Dear HCN,
I read with interest your
issue featuring community-based approaches to conservation (HCN,
5/13/96). Mike McCloskey’s essay illustrates the concerns of many
since, in his view, locally based conservation would disempower the
heavily urban constituencies of the Sierra Club, and by extension,
other national environmental organizations.
That
concern is perhaps the most compelling reason why environmental
groups such as the Sierra Club should participate in local
conservation initiatives. Up to now, environmentalists have been
much more successful in defining the limits of development than in
addressing what may be the key issue for environmentalists today:
how development can be sustained economically, socially and
environmentally.
The Ford Foundation, for some
time now, has supported organizations and individuals who seek
locally based solutions to the complex set of issues and challenges
regarding conservation and management of natural resources. In much
of the world where the foundation works, locally based approaches
to conservation have served local people well; indigenous peoples
in local communities have become the protectors and stewards of
wild land from which traditionally they had been
excluded.
Here in this country, federal lands are
frequently a battleground where industries that seek to extract
resources struggle for advantage over environmentalists who seek to
preserve the land and its ecosystems. Often emotional, nearly
always polarized, these debates play out with local communities
caught in the middle, powerless as outside interests and experts
make decisions regarding lands and resources on which community
livelihoods depend. The emergence of locally based conservation in
this country is a hopeful sign that new, positive relationships
between human communities and their landscapes can be achieved to
work toward mutually reinforcing environmental and development
goals.
Jeffrey T.
Olson
New York, New
York
The writer is a program
officer at the Ford Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Keep it on the ground.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
