New Heroes of the American West:

Conservation and Community in the Twenty-First Century

Remarks by

G. Jon Roush

Member, Board Executive Committee, Institute for Environment and Natural Resources
University of Wyoming

Presented at the University of Wyoming, Laramie
December 3, 1996

As I prepared this lecture, I recalled something that happened to me years ago. I had just moved onto my small ranch in western Montana. That afternoon I was home coaxing the plumbing awake, when a stranger knocked at the door. He was a tall, bigboned man, about sixty years old, wearing overalls and rubber boots and carrying a shovel. He introduced himself as Ersal Bloxham, my neighbor, and said he had been working on the irrigation ditch we shared. I invited him in, but he said he couldn't stay. I offered a cup of coffee, but he declined. We talked about the weather. As usual, it was dry. We talked about cattle prices. They were down, as usual. Finally, after he judged we had observed enough ceremony, Ersal said, "Well, the reason I came by was--your place is on fire."

Behind a ridge, near the irrigation ditch, out of sight of the house, something had ignited an old sawdust pile. The fire was spreading to a nearby stand of ponderosa pines. After Ersal had delivered his slow-motion fire alarm, the rhythm changed immediately. We threw buckets, shovels and chain saws into the pickup, and headed for the fire like cow dogs chasing a stray.

By ourselves, Ersal and I could not have stopped that fire from spreading, but we soon had help. The volunteer fire department from town showed up in their yellow slickers and swarmed over the area. They submerged a pump in the ditch Ersal had been working on, and in a few hours, the fire was dead. Meanwhile, when we weren't dousing and digging, we all found time to lean on our shovels and visit. By the time that fire was out, I had gained information about my neighbors, heard diverse opinions on how to manage my place, and received two invitations to join the fire department. That fire turned out to be a quick release into my new community. Also, we saved most of the trees.

If you had asked them why they helped me, Ersal and the volunteers would have had an easy answer. That's how we do it here. If you had pressed them, they probably could have come up some theory of mutual support, but they were not motivated by theory. What they did was simply what everybody did, or at least was expected to do. To be part of that community was to help your neighbors, without asking anything immediately in return. That kind of cooperation is familiar in communities throughout the west. Some say it is passing, going the way of open range and one-room school houses. Looking at the population growth projected for this region, I can understand that view. Yet it may be wrong. We could be entering a new era of community solidarity, driven by a new vision of community. Those who carry that vision would be the new heroes of the American west.

In this lecture I will describe the outlines of the vision, which is a vision of sustainability. Then I will describe some hopeful signs that make me think we actually could pull it off in the United States. Unfortunately, we also face some formidable obstacles, and I will sketch those obstacles. Finally, I will propose a few steps we can all take to help our heroes overcome the obstacles.

Our heroes will be part of a movement that is gaining force across the United States and around the world. Call it the sustainability movement. A common objection to the idea of sustainability is that it is an empty concept, devoid of real meaning. I disagree. The principles of sustainability are simple and clear. Their application can be enormously complex, but we are rapidly gaining experience with that.

I see four principles of sustainability, adapted from a schema of economist Herman Daly.

Most of my argument tonight deals with the fourth principle, the principle of community. We understand the first three, but when it comes to making them real, they stymie us. The problem lies in the institutions that determine how we work together, or indeed, whether we can work together. The stakes are high. At stake is the quality of life for our grandchildren. Individually, we may want to leave a safe, vital world for the next generation. Collectively, we have made that ten times harder than walking on the moon. So today, I will be talking about our communities, the opportunities and obstacles they present for sustaining our quality of life.

First, some guidelines for systems that endure. Sustainable systems include both natural and human communities. Over time, they sustain their ecological functions and processes, and they sustain their economic vitality. Sustainable ecosystems require sustainable economies, and vice versa.

Sustainable systems also require social stability. They must be fair, economically and politically. A system will not be sustainable if it denies people control over their lives. Anyone substantially affected by decisions about the system must have a chance to participate in those decisions. Diverse interests have to get along together. When they do not agree, then even more, they need routines for working together. People in a sustainable system must be willing to collaborate and allowed to participate.

