After a century of treating the West's lands as a never-ending pool of natural resources, it's time to understand that the “West” no longer really exists, said Karin Sheldon.
“It's no longer an unpopulated expanse with unlimited resources,” said Sheldon, a former law professor who now directs Western Resource Advocates, a Colorado group dedicated to preserving and restoring the West's natural environment.
Sheldon's comments came at the 32nd Public Land Law Conference taking place at the University of Montana School of Law this week.
Sheldon spoke as part of panel discussing the future of federal lands governance, and she offered a visionary suggestion while her fellow panelists mostly spoke of tweaking the status quo. Instead of viewing federal lands as some box containing all possible uses, Sheldon said this: Why not bind the land to a central tenet - promoting and sustaining biodiversity, in this case - then manage the other uses around it?
Federal lands, Sheldon said, are America's primary hope for preserving one of the planet's richest troves of biodiversity, a country that links the tundra of the Arctic to the mangrove swamps of Florida.
That's true despite the wholesale assault conducted on America's public lands over the generations - a staggering loss of ecosystems, habitat and species, she said.
“Now, we know better, or at least we should,” Sheldon said.
Still, we lose thousands and thousands of acres of land to development each year, development that fractures the already tenuous links that tie our public lands together, she said.
Even so, public lands still hold value and resources that aren't found elsewhere, Sheldon said. What can be done to preserve those values and resources?
“What we need is a biodiversity land conservation system,” she said.
That means setting aside lands that are productive in terms of biodiversity, Sheldon said. And that means looking at land less through the lens of beauty and grandeur and more through the lens of biological diversity.
“Some of those lands are not what we might consider ‘beautiful' in a national park sort of way,” she said. “But they are rich in other ways.”
Wilderness, she said, is too often high, gorgeous peaks that move the eye but offer little to the biological set of bones that make up biodiversity. And then there is the tall-grass prairie, the head-high phenomenon that once covered vast acreages in the middle United States and has now been all but erased.
“Those are the lands that we need to protect, and those are ecosystems we need to restore,” she said. “It was a defining landscape for a huge part of the country.”
Then, she said, we need to link those lands to one another in a way that supports animal migration, in ways that support fully functioning ecosystems.
As an example, Sheldon pointed to Yellowstone National Park, which at
2.2 million acres is no longer an intact ecosystem because of development along its borders.
“Most of our federal units are too small,” Sheldon said. “So we need to stop managing those lands in a piecemeal way and start looking at them as something larger.”
That means getting federal land management agencies to work better together. Right now, those agencies work well in the field but do less well at the policy level, where decisions are too often reflective of political rather than scientific realities, Sheldon said.
Of course, getting federal agencies to work together and approve a biodiversity land designation won't be easy. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though, Sheldon said.
“This isn't something that's going to be produced by the next administration, but there's no reason we can't get started,” she said.
Part of the start is adopting a different attitude toward public lands, looking at them as a treasure unto themselves rather than a treasure to be plundered.
“The age for that has passed,” she said. “We have the resources for a new future, but they have to be taken care of in a different way than we're used to.”
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
Land law conference
The University of Montana's 32nd Public Land Law Conference continues Wednesday with an 8:30 a.m. panel on “Valuing Species: Is There a Need for Endangered Species Reform?” and a 10 a.m. update on mining law reform. A final presentation is set for 11 a.m., “Realizing the Vision: Next Steps in a Public Lands Agenda for the 21st Century.”
All sessions are in the University Center, North Ballroom, on the UM campus.
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