Between Preservation and Conservation
Do Environmental Victories Hide the Damage Caused by Consumption?
by ED HUNT [MAY.02.03]

What's the difference between preservation and conservation?

This week the Sacramento Bee published a series called "State of
Denial." The "State" in question is California. The "Denial" has to do
with how this environmentally friendly state impacts the rest of the planet.

For the better part of a century, "concern for the environment has been
a cornerstone of California life" yet the push for Preservation in that
state has implications around the world, according to the Bee.

"With 34 million people and the world's fifth-largest economy,
California has long consumed more than it produces. But today, its
passion for protecting natural resources at home while importing them in
record quantities from afar is backfiring on the world's environment,"
according to the Bee. "It is exporting the pain of producing natural
resources -- polluted water, pipeline accidents, piecemeal forests and
human conflicts -- to the far corners of the planet, to places out of
sight and out of mind. California is the state of denial."

The past decade in particular -- during the Clinton Administration --
large parts of the Northwest forests were set aside from logging and
development. The spotted owl settlement in the Northwest Forest Plan
drastically curtailed logging on federal forest lands. In California
alone, 13.5 million acres have been set aside since 1992.

Yet those set asides increased the import of wood from other countries
like New Zealand and Canada according to William Libby, a professor
emeritus of forestry at the University of California, Berkeley. Today 80
percent of California's wood is imported from places like British
Columbia's old growth forests. Fifty years ago, the state produced the
wood that it used.

"We Californians are really not very good conservationists - we're very
good preservationists," Libby told the Bee. "Conservation means you use
resources well and responsibly. Preservation means you are rich enough
to set aside things you want and buy them from someone else."

That gap between preservation and conservation can be a hard one to
cross for many people.

California, however, is just a case study for the nation as a whole.

"We're the largest consuming nation basically of everything," James
Bowyer, an expert in conservation policy and natural resource
consumption, told the Bee. "Yet we find every reason in the world why we
shouldn't mine steel, why we shouldn't drill for oil. It's ironic
because we are transferring the impacts to someplace else. And then we
are telling ourselves what we are doing is good for the environment."

Worse, Bowyer adds, "we are magnifying them by turning to nations that
don't have the stringent environmental controls that we do."

A perfect example of that is Ecuador, according to the Bee. Where a
decade ago more than 90 percent of California's oil came from within the
state or from Alaska, today more than a third is imported from countries
like Saudi Arabia and Iraq (prior to Gulf War II)

Yet 14 percent of California's oil comes from tropical Ecuador where
biologically rich Amazon rain forests are succumbing to increasing
demands for crude. Whereas California's oil drilling requirements are
some of the strictest in the world.

Ecuador has a lot of paperwork and pollution, but little environmental
enforcement. The water in the rivers is increasingly poisoned by
petroleum and the cultural and biological legacies are being lost.
Meanwhile the people of Ecuador see little gain -- most oil revenues go
to pay international debts.

The Bee also ties California's increasingly preserved forests to clear
cutting of virgin forests in Canada.

"The volume of timber cut from national forests has dropped 80 percent.
At no time in state history have California forest ecosystems enjoyed
such sweeping protection," writes the Bee's Pulitzer prizewinning
journalist Tom Knudson. "Yet there is a trapdoor to this turnabout, one
that opens a passageway to more environmental trauma: The logging never
really stopped; it just moved to Canada."

In 2001 California imported more than 18 billion board feet from Canada
-- "enough two-by-fours, plywood, doorjambs, siding and other products
to build a city the size of San Diego." Per capita wood consumption in
the US is 2.5 times as high as in other developed nations and 3.4 times
the global average.

Yet, in Canada the logging is 90 percent clear cutting, according to the
Bee. Moreover the logging is now pressing into the important Boreal
forest which provides vital habitat and even plays a crucial role in
regulating the planet's climate.

"This is a classic example of not taking a holistic view," Environmental
consultant Richard Thomas told the Bee. "You do the cosmetic stuff at
home. You minimize your ecological footprint in your own back yard. And
here in Canada, you get away with murder. It's out of sight and out of
mind."

If there is a light at the end of the tunnel in this series, it also
comes from Canada, where a unique management systems allows fishermen to
make a living without destroying the source of seafood they depend upon.

While California and Oregon fishermen are facing dramatic cutbacks in
the harvest of several species of rockfish that have been pushed to the
brink of extinction, Canada's fishermen earn a six figure income and
ship three quarters of their catch to California's seafood markets. They
management system uses individual quotas to give fishermen a stake in
the future of the resource, not just the fish in the net.

"In British Columbia, that system is a federal management plan that is
turning commercial fishermen into conservationists by giving them an
ownership stake in the fish of the sea," according to the Bee. "With
legal title to an average of 610,000 pounds of rockfish a year, trawlers
no longer race to sea in a competitive dash for fish. They work at their
own pace, dragging their nets when prices are good. Most fish less - and
catch less - but earn more."

The result is a more profitable, and less wasteful fishery. It succeeds
because it invests the harvesters of natural resources as conservationists.

Such a system is being studied now for US waters, and combined with
no-take zones there is hope for the future conservation of Pacific fishing.

So where does that leave us?

With energy, conservation means using less, using more efficiently and
using A LOT more renewable sources of energy which are now becoming cost
competitive with fossil fuels.

Yet as long as we burn oil in our SUVs we will rely increasingly on
places like Ecuador unless we increasing domestic production. Does more
domestic production mean drilling in Alaska? Maybe. It certainly means
that wherever we drill we need to do it responsibly -- setting and
demanding new standards for safety while minimizing impacts.

A similar two-pronged approach can be taken with wood products.
Conservation means using less, recycling more and finding ways to make
ecologically friendly alternatives cost competitive.

It may be a while before all US newspapers are printed on rice husks and
home are constructed of cob or recycled steel.

So until the US reduces its demand for wood products to zero, we have a
responsibility cut trees. More importantly we have a responsibility to
cut trees right -- to prove that cutting trees can be done in a way that
minimizes the harm to the larger ecosystem while still being profitable.
Like the fishermen in Canada, we need a management system where
conservation becomes the sound economic choice.

We have these responsibilities not only because we consume more trees,
oil and fish than we produce, but because we want to have a leg to stand
on when we try to convince other people to conserve their natural
resources for the good of the planet.

We as Americans -- of all people -- have a global responsibility to
prove the practice of conservation, prove that resources can be
sustainably harvested without ecological or commercial bankruptcy as the
result. Most of all, to prove it in our own backyard.

As consumers we can consume less and better -- but that's only the half
of it. Until all the natural resources we consume are renewable, we have
an obligation to extract natural resources in the most ecologically
sustainable way possible.

Not so we can sleep guilt-free at night, but so others can live with the
planet they wake up to.

-30-

:::| ebbTIDE is a weekly comment on the bioregional news featured in
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