Our planet is in a deepening environmental crisis. Regrettably, the conservation community is not up to this challenge often relying on obsolete approaches and inadequately trained personnel.
This book offers a 9-point framework for getting things on track by focusing on societal values and community action. Anyone who cares about the environment, from conservation professionals to citizens concerned about the living world around them, will find this book a must-read.
The author relates stories from a distinguished career leading international conservation efforts around the globe. These range from powerful insights regarding efforts to conserve the critically endangered tiger to a poignant analysis of North America's extinct birdlife as it relates to the Mayflower's voyage -- considering "what if" a different assemblage of passengers had been onboard.
Our planet is in a deepening environmental crisis. Regrettably, the conservation community is not up to this challenge often relying on obsolete approaches and inadequately trained personnel.
This book offers a 9-point framework for getting things on track by focusing on societal values and community action. Anyone who cares about the environment, from conservation professionals to citizens concerned about the living world around them, will find this book a must-read.
The author relates stories from a distinguished career leading international conservation efforts around the globe. These range from powerful insights regarding efforts to conserve the critically endangered tiger to a poignant analysis of North America's extinct birdlife as it relates to the Mayflower's voyage -- considering "what if" a different assemblage of passengers had been onboard.
Sometimes we foresee events that transform our lives. Other times such incidents emerge out of the blue. Such was the case when Jack Turnell walked into my office a few years back.
Jack’s visit was a fluke of scheduling – a time filler. Jack was in Washington, D.C. to meet with the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency for which I worked and whose mission is to conserve wildlife and plants for the nation’s people. Actually, Jack was going to do more than meet with the director. He was going to “be” the director – for a day. Jack was part of an innovative Service program entitled “Walk a Mile in My Boots.” The purpose was to give some of our agency’s primary constituents – among them hunters, ranchers, farmers – first-hand experience of being a government bureaucrat and, vice versa, to give Service personnel the opportunity to spend time in the shoes of a landowner who was subject to the regulatory processes our agency imposed. The intended outcome of these experiences was to create greater sensitivity to one another’s perspectives and concerns.
Jack was a rancher. Apparently a big-time rancher considering he had been selected to be our acting director for a day. In any case, it was on his ranch in Wyoming that the black-footed ferret, declared extinct in 1979, had been rediscovered. For his support of various conservation efforts, including the ferret recovery program, Jack had received much deserved attention.
Despite Jack’s work, I saw little point to our meeting. My responsibility within the Service was international conservation, not domestic. I worked with other countries to conserve wildlife, habitats, and ecosystems around the world. These efforts ranged from saving world heritage species such as tigers, elephants, and gorillas from extinction; to enhancing the survival of migratory species, such as birds, bats, and butterflies, that fly south of the US; to the implementation of international treaties such as the Convention of Wetlands of International Importance.
Though Jack had agreed to participate in Walk a Mile in My Boots, it was clear early on in our conversation that there was no love lost between him and people of my ilk. Jack did not like bureaucrats. He did not especially like the way agencies like mine did our business – how we treated the private sector, how we addressed land management, how we went about attempting to save endangered species, and the like.
I could at least sympathize with much of what Jack had to say – many of the shortcomings conservation professionals may have here in the US are magnified in spades when practiced abroad. Indeed, some protected areas in other countries have been partially destroyed as a result of resentments generated by their being declared or managed in a careless and callous manner. All too many conservationists believe that any action performed in the name of conservation is bound to have positive consequences, with the only question being what level of success will be achieved. And all too few conservationists recognize that poorly implemented conservation initiatives, though executed with the best of intentions, have the potential not only to be total failures, but to be counterproductive.
Jack and I discussed these matters during our half hour chat, but I was left with the distinct impression he was disinterested in and impervious to my comments on how conservation might most effectively be implemented. Perhaps it was his disdain for bureaucracy. Whatever the reason, the conversation didn’t seem fruitful, and I chalked it up as one of those unproductive meetings which we all experience.
The first indication that I had misinterpreted Jack’s response came immediately thereafter. Following our meeting, at a larger Fish and Wildlife Service gathering, Jack made positive references to our previous conversation. I was pleasantly surprised.
Three weeks later I received a phone call.
“This is Jack. Do you remember me?”
“Oh, yes, certainly.” Yes, I remembered Jack, but what could he possibly be calling about now?
“Well, I’ve been thinking, and I would like to do a project with you.”
“A project with me?” What kind of project could he possibly have in mind doing together? I ran international conservation projects. Jack raised cattle in the American West. “What type of project do you have in mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking you might come up with something.” Huh?
“I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand….” And so the conversation went.
Though Jack had received a boatload of awards for his contributions as a private landowner to conservation, it turned out he wanted to leave a more substantive, ever-lasting legacy. He was not sure, however, what shape such a legacy should take. This legacy would be something grand – in the order of $0.5 billion to 1 billion in size – and he wanted me to draft it.
Now that’s transformative!
