Jim Stiles' "The Greening of Wilderness in Utah" exposed two themes which I agree are challenging and often degrading the current "environmental movement."

The first theme is agenda distortion among environmental advocacy organizations by the demands of their funding sources. Dave Foreman has written a chapter about this problem in his new book, "Myths of the Environmental Movement." The fundamental problem is similar to what we see today in political campaign financing: because of the high cost of getting
elected/supporting the environmental organization staff, the candidate/environmental organization becomes timid about doing anything which might offend donor constituencies, and often shapes message and position aiming to incite special interest constituencies into
contributing funds.

The second theme is the commodification of nature which occurs when natural resources, processes, or information (e.g., genetic) are evaluated in terms of their economic value in the system of human capital. "Enclosure" occurs when something that was free to the public - access to land, for example - becomes privatized so that you have to pay a fee to access it. An environmental amenity becomes commodified and enclosed when you can buy access to it, and you can be charged with stealing it if you possess it without paying for it.

Back in the days when the Leaming Report alleged that wilderness preservation devastates local economies, I and others countered with economic research showing that wilderness amenities and their protection through wilderness designation appeared to attract economic development,
not repel it. Our purpose was to debunk an economic myth which was being used to deny protection of wilderness values on lands which still had them.

In essence, we were arguing that wilderness is of most value to local economies and humankind in general if it isn't commodified and enclosed. We were arguing that wilderness has its best effect on local economies if it is formally, legally protected from commodification and enclosure -
" development" - because its continued presence as an amenity attractor is insured through a public declaration: wilderness protection by Congress.

Alas, we didn't have the conceptual vocabulary to say that back then. The idea of promoting economic development in local communities by deliberately setting wilderness off-limits to commodification and enclosure got swallowed up by economic interests which our arguments alerted to the fact that you could privatize and sell "natural capital" in a new way. By the 1980's, public lands resource extraction was an economy in permanent decline relative to the rest of the U.S. economy. The smarter capitalists were looking for new ways to convert natural capital that belonged to everybody into human capital that belonged to them. Thanks in part to environmentalists making economic arguments, the capitalists discovered promising new ways to enclose and sell natural capital.

The capitalists were tipped off by people like Randall O'Toole's Reforming the Forest Service. O'Toole noted that forest service office budgets were largely composed of a share of timber sale receipts, which supported the vast majority of staff. Managers' salaries were larger or smaller in
proportion to the budget and staff they managed. In order to maximize staff and budget, federal managers were rewarded by maximizing timber sales, even when sales hurt wildlife, recreation, watershed, and the other natural values the managers were charged with protecting. O'Toole and
others argued for commodifying public lands recreation and other multiple uses so that federal lands managers would be economically motivated to take good care of the goose laying these new golden eggs. The flaw in these commodification plans is obvious if you look at how well federal land managers were taking care of forests and rangelands from which they were
already collecting timber harvest and grazing allotment fees. Why these reformers thought federal land managers would care for natural values producing new revenue any better than they were caring for existing revenue-producing values is anybody's guess.

These economic arguments by O'Toole and others were intended to motivate protection of recreational, wildlife, watershed, and other natural values on public lands by public lands managers. To accomplish this, federal agencies had to see those amenities "paying off" in revenue the agency could use for the maintenance of its empire. This led directly to the
" demonstration fee program" concept.

The demonstration fee program started off making sense. In its original form, the demonstration fee program permitted a federal land management agency to invest in the development of recreational facilities and the like, charge fees for their use, and then keep the fees for use in the
land management agency office instead of sending the fee money to the treasury. The Mirror Lakes demonstration fee area in the Ashley National Forest of Utah is a good example. The USFS invested in trailhead, picnic, campground, and trail improvements in a heavily-used scenic recreational area on a paved highway, and spends fee money keeping these amenities
clean and repaired. You can park, hike and camp in the national forest outside this area without paying a fee.

Then the demonstration fee program morphed into a form which the public has been rejecting. When we drove to California to visit my wife's father, all through a national forest around the freeway were signs that you would be cited for parking, walking, or otherwise touching any square inch of the entire national forest without purchasing a "Forest Adventure Pass." The
signs said you could purchase one of these passes at a couple of forest service offices in towns I never heard of and have never been in during my lifetime. I viewed this as un-American tyranny. I have read I am hardly alone; "compliance" in the form of buying adventure passes or paying
citations issued to vehicles not displaying one has been very poor, various local and state governments have gone on record as opposing this program, and apparently some judges won't enforce collecting fines for people cited for trespassing on undeveloped parts of the forest.

