People and nature: where we've been, where we need to go; A collection of essays.

AMERICAN FORESTS' HISTORY HAS LESSONS FOR THE PRESENT

"We need to find a new framework for working with other groups--businesspeople, labor unions, politicians. We need to learn new tactics and build strategic partnerships. It worked a century ago. It can work today."

In 1875, about a thousand concerned citizens gathered at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. There they formed the American Forestry Association (AFA), now known as AMERICAN FORESTS.

Today, when there are literally hundreds of green organizations, it's difficult to appreciate what a departure this was at the time. But the foundation of this organization was, quite literally, revolutionary.

Keep in mind the context of 1875. It was the Gilded Age, a time of great conflict between people and nature--an age of robber barons making fortunes from steel, railroads, lumber mills, mines. The government promoted westward expansion, Manifest Destiny. The industrial revolution filled the landscape with machines that extracted natural resources from the land. In the decade before the American Forestry Association came to be, the mileage of the railroads doubled. The ability to transport timber by rail from forest to mill to market resulted in a devastating increase in the speed of logging and the resulting deforestation. Government officials and wealthy industrial leaders forged strong ties. The relevant federal agencies of the time--the General Land Office and the Department of the Interior--focused on turning land and resources into capital.

It was a difficult era for giving birth to what would be called the conservation movement. Most people felt that the forests were endless. Nowhere in the mission statement of any government department was the conservation of natural resources identified as a goal. Not one American school offered a degree in forestry. No one formally studied natural resource management. In their search for solutions, America's conservationists had to look to forest management practices that had been developed in 16th century Germany.

When the founders of this revolutionary organization called for changes in abusive timber practices, their calls initially fell on deaf ears. To gain traction for these ideas, the AFA reached out to industry, and government to try to form partnerships and find common ground. In an effort to bring these diverse groups together, the AFA formed the American Forest Congress (AFC). The AFC operated more like a conference of interested parties than a formal organization.

By the turn of the century, several AFA officers also held prominent government positions: The AFA's president, James Wilson, headed the Department of Agriculture. Gifford Pinchot, chairman of the AFA executive committee, led the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture.

Spurred on by these political advisors and a growing coalition of citizen groups, President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to address a 1905 joint meeting of AFA and AFC. In his address, Roosevelt said he supported transferring authority for managing the nation's forests away from the General Land Office and the Department of the Interior, which did not employ professional foresters. Roosevelt suggested shifting that authority to the Department of Agriculture's new Division of Forestry, which did have professional foresters. A month later, Congress approved the transfer of authority for 85 million acres of federally owned Forest Preserves.

Thus began the United States Forest Service. The Roosevelt Administration continued its conservation campaign, and today more than 146 million acres have been set aside as National Forests.

Why did it take 30 years for the AFA to help bring the National Forests into being? Politics. In the late 19th century laissez-faire government policies put business in a dominant political position. And the activists were divided. Those who wanted to protect natural areas argued endlessly about "preservation"--keeping land pristine--versus "conservation"--managing land responsibly. This disagreement dampened the voice of organizations such as ours.

Gaining political support for the National Forest system meant that AFA had to be willing to negotiate, to consider other points of view. We believed then, and still believe, that managing forests for long-term health is the only logical approach to policy for the nation's forest resources. But we had to recognize that the money generated from selling lumber was a powerful political force. Accordingly, the board of AMERICAN FORESTS decided it needed to support some logging in National Forests. Had it not, there might never have been any federal forest conservation at all.

Such accommodations are often roundly criticized in environmental circles. But consider this: Eventually, the creation of National Forests gave momentum to the idea of setting aside and preserving the special places that now form the National Park System. Both John Muir--who pushed for preserving land--and Gifford Pinchot--who believed in using forest resources, but managing them carefully--were happy with that outcome.

The situation in 2006 has much in common with the early years of AFA. Now, as then, internal divisions and a failure to develop new strategies have hampered advocates for the environment. We in the conservation community need to expand our focus. We need to find a new framework for working with other groups--businesspeople, labor unions, politicians. We need to learn new tactics and build strategic partnerships. It worked a century ago. It can work today.

Gary Moll is a senior vice president of AMERICAN FORESTS and director of the Urban Ecosystems Center.

--By Gary Moll

WE'VE ACCOMPLISHED A LOT; WHY IT'S NOT ENOUGH

"Environmentalism is dead," announced Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in October 2004, when they released a hard-hitting critique of the environmental community, of which AMERICAN FORESTS is a part. At AMERICAN FORESTS, we find much in the criticism that strikes close to home. We agree with the authors: The stakes are too high to go on with business as usual.

Before we can chart a new future, we need to understand where we have been. Below, we summarize how the environmental movement has evolved and what it has accomplished. The essays that follow discuss the tactics that have been used to address environmental concerns and why they are failing.

When North America was first colonized, English settlers found a continent blessed with apparently inexhaustible supplies of natural resources. Much of the prosperity enjoyed by the colonies came from the vast forests of oak and pine: oak timber for ship hulls, tall pines for masts, and pitch for the seams of these vessels. By the end of the colonial period, the New England colonies had built one-third of the ships under the British flag.

