A good article about looking at conservation in a more systematic and larger way; for example, instead of only being concerned about the Parkway, extend our concern outwards, towards the entire American River Watershed; or instead of only looking at the value a Gold Rush Park has, consider its linking to a series of other parks, greenways, parkways, and trails to form a golden necklace from the confluence of the rivers to Coloma and back, as mentioned in the previous post.
An excerpt.
Green Pieces
States and localities are working with conservation groups to link existing preserves and the privately owned land between them.
By DENNIS FARNEY
Florida conservationists feared the worst when a real estate development firm entered into a contract to buy the 91,000-acre Babcock Ranch. They saw urban development spreading like a blob over an unspoiled area of cypress swamps and pinewoods, home to the endangered Florida panther and a host of other plant and animal species. But then the developer, Kitson and Partners, LLC, offered a deal. If Florida had the money, the developer would sell nearly 74,000 acres.
Florida had the money — and then some.
Back in 1999, the legislature had passed Florida Forever, a $3 billion, 10-year land acquisition program financed by bond issues. Florida Forever, which bills itself as “the largest land-buying initiative in the nation,” clinched the deal for $310 million, plus an additional $40 million from Lee County. The signing ceremony this June marked one of the largest land preservation purchases in state history. Governor Jeb Bush hailed the “massive endeavor” as a huge step toward establishing a southwest Florida conservation corridor stretching from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico.
Significantly, the federal government contributed no money toward the acquisition. These days, that’s usually the case.
Congress is keeping Washington’s flagship land acquisition program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, on a short leash. Although the fund is authorized to spend $900 million per year, actual congressional appropriations have averaged only $100 million per year for the past decade. For fiscal years 1996 through 1999, Congress appropriated nothing at all.
The bottom line is clear: If environmentally sensitive land is to be saved and urban sprawl limited, the states are going to have to take the lead.
And they are doing just that. While Washington has been haggling over millions, states and localities have been spending billions. From 1994 to 2005, the states approved $12.1 billion in conservation spending and localities nearly $19 billion, according to the Trust for Public Land.
(The totals reflect both large projects and small ones, such as urban parks and bike paths.)
They, not Washington, have become the driving force in land preservation.
”States have kind of taken things into our own hands,” sums up Bridgett Luther, director of California’s Department of Conservation. Her boss, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, made the same point in blunter terms when he recently discussed a broad range of environmental issues. “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment,” he told Newsweek magazine. “We have to create our own leadership.”
This state and local activism is coinciding with a fundamental shift in conservation thinking. An emerging school of thought, often referred to as “ecoregionalism,” is increasingly influencing preservation projects across the nation. Ecoregionalism has conservationists thinking big.
The most spectacular example is Y2Y, which stands for “Yellowstone to Yukon.” Y2Y envisions nothing less than a “wildlife corridor” nearly 2,000 miles long. It would start in west-central Wyoming and end just below the Arctic Circle, preserving a whole ecosystem, still largely intact, across the backbone of North America. Audubon magazine has called the idea “North America’s environmental equivalent of the Great Wall of China.”
Y2Y is more than a pipe dream — it is generating serious discussions among government officials in both the United States and Canada — but still far short of realization. Actually completing it, or even part of it, might well take decades. But Y2Y illustrates the central principle of ecoregionalism: Simply establishing isolated parks and refuges, even huge ones such as Yellowstone National Park, won’t preserve biological diversity in the long run. Somehow, conservationists must find a way to stitch together existing parks and preserves with the privately owned connective tissue between them.
This means relying less on the traditional and sometimes controversial tool of outright acquisition. Conservationists can’t possibly afford to buy all that connective tissue and political realities wouldn’t allow it in any event. Thus, ecoregionalism relies more on such tools as easements and voluntary agreements with landowners. Identifying key tracts and protecting them, in turn, means working with state and local governments on an expanded scale.
