriented, again, toward human concerns, and in partnership with kind of corporate interests, that was, at the time being driven by the top science official at TNC, which, who has long since moved on. And I'm happy to say I think the trajectory there as an organization is much better now, much improved. And I think, you know, the overall land conservation movement, it benefits if it’s large institutions, like the Nature Conservancy and others, are strong and principled, and have the capacity to protect wild places and creatures, that's a good thing.
But if we're thinking about sort of the long term trajectory in society, there is no way that a large institution that is going to align itself with corporate power and with the mega wealthy, is going to have the freedom to challenge the techno-industrial growth, economy and worldview in its in its entirety. You know, that very thing that worldview, that political and economic order, which is leading to the loss of diversity. So it's a conundrum. It's a tremendous tension. And it's a dilemma. And for the larger NGOs, it becomes more and more difficult. And so you have to self censor, and the things that you would say if you're a staff person or a board member, sitting around the campfire with your friends, you can never say in a board meeting or in a in a donor visit, which is again, I have to come back to why it was so unusual for a person like Doug Tompkins who had succeeded so wildly as an entrepreneur and Kristine Tompkins. Although, you know, the Patagonia company is an anomaly because of the Chouinard family who founded it and owns it, in their worldview, their nature focus worldview. But so for them to, to infer to Doug in particular, for someone who had wildly succeeded and benefited from this techno industrial growth society then to turn on it to articulate why specifically, it was, in his view, unreformable. Well, it was remarkable and then he could speak to the same level of peer that was benefiting from that same system.
So I think the overarching the concern there is, is it is it is extremely difficult for nonprofit institutions when they get big to remain true to a kind of scrappy, ecocentric, nature loving orientation, one of the, you know the few that you can name is the Center for Biological Diversity, which has become a very large, very effective, very well funded NGO, and yet still has retained its core values. But it's very difficult.
And and here's the, you know, I'll speak again, just a little more to the tension, the dilemma of that, you know, right now, the Northeast Wilderness Trust has the opportunity to do all kinds of great conservation projects you could, right now, just on the cusp of starting a project to create the largest private wilderness area in the state of Vermont and continue a whole bunch of big projects in the state of Maine, but those projects can only be completed, those forests can only be protected, that wild carbon that they store can only be sequestered if what happens? If that NGO raises several million dollars to complete the projects? Where does that money come from? That money will come from the current system that Doug Tompkins used to critique, the whole goal of which the entire orientation of which is to commodify the natural world and take beauty in wildness and turn it into commodities for human use and profit. This is attention. What is needed today that can help protect wildness is also coming from sources, those longer structural systems, that privilege human beings and human and corporate profit over the interests of our cousins in the community of life, all the other wild creatures that live on the planet.
Ayana Young Thank you for speaking to these tensions. It's something that I think a lot about, in my own work with conservation, and hearing the land really needing protection from development and commodification and also seeing that the business side of conservation is really complex and it yeah, it's it's, it's not this purist fantasy, you know, it's like we're in this really-
Tom Butler Yes, exactly. There's no purity, you know which brings to mind the funny line, you know, one of the great land conservation leaders of American history in the last 50 years is Patrick Noonan, Pat Noonan was the person leading the Nature Conservancy when that really became a small organization to a global behemoth, and then he went on to found the Conservation Fund. And he helped protect millions and millions of millions of acres. And in part, he did that because he was a stellar fundraiser. And he used to say, the problem with tainted money, you know, the idea that some money is good and somebody is bad, you wouldn't want tainted money. He said, “The only problem with tainted money is there t’ain't enough of it.” And he was happy enough to find dollars wherever he could from whomever he could, that he then deployed into land conservation projects. Now, I'm not saying that that is the right approach. But I'm saying it is one approach. And it's a reasonable way of looking at the problem if you're in the moment, trying to kind of fend off the worst excesses of this techno industrial growth juggernaut to get as much wildness in, and as much secure security as possible as quickly as possible, you're going to use every tool in tactic that is available in and right now you know, our system in the US is public natural areas and private natural areas and and on the ladder requires private initiative and funding. And that means going to the people who have checkbooks that can help support that work.
And and now the the one really kind of interesting and I think encouraging thing about this trajectory is if you go back and look at some of the stories that I profiled in my book, Wildlands Philanthropy, you see, you know, okay, here's a Rockefeller involved in this protected area, or here's a DuPont or here's the heiress of the 3M fortune. So there's the robber baron class, kind of involved in conservation, but over the successive decades, something remarkable happened and that was the democratization of this is really crowdfunding is what the land American land conservation movement is about. You know, you have land trust's small read local and regional land trust now all over the country, more than 1000 of them, most of which don't even have professional staff or very small staffs, working to protect, locally places of, of importance to a community. And that, to me, is remarkably hopeful. In fact, if you could say, if you can think of one area in our public life, that is still bipartisan. It is that interest in protecting places and protecting land that helps support the beauty, integrity, diversity of nature, and also supports human cultural and economic activity.