A century and a revolution later, the nation expanded relentlessly westward. A growing population and post-Civil War reconstruction needs created huge demands: for wood, for land, for minerals. Entrepreneurs, excited by sprawling forests full of timber nearly free for the taking, mowed down woodlands at an alarming rate. Often, lumberjacks took only the biggest and best parts of the trees to the mills, leaving behind a wasteland with no means for regenerating. This destruction fueled devastating fires, sometimes burning entire towns.

In October of 1871, Harper's Weekly featured a story and picture about a fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin that killed 1,000 of the town's 6,000 residents. This and other accounts of fires burning across the land fueled public outcry over the waste of forests. In 1875, a group of concerned people formed the American Forestry Association (now known as AMERICAN FORESTS) and became the first citizen conservation organization in the United States.

This group's calls for an end to the abuse of forests resulted in the formation of the United States Forest Service in 1905. The creation of the U.S. Forest Service began an era of conservation. Preserving land for future generations became the central tenet of environmental policy at all levels for the rest of the century.

While the arrival of the conservation era was a giant step, it did not stop environmental degradation. By the 1960s, it was painfully clear that nature was becoming increasingly fouled. All the nation's major cities labored under a cloud of smog. More than half the nation's waterways were unsafe for drinking or recreation. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire. Sounding the alarm on pesticides, Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, caught the public's attention.

A newly energized environmental movement emerged. Many environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, trace their origins to these days. Venerable groups such as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society grew stronger and more vocal during this time. Rising public concern peaked with the organization of Earth Day in 1970, when more than 20 million people nationwide gathered to call for action.

Enormous progress resulted. By the end of the decade most of the nation's basic environmental laws had been passed: the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act, the Scenic and Wild Rivers Act, the Endangered Species Act. To oversee it all, the Environmental Protection Agency was established. These successes were clear victories: The air became cleaner, and the nation's waterways began a slow recovery.

Yet, tragically, this protectionist era also began a slow erosion of the public's support for environmental protection. Opponents of the new environmental regulations mounted a counter-offensive: Nature is a nice luxury, they argued, but some pollution is the cost of a healthy economy. Many seem to have accepted this message. Gasoline consumption in the U.S. continues to climb despite the fact that the scientific consensus holds that car emissions are a major cause of global warming.

Today, the environmental challenges facing this country and the world are perhaps more urgent than they were in the era of conservation and in the era of protection. The Millennium Assessment, a 2005 United Nations study involving 1,200 scientists in 50 nations, concludes that the earth's life-support systems have started to fail. But this far-reaching global crisis is more difficult for the average citizen to see than a forest fire. It's less obvious than a burning river. Unfortunately, we in the environmental community have not made this threat tangible to the public.

Yet environmental decay has a direct effect on human survival. If the globe's natural systems falter, we may not get a second chance.

In America, we have tried twice to create harmony between human development and nature. Neither attempt has been adequate. We now have an opportunity to get it right. We need to address the environment as a system, as a central element of a sustainable future. We need to act with the understanding that nature is directly connected to all global systems--be they human-built or merely human-discovered.

In presenting the essays that follow, we don't intend to bash the environmental work that has been done. We simply seek to document the limitations of what we're doing now so that we can move to the next stage. Our future depends upon it.

Gary Moll is a senior vice president of AMERICAN FORESTS. Jeff Olson is AMERICAN FORESTS' vice president for marketing.

--By Gary Moll and Jeff Olson

WE'RE TOO POLARIZED 

Can we bridge the red-blue, urban-rural, canoe-motorboat divide?

As a cub reporter in northern Minnesota nearly 30 years ago, I had a ringside seat to many polarized battles over land use. The main event: the slugfest over regulating motorboats in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

The Boundary Waters is magnificent: more than 1 million acres of deep forest and rock-ribbed lakes along the Minnesota-Ontario border. It is the land once traveled by the bark canoes of Ojibwa hunters and French-Canadian voyageurs. It is a land where wolves still howl, and visitors still travel by the firm bite of a paddle in clear water and footsteps on well-worn portage trails.

The Boundary Waters has a history of raucous conflict. During the early and mid-1900s, fledgling conservation groups successfully fought off road building, dam construction and logging.

The fight I witnessed in the late 1970s hinged not so much on environmental issues as aesthetic ones. The issue was this: Would we, as citizen landowners, allow the whine and roar of motorboats to disrupt the sanctity of this federal wilderness?

What distinguished the debate--at least in my impressionable mind--was it's sheer nastiness. Much of the agitation to ban motorboats came from environmentalists in the Twin Cities and Duluth. Some locals backed them, like Sigurd Olson, author and past president of both the National Parks Association and The Wilderness Society. But most did not. Or if they did, they kept their silence as loggers, real-estate developers and small business-owners marched through Ely, gateway to the wilderness, hoisting placards with slogans such as "Sierra Club Kiss My Ax." Poor Sigurd was hung in effigy. The fight over motorboats raged as an all-out cultural battle.

None of this, I would learn, was unique. It had happened before. It would happen again. The brouhaha over protection of the spotted owl pitted Pacific Northwest loggers and small-town residents against environmentalists and the Endangered Species Act. The more recent controversy over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has helped define red-blue politics for the nation.

These are not disagreements; they are war. What breeds such polarization?

