"Saving
the Land We Love:
Land Conservation and American Values"
Keynote Address for the Land Trust
William
Cronon
Introduction
Welcome
to
I
spoke to this group in October, 1998, when the Rally first came to
I
looked over my notes for that talk before preparing this one, and was struck to
see that my title then was "Conserving Nature in Time." I'm now completing a book entitled Saving
Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism
(forthcoming, W. W. Norton & Co., Fall 2006), and I hadn't remembered that
I was already zeroing in on that title and theme seven years ago when I last
met with you.
In
that talk, my main focus was on biological conservation, the conservation of
ecosystems and organisms and non-human nature, and my core argument was that we
do this best if we understand that the nature we strive to protect exists in time: it is neither static nor
timeless, but dynamic and historical. Only
if we recognize its dynamism will we succeed in protecting its essential
qualities.
This
remains a vital concern for all land conservation and hence for the work of
land trusts, but I do not want to repeat an old argument that you've heard from
me before.
Instead,
today I want to talk about another aspect of "saving nature in time" that
I'm discussing at much greater length in the book of this title that I'm now
finishing. Before I'm done, I want to
talk at least a little about the current state of environmental politics in the
United States, and why land trusts and land conservation seem to me absolutely
essential to the work of environmental protection in the twenty-first century. I'll try to suggest ways we might work to
rebuild a bipartisan consensus in support of land conservation and
environmental protection, and I'll argue that no part of the environmental
movement can make more important contributions to this effort than those like
all of you who work on land conservation.
Nature as
Cultural Landscapes
There
are lots of ways of describing the natural places we protect in the land conservation
movement:
* We often call them "natural areas," "green
spaces," "open space";
* Or we describe them as biological habitats with labels
like forest, wetland, or prairie;
* Or we refer to them according to regional landscapes like
the Eastern Woodlands, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Desert Southwest, Boreal
Forest, and so on (each of which poses very different challenges, ecological,
cultural, political: land conservation must inevitably change depending on the
landscapes and communities in which we do this work).
But today I want to argue that the natural places
we protect need also to be described and understood as cultural
landscapes. In the
City > Suburb > Working Landscapes
> Wilderness
One of the reasons I'm proud to be on the board of
the Trust for Public Land is TPL's great insight, which it embodies as well as
any organization I know, that if we fail to protect nature in all of these cultural
landscapes, we will fail to protect nature in any of them. TPL has always had the wisdom to recognize
that none of these is more important than any of the others. It seems to me that this insight is shared by
the land trust movement in general, and expresses one of our most important
core values.
Why do I say this?
Because the protection of nature is a cultural project, not just a
biological one. Whether we protect deep
wilderness or an inner city community garden, from a human cultural point of view
we are protecting a human symbol of nature. These symbols are crucial in reminding us of
the nature that is all around of us, crucial in reconnecting us to the natural
world, crucial in helping us raise children to care for the world that sustains
us all.
And let's not forget: these cultural landscapes, from
wilderness through working landscapes to the inner city, are equally crucial to
sustaining the national political consensus that protecting land and
environment is among our most vital commitments as a nation.
So what I want to offer you as we prepare to depart
is that land trusts are in the business not just of conserving lands, not just
of protecting ecosystems and ecological services, not just of preserving
biodiversity...but of conserving the human values those lands
embody.
These values are the reason why our
society has created technical tools like conservation easements and special tax
treatments for agricultural and undeveloped lands: we have declared a public
commitment to the public good that is served by such tools.
And because we do this work in the United States,
the values we seek to conserve have a peculiarly American flavor that is worth
remembering especially at a time when Americans are anxious about the role
their nation plays in the modern world, and when, at least on the surface, we
appear to be more deeply divided about core American values than has been the
case for a long time.
Core American Values of the Cultural
Landscapes We Protect
In
the interest of time, I'll be very schematic.
Each of the four cultural landscapes I've named—city, suburb, working
landscape, wilderness—embodies core American values that are absolutely central
to what we believe ourselves to be and what we aspire to become as a nation. [Because my time is limited this morning,
I'll omit the suburb from this discussion; again, the book Saving Nature in Time will have much to say about it.]