To make a long story short, I went out to Jack’s ranch. It was about 100,000 acres – and this was after it had been subdivided! Every mountain one could see from his home was part of his spread. We spent two days discussing ideas around which to build his legacy. The result was an outline for training future conservation professionals in a manner dramatically different from most such training programs today. Presently, the primary focus is on the science of wildlife and resource management. Too few recognize that resource conservation is actually about people and how people treat resources. The goal of our proposed program would be to develop talented professionals serious about conservation, but with an emphasis on the skills necessary to communicate effectively with, empathize with, and develop relationships of trust with the “Jacks” and all other citizens of our country. The importance of conservation values at various scales, particularly the community and national levels, would receive major attention. Students would learn how we develop our attitudes, values, and beliefs, how they are influenced, and how they may or may not affect our behavior and actions. Working in teams, rather than individually, would be the norm, not the exception. Such would enhance key skills of collaboration and sharing. This model program, the subject of Chapter 8, would then be replicated on a national scale to ensure its availability in every state.
What I came to recognize through my experience with Jack was how readily chasms between people can be spanned if two fundamental elements serve as the springboard for dialogue. Most important is the building of trust. The other is the seeking of commonalities – looking for areas of common interest or common values. After all, Jack was a rancher as opposite to me in nearly every way as two white, male Americans can be. I was born in Brooklyn, New York – the congested inner city. Jack was from the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. I grew up among row houses. Jack grew up on a ranch. I generally reside down one end of the political spectrum. Jack is at the other. Despite these differences, when it came to the issue of how best to achieve conservation and the skill sets conservation professionals should have, Jack and I saw eye to eye. We had similar values. When we focused on this, we made a great team.
Jack and I held contrary views regarding the reintroduction of wolves out west and their role in the environment. We had divergent opinions on the role of hunting in conservation. This did not matter. What was important was that we sought out aspects of conservation where our thinking aligned, and we made progress on those fronts. Such overlaps occur among virtually all of us. Our challenge is whether we focus on our differences, or seek areas of commonality.
Despite having already worked for decades in the conservation profession, my encounter with Jack gave me a fresh appreciation of the importance of people’s values in achieving conservation goals, and I began to realize how the initiatives I managed, programs of USFWS generally, and efforts of the conservation community as a whole, ineffectively addressed this critical fact. Working with Jack prompted me to think in depth about the skills I believe conservation professionals should ideally possess. This would mean:
• Less biology and more social sciences in their training,
• Less individual research and more practical teamwork,
• Less field data analysis and more questionnaires to understand community sentiments,
• Less emphasis on individual intellectual development and
more on developing trust,
• Less of a focus on understanding nature and more on
empowering others to appreciate nature.
Though Jack’s legacy project did not become a reality, primarily due to the economic recession of the early 2000s, the thinking that went into it, the recognition of the importance of identifying common values and of developing trust, became a foundation for this book. The more I looked, the more I came to see how essential values are in whether conservation initiatives succeed or fail. At the same time, as I explored this with my project staff, many of them with graduate degrees in animal ecology, I realized how this need was not the least bit apparent to them. It is critical that we shift our efforts as professionals, as citizens, and as a society towards values-based conservation.
Consider, for example, how much a focus on values lies at the heart of two highly successful conservation projects, the Saint Lucia Parrot and conservation of the monarch butterfly. Let’s look more closely at each of these.
The Saint Lucia Parrot: How Local Pride Saved the National Bird
Saint Lucia is a small Caribbean island in the Lesser Antilles. Like its neighbors, it has a fascinating history, culture, and biogeography, but our primary interest here is its parrot known as – the Saint Lucia parrot to the parrot fancier, or the Jacquot to Saint Lucians.
Like many other Caribbean islands, Saint Lucia was colonized by Europeans approximately 500 years ago, and for most of the intervening years, it supported an agricultural society centered on the production of sugar cane. More recently, agriculture has given way to tourism as the focus of the island’s economy. Neither agriculture nor tourism is conducive to forest preservation, consequently, Saint Lucia’s forests have long been decimated, leaving only small hints of their former grandeur.
By the waning decades of the 20th century, Saint Lucia’s parrot, like most parrot species in the Caribbean, was in danger of extinction. There were as few as 100 birds remaining in the 1970s, and it appeared the Jacquot would soon go the way of the Carolina parakeet, North America’s only representative of the parrot family, which became extinct in the 1930s. Already the Jacquot had joined a lengthy list of other parrots in steep decline the world over. In the Caribbean alone, 10 of that region’s 11 surviving native parrots (not counting macaws that had died out centuries earlier) were threatened and dropping perilously in numbers. Among them also was one endemic to Puerto Rico that, by the 1970s, had become one of the rarest parrots in the world: only 13 individuals were alive in the wild.
It is not coincidental that the Saint Lucia parrot, the Puerto Rican parrot, and so many of their relatives had become endangered. Parrots have several characteristics that have been their undoing in an increasingly human-dominated world. For one, the vast majority of species nest in tree cavities. This should not be taken to mean just any tree cavity. Parrots, generally, are fairly large birds, the Jacquot being nine inches tall, and consequently require large tree cavities. As fate would have it, large trees capable of supporting adequate nest cavities also happen to be in great demand by none other than Homo sapiens. Suffice it to say that human demand for timber, combined with the clearing of forests for development, make up the single greatest threat to this family of birds.
A second characteristic of parrots, for which they suffer immeasurably, is their habit of being frugivores – they feed primarily on fruits. To make matters worse, they have the audacity to like fruits that we humans cherish – oranges, grapefruits, apples, cherries, you name it. This resulted in farmers shooting them as pests. Parrots are also pretty and easily tamed – two other characteristics that have made them vulnerable to extinction.