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"Land has always been a contentious issue," says Bill Ginn, director of forest initiatives for The Nature Conservancy. Not much has changed from Old West range wars between ranchers and sheepherders. Disputes over land touch on vital issues: important resources, a sense of identity.

But recent developments have stoked the flames.

Since the 1960s, a raft of environmental laws have provided a legal foothold for lawsuits. Mostly, that's a good thing. "I tell you we have some of the best environmental laws anywhere," says Cliff Dils, supervisor of Umpqua National Forest in Oregon. One example is the National Environmental Policy Act, mandating environmental impact statements on potentially damaging projects. Another is the Endangered Species Act, requiring the federal government to protect imperiled species by listing them and developing recovery plans. These laws and others provide many opportunities for public input and the appeal of decisions. The appeals process "is an easy button to push," says Dils. And the result is delay. "Across the nation, things have gotten locked down because of litigation."

National environmental groups are also to blame. Land-use debates, more than ever, are national debates. They involve folks with different interests and values--and little familiarity with one another. Without a relationship, it's easy to be nasty.

Furthermore, advocacy groups stake out a position and depend on it for identity and fund-raising. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club don't grow their membership and raise money by negotiating away their positions on whaling or nuclear power. Champions of free enterprise at the Cato Institute won't be leading the charge for more government regulation to protect wetlands.

Finally, polarization is a sign of the times. As Washington Post political columnist David Broder recently observed: "The stench of partisanship is so strong in Washington these days that it is difficult to remember that it was not always the case that Republicans and Democrats were at each other's throats." The same self-righteousness has hijacked environmental issues.

Now, not all polarization is counterproductive. National environmental groups provide a voice that was barely heard a half-century ago, when many decisions proceeded smoothly because there was no debate at all. Polarization and controversy define issues. They rally advocates. And solutions can prevail.

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Despite hard feelings, Boundary Waters legislation reached some measure of compromise, allowing motors on 20 lakes, and banning them on hundreds of others. In the Pacific Northwest, the spotted owl controversy forced the forest industry to make concessions for the sake of biodiversity. "None of that would have happened if it hadn't been for the contentious and divisive public debate," says Bill Ginn, of The Nature Conservancy.

But some work gets done only through cooperation. "Both sides have to compromise and talk to one another," says Ginn. "Not everybody comes to the table, but things do get done when most people come to the table."

A good example of someone who agrees is Minnesota conservation activist Dave Zentner, a past national president of the Izaak Walton League of America, a conservation organization that emphasizes habitat protection. Zentner and the "Ikes" fought for protection of the Boundary Waters and nearby Voyageurs National Park.

For two years, Zentner has been trying to bridge the cultural divide between urban environmentalists and rural sportsmen to protect Minnesota's remaining wetlands for the benefit of waterfowl, fish, and nongame species. Unlike many urban environmentalists, Zentner is comfortable with hunters and anglers because he is a hunter and angler.

Keeping the coalition together has meant ignoring issues that often divide the two groups, such as animal rights and gun control, and focusing instead on habitat. "When you wash away the symbols and look at the mission, [you see] that 80 percent of the agenda is common," Zentner says. "People are starting to wake up to the fact that it is very healthy to collaborate on that 80 percent and not spend all our time on the 20 percent.

"We're tribal," says Zentner. "We go in our own tent." Success, he says, depends on meeting and listening. "You just have to be together, be together, be together."

And that is not bad advice for anyone working to protect the environment. Though politicians and special-interest groups often find traction in the politics of polarization, left behind are the pragmatists who must accomplish the actual heavy lifting. That requires forging alliances. Heavy lifting is a lot easier with help.

Greg Breining writes about the outdoors, travel and the natural environment for The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Wildlife Conservation, and other magazines. An avid hunter, angler and kayaker, he lives with his wife in St. Paul, MN

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--By Greg Breining

WE FOCUS ON SYMPTOMS, NOT CAUSES

We must get to the root of eco-problems.

It took threatening to sue, but the Center for Biological Diversity finally prodded the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to add elkhorn and staghorn corals to the federal list of threatened species in June. Once the dominant reef-builders throughout Florida and the Caribbean, elkhorn and staghorn corals--they're animals, not plants--have been disappearing since the early 1980's.

The listing acknowledges that these corals could face extinction in the foreseeable future. They have declined by more than 97 percent in the Florida Keys and other areas. But the NMFS points out that dying corals aren't the real problem. They're more of a symptom. In the final rule published in the Federal Register, the agency identifies a host of underlying threats to these corals. It singles out disease, warming oceans and hurricanes as the three most serious threats and concludes that all three are "severe, unpredictable, likely to increase in the foreseeable future and, at current levels of knowledge, unmanageable."

These are the more serious problems. But even these problems are just symptoms. The root problem runs much deeper. Consider some of the other threats the NMFS lists: silt, pollution, increased C02 dissolving from the atmosphere, and rising sea levels. Trace all these threats back to their sources, and most scientific evidence brings us back to the role human activities have played in creating or aggravating them. That's the real problem.