At
the wilderness
end of the spectrum, for instance, we are the nation that invented the idea of
a national park, and later on we created the first legally designated
wilderness areas in the world, concepts that have since gone on to have
enormous influence all across the planet.
We
did so because, as a nation born of the romantic era, we saw in our wildest and
most beautiful natural lands symbols of the sublime—sacred places where the
divine presence of God is most immanent in the world—and also because we saw in
them monuments to our most powerful myth of national origin, the long frontier struggle
to carve a civilization from a wilderness.
Although
today we also protect wild places to preserve biological diversity and other
values, we should never forget how deeply they are tied to American ideas of God
and nation.
At
the other end of the spectrum, the city at its best has
stood for the civilized world we have fashioned from our wilderness. Like each of these cultural landscapes, it
has a negative set of values to accompany its positive ones, so that it is
sometimes easy—especially (and unfortunately) for environmentalists—to view the
city as fallen, corrupt, polluted, unnatural.
But
this is not what we aspire for an American city to be. Remember the words of John Winthrop as the
Puritans were just beginning their settlement of
wee shall finde
that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a
thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men
shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England:
for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all
people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this
worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from
us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open
the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours
for Gods sake
The
notion that America is a "Citty upon a Hill" standing as a beacon for
all the world to see, an inspiration for what a community in the service of God
and the common good might accomplish, is deeply embedded in our collective sense
of what the nation is and should be.
Many of our greatest reform movements—from antislavery to
conservation—have been inspired by what has become a vision of social and moral
progress.
When
we protect natural areas and green space in the city, we do so partly because
we believe that even urban dwellers—perhaps especially urban dwellers—need
regular reminders of the natural world that sustains their lives, and that
green respites from the hurried lives we live in the city make urban life more humane
and sustainable.
But
notice too that green open space in the city has stood since at least the days of
Frederick Law Olmsted as an expression of that which we hold in common. Most powerfully embodied in New York City's Central
Park, our urban parks have symbolized the civic space where we gather and
affirm our membership in a shared community, where we reenact the democratic
values of a free republic so that this American experiment of what Lincoln
called "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not
perish from the earth."
I
don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that we live at a political
moment in our nation's history when it has become rarer for Americans of
different beliefs and convictions to gather in common spaces to affirm the
underlying values that they share in common.
This
is precisely what civic space in the city should do for us at its best. It is what all our common lands should do.
And
then there is the working landscape, which we know variously as farm,
ranch, timberland, mine. These are landscapes
which in European cultural history have sometimes been gathered under the term
"pastoral," an ancient icon of beautiful nature that
goes back at least to Virgil and Roman antiquity. (Indeed, many of our most cherished ideas
about wilderness in the
Working
landscapes are of course the parts of nature that sustain our material lives, a
fact that those who regard such landscapes as intrinsically fallen and profane
and desecrated too frequently forget. We
do not get our food or fiber or material sustenance from the wilderness any
more than we do from the city.
Wilderness
provides essential ecological services, and our hearts soar skyward in the
presence of the wild. But our material
lives are sustained even more by the working landscape, and we love their
pastoral beauty too.
The
working landscape is the land we harvest to sustain our human lives, and I have
said in other contexts that one of the most urgent tasks of environmentalism
and conservation is to reclaim an ethical and aesthetic vision of what I would
call the honorable harvest as a symbol of the human good.
Our
failure to do this is a key reason why some of the angriest and most volatile
environmental conflicts of the past several decades have happened on the
margins of urban and wild lands on the one hand, and working lands on the
other. If you reflect on the electoral
maps that received so much attention in the last two presidential elections,
and think about the states and counties that came to be divided by the red/blue
divide, you will quickly see that the boundary between working and non-working
landscapes has become one of the most fraught political divides in our national
life.
This
does not seem to me a good thing.
For
now, I'll simply note that one of the most compelling visions of our republican
democracy was of small landholders earning their livings from the soil and
building communities on the land as the best bulwark for defending democracy
and liberty in our national life. This
was the vision that underlay the celebrated Homestead Act of 1862. And it was of course the core of Thomas
Jefferson's vision of what would best sustain American democracy in the long
run.