Some can even imitate the human voice. What better creature to have as a pet and keep in a cage! Further, the very rarity of parrots has increased demand for them, as reflected in the price collectors are willing to pay for them. With characteristics such as these, it’s surprising that so many parrot species continue to survive at all.
Despite these insults to Caribbean parrot populations, there have been remarkable success stories in the restoration of some of these species up and down the West Indian archipelago in relatively recent years. The Saint Lucia parrot is the most impressive case and much of the inspiration for recovery efforts on its behalf can be traced to the work of a man named Paul Butler and the staff of Saint Lucia’s Forestry Department. Now, thanks primarily to the campaign they initiated in the 1970s, the Saint Lucia parrot numbers over 2000 individuals and climbing. In fact, the parrot is reverting to becoming the pest to farmers and fruit growers it likely was centuries ago – a bad thing in one way, but a very good one in another.
What happened?
What happened was that Saint Lucia developed one of the most outstanding conservation programs ever devised. What was so distinctive about the program that restored the Saint Lucia parrot was its unique focus on local values along with the thoroughness with which it was implemented.
The focus of the initiative was to place the parrot in the hearts and minds of all Saint Lucians. This is not to say that Saint Lucians did not know the parrot. Virtually all did. What they did not know was just how special their bird is.
To most young children the animals, plants, landscapes, and general circumstances under which they grow up are believed to be the same as those of all other children regardless of where they live. It is only as we grow older and learn about other places that we come to understand the similarities and differences between the place we were raised as compared to other localities. And even then, we may not recognize what’s unique in our own land unless it’s pointed out to us. Though all Saint Lucians knew of the Saint Lucia parrot, practically none were aware that this parrot that bears the island’s name was found only on Saint Lucia and no place else in the world. It is what biologists refer to as an endemic species.
It was Paul Butler, a young Brit with a background in social marketing, who conceived of applying concepts of that field to addressing the plight of the parrot. He was visiting Saint Lucia on a university study tour and became involved with the island’s Forestry Department in its parrot conservation efforts.
Paul began by making the Jacquot the “spokesperson” for a conservation campaign. Through trial and error the initiative took shape. Schoolchildren were the initial focus. The Jacquot spoke to them through a newsletter and visited them in the classroom and schoolyard. These visitations by Paul or one of the Forestry Department staff were not conducted in the traditional manner – as government officials coming to inform the kids. Innovatively, they came dressed in a make-shift parrot costume. This had a dramatic impact on young children. Teachers were provided lesson plans to help them educate their students about the parrot, its importance to Saint Lucia’s cultural heritage, and its plight. This was coupled with information regarding the importance of the Jacquot’s forest home for water and soil conservation on the island.
The campaign expanded to involve every school on Saint Lucia. From there it moved beyond the schools to reach out to Saint Lucian society more broadly. Every type of media on the island was utilized. Local musicians were engaged to write and sing songs about the uniqueness of the Jacquot and the importance of saving it. Sermons were written for clergy interested in addressing the issue before their congregations. Businesses were encouraged to incorporate the Jacquot on their logos.
Central to the success of the campaign was that it was not dominated by biological facts and figures about the parrot’s status. Such data are of scant interest to most people other than the biological researchers who create them. Instead, the core message was that the parrot is as unique to Saint Lucia as any Saint Lucian. It had been on the island, and only that one island, for countless millennia thus making it an important, distinctive member of the Saint Lucia community. The benefit of this approach was its appeal to the deep pride local people take in their sense of place – things which make their home, or homeland, special. Pride in one’s home and place of origin is a powerful value in any person or society. By portraying the Saint Lucia parrot as a unique representative of Saint Lucia, this powerful human sentiment was brought to bear in the bird’s favor.
To be fair, the parrot’s endemism and evolution on Saint Lucia are biological facts. The point is that heavy emphasis on biological research should not serve as the hub of most conservation initiates. It should fill a complementary and secondary role.
The campaign was transformative. Surveys conducted before and after the multi-year campaign revealed a dramatic shift in attitudes of islanders towards the parrot. Saint Lucia’s Jacquot had been taken into the hearts and minds of the island’s people. Islanders had learned that the parrot deserved a distinguished place in their national heritage. It was something special about which they could be proud.
This dramatic shift in attitude subsequently led to behavioral changes including a considerable increase in public support for new conservation legislation, participation in parrot counts, and visits to the forest reserve. The attitudinal changes also had an effect on Saint Lucia’s political establishment, since, as is the case everywhere, politicians keep their ears close to the ground so as to detect the interests of the people they govern. Among other legislative changes, the forestry law was revised to increase penalties for violations, such as killing a parrot or intentionally poaching nests. Fines went from 48 EC$ to 5,000 EC$ – a hundred-fold increase – and one year in jail.
Increased appreciation of the parrot also led to other positive changes in what were, up until then, traditional behaviors of the populace. Keeping of parrots as house pets had been a common practice in Saint Lucia, for example. Traveling the countryside one would regularly see caged Saint Lucia parrots decorating verandas. Evidently, the procurement of pet parrots was a great threat to the species. Not only were these increasingly rare parrots being taken from the wild, but often the scarce trees with adequate nesting cavities were cut down to capture the birds. As a result of the pride campaign, Saint Lucians not only refrained from keeping parrots as pets, they even turned in dozens of pet parrots as a gesture supporting restoration of the bird. And, in one telling anecdote, a local taxi driver, upon learning the destination of his fare was the forest reserve to procure a Saint Lucia parrot for smuggling back to his home country, drove the visitor to the police station instead!