The need for participation has driven some community advocates to emphasize local control, but that can be overdone. If we hope to manage our land and water systems sustainably, we need to coordinate multiple ownerships and multiple jurisdictions. We have to be stewards of ecosystems, and ecosystem boundaries rarely coincide with political boundaries or property lines. Some of our problems, like clean air, are national in scale. Others, like climate change, are global. The art is to fit the decision process to the scale of the problem.

Sustainable systems have one other essential quality. They are complicated. No one completely understands them. Commitment to sustainability is commitment to uncertainty. For sustainability, we have to expect unintended consequences from our best guesses, because we always will have inadequate information and imperfect theories. Uncertainty drives everybody crazy. With uncertainty, business people do not know how to plan. Regulators cannot be sure their rules will produced the results they want. Julie Gorte, an economist and a vice president of The Wilderness Society, says that the motto of sustainability should be, "Give me ambiguity, or give me something else."

The only antidote for uncertainty is to learn from mistakes. Sustainable systems need plenty of feedback loops. Someone needs to monitor actual results, compare them with predicted results, and analyze how and why surprises occurred. Then we can make changes to improve the system. In the current j argon, some people call this capacity to learn from results "adaptive management."

I have been talking about sustainable systems as if they were real, as if we could and would develop them. You might ask whether that is not a Utopian idea. It is encouraging to learn that other societies have come close. In his book Ecologies of the Heart, the anthropologist E. N. Anderson describes three societies that achieved a sustainable relationship with nature for centuries: Chinese rural communities, Mayan villages, and native tribes along the northwest coast of North America. None of the three have a perfect record. They all have had episodes of abusing their environment with disastrous results, but they learned from their mistakes, using their versions of adaptive management, and they evolved more sustainable cultures.

Anderson concludes that these cultures have three elements in common, and those three elements form the bedrock on which a sustainable culture can arise. First, people in these societies understood their environment and how it worked. We might not view their understanding as scientific, but it guided their actions well enough. It often took the forms of myth and parable, a point to which I will return. Second, they cared. Their customs, laws, and other institutions reinforced a respectful attitude toward nature. Third, they taught their children ecological lore and rules of ecological behavior.

If our society developed those three simple attributes, we would be well on the way toward sustainability. Whether we would succeed is still not clear. Our society differs from the societies Anderson describes, and the differences do not bode well. Let's look at the obstacles to sustainability.

We live in a time of rapid change, especially rapid population growth, which is changing our relationship to our environment. Whether we have time to adapt is open to question. A few years ago, the yield of the world's two main protein sources -- rice and fish -- leveled off, and they may have begun to decline. Meanwhile, the global population continues to grow. China, the world's most populous country, is on the verge of becoming a net importer of food. This is not a problem just for the rest of the world. The most productive agricultural region in the world is the Central Valley of California, which now is a massive exporter of food. Demographers project that within a generation, the Central Valley will have trouble feeding its own population, which will have doubled or tripled in that short time. Politically, economically, and socially, the demand for food will soon become our biggest problem, and it will limit our possibilities for sustainability.

Another barrier to sustainability is the problem of scale. The societies that Anderson described in Ecologies of the Heart were homogenous. Although they covered a large land area, their basic unit was a compact village or even extended family. Anderson quotes a Chinese proverb -- heaven is high, and the emperor is far away -- explaining the self-sufficiency that let Chinese villages work out their own relationships with nature. Yet our heaven contains particulate matter from smokestacks hundreds of miles distant, and the emperor is everywhere. Many entities governing our environment are huge, national and international, while others are small, local, and private. We have no precedent for sustainability in a world of such complexity.

Finally, even if we could figure out how to do it, some powerful interests would resist sustainability, with resources and ingenuity that would challenge both heaven and the emperor. Few people really like change, especially if those people are doing all right as is. Many people in business, universities, government, and even the environmental movement feel threatened by these changes, and with reason. Those who focus on the short-term at the expense of the future would suffer most from a turn toward sustainability.

Despite these obstacles, the idea of sustainability is gaining adherents. Sometimes an idea is simply too right and too timely to ignore, and this may be such a time. That is what millions of people in developing countries believe. The cause of sustainability first got widespread notice in the report of the 1987 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (Our Common Future or "the Brundtland Report). It gave us the standard definition of sustainable development: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainability was the dominant theme at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. The next year, President Clinton formed the President's Council on Sustainable Development. He charged it with shaping national policies for sustainability. Its report, presented earlier this year, did not make anyone completely happy. Still, it marked the first time that leaders of industry, labor, scientific research, and environmental organizations had agreed on comprehensive principles of development and conservation.

