Search Results

Maquipucuna is one of the 61 neotropical protected sites included in the Parks in Peril program of the Nature Conservancy. This chapter reviews the present conservation status of the Maquipucuna cloud forests. It describes the preparation of a management plan for Maquipucuna and notes that the preservation of the cloud forests of Maquipucuna would be greatly facilitated by the implementation of the plan for the Chocó–Andean Biological Corridor (CABCOR).

This chapter narrates the history and politics of The Nature Conservancy’s acquisition of the 97,000-acre Baca Ranch. The organization, one that is built toward the preservation of unique and endangered ecosystems, purchased the land in order to protect San Luis Valley’s famous Great Sand Dunes Monument. The chapter uses this example to explore the moral economy of water, its principles and equity, and how this concept also covers the social, cultural, and political factors that call for greater and more efficient allocation of water resources. It looks at the history of water development in San Luis and how this affected the overall development of the communities in New Mexico. The chapter finally connects several cases such as the Rio Grande Compact, AWDI, Stockman’s Water, and the Great Sand Dunes to the moral economy of water and showcases how they have affected valley politics.

This chapter explains how citizen science can be used to develop a conservation research program. It describes a specific case in which “super citizen scientists” used manipulative sampling to gather data implicating acid rain and mercury in forest bird declines, highlighting the advantages of partnerships with governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Focusing on the Birds in Forested Landscapes (BFL) project that was originally developed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the chapter demonstrates how citizen data can help address the effects of pollution on birds over wide regions. It also considers the BFL's collaboration with The Nature Conservancy as well as new research using data from another citizen science project, the Breeding Bird Survey, to develop a program for investigating significant conservation issues for birds and for translating science for policy and management.

Palmyra Atoll receives 13 feet of rain because of its location in the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Ancient Polynesians first colonized Palmyra, later it was developed into a copra plantation. Palmyra was used as base in WWII and airstrip construction affected the coral reef circulation. The privately owned island was the site of a double-murder and piracy of a yacht in 1974. A failed rat eradication effort in 2002 further affected the rainforest. Ants and scales killed the largest stands of native Pisonia trees in the Pacific, but the forests started to recover with a second attempt at rat eradication by Island Conservation eradication in 2011 that was successful. Palmyra was purchased by The Nature Conservancy and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. A marine lab is studying climate change in the Palmyra, and now rat-free, Palmyra is planned to be the site of reintroduction of the endangered the Christmas Island Warbler.

In 1973, George Lindsay, one of Baja California’s most eminent botanists, visited the islands of the Sea of Cortés together with Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Kenneth Bechtel. Lindbergh, one of the most celebrated popular heroes of the twentieth century, had become by that time a committed conservationist, interested in the preservation of whales and in the conservation of nature at large. Joseph Wood Krutch, a naturalist, had written The Forgotten Peninsula, one of the first natural history descriptions of Baja California. George Lindsay had helped organize a series of scientific explorations into the Sea of Cortés and the peninsula of Baja California, first from the San Diego Natural History Museum, and later from the California Academy of Sciences (Banks 1962a,b; Lindsay 1962, 1964, 1966, 1970; Wiggins 1962). Kenneth Bechtel, a philanthropist from San Francisco, had given financial support to the Audubon Society in the 1950s and 1960s to study the sea bird rookery at Isla Rasa, which had been decreed a protected area by the Mexican government in 1962. Bechtel was interested in showing the Sea of Cortés to people who might be aroused by its astounding natural beauty and who might help to protect it. For this purpose, he organized the trip and invited Lindbergh to visit the region. The group flew a chartered Catalina flying-boat that allowed them to get to small and remote islands. They landed in the water and then piloted up to the beach so they could have shade under the wing. They visited many of the islands, starting from Consag north of Bahía de los Ángeles, and ending up in Espíritu Santo, east of the Bay of La Paz. It was a wonderful and memorable trip. Two or three months later, both Lindbergh and Lindsay traveled to Mexico City to watch the Mexican premiere of a documentary film on the Sea of Cortés by the California Academy of Sciences that Kenneth Bechtel had sponsored (see chap. 1). Taking advantage of the opportunity, and also of his immense popularity, Charles Lindbergh requested to see the president of Mexico, Luis Echeverría.