There are a number of important points to note in the exceptional success of Saint Lucia’s pride campaign. Most important was the effect of the campaign’s focus on people’s hearts and national pride. As Saint Lucians began to recognize the uniqueness of their Jacquot, their attitudes shifted in favor of saving the parrot. This attitude shift led, in turn, to the various positive actions and behaviors described above.
A second point concerns Saint Lucia’s economic status. It is often said that concern for conservation is a luxury reserved for the relatively affluent. Yet, in the 1970s, Saint Lucia’s average per capita annual income was in the order of $2,000 per year as compared to $20,000 in the US at the time. Despite many economic challenges that the country faced in the provision of basic infrastructure such as housing, schools, health clinics, roads, and the like, Saint Lucians found a means to embrace their parrot and recognize the importance of conservation for their nation’s future.
Third, this dramatic turn-around in attitude and behavior was achieved with scant financial resources. The campaign to develop pride was extraordinarily cost-effective – just a few tens of thousands of dollars. It also had positive spin-offs, such as reducing habitat destruction and promoting the desire to set aside additional protected areas. Saint Lucia’s prime minister actually sent a specific request for assistance in this regard to the US Fish and Wildlife Service – a rare request from such a high level of government.
Comparison of Saint Lucia and Puerto Rican Parrot Conservation Initiatives
Comparison of the campaign’s achievements and cost to save the Saint Lucia parrot with that of efforts on behalf of the Puerto Rican parrot a few islands further north is instructive. Efforts to conserve the Puerto Rican parrot may well be claimed as one of the US’s wildlife success stories. At the time I began my career as a field biologist in Puerto Rico in the early 1970s, the Puerto Rican parrot population had declined to an all-time low of 13 birds in the wild. It had become one of the rarest birds in the world. Over 40 years later, prior to Hurricane Maria which devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, the number of Puerto Rican parrots in the wild was in the order of 200 birds. Such success was the result not only of decades of extensive scientific research, management, and inter-agency collaboration, but also many tens of millions of dollars of investment. Attempts to influence human values had little if anything to do with the bird’s recovery, however.
Why such different approaches between the two islands? The problems facing both the Saint Lucia and Puerto Rican parrots were quite similar: habitat destruction, poaching, nest-tree cutting, local indifference. The reason for the difference in conservation strategies was primarily that of leadership and vision. In Saint Lucia, Paul Butler developed a new vision, refined it, and demonstrated that it worked. He thought innovatively. In Puerto Rico, by contrast, a traditional approach based upon field biology was used which, despite its accomplishments, cost 10 to 100 times more than the Saint Lucia model and, in significant ways, has yet to be as successful. Most importantly, it has scarcely sought to amass the will of the Puerto Rican people behind it. Relative to Saint Lucia, pride in the island’s endemic parrot is minimal. As a result, political awareness and support for the Puerto Rican parrot is far less.
One caveat. In all fairness, Puerto Rican parrot numbers in the 1970s were so low, just 13 birds, that recovery of the species built on developing national pride almost certainly would have been unsuccessful. At the same time, had parrot numbers been more substantial, similar to parrot numbers in Saint Lucia, such an approach would not have been considered as, based on personal discussions with them, it was outside the frame of reference and skill sets of Puerto Rican parrot biologists.
In a nutshell, the traditional approach applied to conservation of the Puerto Rican parrot began with research on its status: knowing its distribution, abundance, breeding ecology, and threats to its survival. Such information would be the basis upon which concrete conservation actions could then be developed. But, what was happening to the parrot population while all these data were being collected? Not surprisingly, the bird was still declining. In fact, by the time the problems facing the bird were reasonably sorted out, which arguably spanned over a decade, the Puerto Rican parrot was in such dire straits that a number of the possible actions which might have helped save it, such as trans-locating a few birds to new potential breeding grounds, were now no longer feasible. Moreover, it is believed a former poacher, hired to locate parrot nests, actually continued poaching parrots located during the study.
This is quite contrary to the experience on Saint Lucia where, as we saw with the taxi driver, poaching had become frowned upon. The most outstanding ornithologist to work on the Puerto Rican parrot, Noel Snyder, recipient of the Brewster Award from the American Ornithologists’ Union for a career of outstanding research, once declared to me, “A single Paul Butler is worth a hundred of us” referring to scientific researchers. Noel was right. The renowned Jane Goodall (2015), was of equal mind, “I believe the most crucial aspect is for the local people to develop a sense of pride… and a sense of ownership.”
The situation regarding the Puerto Rican parrot was not unique. In fact, its over-emphasis on research at the expense of addressing the social issues associated with conservation was, and to a large extent still is, standard procedure. A few years ago a widely respected wildlife researcher charged with conserving the endangered Hawaiian honeycreepers, a unique group of birds, bemoaned that he may well be the only researcher in the world to have documented the extinction of six species of birds. Perhaps this gentleman should have considered a different approach to doing his job.
