Time, Space, and the River: Giving Voice to Nature
Robert Redford abandoned the idea of using Norman Maclean's Big Blackfoot River in Montana when he filmed A River Runs Through It. Mountainside scars from previous decades of clear cutting, driven by corporate decisions of Anaconda and Champion, had changed the quality and the image of nature. Redford found another venue closer to Yellowstone to please movie goers. While we have become accustomed to such artifice in the movies, Maclean's Big Blackfoot watershed deserved better. In fact, the point of this essay is that Nature deserves better.
To ensure better and wiser treatment of Nature, we would need to see the world from Nature's perspective, and to heed Nature's claims—to give Nature a place at decision-making tables. There are obvious intellectual challenges involved in this for Nature speaks with many voices in complex and often mysterious ways.
Perhaps a larger challenge lies in the test of our moral imagination—in our ability to step beyond familiar (though often contested) human measures of right and wrong and to stretch the meaning of those terms to include other species and the entire range of natural processes. Indeed, our understanding of Nature will always be severely limited if our perspective is based on the short-term needs of our species.
What would it take to imagine Nature as an independent "stakeholder" sitting at tables where corporate, governmental and foundation decisions are made—actively and persuasively representing the well being of all non-human species and natural processes? How would that presence change decisions? Perhaps granting Nature a place at the table would require that we consider the huge differences between the scales of time and space that humans use and those which Nature employs.
Most human decisions are made in political, economic policy, business, and land management domains. These time frames are far too short to accommodate natural processes. In politics, the two-year election cycle impels decisions; in economics and business, interest rates and quarterly earnings drive actions; and within federal agencies charged with managing the land, career systems require the rotation of field managers far too frequently for them to be held accountable for the resources they "manage."
Decisions affecting Nature must hold for decades because Nature moves slowly. The Big Blackfoot River is still healing. The forests burned by the Montana fires of the past summer will require decades to recover. Injuries and losses in the natural world cannot be repaired or replaced through good quarterly sales.
Humans have also defined space in ways prejudicial to Nature by drawing arbitrary boundaries on the land and sea. For example, grizzly bears in the U.S. Northern Rockies are protected under the Endangered Species Act, but legally shot when they wander across the border into Canada. Returning salmon intercepted in Alaskan waters never spawn succeeding generations of their five major species in British Columbia's coastal rivers. Counties and towns located in the same watersheds make conflicting claims on the integrity of these natural systems, usually in the name of "development." Indian reservations in the American West were shaped in ignorance of Nature's needs (to say nothing of human needs), and private property lines ignore the natural world, only accidentally accommodating Nature's requirements. Further, the barriers created by North American interstate highways would be considered callously abusive if humans were routinely required to cross them on foot to breed and eat. We, like other species, would often become "road kill."
Recognizing threats that our human constructs pose for the natural world, we at Kendall have sought opportunities to transcend them by giving Nature a place at the table where grant decisions are made. We are trying to take a longer view of time and a broader view of space—thinking and acting as if Nature is our client and human generations to follow us will be the beneficiaries. Some examples will indicate how we are seeking to pursue this logic:
- The Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine was removed on July 1, 1999 following a multi-year campaign with support from many sources, including the Kendall Foundation. Seventeen miles of free-flowing river are experiencing a renaissance in aquatic and marine life.
- Humans
are changing the climate over a time frame that resists short-term
measures, and in a global arena over which no system of governance
exerts real influence, certainly not the UN. As the map of "North
America at Night" illustrates, the human footprint
on our own continent is huge and signals oil, gas, and coal
consumption and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions which
fuel climate change. We have acted by helping to create Clean
Air-Cool Planet, a region-wide initiative to reduce these
emissions in the Northeast—premised on the understanding
that "…if the people lead, their 'leaders' may follow."
- We have supported the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), a landscape approach to the stewardship of nature, since its beginning five years ago. Ample evidence convinces us that land fragmentation is a threat to most species and in Y2Y we are seeking to promote reconnections along a large stretch of the Rockies at a scale that reflects the needs of keystone species rather than the habits and whims of humankind.
- Through
grants in the border regions of the U.S. and Canada--especially
in the Rockies and the Gulf of Maine-we are bringing Canadians
and Americans together to focus on common biological systems.
These grants, designed to encourage transboundary collaboration,
represent an explicit attempt to "erase" the international
border on behalf of Nature. See maps: Crown
of the Continent and Ecoregions
of the Canadian/U.S. Border.
- Because
fragmented land ownership works against Nature, we are funding
conservation strategies that embrace approaches to integrating
the management of public and private lands. Not surprisingly,
private lands often hold the greatest biological wealth and
represent key corridors for wildlife movement. Maps of these
animal "highways" and byways are rarely drawn and
seldom penetrate our consciousness. Private property,
which is taken for granted today, did not exist on this continent
prior to the arrival of Europeans. (The map entitled Roads
& Roadless Areas in Western Montana illustrates
how profoundly human road systems have penetrated the integrity
of Western Montana's public and private lands.)
- Limited public understanding of the need to secure habitats has provoked the adoption of politically contentious laws to protect individual species. This narrow approach may be due to the fact that people respond more readily and emotionally to the threat of extinction of certain plants and charismatic animals than to the broader and more complex needs of ecosystems. The Kendall Foundation is not drawn to individual species, but rather funds efforts to protect watersheds, ecosystems, and landscapes with the understanding that land use lies at the core of extinctions.
A
landscape approach to nurturing Nature is gaining favor, bolstered
by lessons from the emergent science of conservation biology.
Y2Y and its 2,000-kilometer reach may be the outstanding North
American example of this approach, but its logic is being acted
upon elsewhere by conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy
through its bioregional
mapping work. Landscape approaches to nature conservation
will need to be sustained over many years, a challenge that Y2Y
and other landscape conservation programs will need to meet in
the Rockies, the Northern Forests of New England, Gulf of Maine,
Bering Sea and elsewhere. Stewardship of natural systems must
be connected to a different clock—one which measures time
in decades—and to larger definitions of space—ones that
are natural, not contrived.
By securing a place for Nature at our decision-making tables and giving weight to its longer view of time and more expansive view of space, we would enable Nature to compete more effectively with the immediate biases and demands of today's generation.
Norman Maclean's Big Blackfoot River and its watershed will need several decades of good stewardship to recover to the point where a successor-director to Redford can remake A River Runs Through It without artifice or apologies to movie goers. Perhaps over that span of time—relatively brief for Nature, but longer than many of us will live—we will do better by Nature if we listen to its claims for time and for space.
Theodore M. Smith
Executive Director
August, 2000
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