Although
we long ago ceased to be a predominantly rural nation, this vision of landed property
as a foundation for both liberty and democracy remains among the most dearly
held values of the American people.
Protecting Land Means Protecting
Human Values
I
could go on at much greater length about the really quite fascinating history
of the ideas and values we attach to our national landscapes, and much of my
book Saving Nature in Time will
explore these themes much more fully when it is published next year.
But
today I want to close by suggesting why it can be immensely helpful to remember
that the work of land conservation is not just about protecting material
nature—plants, animals, and ecosystems—but also about protecting human values
and cultural landscapes.
Put simply: we protect nature because we
love the land.
We
protect preserves and natural areas and open space because they stand for some
of our most dearly held values.
In
the decades following the American Revolution, the
Rather
than look to the Crown, we now appeal to the
People as the source of legitimacy for democratic rule. And to affirm our love of the nation that the
People have constructed, we celebrate two things: the history of our common struggle to build a democratic
republic that loves liberty and justice, and the land that embodies our love of country.
History
and the land are the core of our patriotism as a nation, and sustain our vision
of what the
Why
is it important for all of us involved in land conservation to remember that
the work we do is about affirming core American values?
I
have many answers to this question, but today I will simply point to the
troubling loss of bipartisanship that has come to characterize our national
political life vis-à-vis conservation and environmental protection since the
heady days of the 1970s when it seemed that everyone was eager to call
themselves an "environmentalist."
By some measures, the percentage of Americans who willingly attach that
label to themselves has dropped below 20%, even though a very large majority of
Americans still say that they strongly support environmental protection.
For
most of the twentieth century, both of our national political parties,
Democrats and Republicans alike, strongly supported conservation and
environmental protection, albeit with different emphases and different policy
strategies. Most of our greatest
conservation achievements, from the founding of the national parks to the
passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act to the flood of legislation that now
provides most of our legal framework for environmental protection at the
national level, was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
We
too often forget that most of our key federal statutes for environmental
protection date from the Nixon Administration, and were passed with large
majorities because of fierce competition between a Republican White House and a
Democratic Congress over which was more committed to environmental protection.
That
competition essentially came to an end in the 1980s, and the consequences have
not been good for the environment, for our national politics, or for our core
values as a nation.
The
history of these changes is far too complicated for me to narrate today, but I
can easily summarize one obvious cause.
The late twentieth century saw a conservative
reaction against the state in defense of American ideas of liberty.
It is vital to remember that this American suspicion
of state power goes back to the Revolution itself, which was anti-statist and libertarian
in many important ways. Our Constitution
and Bill of Rights both reflect deep anxieties about the potential tyranny of
state power.
The conservative reaction against environmentalism
in 1980s arguably flowed from this source.
It represented not a failure to love the land, but a fear that the
environmental laws and regulations of the 1970s at least potentially represented
a new form of state tyranny.
The collapse of bipartisan support for
environmentalism (which to my mind is among the greatest losses to our national
politics in the past quarter century) was primarily a reaction not against
nature, not against the environment, not against the American land, but against
centralized government power and its feared abuse.
I do not intend to take a position today regarding the
conservative reaction against state power as expressed in environmental law,
nor do I want to criticize the Republican Party for moving away from its
longstanding tradition of environmental protection.
Instead, I want to express regret that the two
parties no longer compete nearly as much as they once did over their commitment
to environmental protection.
We all suffer from this change in our politics.
In my view, it is little short of a national
disaster for the environment to look as if it is somehow a one-party issue.
It is also very far indeed from being an accurate
reflection of core American values: all Americans love their land.
Land
Conservation as American Democracy
This is why I cannot think of a better place than
the land conservation movement to begin the great work of reforging a
bipartisan national commitment to protecting the environment and caring for the
land we all hold dear.
Because we work at the interface between public and
private land, we affirm the value of both.
No comprehensive vision of environmental protection can limit itself to
one or the other. Both are essential if
we are to take responsibility for the good of the whole.
We are not about assertions of state power; we are
about communities expressing shared values and working to make sure that the lands
they love will continue to embody those values for all time to come.