Because the Puerto Rican parrot was already so seriously endangered when conservation actions were finally put in place, captive breeding to save the species became a necessity. Captive breeding is not cheap – it requires facilities, highly trained staff, sanitation, security, feeding, veterinary care, and the list goes on. Following decades of difficulties, the captive rearing program became successful, and Puerto Rican parrots have now been released in numbers into superior lowland habitat. The released birds are only quasi-wild, though, because they are provided food on a regular basis by aviary staff. And, because limited outreach has been done to farmers in the vicinity, it remains to be seen whether they take retribution on the parrots for the inevitable future crop damage.
Also, note the relatively minor role played by parrot research data in reversing concern about the Jacquot’s decline. Reams of biological data did not change the attitudes of Saint Lucians; what worked was a few biological tidbits coupled with major appeals to their emotions and gut feelings. The biological sciences are, of course, important to conservation. They can track down the causes of decline or resurgence, they can project the likely consequences of various courses of action, and they can tell us about the sizes and trends in animal or plant populations. But when it comes to encouraging changes of heart, public support, or political action, arguments from the biological sciences alone seldom suffice.
The Saint Lucia parrot is not the prettiest bird in the world. It is not even the prettiest parrot. It does have a beautiful blue head, but as parrots go, it is hardly spectacular. Despite this, thanks to an innovative campaign, it was made into a flagship species equal in stature to the tiger in India as far as Saint Lucians were concerned. The point here is that so much of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The power of emotion and feelings of the heart can be much more potent than that of intellect alone, or even the pocketbook.
In the mid-1990s, I had the pleasure of visiting Saint Lucia. It had been more than a decade since Paul Butler’s initial pride campaign. As I checked into the hotel, I heard the characteristic squawk of a parrot and raised my head. Noting my curiosity, the young woman registering me smiled broadly and said, “That’s the Jacquot, Amazona versicolor. It’s our national bird.” Now that is getting conservation into people’s hearts where it belongs!
The transformation in parrot conservation was so successful in Saint Lucia that the conservation organization Rare adopted the Pride Campaign as its signature focus and, with Paul Butler continuing to refine its delivery, initiated similar campaigns on other islands of the Caribbean where they also proved highly successful. Beginning with the Saint Vincent and imperial parrots, endemic to Saint Vincent and Dominica respectively, campaigns expanded to other islands using other species as flagships, such as the Jamaican giant swallowtail, the largest butterfly in the Western Hemisphere. To date, many hundreds of pride campaigns have been initiated by Rare around the world, their success continuing to be exemplary.
Pride campaigns are one powerful tool for the conservation toolbox. They are a good example of a Cornerstone Initiative, one of our framework elements discussed in Chapter 8. There are others. Our second values-related example involves a totally different approach. It focuses on addressing a community’s basic needs while gradually, over time, connecting those needs to a concern for conservation.
The Monarch of Migration: Conserving the Monarch Butterfly
High on the mountain massifs of central Mexico, amidst the swirling clouds and majestic oyamel fir forests, resides, during the full extent of northern winters, an extraordinary insect whose presence, during summer, most in the United States take for granted in our own backyards. This is the monarch butterfly, a species well known, but whose phenomenal life history draws much less attention. This beautiful orange and black butterfly undertakes an annual migration from eastern North America down to central Mexico where it congregates in huge colonies often numbering 50 million or more individuals. Here, dangling from the fir trees in spectacular densities, the butterflies hang in torpor until spring arrives and their northward migration begins. To make this migration even more remarkable, the butterflies actually take several generations to return to their northern climes, as far north as Canada, from which their ancestors originally departed.
Tragically, the oyamel fir forests of the monarchs happen to belong to the most endangered forest type in Mexico, and the only forest type the monarchs find suitable. Only two percent of these native forests survive, the remainder having been cleared for various purposes, particularly to accommodate subsistence agriculture.
In 1986, with pressure from US-based conservation organizations, the president of Mexico decreed 60 square miles of oyamel forest as a Monarch Butterfly Special Biosphere Reserve. Though a victory for conservationists, this was hardly a victory for the butterfly. In Mexico, unlike the United States, national parks and protected areas are declared without shifting ownership of the land from private hands to those of the government. The result of the presidential edict was, thus, to impose additional constraints on land use by already impoverished peasants living within the newly designated reserve without consultation with them on the matter and without compensation. This, unquestionably, was not well received and soon led to such resentment among local communities in the reserve that some individuals began to cut and burn the forest in protest.
That was one approach to conserving the monarch in Mexico – US-born, culturally insensitive, politically naive. There have been others. Some of these too have failed, though not as disastrously as the 1986 decree. There has also been a masterful success story and it bears a closer look.
Because of the failures of previous efforts, communities in and around the monarch reserve had become highly suspicious of conservationists. Why shouldn’t they be? Recognizing this, and that monarch butterfly conservation had to be built around the wants and needs of the people of the area, two young women, Guadaloupe del Rio and Ana Maria Muñiz, subsequent founders of the group Alternare (“Alternatives” in English), in the mid-1990s, sought a way to engage these now suspicious communities. Being from Mexico City, and scarcely expert in rural agriculture, Lupita and Anita, as known to their friends, realized a unique mechanism was needed to reach out to the local campesinos. The solution: the women engaged Gabriel, a peasant farmer from an adjacent region of Mexico, and an expert in rural agriculture who was willing to transplant his family to the vicinity of the monarch reserve and bring new skills to the local people. Such skills were needed because many of the communities surrounding the reserve were composed of families originally from elsewhere in Mexico. These individuals had been provided land up in the mountains following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and, being displaced to a totally new environment, had no idea how to manage the land productively.