So that's actually one little bit of hope for that kind of expansion of the land trust community and the fact that, you know, you don't have to be a Rockefeller to, to support your local land trust. You don't have to be a DuPont, people with modest means and modest incomes have and are doing this and some of the stories in that book in Wildlands Philanthropy, the success stories were from people with very, very modest resources, but who had extraordinary creativity and energy and passion for the work and did amazing things. And the result is, like the arc of Appalachia, the system of natural areas in southeastern Ohio. It's a remarkable story, founded by people who were not of means, but had extraordinary commitment to wild nature, and to the particular landscape they loved.
Ayana Young Yeah. Now when it comes to tainted money, if we assume that all money comes from extraction of, then it's all tainted. And to me, it's what tainted money are you going to take? And are there strings attached? And that is another level to this question. But again, there's so much for us to talk about in this that I am going to move on. And hopefully we'll have another conversation, where I'm taking notes on these pieces that I wish we had more time for, but I wanted to come back to Keeping The Wild: Against The Domestication of Earth, an anthology of essays you edited, I wanted to read a quote “Conservation biologists are certain that providing enough shelter, food, water, and smartphones for 3 or 4 billion more humans by the end of the century means wildness will survive only in highly secure parks, most of them already in industrialized nations. Assuming that commerce and growth carry on as usual, soon virtually all wild rivers will be damned, tropical forests will be replaced by commercial plantations, marine fish stocks will continue to be depleted, oceans will be increasingly acidified, and deserts will be “improved” with desalinated seawater, wind farms, and solar collectors.” Upon reading this passage, I thought about the many countries that possess the resources required to transition to green energy, places with abundant sources of copper, lithium, and iron - and I do think, this raises the question of what does conservation need to look like in the next several decades, and how might it actually oppose mass extraction in the name of green energy?
Tom Butler I think it's going to be extremely difficult, but absolutely crucial to have substantive conversations about this growth trajectory and how getting beyond whether you can power the world with renewables, or power the world with fossil fuels, getting beyond the sort of superficial level of that conversation, and get down to the more structural and systemic questions that undergird all this growth. But it's crucial, I think, as a social change movement that we hope for the long term is building the seeds, planting the seeds of a future, eco-centric, a future ecological civilization. And we'd be having these questions and the deep conversations now, including the deep systemic critique of people who say, in effect, well, the problem to climate change is we're just going to put wind turbines and solar panels and we'll all drive priuses or we'll all drive a EV’s, but will not challenge the underlying logic of a techno techno industrial growth civilization, which is designed to do one thing, grow and produce profit and which we know is absolutely impossible to maintain on a finite planet, you know that I often go back to that clip by the the economist, elite economist, Kenneth Boulding, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, you know, the only people who believe that perpetual economic growth is possible on a finite planet planet is either a madman or an economist. So that's what we have is we have an economic order that is based on madness.
And so conservation has a role to play in, again, saying always, even in times when this may be difficult, because we you know, we want the large donor to write the check to our project, at least some slice of the conservation movement, those leading edge, those vanguard groups need to constantly be going down to the deeper systemic analysis and saying why the current economic order has gotten us in, in large part to, the pickle we are in and the ways that society has to change if we have any hope, of stopping this twin crisis of of escalating climate chaos, and escalating biodiversity loss, the extinction spasm and climate change. And the answer to that, I mean, there's no silver bullet, you know, everybody wants to shoot and go out hunting their favorite ism- I was speaking earlier today about one ism with the absolutely brilliant, one of the world's leading wild river defenders, Juan Pablo Orrego, the president of Ecosistemas, the NGO, in Chile and he's working on a paper and explanations of militarisms's impacts on the Earth, and particularly the way that Chile’s economy produces vast, mature amounts of raw materials for the war industry.
So militarism, you know, people to militarism or capitalism, or they front to the problems of sexism and how we have to smash the patriarchy. All of these isms deserve scrutiny. But the ultimate one that we have to drill down to, again, is this question of, of anthropocentrism, of human centeredness, of human supremacy, and all the systems political, economic, cultural, that privilege one species over all the other, perhaps 10 million others on the Earth. And the ways we do this in the most unthinking and unexamined way, beginning, with the language we use, which shapes the sort of the ideas that we think our cognitive frames are in large part shaped by the language we use, is why I sort of get on this topic of language and my, my distress over when my fellow conservationists, unthinkingly continue to use the language of dominion, the language of commodification of the language of industrialism, even as we pretend to be trying to heal the the problems or the symptoms of the underlying system that we oppose.