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The Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity tried to address this fact. In a press release issued in May, the Center reminded everyone that, technically, now that the corals are protected, major dischargers of greenhouse gases will have to "consider the impact of global warming on these corals" and could be required to change their ways. That's unlikely to happen, of course, but the Center deserves credit for at least trying to address this root cause--because, ultimately, it's the only approach that works. It may be more difficult than viewing problems in isolation and tackling them one by one, but treating symptoms instead of causes has a way of backfiring. Often, it only creates new problems and makes things worse.

In Florida, for instance, scientists have discovered that one type of hydrilla, a highly invasive fresh-water plant, is becoming resistant to fluridone, the only herbicide approved for use against it. Hydrilla, originally an imported aquarium plant, has spread to some 20 states since appearing in Florida in the 1950's. Now, researchers are worried now that this resistant strain will spread quickly too. In areas where hydrilla-infested lakes supply drinking water and herbicides can't be used, officials sometimes stock lakes with sterile, hydrilla-eating grass carp. But stock a lake with too many carp and they can eliminate all plant life, disrupting habitats and contributing to algae blooms.

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It's a sadly familiar dynamic in environmental work: Try to isolate and correct one problem and something else gets thrown off. Mistake a symptom for a problem and the real problem only gets worse.

Consider how different coastal communities are struggling with their fisheries problems. In New Jersey, sports fishermen and NMFS scientists are at odds about the robustness of the fluke population. Along the Gulf of Mexico, most parties agree that the red snapper population is severely depleted but can't agree on what to do about it. In California and Oregon, commercial salmon fishing was shut down in August when that fishery failed. The Department of Commerce explained in a press release that fishery closings are decided on a "case-by-case basis"--as they should be when people's livelihoods are at stake. But these cases are all symptoms of something larger.

The fact is, the world's fisheries are in serious trouble. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that almost 75 percent have been fished "to their limits, or beyond." Industrial fishing practices on the high seas are rapidly destroying whole ocean ecosystems. The draft of a new U.N. report points to bottom-trawling--in which ships drag nets and other heavy equipment across the ocean floor, demolishing everything in their path--as one of the worst practices.

Bottom-trawling is not a symptom of the looming collapse of the ocean's fisheries. It's a cause. The U.N. General Assembly is scheduled to vote on a worldwide bottom-trawling moratorium in November. The Bush administration says it might be willing to hold American bottom-trawling operations to their present size for the next three years and revisit the subject then, but that's all. Yet as marine biologist and conservationist Sylvia Earle wrote in The Sacramento Bee, "three more years of trawls razing the deep-sea floor could cost us thousands of years of marine life in the making."

Getting to root causes as vast as international bottom trawling and taking sweeping action to address them is not as impossible as it may appear. Remember the ozone hole? Twenty years ago, in August 1986, a NOAA research team led by NOAA scientists Susan Solomon and David Hoffmann traveled to Antarctica to study the then recently discovered hole in the ozone layer and try to determine its cause. In two months' time, Solomon figured out that human production and use of chlorofluorocarbons was a main culprit. In 1987, the United Nations drafted the Montreal Protocol, calling for these chemicals to be phased out. In 1989, almost 30 countries ratified the Protocol, including the United States. (The number is now 175.) That's three years start to finish--the same amount of time the administration wants to keep bottom-trawling.

The NOAA team recently provided an update on the status of the ozone hole and how human activities are affecting it now. The news was cautiously good. "The patient hasn't recovered," said NOAA scientist David Hoffman. "But it's not getting any sicker." Healing could happen in 50 or 60 years, he said, if humans stay the course--and, other experts add, if global warming doesn't undo the progress made. That's not a promise, but it is an indication of what we can perhaps accomplish when we shift our focus from symptoms to causes.

The parties to the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol--which aims to limit emissions of the greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming--will meet in Nairobi in November, the same month the U.N. will consider the bottom-trawling moratorium. The United States doesn't support the Kyoto Protocol either. But that hasn't stopped local and state governments from trying to address this root cause of so many emerging environmental crises--the possible extinction of elkhorn and staghorn corals, among them.

At the June 2005 U.S. Conference of Mayors, 168 mayors from 37 states committed their cities to the Protocol, and a number of states have now adopted greenhouse-gas emissions targets. In Anchorage, Alaska, where the Portage Glacier has retreated so far that it can no longer be seen from a visitors center built 20 years ago, Mayor Mark Begich was recently preparing to host a contingent of the U.S. mayors who've pledged to try to reduce carbon dioxide levels in their jurisdictions. "Instead of slides and DVDs, they can see some of the effects in Alaska," Begich told The Oregonian. "It has an impact. That's what we want to show."

In California, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced on September 27th, "We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late." Then he signed California's "Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006" into law.

Some people, scientists among them, think it's already too late. Maybe. But Schwarzenegger predicts that other states and countries will follow California's lead "when they see all the great work that we are doing. Also our federal government will follow us--trust me."

Call him a dreamer. Maybe he is. But at least he and others like him are trying to address this root threat to the natural systems that sustain us all. And that's a start.

G.K. Wallace is a Manhattan-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in more than 30 magazines, including Life and The New York Times Magazine. She is the co-author of two books.

--By G.K. Wallace

WE'RE TOO PROTECTIONIST

Save the deer, lose the suburban ecosystem. Save the sea lions, lose the salmon.