Gabriel began by teaching the benefits of proper composting. He then expanded his instruction to address soil erosion and promote better crop rotations. Building forest-friendly houses out of adobe rather than wood was among the skills Gabriel transferred to the local communities. The use of more efficient wood-burning stoves was another. Though it took a while, years in fact, Alternare gradually gained ever-increasing levels of local trust. They achieved this by focusing on their core values of respect, responsibility, honesty, and commitment. And they listened. They listened to the communities and responded to their needs. Extremely important was their early success in enabling the communities to live more prosperously off the land. This helped open the eyes of many skeptics. Over time, with a scant budget of $100,000 per year, Alternare engaged the most successful local campesinos as “promotores” – informal extension agents – who were better able to develop a rapport with neighbors and adjacent communities. As of 2016 there are over 51 such promotores. Many of the most avid and effective promotores were women, an important empowering element of this initiative.
How did these efforts contribute to conserving the habitat of monarch butterflies? Crops need water. The local people learned how intact forests help capture water which can later be used for crops. Cooking requires wood thus, simple, efficient stoves helped save on the need for timber cutting. Typical houses required timber, but converting to adobe, made from clay, dramatically reduced this need, plus made for a much more long-lived home. Learning about fire control and prevention reduced forest loss, as did the creation of tree plantations. As a consequence of these new insights and livelihood changes, the demand for timber from the forest on which the butterfly depended was decidedly reduced. Alternare deliberately refrained from focusing on butterflies in the course of this work. Though butterflies were their long-term interest, Alternare recognized that building trust by focusing on the community’s greatest needs was a necessary first-step. Without mutual trust, community engagement in conservation of the butterfly would be impossible. To address this, emphasis was placed entirely on improving livelihoods which, in turn, resulted in both the wiser use of resources and a greater appreciation of the forest and the benefits it provides. Over time, through expansion of more effective living and farming strategies, the image of the forest, the reserve, and the butterfly shifted from being a constraint on the livelihoods of the people to something that was now understood and cherished. The power of this shift in community attitudes and perceptions was dramatically demonstrated when, as a result of increased illegal logging by outside entities wishing to make a profit off the wood, communities with which Alternare collaborated actually sent contingents of armed guards into the forest to protect the trees from vandalism.
Alternare’s approach was slow. It was tedious. It did not focus on the butterflies directly, but rather on their habitat, which became as important to the communities surrounding the forest as it was to the butterflies themselves. Through over 500 workshops and tireless engagement with families and communities for over two decades, the value of the forest, the importance of reserve status in protecting the forest, and the importance of the butterfly in a decision to create the reserve, has been reversed in the hearts of local people from an attitude of disrespect for the butterfly to one of appreciation. The result: a level of effective conservation unachievable by more conventionally accepted approaches such as (1) the failed 1986 decree which simply set aside the monarch reserve, but led to degradation of the butterfly’s habitat, not its preservation; or (2) by foreign scientists who monitor butterfly numbers, sound the alarm when numbers are down or the forest is cut, but are short on practical solutions when it comes to how best to address the situation. To the contrary, Alternare found a long-term solution that has worked.
Why so little progress?
Why then, after so many decades, and thousands of conservation projects implemented at home and abroad, have not these approaches of reaching out to the hearts of people as was achieved in the examples from Mexico and Saint Lucia, and of seeking out common ground – common values – and of developing trust as I experienced with Jack Turnell – why have such approaches not taken hold? There are seven key elements in answer to this important question because they are so central to the problem before us.
Let’s look at each of these important obstacles to a values-based approach to conservation:
Obstacles to values-based conservation:
1. Changing Context
2. Change Is Hard
3. Belief Money Solves All Problems
4. Simple Solutions Rarely Work
5. Society Is Outcome Oriented
6. Changing Values Is Too Slow
7. Values Don’t Always Match Behaviors
1: Changing Context
One major cause of this disconnect – a focus on animals and plants outside of the context of the human environment around them – probably derives from the early days of wildlife conservation, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the study of animals as compared to the practice of conserving them, were not very far apart as disciplines. After all, during that period you could conserve wildlife in areas where scanty human populations were a non-factor in this process. Over time, however, our burgeoning human population has increasingly impinged on wildlife causing increased conflict with it. Fundamentally, the vast expansion of people into habitats that previously were nearly uninhabitable, deserts, and the arctic for example, has made conservation almost entirely a “people problem” not a biological one. Over time, therefore, the study of wildlife versus the conservation of it, have diverged – substantially. Because this shift has been a slow, inconspicuous occurrence, it has not been well recognized nor have the necessary adjustments been made. Successful strategies of years ago have not adapted to changed times. Conservation of our nation’s first national park – Yellowstone – is an excellent example of this. When Yellowstone was designated a national park back in 1872, the American West was still decidedly wild. Five years after the park’s designation the Nez Perce Indian tribe, in flight from the US cavalry, fled through the center of Yellowstone and had several hostile encounters with park tourists. What better example of how lightly inhabited and remote parks were. But look at Yellowstone today! It is surrounded by towns, ranches, and farms. Approximately three and a half million people visit the park annually. Does it not now make sense that conservation practice should have undertaken a dramatic shift towards working with people?
