Dear HCN,
Being an urban dweller, I
do not know much personally about grazing, but I do know something
about consensus process due to my involvement with co-housing and
the Green Party, both of which use consensus process. When it
works, its power is inspiring; when it doesn’t, it leads to
gridlock. It requires all sides to share some basic values, in this
case about protection of the land as a priority. In some ways, the
Colorado process so criticized by environmentalists may be ahead of
its time, but when will its time come if it isn’t tried and
tested?
More fundamentally, environmentalists
should apply our sustainability criteria to process, not just
results. How will a centralized reform system based in Washington,
D.C., fare when the next Ronald Reagan or James Watt comes to
power?
A decentralized system will be more
robust, warts and all. Just as our democratic system has some
checks built in via the Bill of Rights, and this will apparently
lead to the overturning of Amendment 2 here in Colorado, we need
decentralized control of environmental issues with a floor of
ecological values similar to the Bill of
Rights.
Maybe we can’t implement consensus-based
local decision-making instantly, but to champion centralized
control as the ideal will lead to failure in the long
run.
Dean
Myerson
Boulder, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Top-down control doesn’t work.
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