What The #!!?** Happened to Conservation??

[PoliticalChic]

Conservationism certainly differed from modern environmentalism, but the idea that conservationism was merely or predominantly about preserving national public assets for future private exploitation and private profits from that exploitation, is an inexcusable perversion of conservationism. That may arise from the conflations of TR concerns about sustainable public access and usage, and about some of the short-term utilitarianism and “the greatest good, for the greatest number” fringe ideological statements and sentiments of Pinchot that many seem prone to deliberately misunderstand.
Likewise, while there are certainly fringe Left groups that wave the flags of their own perversions of environmentalism (who fully deserve as much disdain and denouncement as the fringe Right groups that have actually managed to hijack much of the business centric economic conservatism on the other side of the discussion). This is not to say that there are not significant, non-extremist differences between progressivism and conservatism. Rather, this points out that the median ground and give/take between Progressive Environmentalism and Conservative Administration (which seems to be what you are depicting with your interpretation of conservatism) are much more clear cut and of a different nature than the arguments we typically witness in the public discourse of environmental issues.
Human understanding about the interconnected nature of systems within and between biomes and the species that compose these biomes has grown. Much of the short-term utilitarianism with regards to nature preservation and conservation in general has changed, and continues to change. Our understanding of the issues surrounding our natural environment and our interaction with that environment has grown over the last century. It would seem rather silly to ignore the advances in learning and understanding to promote concepts that often failed in their goals because of earlier prevailing ignorance and misunderstandings about the natural environment.

"Human understanding about the interconnected nature of systems within and between biomes and the species that compose these biomes has grown."



Bogus.

I commend your titular selection for its succinct accuracy. All that followed was indeed bogus

definition Bogus
Adjective
Not genuine or true; fake.
Synonyms
false - spurious - counterfeit - sham - dummy - mock


Conservative statists at that, in what is generally an idiomatically revisionist rant of no relation to the modern usage or application of these terms.

The Economist -

...

Like many of England's early Freudians, Tansley was a man of the left...And his beliefs put him in conflict with a powerful school of thought in the emerging science of ecology. American ecologists had developed the idea that plant communities were themselves organisms, and had a natural "climax" state towards which they tended,...These ideas had fed into the new philosophy of "holism" propounded by Jan Smuts,...The idea of a natural whole into which people had to fit in an appropriate way appealed to various conservative mindsets, both in Oxford, where Smuts was feted, and in South Africa, where it justified the idea that native people should not be tempted by, or allowed, the industrial development natural to the more evolved races. (One of Smuts's Oxford supporters was J.R.R. Tolkien, also born a South African; the idea of the world having a proper, settled way of being that industrialisation, and lesser species, can but threaten would be a powerful part of "The Lord of the Rings".).

Tansley was having none of this; the ecosystem, a term he coined in 1935, was his alternative. Like the human mind, it was dynamic and shaped by circumstances. It was composed not only of plants and animals, but also of their mineral substrates and the energy they used. And unlike the communities of holism, which had a pre-ordained endpoint, ecosystems were the product of the forces and flows that made them up. While there were typical ecosystems, there could also be novel ones; wherever living things came together there had to be an ecosystem of some sort, whether nature had ever envisaged it or not. People powerful enough to reshape, destroy and create ecosystems, whether by design or not, were responsible for a great deal of novelty along these lines. With the ecosystem, Tansley wrote, "human activity finds its proper place in ecology."

The term stuck. The ideas, rather less so. The ecosystem is ecology's unit of analysis, and an approach which takes the flow of energy and nutrients as the essence of what is going on—which looks at the system, not just the components—is often the norm...[/unquote]
DREAMING UP NATURE | More Intelligent Life






http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1223&context=facpub

(snip of straw red herrings)





And as any complete reading of the passage would quickly reveal, Levin is speaking of the "superorganism" (conservative favorite mentioned above) definition of eco-system and the over-arching Gaian mythology in general, not the manner in which either Tansley or modern science tend to use the term.

p. 71 Fragile Dominion - (Levin 1999)

Which is hilarious in conjunction with the early statements regarding dynamic nature of ecosystems by Tegsley who coined the term, I can only presume that your argument is against how some individuals misuse and misunderstand the term rather than the way that the scientists, researchers, statute writers and epa enforcers understand and apply such terms? I'd have to see examples of exactly what you are referring to, and I'm sure their are instances of such just as there seems to be some confusion among some about decreasing tax rates and the resultant tax revenues,...but, I generally don't encounter those who engage in such practices.