2: Change Is Hard
A second key element, as in all human endeavors, is that change is always difficult. The status quo may be the strongest force influencing everything we do. It is an anchor against change. When reaching a set goal requires a new approach, addressing the status quo will always be a major challenge.
3: Belief That Money Solves Problems
A third element is that many people, professional or not, would argue the problem of achieving effective conservation is not about the approach – a focus on species rather than values – but is a matter of money. They believe if funding could be considerably ramped up, everything would be fine. I doubt that. I believe a fundamental reason there is not more funding is because the present approaches for delivering conservation have limited capacity to generate the social and political support they need. Scant funds are a consequence of this – not a good sign. We shall see in the following chapters that the availability of funds apparently is of minor consequence when compared to the importance of a society’s values system. We have already seen, in the cases of the Saint Lucia parrot and monarch butterfly, the notable success of conservation projects which focused on changing attitudes and values that achieved success with modest amounts of funding. Success hinges more often upon the approach used, not the money spent.
4: Simple Solutions Rarely Work
Another reason a more values-oriented approach hasn’t taken hold is our desire for simple solutions. As a consequence, we frequently fail to recognize that what appears the most direct route to a solution isn’t always the most effective in the long run. If we wish to conserve wildlife, the thinking goes, then let’s focus directly on wildlife. Likewise, if we want to conserve habitat, then let’s find the easiest way to set it aside. In that context, while a number of conservationists make the case that developing a sense of shared values among our populace may be a worthy aim, it should take a back seat to addressing, through land purchase and other actions, the urgent problems we face of conserving species, saving habitats, reversing climate change, and the like. Though, these goals, as lofty and urgent as they may be, cannot be effectively achieved without our populace first having a set of widely shared conservation values in place. Focusing on people’s positive conservation-oriented values and making their identification and adoption a major priority is essential if conservation is to advance, as it desperately must.
Aldo Leopold (1949), the renowned American conservationist of the mid-20th century, recognized this centrality of values. “I think we have here the root of the problem,” he wrote. “What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.”
Many in the professional conservation community have never taken to heart Leopold’s insight. They have chosen, instead, to do what is most comfortable – to do what they are trained to do – to study and manage wildlife and their habitats – or whatever other resources they are charged with managing. They remain driven by the idea that their core leadership role revolves simply around the science of studying wildlife, not of using the social sciences to work with people and address their basic conservation values.
Case in point: In 2020 I attended a “listening session” held by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife devoted to hearing what the people of Cape Cod thought about a coyote killing contest sponsored by a local gun and outfitting shop. The contest offered prizes for the largest coyote killed, the most coyotes killed, and the like. One local outdoor writer equated such a contest to any other – a beauty contest for example.
The vast majority of the nearly 200 meeting attendees thought otherwise. Most considered it barbarous, inhumane, and cruel killing for fun. And what did the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Game think? Well, for one thing, the Division never would have even held the meeting had it not been pressed to by local politicians. Such contests were perfectly legal in the state because coyotes are not considered game animals and so are subject to extremely loose hunting restrictions. The Division chose to usurp half of the meeting with nearly an hour-long presentation on coyote biology because that is all it was concerned about – that the contest was not threatening coyote numbers in the state. This was its sole yardstick.
The contrast in values was stark. The local populace overwhelmingly wanted the unnecessary killing stopped. The Division of Fisheries and Wildlife cared solely about applying biological data to the law. And oh – just what law is this? A law so obsolete it still contains terms such as “varmint” and “vermin” and treats “predators” as pests instead of important natural features of the environment. Such derogatory terms have a strong influence on how we view these animals and the actions we take to protect, or destroy them (Bekoff 2014). It was quite an experience listening to a boat load of up-to-date scientific data being applied to justify the continuity of long obsolete and inhumane practices under an arcane law that ignores the values of the majority of the Cape’s, and the state’s, citizens.
The premise of the overwhelming majority of resource managers with whom I have interacted over decades, particularly in the US and other nations of the developed world, is that no meaningful conservation can be achieved until we have a reasonable idea of the status and distribution of the species and habitats we wish to conserve. From there, they anticipate some top-down intervention that will implement their professional recommendations. This fundamental misconception is the underlying flaw of much conservation as practiced today and, as well, for many decades in the past. It is simply not widely acknowledged that the science associated with the study of wildlife to achieve conservation is a tool, one of many. It is simply not believed that values are the basic foundation of conservation without which no effective conservation edifice can be constructed. Commented on by Dwight Barry and Max Oelschlaeger (1996), “To pretend that the acquisition of “positive knowledge” alone will avert mass extinctions is misguided.” The facts that people use to make decisions are in many instances of minimal influence in their decision-making process (Zaltman 2003; Akerlof and Kennedy 2013).