Pursuing the idea of commodifying and deriving economic revenue from public lands recreation has distorted the public lands wilderness and convervation debate. The opponents of the Utah Wilderness Coalition have turned the debate into a conflict between competing human recreational user groups. I will flippantly refer to them as the "exhaust suckers" and the "waffle
stompers." This has led to such wonders as SUWA asking waffle stompers for instances in which they have been "displaced" from favored hiking routes by the adverse effluvia of motorized trail users; countered by the exhaust suckers arguing that the waffle stompers are being "voluntarily" displaced because they could choose to walk by the side of the trail and not compete with the machines, whereas the motorized users would be "involuntarily" displaced by trail closures to motorized use. It's hard to find any moral high ground in this morass.

The Way Out

Dave Foreman, Dr. Michael Soule, Dr. Brian Miller, and a bunch of conservation biologists including me have been developing a different paradigm for natural conservation for some years now. I think it is the next step in the evolution of environmentalism. For years now we have
been putting together science-based "wildlands network" or ecological systems plans for bioregions. These plans identify the core habitat areas and connectivity corridors needed to restore ecological integrity to the ecosystem at hand, including necessary conditions for keystone or "highly interactive" species which conservation biology has demonstrated are essential to making an ecosystem function properly. A properly functioning ecosystem is the foundation on which a sustainable human economy must rest, but it is not evaluatable in classic economic terms because an ecosystem is a system in which, as John Muir said, "everything is hitched to everything else." The value of any entity in the ecosystem is defined by its role in the exchange of energy and information in the system as a whole. We've discovered that losing an entity from the system can throw the system out of kilter in unexpected ways because of these complex interactions.

The first of these plans, such as the "Sky Islands Wildlands Network Plan" for Arizona, have enjoyed extensive implementation and have been adopted as part of official government plans by various jurisdictions. It is no wonder why. These plans describe how we can keep from wrecking our life support system, yet are not ruinous in what they demand of us by way of limits on our land use practices. And they are fair. All proposed land uses are viewed through the same ecological lens: what is the effect of the activity on ecological integrity? Turning to the waffle stompers v.
exhaust suckers argument, as a conservation biologist I don't give a rat's ass whether cryptobiotic soil damage, turtle squashing, and vegetation trampling is done by 500 Sierra Club hikers, a mob of ATVs, or a herd of cows. If it's critical habitat, none of them should be trampling it. If it's a connectivity corridor, my concern is whether the hikers, ATVs, and/or cows interfere with the movement of wildlife through the corridor. If they don't, fine. If they do, they need to be kept out when they will interfere with the wildlife.

Making restoration and preservation of ecological integrity your core value in land management transforms the wilderness debate. The best available tool for preserving a core habitat is wilderness designation. The need to preserve a core habitat becomes the rationale for wilderness preservation, not the area's attractiveness to human recreationists. If the area is critical to ecological integrity because of its habitat or connectivity value, it doesn't matter if it is butt ugly and full of bugs and nobody ever wants to go there. In fact, it helps if nobody ever wants to go
there because it leaves the critters in peace. We aren't designating wilderness to satisfy the desire of waffle stompers for outdoor recreational theme parks. We're designating wilderness for our fellow critters because it is the morally right thing to do, and because we also know that it is in our enlightened self interest to maintain intact ecosystems for the sake of our own future survival and welfare. It isn't a matter of "worshipping nature," although if you want to do that it's a free country. From the viewpoints of various Christian spokesmen, it is an expression of respect
for God's creation, and an exercise of the stewardship responsibility for creation God assigned to us.

The Committee of Scientists advised the U.S. Forest Service, and the Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey advised the Bureau of Land Management, to make restoring and preserving "ecological integrity" the central principle of public lands planning. The USFS amended this advice into the Forest Management Act in 2000 under
Clinton, but the rules were suspended by the Bush administration nanoseconds after coming into office. This illustrates how managing public lands to restore and maintain ecological integrity is not a fringe concept, but has become the central concept for how to do public lands planning and
management among forest and range scientists.

I am currently working with the "Core Design Team" of the "Colorado Plateau Ecological Systems/Heritage Plan" project. The Colorado Plateau is the last ecoregion in the Rocky Mountain Cordillera from Alaska through Mexico which has not had an ecological systems plan done for it. A "Restoring the Spine of the Continent" coalition has been organized by the various
ecoregional planning groups. We plan to link our ecoregional plans together into a Continent-scale ecological restoration and conservation plan and get it implemented on that scale.

A major impediment to implementation of these ecosystem plans is the idea that doing so will hurt human economic welfare. In fact, we know that we can improve human economic welfare while restoring ecological integrity, but it will require applying existing Best Available Technology and Best Available Management Practice to how we generate and use energy, graze domestic livestock, manage watersheds and water efficiency, harvest trees, and grow our food. I am a principal in developing a series of implementation white papers describing these existing, proven,
technologies and management techniques which are not yet widely known or adopted. Yes, this is a paradigm shift. We need to make it to obtain a secure, healthy, and comfortable future for us and "all our relatives."