In recent years, basic safeguards of land, air, water and species have been weakened or threatened on the grounds that regulations are too protectionist. Environmentalists are so busy fighting back on all fronts, it's hard to peer through the smoke and see that the notion of overprotection occasionally deserves a closer look.

Granted, in most cases, more protection is needed, not less. But the reflexive impulse to dismiss every protest about overprotection or oppose every effort to revisit regulations sometimes damages the environment and environmentalism while shortchanging common sense.

Consider what should be an easy case: white-tailed deer. By the early 20th century, over-hunting and deforestation had reduced the population of white-tails to an estimated 300,000 to 500,000. Since then, stricter hunting regulations, fewer predators and changing land-use practices have allowed the population to explode. Estimates range from 25 million to 30 million animals. That's an astonishing recovery. But too many deer are crowded into the fragmented landscapes created by suburbs and exurbs.

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The economic consequences for the nation are heavy: $100 million in lost agricultural crops each year, plus another $250 million for ornamental plants. High densities of deer also cause an alarming number of deer-vehicle collisions: 1.5 million every year. High densities of deer also raise the incidence of Lyme disease. The total bill comes to about $2 billion a year.

The problem isn't just economic. A 2005 report on forest health by the New Jersey Audubon Society details the ruinous consequences for wooded areas with too many deer. Echoing findings from other states, the report found that high densities of deer "dramatically alter the structure and composition of natural ecosystems" in ways that lead to "overall degradation of ecosystem health," including the eradication of native flora and the spread of invasive species. Biodiversity declines. Some songbirds, their nesting places devoured, move out. So do small mammals unable to compete with deer for acorns and other food. "In the absence of intervention," the report states, "deer will ultimately destroy many native terrestrial ecosystems in New Jersey."

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When crowds of deer threaten ecosystems, it's time to act. The most effective, affordable solution is to kill a lot more deer wherever areas are overpopulated. But the public, and the politicians and officials who serve them, often balk at the idea that the deer must go.

Environmentalists could be allying themselves with erstwhile opponents such as hunters and wildlife officials to educate the public about the consequences of letting Bambi become a biohazard and the necessity of culling herds. This would have the dual benefit of helping the ecosystem and showing the public an underexposed dimension of environmentalism--the side that thinks about the environment broadly and cares more about systemic balance than narrow causes.

California sea lions present a more complicated case. Their numbers were severely depressed by commercial hunting, which lasted until the 1940s. Then came the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). It worked spectacularly for the sea lions, which now number 200,000 to 300,000.

Success led to unforeseen snags. The MMPA made it illegal to harass sea lions in any way, and these intelligent pinnipeds soon sensed that they no longer had much to fear from humans. Sea lions took over the Children's Pool in La Jolla, California, attracting tourists but also displacing swimmers and turning the beach into a fecal mess. During the last two summers, sea lions invaded the harbor in Newport Beach, south of Los Angeles, where they sunbathed on boats, almost sank a yacht and drove people crazy by barking all night.

Such irritations sound almost comical from afar, but there are more serious complaints as well. Fishermen grumble about sea lions raiding their nets and stripping their catch from hooks. It's upsetting, but not surprising, that gunshot sea lions sometimes wash up on West Coast beaches.

Similarly, each spring a number of sea lions take up residence near dams and sea ladders along the coasts of Washington and Oregon, where they gorge on salmon and steelhead trout, species that are already stressed. In August 2003, James Lecky, assistant regional administrator for Protected Resources for the Southwest Region of the National Marine Fisheries Service, testified before a House subcommittee that although sea lions didn't cause the decline of these fish stocks, their rising numbers and appetites could affect recovery.

What should we do? "Nothing" is a feasible answer, for reasons ranging from the political (it's risky to open the door to revisions of the MMPA), to the scientific (we need more data), to the sentimental (sea lions, like deer, are too adorable to bother). But now that we have protected sea lions back into boisterous recovery maybe we ought to acknowledge that all good things have a cost, which shouldn't be carried by just a few locations or professions or species.

It's environmental dogma that there should be no cutting in old-growth forests. Mike Dombeck and Jack Ward Thomas, former chiefs of the U. S. Forest Service, agreed strongly with that position in a 2003 op-ed in a Forest Service publication. But they added that younger trees, "some quite large," should be harvested because they become "ladder fuels" that "can carry fire into the crowns of old-growth trees." They noted that people who fought to protect old growth should realize that by insisting on absolute protection--no thinning--they endanger the very thing they hope to save.

In 1998, 850 double-crested cormorants were slaughtered on Little Galloo Island in Lake Ontario. Fishermen had been complaining for years that the local population of federally-protected cormorants had gotten so big that the birds were hurting the economy of the nearby communities by depleting game-fish stocks. The cormorants' advocates pooh-poohed the charge before and, especially, after the slaughter. A year later, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation released a report that correlated diminishing stocks of smallmouth bass with "the exponential growth of nesting cormorants at Little Galloo Island." This finding, the report stated, "raises serious concern for the smallmouth bass population in eastern Lake Ontario."

The massacre was vile, but it illustrates what can happen if people feel ignored when they air their concerns about an animal that is protected, abundant and destructive. Did the advocates who smugly dismissed the local communities' anger and anxiety feel a pang of responsibility for what happened?

