Lee Rickert
February 21, 2011
The more I take upper level classes dealing with our resources and how we manage them, it seems that our story is a sad one. Our world fisheries are overharvested and nearly gone, species are outcompeting native species and radically changing ecosystems, deforestation is occurring at an ridiculous rate, we are lagging on development of “worthy” alternative energy sources, numerous species are steadily going extinct, a majority of the United States will experience water shortages in the near future, landfills are filling up, and nearly everything we do pollutes the air, water, or soil with what we discharge as waste. Discouraged yet?
The future of natural resources management has the daunting task of trying to demonstrate to the world that natural resources are important, valuable, and directly linked to us and our economy. Former Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson says this:
"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. All economic activity is dependent upon that environment and its underlying resource base of forests, water, air, soil and minerals. When the environment is finally forced to file for bankruptcy because its resource base has been polluted, degraded, decapitated and irretrievably compromised, the economy goes into bankruptcy with it. The economy is after all, just a subset with the ecological system."
This is truly a tragedy of the commons. It seems that people are not going to realize this until it has directly affected them and their pocketbook. Then people will wonder, why hasn’t anything been done? who was in charge of all this? I never knew about that! Aldo Leopold says this:
"The problem is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a
people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among
whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with
landlessness."
Most Americans (and other people that live in industrialized nations) are too distanced from the environment because they live in the city. People in the city fail to see how they are affected by the environment because they have “little experience” with it. Aldo Leopold says this:
"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace."
People in the United States fail to see how good we have it. We have clean and readily available drinking water, nourishing and sufficient food, more than reasonable housing, clothes on our backs, excellent education, and countless more blessings and opportunities! Compare that to people who have none of those things and live in true poverty and neediness! Who better to give those things than those who have excess!
3 comments:
So what is the solution? Eliminate useage of our natural resources? Stop harvesting timber? Eliminate recreational and commercial fishing? I believe that the depletion of our resources has more to do with the pressures of an ever increasing world population and not necessarily with the natural resource management practices of those in industrial countries such as our own. You say that deforestation is happening at an ever increasing rate, but where is this happening? In poverty stricken countries where the people are forced to harvest unsustainably on already nutrient depleted soils. True, clear cuts are still happening in the U.S. but this is a legitimate silvicultural prescription that has earned a bad reputation because of irresponsible logging in the past.
I do agree with you, and it is fact, that the United States uses more fossil fuels and probably produces more waste per capita than any other country, and this is a problem. But again I ask you what is the solution? We have reduced harvesting of our national forests, but the demand for timber is still there so now we import it from other countries, such as Canada. Are we to stop using our own natural resources and just buy them from other countries? Waste more fuel and money in shipping costs? Eliminate more jobs from the United States?
I agree that the problems at hand are huge and overwhelming, but quoting Leopold and saying that we are all doomed seems more like fear mongering and less like a helpful solution.
I often struggle with a similar concept. The more I learn about ecology and natural resources here at UWSP, the more and the bigger problems I see. It's hard to stay positive when I hear about things like mass extinctions, air water and soil pollution, the global food crisis... How are we as natural resource managers going to solve these huge, far reaching problems? It seems way out of our hands.
In order for our problems to be "solved", society as a whole must go through a radical change in our philosophical views and in the way we live. Right now most of the harmful activities humans do have unseen consequences. This may be due to the facts that we do not fully understand the extreme complexity of our ecosystem, and that many of our activities have affects that are hard for us to see; pesticides may be harmful to microorganisms, too small for the human eye. Pollution runs down the river and changes the landscape a few miles down, where we don't see. Some affects are on too wide a time scale to be apparent to us.
We are the professionals who know most about these things. We should be pointing out the details to the public. I think it's important that everyone understand natural ecosystem processes and values like hydrology and nutrient cycling. Maybe a land ethic will naturally follow with this knowledge under their belts. That's my hope...
The way I stay sane is by focusing on small victories. We can restore native vegetation to the banks of a eutrophic Wisconsin lake to slow erosion and to suck up excess nutrients. We can establish and improve a network of wildlife preserves to help species in our area. We can hold workshops and presentations for citizens and maybe really inspire some of them to change for the better. The important thing is that it's a rising movement. More and more people are trying to live "green", actually becoming interested in the environment. It's up to us to push for this and to practice similar things in our lives and careers.
I'm glad that someone else has come to a similar conclusion, that we can't quit even in the face of these important problems!
-Nichole Besyk
Sorry My conclusion was not posted by mistake:
We can’t do anything about a problem unless we know it exists. We can’t comprehend injustice unless it has directly affected us. Stewardship is the solution. Stewardship is the proper allocation of what has been entrusted with us. We have the abundant resources, others don’t. People elsewhere live on dollars a day while we spend that on highly inflated and unnecessary luxuries. We need to realize that these things affect us all. The more we realize the truth of things, the more of an impact we can have.
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