c. “Sixty years after the ecosystem idea surfaced in the scientific literature; after decades of dominance on university campuses; after thousands of books, articles, conferences, and monographs; scholars cannot agree on the most fundamental matters regarding ecosystems. They do not agree on what constitutes the core characteristics of ecosystems. They cannot say where ecosystems begin or end in space or time, or tell us when one ecosystem replaces another on the landscape. They cannot agree on how to locate ecosystems. They offer no generally accepted definitions or measures of health, integrity, or sustainability. The state of the science concerning the ecosystem notion and its attendant ideas provides little scientific justification for the radical change in public policy proposed by the Clinton administration.”
Ecosystem Management: | PERC ? The Property and Environmental Research Center Fitzsimmons, Allan K. 1999. Defending Illusions: Federal Protection of Ecosystems. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

first you contrive an argument upon the botanist who coined the term and attempted to misrepresent him and his efforts, then you try to drive a wedge between the researchers and the advocacies by misrepresenting an author's intended position and statements, and then you end with a political rant against the science and how it is being used to the detriment who would prefer to leave the implications of the research and findings in this field of endeavor out of public policy debate and decisions.

sounds rather argumentum ad consequentiam to me.

But you didn't repeat this:
"Human understanding about the interconnected nature of systems within and between biomes and the species that compose these biomes has grown."


Good.


We're making headway.

 

[Deepbluediver]

The short answer to the OP's question: to many people did not take TR's message to heart and DID waste and abuse significant portions of the environment, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in malice, and the pendulum swung to far to one side. It had to adjust, and eventually swing back, and what's happening right now is people are fighting over exactly where they think it should rest, as if there was some absolute right answer.

I'm a fan of Conservation AND Preservation; as some one in another thread recently pointed out to me, two different philosophies are not mutually exclusive.

I have been to quite a few of America's natural parks, and I'm an avid hiker and backpacker. Having relatively pristine wilderness land is, IMHO, a great thing for our country. In fact, I wish more people had the opportunity to get out of the city and see some of it.

On that note, I also support not taking preservation to an illogical extreme. Most people know the acronyn "NIMBY", but I came across another one that I think is also appropriate to describe some situations: BANANA.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone


Industry and development are the reasons for our current high standard of living, and they are the reasons our society is wealthy enough to even have this discussion. I favor reasonable land use, and limiting the impact of any structures that we do build. For example, I think support drilling for oil and natural gas in the ANWAR, but with sufficient caution and oversite to ensure we don't have a repeat of the BP-gulf oil spill.

There are plenty of areas that are open to compromise- intelligent forest management is the halfway point between clear-cutting and walling it off forever, etc etc etc.

 

[PoliticalChic]

The short answer to the OP's question: to many people did not take TR's message to heart and DID waste and abuse significant portions of the environment, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in malice, and the pendulum swung to far to one side. It had to adjust, and eventually swing back, and what's happening right now is people are fighting over exactly where they think it should rest, as if there was some absolute right answer.

I'm a fan of Conservation AND Preservation; as some one in another thread recently pointed out to me, two different philosophies are not mutually exclusive.

I have been to quite a few of America's natural parks, and I'm an avid hiker and backpacker. Having relatively pristine wilderness land is, IMHO, a great thing for our country. In fact, I wish more people had the opportunity to get out of the city and see some of it.

On that note, I also support not taking preservation to an illogical extreme. Most people know the acronyn "NIMBY", but I came across another one that I think is also appropriate to describe some situations: BANANA.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone


Industry and development are the reasons for our current high standard of living, and they are the reasons our society is wealthy enough to even have this discussion. I favor reasonable land use, and limiting the impact of any structures that we do build. For example, I think support drilling for oil and natural gas in the ANWAR, but with sufficient caution and oversite to ensure we don't have a repeat of the BP-gulf oil spill.

There are plenty of areas that are open to compromise- intelligent forest management is the halfway point between clear-cutting and walling it off forever, etc etc etc.

Here, let me reset the parameters.

1. TR and Pinchot were not opposed to human involvement in conservation...and saw natural resources as a useful tool to better both man and the nation.

The modern scam is based on leaving nature untouched and restricting all human involvement.


2. TR-conservationists understood that preserves must be tended to, pruned, replanted...
....the totalitarians are responsible for the failures such as:
Holly Fretwell is a Property and Environment Research Center (PERC): Senior Research Fellow, and an adjunct professor at Montana State University. She spent a year auditing the health Forest Service’s 446 million acres under it and the Bureau of Land Management’s command. The effect of fifteen years of sequestration of public lands has been a disaster.

Thinning, salvage harvesting, cleaning deadfall are expressly forbidden by environmentalists, the areas are considered by the Forrest Service itself to be in immediate danger of exploding in a once-in-a-millennium fire that would burn so hot that not only would the seeds in the soil die, but also the dirt itself would be burned to dust. Fretwell, “Who is Minding the Federal Estate?” p. 54.



Perhaps I'll post an OP about the folks like Fretwell who are trying to re-institute TR's ideas.
Hope you'll read it.