It's indisputable that humans and governments are too careless with the natural world and must protect it better. Yet that larger truth doesn't preclude smaller ones. By protecting some things we cause unforeseen consequences to others, and so create new responsibilities. The environmental movement would benefit by mimicking nature's flexibility and openness to modification. For instance, it turns out that biodiversity "hot spots"--areas with vibrant concentrations of species--often shift from decade to decade. That calls for a similar nimbleness in protective strategies.

Inflexible, myopic, arrogant--such charges are familiar to environmentalists who work to protect our natural resources. The accusations are usually wrong. But when they aren't, they provide anti-environmentalists with "ladder fuels" that threaten the larger movement and scare off potential allies in the undecided middle.

Steve Kemper, a writer living in Connecticut, has written for many magazines including National Geographic and Smithsonian. He is the author of Code Name Ginger.

--By Steve Kemper

OUR APPROACH IS TOO PIECEMEAL

How can 600-plus green groups hope to solve anything?

According to the official tally, some 1,300 people attended the White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation in St. Louis two summers ago--a three-day event that kicked off the same morning Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf. Long in planning, the conference grew out of an executive order signed by President Bush a year before directing all federal agencies to begin implementing his vision of a more collaborative approach to managing our nation's natural resources.

One of the messages conference organizers came away with: if the federal government really wants to help, it can start by improving communication and cooperation among its own agencies.

That would be a start, yes. Consider, for example, that six federal entities were involved in organizing the conference--the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense and Interior; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Council on Environmental Quality--and that more than three dozen other federal offices were represented. Consider what the lack of inter-agency coordination cost a number of Louisiana shrimpers whose boats stayed sunk after Katrina until they were beyond salvaging because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard could not resolve who was responsible for what. "No one could figure it out," a former USDA official told The Christian Science Monitor. "It just seemed like a lot of confusion."

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But governmental agencies don't have a monopoly on fragmentation or absurdities born of a piecemeal approach. Earthjustice, the environmental law organization, has worked with more than 600 conservation groups. Critics, both inside and outside the American environmental community contend that these groups make their share of questionable calls too: The National and Arkansas Wildlife Federations sued to halt construction of the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project, for example, on the grounds that it threatens a wooded area where the once-thought-extinct, ivory-billed woodpecker may or may not have been sighted two years ago. The Pew Charitable Trust angered Hawaiian fisherman by offering to buy out their licenses to fish in the newly protected Northwestern Hawaiian Islands without acknowledging that other livelihoods also would be affected.

The Pew Trust didn't mean to insult these fishermen, but in its haste to achieve a short-term goal--get them to stop fishing immediately--offend it did. Similarly, there's more to the Grand Prairie project lawsuit than trying to preserve the habitat of one possibly misidentified woodpecker. But the larger concerns about how rivers, forests and fields are interconnected are more complex. Focusing on the simpler piece of preserving the woodpecker's habitat worked--as a stopgap measure. Eventually, however, those larger issues will have to be addressed.

It's a wonder, really, that any environmental problem gets resolved given how many agencies, organizations and interest groups it means bringing to the table. No fewer than 85 parties had a hand in negotiating the renewal of Duke Energy's license to operate hydroelectric plants along North and South Carolina's 225-mile-long Catawba River system. After three years of talks, terms were hammered out. Even then, 15 parties didn't sign.

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Meanwhile, counties along the river are fighting a request from the cities of Concord and Kannapolis for a water transfer to support their growth. The water would come from only one of 11 lakes along the river, but residents know that other parts of the system could be affected. The towns of Concord and Kannapolis believe, however, that they should be considered part of the system too. "We would argue that when you have a state or region, any area that is not healthy will harm the whole," Concord's city manager told the Hickory Daily Record. "It's difficult and risky to build walls at county lines."

However well-intentioned, addressing just one piece of an environmental system seldom works. Consider the case of Smithville, Missouri, where corn growers worked hard to reduce unacceptably high levels of the herbicide atrazine that were running off their fields into Smithville Lake. Between 1999 and 2003, with the help of state and federal agencies and the herbicide's manufacturer, farmers made changes in practices. They applied the herbicide at different stages and in smaller quantities. They planted buffer strips to filter runoff. Herbicide levels came down.

Atrazine isn't a problem in the lake anymore. But the lake remains on the EPA's national list of impaired waters. The problem now: mercury spewed from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants. Kansas City Power & Light wants to build a second coal-burning plant in a nearby town. The Sierra Club and other groups are fighting it. But even if the new plant never gets built, its sister plant will continue to operate, along with an estimated 1,099 other plants across the country that currently pump some 48 tons of mercury and 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, helping to make the United States the single largest emitter of greenhouse gasses on the planet.

Efforts to clean up one lake can seem paltry in comparison. But local action trumps no action--and in best-case scenarios, piecemeal efforts can sometimes add up to more than the sum of their parts. Researchers working in South Carolina recently confirmed, for instance, that there's a relatively simple way to maintain plant biodiversity in fragmented plots of preserved habitat: link them together with landscape corridors. Connecting the pieces has power.

Looked at from that perspective, the President's push to promote cooperative local problem-solving may accomplish more than expected--simply by giving people a chance to come together and connect. You've heard of the tipping point?