Meanwhile, our society may not have awakened, but it is stirring. Some sectors are responding more vigorously than others. One such sector is the timber industry. I am going to describe changes in that industry in some detail. The forestry profession is changing, and consequently it shows some turmoil. Although their numbers are growing, champions of sustainable forestry are not always popular with their colleagues or their bosses. That makes the forestry profession an ideal case study for us. It exemplifies the struggle between forces encouraging and those obstructing a shift toward sustainability.

First, the good news. In many academic schools of forestry, the emphasis has shifted from producing foresters narrowly trained in timber production to producing people trained in environmental and social sciences. One of the oldest, most prestigious, and most selective schools of forestry is at Duke University. A few years ago, Duke's forestry school changed its name to the School of Environment. Recently Norman Christianson, Dean of the School, described four goals of the new forestry education. One of them is conventional. Duke still teaches its students technical forestry skills. The other three goals summarize the new direction for many schools of forestry. Duke wants its students to learn to work with multiple disciplines, to learn decision making, and to learn to work with uncertainty. This is a far cry from the forestry education that ten years ago still concentrated on increasing timber growth and suppressing fires and insects.

Meanwhile, government forestry agencies are joining in. In the past few years, several states have reoriented their forest systems. For example, with over two million acres in public and private forest, Pennsylvania has launched a long-term strategy that relies strongly on economic incentives and technical assistance for loggers and land owners. In Minnesota, the 1995 Sustainable Forest Resources Act is more directive, mixing regulation with voluntary incentives. The new strategic plan for the Oregon Board of Forestry recognizes the need to coordinate state forests with large private forest holdings and federal land, and federal mandates for managing habitat for endangered species like spotted owls and salmon. Although their approaches differ, each of these three plans aim for the long-term health of forest ecosystems. Each supports a fullof forest values -- including timber, recreation, wildlife habitat, and research -- and each tries to involve a full range of people in decision making.

Changes also are happening at the federal level -- for example, in the Department of Agriculture, which houses the U.S. Forest Service. In September, Secretary of Agriculture Daniel Glickman took several steps to support the report of the President's Council on Sustainable Development. He created the position of Director of Sustainable Development and a Department-wide Council on Sustainable Development. He directed that each agency head in the Department, including the Chief of the Forest Service, direct his or her agency's programs consistently with the principles of sustainability. Are these changes only symbolic? I don't think so. Will they yield results over night? No, but they are important steps. Such changes open doors for those employees who want to help the agency change, and they prepare the ground as new foresters enter the Service.

The timber industry is also providing leadership. Some of the more enlightened companies have made substantial commitments to sustainable forestry, including a commitment to public values like habitat conservation. In some cases, these policies demonstrate a dramatic change over the past few years. Consider the American Forest and Paper Association, or AF&PA, the industry's largest trade group. Last year, it unveiled its Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which set standards of sustainable forestry practices and declared that only companies meeting those standards could be members of AF&PA. So far, the AF&PA has expelled fifteen member companies that did not comply with the new guidelines. Ten other companies have voluntarily withdrawn from AF&PA, because they could not or would not comply. You can look a long time before you find another trade association that voluntarily reduced its own membership so drastically.

Some large timber companies are using their influence to help small producers move toward sustainable forestry. Last year, the AF&PA launched a logger education program. In its first year, the program trained 3,300 loggers in thirty-four states. They also have a landowner outreach program, in which foresters working for member companies train small landowners in best management practices. To carry out its Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the AF&PA has formed thirty-four state implementation committees. These committees reach out to small landowners, working with them on the site to help them comply with AF&PA's standards for sustainability.

The bad news, as you might expect, is that not everyone in the industry welcomes these changes. How bad is the news? We need to understand the motives of the leaders of AF&PA's corporate members.

Some senior managers of AF&PA companies do understand sustainability, albeit with varying definitions. They want to do the right thing. I think their number is growing, as a new generation takes over the leadership of our largest timber companies. Still, if those leaders don't make money for their shareholders, they can take their integrity to the unemployment line. People in our society -- including those who manage pension funds and university endowments -- expect companies to make money for them. We punish those who don't make a profit.