The most stark example of this ill-focused approach is well illustrated by a meeting I attended between the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and his Mexican counterpart held in the early 2000s. Mexico’s director had explained how for years his country had applied the US approach to enforcing wildlife law and had failed. They found that a heavy focus on going around and arresting violators was counterproductive. Only when Mexico shifted to having its law enforcement personnel engage local people and focus on informing them about the relevance of wildlife law and how it fit into each community’s values, did they have any success. This had resulted in Mexico integrating cultural values as an important component of all the country’s conservation efforts. I found the presentation inspiring. Mexico had figured it out. The US director’s response? “That’s regrettable. In the US we make our decisions based solely on biology. Period!”
Is this position so unusual for the US? Not really, as environmental philosopher Bryan Norton (2005) points out, a major criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency was that scientists there “consider discussions of values to be specifically forbidden topics of conversation. Norton goes further to insist that “attempts to separate factual information from value judgements have been the root of much miscommunication and dysfunctionality in environmental discourse.”
5: The Conservation Community Is Outcome Oriented
A fifth point is that the conservation community is outcome oriented. It wants to know the bottom line. It is increasingly focused on a measurable final product. And, as far as wildlife conservation is concerned, the values people possess are not a final product but merely a tool to get to that goal – the goal being the number of breeding ducks we can produce or acreage of deer habitat we can set aside. I would not be the least bit surprised if the number of wetlands acres reputed to be conserved through conservation grants far exceeds the total acreage of wetlands actually existing in the US. Why? When simplistic goals are set, the entities responsible for achieving those goals interpret their efforts in the light most favorable to themselves. As an example, I recall reviewing a report claiming that 20,000 acres of habitat had been conserved but, when I looked deeper, the claim was based upon the fact that a brochure costing $5 thousand highlighting the values of this acreage had been funded by the reporting entity and so they chose to claim the land as “conserved.” Though “goalsetters” may be satisfied, close scrutiny will typically demonstrate the goals have not been reached. Such is likely the case in most fields of endeavor where simple measurables are applied to complex problems.
6: Changing Values Is Too Slow
A sixth and frequently voiced objection to a focus on values is that the process is much too slow. The species we desire to save will be long gone before people’s attitudes are changed, they argue. Let’s consider three responses to this objection. First, had the conservation community begun addressing societal conservation values when the problem was first recognized, we might now be in the second or third generation of broad conservation thinking and many of our present dilemmas might not exist. Second, it is now well documented – views regarding cigarette smoking being an excellent example – that if children’s attitudes are changed, their parents’ attitudes may shift as well. Parents are affected more by their children than probably any other factor. Helping children develop a consciousness of conservation and its importance serves to influence attitudes and behaviors not only of their generation, but also that of their parents, leading in some cases to relatively rapid changes in, for example, recycling practices. Third, choosing an alternative approach just because it is easier or quicker, if it does not get us to the intended goal, is no alternative at all.
7: Values Don’t Always Match Behaviors
A final objection, recent in nature and voiced by some environmental sociologists, is that values and attitudes are not necessarily reflected in an individual’s behaviors and actions (see Heberlein for a comprehensive discussion of this concern). Though this may be the case, it is likewise true that values and attitudes are the necessary underpinnings for positive conservation behaviors and societal norms. As a result, our ultimate challenge is to build norms around our society’s conservation values. As Herberlein (2012) points out, “They are the key to changing environmental behaviors.”
Seeking a New Path Forward
We are fortunate. There are solutions to every community’s, nation’s, and the globe’s, conservation woes. We can reverse the declines of many species. We can dramatically reduce the threat of climate change. We can address the problems of desertification, water shortage, acid rain, ozone depletion, and deforestation. All the negative trends we see today can be reversed. But this can happen only if we are smart regarding how we go about the process – only if we identify the best tools available to us and use them wisely and effectively. My remarkable experience with Jack Turnell, the saving of the Saint Lucia parrot, and the conservation of the forest home of the monarch butterfly are indicative of the critical importance of values, trust, and people’s hearts in achieving conservation. In the next chapter we look at the importance of values from a quite different perspective. We compare conservation achievements and practices in two dramatically different countries and see what we can learn from the results.
Revoyage of the Mayflower: Societal Values - Conservation's Driving Force by Herb Raffaele offers a nine point framework for getting things on track by focusing on societal values and community action.
Nature comprises everything that surrounds us. The trees, forests, rivers, brooks, soil, and air are all part of nature. Keeping nature and its resources integral is crucial for continuing life on the Earth. It would be difficult to imagine life on the Earth with a spoiled natural environment. Therefore, taking appropriate steps to conserve nature must be a priority for the human race. Only human beings can save nature in its purest form with their power and ability.
As an Indian, the population has been our greatest enemy when it comes to anything and everything. I was born and spend most of my childhood in a place surrounded by forests and rivers. I live in a city now, but I do go there occasionally. And I see that their old glory is gone today. It’s just sad that we are not living in peace with nature. We should be more conscious.
The author talks about how most the conservation around the world is going on the wrong path, Modern Society’s Disconnectedness from the Natural World, comparison between Conservations and wildlife in the U.S and India, Ten Factors of Reputed Importance for Effective Wildlife Conservation, conservation values and beliefs of different countries, a framework for successful community-level conservation, er Cetera.
The book is around 80000 words or about 280 pages. It's very helpful to understand the whole process of conservation and preserving our nature. A great resource for anyone interested in understanding the current state of global environmental issues. A very good book that provides some insight into what we can do as humans to make our Earth whole again. I highly recommend this book to everyone.