As a follow-up to the 2005 White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation, federal officials have been conducting "listening sessions" in some 25 cities across the country. They hope these sessions will give people on different sides of different environmental issues an opportunity to share their points of view.

The 9th session was held in Jefferson City, Missouri on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. All kinds of people showed up with all kinds of things to say. On one point, however, they seemed to agree: If the federal government wouldn't take the lead in confronting and addressing these problems, they would. "A lot of people today sent a very clear message," USDA deputy undersecretary David Tenny told the Associated Press. "'Either position yourself to help us, or where necessary, get out of the way.'"

G.K. Wallace is a Manhattan-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in more than 30 magazines, including Life and The New York Times Magazine. She is the co-author of two books.

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--By G.K. Wallace

WE DON'T SEEK BUY-IN FROM BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT

Can we reach beyond our silos? Create new alliances?

One of the big environmental victories of the 1970s wasn't really an environmental initiative at all. It was an economic one.

In 1975, with the auto industry reeling in the wake of higher gas prices following the Arab oil embargo, the U.S. Congress passed a law establishing corporate average fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars and light trucks with the goal of doubling fuel economy in a decade. That dovetailed with Detroit's need to compete with fuel-efficient imports. The giant automakers, notoriously complacent, responded with innovation. By 1987 passenger cars averaged 26.2 miles per gallon, up from 13.5 mpg in 1975.

A National Academy of Sciences report concluded that without these standards, gasoline consumption would be about 2.8 million barrels per day higher than it is now. That works out to approximately 14 percent of daily consumption.

Yet since 1987, despite improved automobile technology, overall fuel efficiency standards have dropped--even as concerns about carbon emissions and reliance on imported oil have grown. Time after time, environmentalists and their allies in Congress have tried to raise these efficiency standards. Time after time, they have failed.

Why? The 1975 act was backed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Ford Administration. By the 1990s, fuel efficiency had become an environmental issue, not an economic one. As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus contended in their controversial 2004 paper, "The Death of Environmentalism," environmental groups failed to negotiate with the UAW and automakers. They failed to work with labor and industry.

That failure shows how environmentalists have become trapped, seeking technical solutions to single issues without seeing the broader context or opportunities for new alliances with business, labor and government, says Shellenberger, co-director of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank, and co-founder of American Environics, a research and strategy firm. To quote from the paper Shellenberger co-authored with Nordhaus, a pollster, political strategist and market researcher who has run campaigns for the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense and other groups: "There is no better example of how environmental categories sabotage environmental politics."

It's just one example of environmentalists' tendency to create "issue silos" instead of broad-based policies that appeal to everyday values with buy-in from business and other interests, says Peter Teague, a former Congressional staffer and director of the environmental program at The Nathan Cummings Foundation, which funds a variety of progressive causes. Too often, Teague says, environmentalists are viewed as extremists unwilling to come to the table and begin a dialogue. "We [environmentalists] have had a tendency to create a monolithic other," Teague adds. "We don't know developers. We don't know Republicans. We don't know evangelicals."

Too many environmentalists think all they have to do is make a rational argument, critics say. But while the public proclaims itself green in survey after survey, that support for environmental causes is often shallow, well down the list of major priorities, explains John M. Meyer, an associate professor of government and politics at Humboldt State University in California and author of Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought (MIT Press, 2001). "The mainstream environmental movement is not good at talking the language of everyday life and everyday concerns," Meyer says. "[It's not good at] tying issues like global warming to everyday life."

In "The Death of Environmentalism," Shellenberger and Nordhaus noted, for example, that Japanese auto companies benefit from their country's national health care program, which gives them a huge competitive advantage. "If you were to propose that environmental groups should have a strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto industry," they added, "you'd likely be laughed out of the room."

Yet some legislators are beginning to see the wisdom of such an approach. Last year, Sen. Barrack Obama (D-Ill.) introduced "Health Care for Hybrids," a bill offering Detroit automakers relief from skyrocketing retiree health-care costs if they invest at least half of the savings in the development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Teague notes, by way of contrast, that filing a lawsuit over the habitat of the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest was a clever legal strategy: protect the owl's habitat and you preserve old growth forests. "But it exacted an enormous price politically," he says, "because right wing organizations saw it as an opening to paint environmentalists as the enemy of workers." Teague's question: "What if environmentalists set about creating a strategy that created economics that worked for people and saved the forests?"

Or, what if we saw insurance as an environmental issue? Commercial insurance payouts in the wake of Katrina are estimated at about $20 billion. Federal flood insurance claims nationwide will likely hit $22 billion this year and may run as high as $30 billion. Only recently have some insurance companies begun to address these financial repercussions of global warming, an opening for collaboration that environmentalists missed for years. Fireman's Fund[R] Insurance Company, for example, is introducing commercial insurance policies encouraging the development of "green" buildings that save energy and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

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Shellenberger and Nordhaus contend that environmental crises are opportunities for growth and innovation. Yet the environmental movement has shied from embracing this possibility.

"I think environmentalists need to be the change they want to see in the world," Shellenberger says. "The change that we want to see in the world is human prosperity. We want to see vibrant businesses that profit. We need to change in ways that really puts the ball back in the court of business. We've got to be putting forward a set of really exciting proposals for a new kind of development where business is going to look really bad in turning it down."

