Conservation Imprinting, Oak Savannas, and the Community We Serve

12 Mar Conservation Imprinting, Oak Savannas, and the Community We Serve

12 March 2024

By David Allen, Development for Conservation

My formative years in conservation were all with The Nature Conservancy. I learned how to raise money, and why raising money for land conservation was important, from some of the best practitioners available. That imprinting came in many forms. But one of them was around the word “community.”

From a very young age, I was fascinated by symbiosis – the close and long-term biological interaction between two different species of organisms. And I remember vividly the day I “discovered” that whole “communities” of plants and animals can enjoy a “close and long-term biological relationship” too.

In the same way that specific animals and plants can have “ranges” and be described as “threatened” or “endangered,” so can communities of plants and animals have ranges and be described as “threatened” or “endangered.” Everything has to live somewhere, and nothing can live everywhere.

A good example from the Midwest is the oak savanna – a distinctive plant community characterized by a mix of prairie grasses and wildflowers, interspersed with large, widely-spaced oak trees. Oak savanna once covered more than 32 million acres – less than 1% remains.

A decade later I read A Sand County Almanac for the first time:

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

I’m sharing all this with you because I am on a journey. I am white, male, and privileged. And I am finding myself tripping on the word “community.” Because where I came from it was used in a very different context.

Today we see the word “community” everywhere – but always, it seems, connected to the idea of “human.”

• “BIPOC” community
• “Geographic” community
• Community “engagement”
• Community “outreach”
• Community “involvement”
• Community “empowerment”
• Community “health”
• Community “resources”
• Community “organization”
• Community “conservation”
• Community “collaboration”
• Community “activism”
• Community “values”
• “Under-resourced” community
• “Under-represented” community

• And “the community we serve.”

When I started my career with TNC, we were regularly given information about why protecting land and water resources was important – to protect habitat for endangered plants, animals, and communities of animals and plants. At some level I understood that even being able to consider land conservation was a privilege, but I tended to see it much more related to economic privilege than to racial or ethnic privilege. Indira Ghandi is credited with having said that there is no conservation until people are fed.

Meanwhile just a short time ago, I conducted a capital campaign feasibility study in which the most important reason to protect land was for human use – forest bathing, through hiking, mountain biking, and so on. It was the first time I had seen this result in any form, and it made me sad.

I guess what I’m saying is that I still believe the “community we serve” is the land community. Humans can be a part of that, but they are ONLY a part, and in many cases, not even the most important part.

And I sort of just get stuck there.

I don’t understand why conversations about land conservation automatically have to connect to questions of diversity and inclusion, because conversations about diversity and inclusion never include other species. They never include oak savanna. Why does there have to be an answer to the relevance question (which I interpret as “what’s in it for me?”) before we can talk about the other members of Leopold’s “land community.”

In other words, I can get to a place where I’m willing to accept that there are perspectives I don’t fully appreciate, but I don’t know where to start putting one foot in front of another from there.

Except perhaps to write about it – here.

In another formative TNC experience, I traveled to Nicaragua to work with indigenous nonprofits to help raise money for a mapping project. There were five tribes of Mayangna on the border of Nicaragua and Honduras. They each had territory that they identified as “theirs,” but no maps existed that showed where one tribe’s territory stopped and another’s started. And without clear boundaries, they were easy to exploit (still are!).

TNC’s interest was in using GPS technology to help them map their boundaries.

The Mayangna were primarily subsistence farmers, though they supplemented their diets with river fish as well. But what I remember most was that within each of their territorial boundaries, they maintained a sacred space. Members of the tribe could travel through the sacred space, but only silently, without speaking, and never to hunt, fish, or cultivate in any way.

What TNC discovered, through the mapping project, was that the sacred spaces for each tribe were all contiguous with each other. This was something the tribes themselves did not realize before then.

That image – of contiguous sacred spaces, ringed by tribal land – has stayed with me ever since.

All around us, there are strong arguments for nature, wilderness, and sacred spaces having intrinsic value. They don’t need to have a defined human use to be worth protecting from human use.

I accept that I am on a journey.

If you are on a similar journey, I would be interested in starting a conversation.

Cheers and Have a Good Week!

-da

PS: Your comments on these posts are welcomed and warmly requested. If you have not posted a comment before, or if you are using a new email address, please know that there may be a delay in seeing your posted comment. That’s my SPAM defense at work. I approve all comments as soon as I am able during the day.

Photo by The ND lense courtesy Pixabay