A Social Movement for Conservation

(Photo by iStock/South_agency)

“Conserving nature” is not going well. Nearly all indicators of biological diversity are trending in the wrong direction, from habitat loss and the impacts of invasive species to extinction rates and the degradation of ecosystem services. Most governments severely underfund the protection of nature and have failed to meet the Convention on Biological Diversity targets; globalized trade continues to exacerbate impacts of invasive species; new threats, such as climate change, are emerging and are predicted to drive massive extinctions and ecosystem changes; and new agrochemicals and agricultural practices are putting ecosystems under further stress. The 21st century has not been good for nature.

This may be viewed as a government failure. Most conservation action is accomplished through governments and governance: (a) enforcement of environmental protections; (b) the establishment of protected areas; and (c) incentive programs to encourage private landowner participation in conservation actions. This has been the model for a century: governments pass laws to protect nature, fund and enforce protected areas, and set rules to incentivize private conservation action.

However, government action is contingent on public support. And while people like nature and want to live in healthy environments, the forces that degrade nature also have a constituency. The business world relentlessly messages us that freeing the economy for prosperity and jobs—which includes further exploiting nature—is a top priority. The conservation movement cannot succeed with the current level of public support: as conservation has become more political, it remains electorally weak. For all the successes of the past half century, nature’s constituency has not been adequately motivated to drive the opportunity for success.

Recognizing conservation as a social process, requiring a large and engaged constituency, highlights the critical importance of supporting political action for conservation-friendly policies. It may sound antithetical to suggest that NGO’s are missing opportunities to build constituencies, of course. Working with people is what NGO’s do: they welcome membership and have professional campaigns to advertise their programs and capacities and work with landowners and communities on conservation projects. But the NGO conservation community often takes the general public’s support for nature for granted.

More to the point, building a constituency for nature is a significantly different thing than advertising for members and working on projects. In the past decades, conservation has moved from establishing better protections for more protected areas as the primary means of conservation success to prioritizing business, entrepreneurialism, and partnering with private landowners and communities. For example, the Nature Conservancy lists four priority areas for their work—tackling climate change, protecting land and water, providing food and water sustainably, and building healthy cities—and pursues these objectives by to working “across aisles, across sectors, across borders” to do evidence-based science, drive policy, work with companies, and leverage new technologies and innovation. But as the fund-raising model for big NGOs has shifted from growing the member base to targeting large donations from corporations and wealthy individuals—and as they work to achieve project objectives—little in their portfolios signals an interest in building a constituency for nature.

With success in conservation so elusive, it is time to reimagine NGO priorities and promote more engaged and intentional relationships between people and nature.

Building a Base for Social Change

The good news is there is an appetite for societal engagement with nature. For more than 25 years, strong majorities of Americans have reported that the US government should do “whatever it takes to ensure a healthy environment” and recent polls show the environment rising into the top tier of political concerns. A significant majority of people (68%) report that they take time to visit green or blue spaces at least monthly. This interest in nature spans generations, ethnic identity and political party: Nature programming appears to be growing in popularity and environmental activism is on the rise.

Building a social movement for conservation may never been more attainable. The key will be changing this large latent constituency into an active one.

I argue that there are three critical components in building a strategy for social change for biodiversity. These are (1) engaging people in conservation; (2) building a sense of pride in people and communities through protecting their biodiversity; and (3) appealing to the self-interest of people.

1. Engaging People

What could environmental volunteerism look like? The Nature Conservancy reports 75,000 volunteers, while the Department of Interior is striving for 1 million volunteers. Both efforts might be thinking too small. About 45 percent of Americans attend religious services monthly; with nearly 25 million church volunteers, 17% of people attend services at least monthly also volunteer for church organizations. If this same 17 percent of the 70 percent of Americans who self-report as committed to nature also volunteered, the volunteer workforce for nature could reach nearly 40 million, an order of magnitude increase over the 3.87 million, in total, who currently volunteer for the environment.

The need is there. The National Parks and Recreation Association reports that 70 percent of Americans live within walking distance of a park and 68 percent visited a park within a month of the survey, but most protected areas, for example, lack critical monitoring information on the organisms the reserves are meant to protect. The suite of protected areas represents 13 percent of the terrestrial lands of the United States, larger than the states of Texas and California combined, sampling diversity and monitoring nature is a large and time consuming job: one volunteer contributing 100 hours of observations on every 10 acres of protected area, for example, would require nearly 30 million volunteer observers.

The appetite for engagement, however, is both large and growing. Platforms for voluntarily entering observations of nature are growing rapidly: over 100 million eBird observations were registered in 2018 and nearly every state now has a Master Naturalist and Master Gardener program. Volunteerism offers many social benefits, as well: loneliness is a serious social issue that impacts people of all ages and social isolation is also dangerous to democracy. As social connectedness has been replaced by “checkbook organizations” and the internet, conservation organizations have an opportunity to help foster an engaged society through volunteer opportunities.

Managing volunteerism is not a simple issue: an organization has to consider why they want volunteers, what they want to accomplish, and how to make the volunteer experience rewarding But there is much to be done: from ballot initiatives to managing information, leveraging voluntary expertise for nature requires thought, planning, and dedicated programs. .

2.  Building a Sense of Pride in People and Communities

What better way to build a constituency than building a sense of pride in the nature with which we live? A large body of scholarship describes the deep-seeded psychological connection that we tend to have with the places that we live. The campaign to stop littering remains a classic case of successful marketing to sense of place^: as the 20^th century became the century of plastics, wrapping, and waste, the federal, state and local governments made concerted efforts focused on building a sense of pride of place to reduce littering. It worked.