Jim Morrison has written about wildlife and the intersection between environmentalism and business for Smithsonian, National Wildlife, The New York Times and numerous other publications.

--By Jim Morrison

RELATED ARTICLE: Q & A: RUSSELL TRAIN, GREEN LEGISLATION PIONEER

"If policy is too fragmented, it doesn't have to be.

Russell E. Train was Undersecretary of the Interior when President Nixon appointed him to chair the brand new White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in 1970. The mandate of the CEQ, which Train helped create, was to advise the President on the state of the environment, draft legislation and provide leadership on environmental issues of the day.

In 1973, Train became the second Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a post he held through the Gerald Ford Presidency. He was instrumental is formulating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which required, among other things, that every proposed major federal action "significantly affecting the quality of the environment" had to be subject to an environmental impact analysis. Train also oversaw the passage and implementation of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Cancer Advisory Committee and National Pollution Discharge Elimination Permits. During his years as EPA administrator, catalytic converters became mandatory in automobiles, toxic pesticides were banned, the Everglades were saved from development, and the fragile Alaskan tundra was rescued from the damage that construction of the Alaska pipeline would have done to it had the pipeline not been required to run above ground for some of its length. Now 86 and retired, Train is also a founding trustee and past president of the World Wildlife Fund.

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AF: You've said that the Nixon Administration's actions and Executive Orders relating to the environment represented the most comprehensive set of initiatives produced in any domestic area in American history. In retrospect, it's amazing. How did it happen?

Train: They were heady times looking back from the rather dreary picture today. I think it's quite remarkable we were able to accomplish what we did. There's no question that the Nixon period saw the most extensive initiatives in the environmental area that our government had seen before or has since. Of course, there was a lot of catch-up to do at that time.

Nixon was smart politically, and he saw the importance of environmental issues to the country, the upsurge of interest culminating in Earth Day in 1970. He was also determined to neutralize the Democrats on this issue, or to take it away from them if he could.

I've heard it suggested that industry was not prepared to oppose us. There was overwhelming support in those days [from the public, for passage of sweeping environmental legislation]. Certain elements of the business community were negative, but they didn't carry much weight. The energy crisis didn't hit until after most major initiatives were launched. Then the tide turned, and it was a matter of holding the ship afloat. These days the whole K Street lobbying effort is much more effective.

AF: You worked hard to incorporate environmental considerations into government policy. Can you elaborate on how you did that and what your hopes were?

Train: I was at Interior when the Alaska pipeline was proposed. The process highlighted the importance of taking environmental factors into account in decision-making. It was probably the largest single private construction project in history, crossing all sorts of public lands, and this was before NEPA. We laid down, in effect, a requirement that the pipeline had to be reviewed from an environmental standpoint. Later on, that's what NEPA did.

AF: Around the time the EPA was created, there was some talk of creating a Department of Natural Resources or other cabinet-level environmental body instead. Why wasn't one created in the first place?

Train: During the Nixon years, there was a move afoot to have a Department of Natural Resources merged with Interior. There was some logic in that, but I testified against it, against building a bigger bureaucracy. I was opposed to burying environmental responsibility in a big conglomerate with everything from Indian affairs to reclamation. The environment would have been submerged. Creating the EPA as an independent agency was the right thing to do when we did it. It was important then to have a clearly identified, sharply-defined government institution that had a clear focus on environmental issues.

Later, I testified in support of making the EPA a cabinet-level department and giving it a broader purview. But if I were to revisit the issue, I'd say, "Keep it as an independent agency, rather than a department." One consideration is that one department is always on a par with every other, and [because of that] it's difficult for one head to influence others. Having the EPA as an independent agency gets around some of that.

AF: Has NEPA turned out the way you hoped and is it adequate for the job? What about the CEQ?

Train: Generally, yes, NEPA has been adequate to the job. But it requires support. It can be adhered to in a very fundamental sense, but you need White House support. The CEQ has to have clout, and I'm not sure it's working as well as it could today. The CEQ speaks for the White House and has the ability to bring agencies together. It has that power if it wants to use it, which the president does not frequently do--and not just this president, but others as well. The CEQ can cut across the bureaucratic vein. It takes diplomacy. One problem is the anti-environment lobby has been quite strong. Not quite strong enough to effectively roll back much legislation, but it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to move forward on the environmental front.

AF: You've often noted the interplay of various environmental challenges. Is federal environmental policy today too fragmented?

Train: Of course there is a crosscutting nature of environmental issues--forests, wildlife, transportation, trade, agriculture, public lands, climate, etc. There is a strong interplay, but that is what NEPA is all about and what role the CEQ ought to have, to bring environmental considerations to the table. If policy is too fragmented, it doesn't have to be. As is so often the case, what you need is clear direction from the president and we don't get that very often. The CEQ is potentially a remarkable institution. It just doesn't get used.

AF: How can the environment be better served today?

Train: Overall, we need a brand new political climate that recognizes the environment is a key area of vital importance to this country today and in the future. It is of vital concern internationally and domestically. And we need a President who recognizes that and gives it full support. That's what we need.

Florence Williams is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine. Her work also appears in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, OnEarth and other publications.

--By Florence Williams