We now provide a parsimonious framework for recasting the paradox so that it can be acted on. Our framework of ecosystem management regimes is used in the following chapters to resolve the impasse between ecologists and engineers. In so doing, it integrates engineering more positively into ecosystem management than is currently done. The goal of ecosystem management is a twofold recoupling: where decision makers are managing for reliable ecosystem services, they are also improving the associated ecological functions; and where they are managing for improved ecological functions, they are better ensuring the reliability of ecosystem services associated with those functions. In practice, improvements in ecosystem functions may range from preservation or restoration of self-sustaining processes to the rehabilitation of functions by reintroducing to the ecosystem something like the complexity and unpredictability they once had. The recoupling of functions and services that have been improved varies by the type of management (more formally, the management regime) relied on by decision makers, where the principal task facing the decision maker is to best match the management regime to the ecosystem in question. A “regime” can be thought of as a distinct and coherent way of perceiving, learning, and behaving in terms of variables discussed more frilly below and summarized in table 4.3 at the end of this chapter (for more on policy and ecological regimes in ecosystem management, see Norton 1995, p. 134; Berry et al. 1998; for a discussion of regime theory, see Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986). To summarize our argument, while ecosystems are internally dynamic and complex, they also vary along a gradient in terms of their human population densities, extraction, and other significant features discussed in chapter 3, such as differing models, competing organization, and multiple-use demands. In response to changes along the gradient, ecosystem management passes through thresholds (the most important being limits to learning) as decision makers move from one management regime to another. The thresholds, in fact, are best thought of as gradual transitions between modes and models of learning about ecosystems.

The rains have forsaken El Cuervo for nearly a year, and the mountain-ringed plain that used to be a prairie is as naked as a parking lot. Not a blade of grass is in sight, scarcely a bush. A few low mesquites, defoliated and dormant, hug the parched ground, the wind having packed into their thorny embrace the dried-out stems of last year’s tumbleweeds. Except in the burrows of the kangaroo rats, nothing can be hidden here. A lost coin or key would shout its presence, much as the potsherds do on the mounds of the ancient pueblo by the arroyo. Every edible thing has been consumed, every plant nipped off at the level of the ground. Even the soil is leaving, blown away, tons to the acre, by winds that sweep down from the Sierra Madre, a dozen miles to the west. If you were to make your way to the top of one of the chipped-tooth peaks of the sierra (no small task), you would be able to look down into great canyons. One of those canyons belongs to the Río Gavilán, where in 1936 Aldo Leopold glimpsed a kind of ecological heaven that no longer exists. From atop the peak you would also see for great distances, certainly as far as Janos, the crossroads and market town through which nearly every visitor to this northwest corner of Chihuahua passes, and on a dustless day you might see the gritty penumbra of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, far on the northeastern horizon. The air is dry, and here it is empty of pollution, which makes El Cuervo and its environs a good place for looking long distances, even into the past. One way to understand changes in the land is to visit a place that shows how things used to be. That’s what Leopold realized when he visited the Río Gavilán. He saw it as a fragment of the Southwest that had escaped the pressures of white settlement, and he recognized it as a mirror of how Arizona and New Mexico used to be, back in the days when the Apaches still roamed their homeland in freedom.

I Sat down the other night to do something I had not done in a long time: read the United States Constitution. Though a short document, only some twelve or thirteen double-columned pages in most printings, it was writing I had not looked at for over a decade. Yet I am an historian of this country. My excuse is that there is not enough time to read most things even once, and twice or more is out of the question. It is a poor excuse; some things we really ought to read more than once in a lifetime—ought to read every year, like Emily Dickinson’s poetry or Henry Thoreau’s book about that pond in Massachusetts. The Constitution is a piece of writing I would recommend reading no more than once a decade. It hasn’t got much of a plot. The language is clear and easy, but lacks eloquence. Its single great virtue is its plain sensibleness, a virtue that has, with many glaring exceptions, stayed with us and become one of our most attractive national qualities. We like to think we are a level-headed people and that this document epitomizes our level-headedness. In a world that often seems to have gone plumb crazy into one fanaticism or another, the Constitution reassures us with its good sense. We can look back to it with relief that our political system was framed by wise, far-sighted people; and unsure today whether we could improve on their wisdom, we usually leave it alone. Now and then we take the document out and actually read it. There is, however, one glaring omission in the Constitution, so immense and damaging that I believe we ought to try to repair it. Nowhere in all the sections, articles, and amendments is there any mention of the American land and our rights and responsibilities pertaining thereto. I find the word “land” appearing only once, and then it refers to rules governing the capture of prisoners “on Land and Water.”