If being human predisposes us to love where we live and to love nature, then conservation organizations should work on campaigns that promote our pride in our local natural ecosystems and species. Yet, this is, by and large, not what we see. Nature programming remains focused on showing us the wonders of nature in the remotest parts of the world, while advertise the amazing work they do around the world. These make great photo opportunities, but can send the message that nature in our neighborhoods is unimportant, unthreatened, or uninteresting. What a de-motivator!

I happen to live in a county with several narrowly distributed species that are at risk of extinction. It would be both obvious and easy to change the information signage for my county to not just report on how many people live in the county, but to include the special species that live there and nowhere else in the world: Welcome to Yolo County, home of the globally endangered Tuctoria mucronata.

Conservation organizations have the opportunity to partner with local governments to build a sense of pride of place and stewardship of nature, making nature real for people where they live: “Welcome to Humboldt County home to salmon and more kinds of slugs than anywhere else.” “Welcome to Crown of the Continent, America’s great wilderness.” There are many opportunities to use simple signs to advertise local, unique biodiversity where we live and work. Making people proud prepares them to engage. Conservation NGO’s could be instrumental in helping to build nature-based local pride of place.

3. Appealing to Self-Interest

An enormous literature has emerged on the personal health benefits of spending time in nature. From increasing our personal happiness to prolonging our lives, spending time in green or blue places, engaging with animals, and getting one’s fingers dirty with soil and plants is good for our health. Stories of the personal benefits of communing with nature, even in urban settings, are putting us on the cusp of broad societal recognition of the tangible benefits of access to nature.

A conceptual model of the challenge of unifying the many individuals who work on environmental campaigns into a constituency that can leverage political influence for social change.

The big conservation NGO’s have large membership base. These organizations should be asking themselves, how can they help their members get more out of nature than the tote bag or the magazine? How can they help members connect to nature in a more personal way? Many conservation organizations offer special member trips to spectacular places in nature, but the goal there isn’t to build an active constituency for nature but the loyalty of wealthy donors. We read about children who live just miles from the ocean, but never have the opportunity to visit: how can we expect those people to vote for nature, donate to nature? A 21st century challenge is for conservation NGO’s to take our existing knowledge of the health benefits of nature and leverage this into a program to both build members and build nature-centered activities among those members.

There are myriad opportunities. From small land trusts to citizen science projects, numerous programs exist that help people connect to nature. Numerous small organizations have emerged with the expressed aim of developing green spaces for under-served populations. But mainstream conservation organizations have, by and large, watched these developments from the sidelines. These small programs doing the work of putting people in contact with nature could benefit from the help, cooperation, and wisdom that the large conservation organizations have gained over the decades. These, often urban, greenspace programs need the collaboration of larger land trusts to best leverage private property easements and protected areas to meet their goals. The big conservation NGO’s have moved toward partnership with private landowners and companies, but mostly missed opportunities to partner with small NGOs that are doing important work of helping people realize their self-interest in nature.

Creating a Social Movement for Biodiversity

It would be naïve to think that changing the politics of conservation will be easy. When it comes to protecting the environment, the list is daunting: environmental justice, mining waste, plastics in the environment, climate change, access to clean water, species extinction and others clutter the landscape of concerns. We must create a common culture of caring for the environment because it is difficult for one person to actively engage; without a social movement, we look and feel like small isolated crowds of angry extremists. Large conservation organizations are positioned to make what is already a majority opinion into a movement, making the green majority needs feel part of the social mainstream.

The larger goal of conservation must be organizing people’s interests to put sufficient social pressure on leaders to adopt the institutional changes to create conservation success. In order to do that, people need to feel a part of a larger whole, a constituency for a sustainable future for people and the planet (Figure 1).  The challenge for those concerned about biodiversity, and other environmental issues, is creating the big vision that embraces the idea of improved human well-being that moves beyond inadequate economic indicators. Achieving this goal requires a big constituency for nature. While the Green New Deal has the potential to be the face of this synthetic movement, it has already been pitched into an extremist corner from which it may be difficult to politically recover.

Adopting societal change as a goal can lead to new directions for conservation organizations. With the exception of isolated examples, the major conservation organizations have struggled to act as a unified front for biological diversity.  However, there are examples where this has worked. The Chicago Wilderness has rallied more than 100 different organizations in the service of conservation planning in the greater Chicago region for over 25 years. Leadership and coordination are required for nature’s constituents to become active participants in solutions and the leading conservation organizations are primed to provide it. In doing so, they need not become political entities, they merely need to provide a platform in which members feel the opportunity to have a voice for nature.

We cannot pretend or presume that resolving environmental issues are, or even could be, easy. Creating a sustainable future that achieves a societal balance of the mixed attributes of human well-being is a massive challenge. However, reimagining the conservation of nature from one of raising money to fix problems to one of societal change to focus on sustainability and well-being has to be the first step in having that difficult discourse. Governments have vastly more power and resources than private conservation organizations: the annual budget for The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest private conservation NGO, is less than 10% of what the US spends annually on national parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests. Conservation runs on government programs, and NGO’s facilitate. We need our environmental NGO’s to embrace the power of the people to foster institutional change in governments.

Read more stories by Mark W. Schwartz.