Ayana Young Well, for my last question, I was reminded again, that environmental conservation philanthropy makes up some, like a miniscule portion of charitable donations in the United States, I believe less than 1% of all philanthropic donations in the United States go to wilderness protection, endangered species restoration and natural parks. If you know differently, please correct me. And I think listeners will be surprised to learn of this as well, just this miniscule amount. But I'm wondering how much of our Earth is protected through conservation? And what sort of projects are valued within the conservation community when funding is somewhat limited?
Tom Butler Quick answer about how much is protected is terrestrial, I think the current number is roughly 14% of the Earth's land is in some form of protected area. That's not just sort of wilderness protection, but all categories of conservation. So 14%, and some of that, of course, would be in what you alluded to earlier, this idea of paper parks, places that have protection, in name only, but not in fact, on the ground. Of course, the number of marine protected areas is much, much lower percentage and sort of this sub category that we talked about no take, no exploitation, no resource extraction, marine protected areas, whether you call them marine wilderness areas, or no take zones or Marine National Parks, well, that's even a tiny, tiny fraction. So to get from that level of protection of the Earth, to let's say at least 50% of the planet protected in durable institutions in an interconnected way, sustaining the most important and ecologically diverse habitats. That's a big leap to big jump. And it's going to take time, which is, again, why we're in this for the long term of the social change movement that we think of now as conservation or the conservation and environmental moves, they're very recent. We're not, we're not talking about something that's been around for 1000s of years, you know, we we first started this kind of organized thing that we think of is conservation, you know, it's only 150 years old. And the thing that people talk to, which is slightly different, and has different historical antecedents that people refer to as the environmental movement, that's much more recent still. So it is a long game. It's a marathon, not a sprint, for conservation, and allied social change movements, including the peace movement, women's movement, human rights movement, anti- racism movement, all of these kinds of allied movements that are, again oriented toward expanding freedom and justice, we're going to be at it for a long time.
But certain things, if I can, I'll just say, when we think about why it is so crucial to do this, we want to circle back to the idea of freedom and justice, because the key social change movements, at least in American history, the right the movement to get women to vote, or to end explicit forms of racism during the Civil Rights Movement. Even the the more recent campaign successful to achieve marriage equality, for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, change movements were about expanding the sphere of ethical concern, from one category of teams to these formerly marginalized categories of people, there's always sort of, you know, okay, those people are now worthy of our, our ethical concern. So the circle of ethical concern gets a little larger each time. But something really remarkable happened in America when the conservation movement emerged, and particularly that subset of the conservation movement that was oriented toward national parks and wilderness areas, here, you're expanding the sphere of ethical concern to wild places and creatures, and at least implicitly saying, These are the places that exist for their own sake, we will not graze there, we will not log there, we will not mine there. And moreover, if there are grizzly bears, or mountain lions there, they can have the, you know, the freedom to pursue lives of beauty and quality on their own. Even if they're, you know, creatures that could potentially eat me. You're essentially moving from a purely human centered framework of justice, to a more eco-centric, or life centered and holistic framework for justice. That is what wilderness conservation is about. It's expanding freedom, and justice to all the members of the land community, including if you're in a grizzly bear country, into members of the land community that can eat you.
And I think this is the most important area of evolution for our country, at least the land conservation movement, to understand not that the utilitarian reasons protecting wild places aren't important. Of course, it's wonderful to go for a hike in a park. It's wonderful for our children's brain development, to have access to nature to nature, it's wonderful for natural climate solutions for wild places to store and retain natural carbon, and help regulate the climate, all of those things benefit us. But ultimately, the ultimate reason for protecting wild places and creatures is because they have intrinsic value. They don't require us to value them to be valuable. That, to me, is the ultimate argument for conservation. And it's why I'm in this movement and why I think ultimately, you know, we will get there toward that future ecological civilization that we all imagine.
Ayana Young Thank you for ending on that note. And yeah, I really appreciated your thoughts and your time, and I definitely have a lot to chew on. And I'm going to take these thoughts to the woods, to the trees and ground myself in the complexity of conservation a bit more, although I know, I think about it every day. And this just gave me a lot more to weave into the fabric of my understanding.
Tom Butler Oh, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. I really enjoyed it.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Jeffrey Silverstein and Galen Hefferman. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.