It seems to me that one of the greatest
contributions land trusts can make is to help all of us remember this great
truth. Public land does not mean land
that belongs to or is controlled by government.
Public land is land we hold together, land that reflects and stands for the
values we share: We, the People.
Against the heroic vision of government power that
characterized so much of the twentieth century, for good and for ill, we should
set the older traditions of republican democracy that have been part of
American life from the beginning:
* the volunteerism lies that
is so much a part of both our public and our private lives;
* the covenanted communities
of colonial
* the joint stock companies
that were modeled on these same contractual covenants;
* the remarkable document
called Robert's Rules of Order which without forced statutory authority
nonetheless organizes an extraordinary range of democratic decision-making
processes in all parts of American life;
* American federalism, from
the national to the state to the local level, yielding a republican government committed
to the practice of democracy on at all scales.
This is the true genius of American democracy: it is
owned and practiced not by the state but by the people, not just in government
offices and elections, but in churches, schools, voluntary associations,
corporations...and non-profit organizations like every land trust represented
in this room.
We do not just protect land and environment; we help
sustain the democratic traditions of this nation.
Remembering these democratic traditions can help protect
us from the political perils we currently face, perils to which the prior two
speakers this morning, Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett and IRS
Commissioner [for Tax Exempt and Government Entities] Steven Miller, have already
alluded.
The nation's willingness to give generous tax and
legal protection to land conservation exists because the government and the
American people have long recognized that our work serves a profound public
good.
We must not abuse that trust.
Land protection for the sake of narrow economic self-interest,
whether in the form of illegitimate tax benefits or lands protected to benefit
only the privileged few: we should hardly be surprised if these come under
attack, for they betray the core democratic values that our work should always
strive to defend.
We are given tools like conservation easements and
tax deductions because we serve a public good.
If we abuse those tools, not only our own work will suffer; so will the
public good.
I would add in response to one of Commissioner
Miller's earlier remarks that we should be careful not to impose such burdens
on local land trusts that it becomes impossible for small volunteer
organizations to do the work that Assistant Secretary Lynn Scarlett so
eloquently described as "citizen stewardship."
Although we should certainly set high standards and
oppose corrupt practices, it would be a tragedy if new accounting rules or
financial requirements had the effect of professionalizing land conservation to
such an extent that only government agencies and large regional and national
organizations could possibly do this vital work.
Much of the best work of land conservation is done
at the local level, and the IRS should be careful not to promulgate standards
that may seem to make sense to a
We will all lose—and so will the American people—if
new IRS rules have the unintended consequence that only accountants and lawyers
and land trust professionals can create and sustain land trusts.
If I'm right that land conservation expresses some
of our deepest American values, then local communities and regular citizens
should be able to participate in and lead this process.
At their very best, land trusts should be about ordinary
people protecting the places they love.
Making Our
Land Worth Defending
To repeat: Land conservation protects nature. But it also protects community and democracy
and our core values as a nation.
This is what the Trust for
At its core, land conservation is an expression of
our patriotism and our love of country.
Let me close with the words of a friend of mine,
the filmmaker Ken Burns. A few years
ago, the Wisconsin Historical Society, on whose Board of Curators I serve, was
facing huge budget cuts that threatened to undermine its ability to carry out
its mission as one of our greatest repositories not just of
As part of our efforts to defend the Society, we
asked prominent historical thinkers to write letters on its behalf, and the
most eloquent letter we received came from Ken Burns. Here's what he wrote:
I know things are tight (they are
everywhere) and quite often cultural resources are the first to feel the
budgetary ax, as if these critical institutions aren't as important as other
more 'obvious' groups essential to our safety like the fire department or the
National Guard. I know, too, that the
It seems to me that what Ken Burns said of the
Wisconsin Historical Society applies just as profoundly to land conservation,
so let me close with a slight modification of his eloquent words.
"I know...that the lands we protect have
nothing to do with the actual defense of our nation. They only make our nation
worth defending."
Thanks to all of you for the extraordinary work you
do on behalf of the environment, on behalf of the land, on behalf of the
people, and on behalf of what we want the
Copyright © William Cronon
(Please do not reprint without permission; links to this website are fine.)
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