Freeman House
Bioregionalist, Petrolia, CA

It is safe to characterize the public debate about threats to biological diversity, up until sometime in 1991, as an argument about the validity of the claims by the scientific community that we were facing massive damage to ecological integrity.

Today, I believe that a critical number of people have become convinced of the truth of these claims. Further, the realization is dawning in every sector of society in North America that human social and economic institutions are now challenged with reconstructions that are deep and thorough.

In the area of the management of natural resources, the beginning of this reconstruction can be found in the dedication to the insight that natural resources must be perceived in the context of the health of ecosytems and stability of landscape phenomena; that production of goods is totally reliant on the productive capacity of biological and geological systems. To put this in plain language, let me quote Wallace Stegner in a recent interview: "the basic problem [of living in the West] has consistently been how to reconcile what you do to make a living with how to save the country you make your living from."

I believe we've begun to do that. The Agreement on Biological Diversity (ABD) marks an historical turning point in this revolution of consciousness. The challenge that the signatories have agreed to engage is as daunting as any challenge people anywhere have ever taken on.

I have been attending public meetings in the Klamath Province of California for over a year now, and I can perceive several parallel tracks of response to this challenge. I will concentrate in this paper on two of these tracks.

The first track is the institutional response being implemented by people that are constrained by the built-in structures of big science, regulatory agencies and government bodies for which they work. Most of the signatories of the ABD fall within these constraints. Their approach is big-picture and top-down by definition. It's an approach that uses a lot of zoning -- jurisdictional zones, economic zones, ecological zones. In pursuit of efficiency, they attempt to come up with the most generic description of problems and charge the best scientific minds with creating a most generalized set of solutions. Because of organizational restraints, they tend to be proscriptive rather than proactive. And they manage a lot of land, which makes their work terribly important for the protection of biological diversity.

A second track of response has begun to emerge over the last ten years among people who have begun to understand themselves as responsible parts of the natural areas they inhabit. Who have begun to organize themselves within those natural areas, and to tackle land-use issues from this perspective. These groups are proliferating like mushrooms in a wet year. I'll call these groups inhabitory, and make the claim that their goals are: consensual agreement on land use, and management within the context of the ecological health of particular places. In rural northern California, watersheds have become a popular way to develop a social identity with natural areas, and this mode of identification is making headway in some urban areas -- notably in the easterly tributaries of San Francisco Bay, to some degree in Arcata on Humboldt Bay, in San Luis Obispo, and in cities around Monterey Bay.

In the case of my watershed alliance based in the Mattole River on the North Coast, whatever successes we have had can be attributed to some general principles. All were discovered the hard way, and only after communications between various elements of the inhabitory community had broken down almost entirely.

The first principle involves assembling a thorough representation of landowners and as many elements of the environmental community as represent themselves as being organized around the place itself. For the Mattole this means industrial timber owners, ranchers, homesteaders, and groups devoted to watershed defense and environmental restoration. In practical fact, anyone who shows up for a meeting is a working member of the Alliance, but at most meetings each of these elements of watershed society is represented, plus some. Regulatory agencies have been represented only as they are land-based; in our case, by the Bureau of Land Management. Other agencies have had the good grace to send representatives when they were invited, i.e Department of Fish and Game and the California Department of Forestry when forest management reached the agenda.

Most land use issues will eventually involve a regulatory agency, but we have been careful to consult with all affected parties before approaching the appropriate agency. A complex set of recommendations for changes in recreational fishing rules that included a five year moratorium on all salmon fishing was not carried to the Fish & Game Commission until after all local interests and attitudes had been heard. The changes were first initiated, in fact, by resort owners. A group, which includes people who in the past had accused restoration workers of being welfare hustlers, found itself signing a letter of support for a hatchbox program when funding was threatened. Face-to-face discussions with commercial salmon fishers have never involved agencies and have resulted in a commitment to voluntary self-regulation that has yet to be tested. This is not to suggest a systematic avoidance of regulatory agencies, but only that affected parties dealing directly with each other may have more long range success than if one party succeeds in imposing institutional policing on another.

The second large principle, which has evolved hit-and-miss, is that success is most likely to occur when discussions are based on specific actional projects rooted in common concerns. Ideologies need to be checked at the door, and can be picked up again on the way out. We sometimes find our ideologies changed in subtle ways after our cautious experiments with cooperative action, but we have found it hopeless to try to debate them in the abstract. Individual participants, we have found, do not violate their ideologies as they find ways to move together. However discussions begun from ideological positions rarely result in common action. In the beginning of our discussions the only common ground that we could identify was a deep felt desire to prevent the extinction of our precious native salmon run -- but that was enough. Years of effort at trying to agree on the reasons for the disappearance of the salmon had failed again and again. But once we focussed on what to do about it collectively some of those disagreements began to appear irrelevant. In two years we have collectively addressed sport and commercial harvest of fish, road building and maintenance, what the county does with its landslide spoils, and we are beginning to address sedimentation from logging.

None of these problems have been "solved," but a context has been established wherein the problems can be approached locally, and head-on. As the group has developed a common history of successful communication and accomplishment, more of the same has become possible. We have moved from a position of being unable to talk about anything, to a position where we can talk about almost everything, and often do something about it. At this point we are beginning to discuss watershed-wide timber management. A discussion that includes the disposition of the remaining stands of old growth in the basin.

It is obvious to me, and I think to the signatories of the ABD, and I assume to most of you, that the two approaches need to converge if we are serious about the protection of biodiversity. It is my opinion that the format for synthesis could be provided in the structure of the bioregional councils as proposed by the ABD. But if the Councils are to be the voice of the larger place, don't they need to be made up, at least in part, of people who are representing the ecological processes of smaller places within?

I believe they do.

Wouldn't a council based on identification with real places cut the ground out from under those who would oppose the ABD as an oppressive overlay of regional government?

Maybe.

How else can we imagine responding to the geographical adaptation of living things that is the very expression of biodiversity?

I have rarely encountered a word understood so variously as the word consensus. (Although the word sustainability comes close.) If the parts of ecological systems that can talk can't learn to talk to each other, how are we going to get from the state to the ecoregion? We need to arrive at a common understanding of consensual processes and decision-making techniques before we can hope to tackle the more complex land-use issues that are facing us. We need to find facilitation techniques that can move diverse groups toward consensual decision-making quickly and often. This is a pressing concern for my group, and for the Klamath Province experiment, and from everything I hear, for inter-agency communication as well.

I remain convinced that the ABD represents an opportunity and a context for taking some of the large steps we must take if we are to reassume our social roles as benign and comfortable participants in ecological systems.