Luckily, industry leaders have good business reasons for doing the right thing. AF&PA's members have taken public relations hits for years. Many Americans think of them as the companies that clear cut sensitive areas, liquidate old growth forests, evade the Endangered Species Act, oppose public participation in public policy, and live off various forms of corporate welfare, including below-cost timber sales on public land. Their PR and lobbying units need a good story to tell.

One other business motive is even more important. Businesses need certainty. Good business people can succeed with any reasonable set of rules, as long as they can be sure the rules will not change too often. For foresters, the last ten years have seen a new generation of regulatory challenges. Domestically, the Endangered Species Act has thrown a shield over the forest homes of spotted owls, salmon, wolves, grizzlies, and a host of less charismatic but legally powerful creatures. The Endangered Species Act reaches onto private land, with unpredictable consequences, and in the last ten years, its impacts on private land have been dramatic.

Many of the most progressive and creative changes in the timber industry are a direct response to the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. Industry, regulators and environmentalists are collaborating on various versions of habitat conservation plans, or "HCP's." An HCP is a long-term management plan for a large area of critical habitat that includes private land. Landowners and the regulators in the Fish and Wildlife Service sign off on the plan. In theory, landowners should like HCP's, because they increase certainty. Regulators and environmentalists should like them, because conserving large areas of habitat is the best way to conserve biological diversity. Those arguments are persuasive enough so that the number of HCP's has grown dramatically, by a factor of one hundred, over the past five years. Problems remain, and people on all sides are watching skeptically. Despite the problems, HCP's are fertile laboratories for techniques of collaboration.

Meanwhile, the forest industry is challenged by new market pressures. Around the world, but especially in Europe, the United States, and Canada, a "green marketing" movement is growing rapidly. The idea is simple: let consumers know, through a reliable certification system, whether the wood used in products has been grown sustainably. The idea is simple, but the application is complicated, and the stakes are high. So far seven major certification programs have certified about two dozen forests world wide. No mass market for certified wood has developed, but niche markets are emerging in Europe and the U.S. The debate over criteria and procedures for certification is intense. It has prompted two international organizations to propose global standards. U.S. companies are concerned that such standards could be adopted officially, and so become a trade barrier for U.S. wood. That fear was one of the reasons behind the AF&PA's Sustainable Forestry Initiative. AF&Pa's leaders were smart enough to know that when everything is uncertain, the best way to predict change is to create it.

Certified wood has no inherent superiority. It is not stronger or more beautiful than other wood, and it certainly is not cheaper. It still is more valuable to a growing number of consumers. Its value lies wholly in the fact that someone presumed trustworthy has said, if you worry about deforestation, you should buy this wood.

To the extent that the timber industry is changing, it is changing in response to two driving forces: government regulation like the Endangered Species Act, and changing public attitudes, which show themselves in changes in market demand. These are two different ways the public expresses its preferences. The first is the product of political competition and compromise, and the second the result of commercial competition and compromise. These days, that distinction is posed as a distinction between regulation and market-driven decisions, and we hear many claims about their relative merits. I am going to side-step that argument here. Let us just note the obvious, that one way or another, society needs effective mechanisms for setting goals and constraints for individual enterprise.

In Ecologies of the Heart, Eugene Anderson tells of being in a Mayan village and seeing children knock a butterfly out of a tree with a stick. At that moment, their mother came out of their house and forced the children to eat the butterfly. The lesson was inescapable: you kill it; you eat it. I think of her as Mom, the Game and Fish Department. In a community like that village, personal sanctions are often sufficient. In our complex society, we have resorted to more bureaucratic institutions, but that does not mean they are the only means we have or use for expressing our preferences.

Market forces are important, but we have a choice about the context in which they work. Even Adam Smith, who was a high ranking bureaucrat, understood that we need government to maintain infrastructure, like roads. We now understand that we also need our green infrastructure, the natural systems on which our survival depends. The standards we want to apply, the quality we expect from our green infrastructure, is the proper business of the whole society. Society must enunciate its goals and reinforce them. Then we can unleash market forces to reach those goals effectively.

Here is an example of how that approach can work. A few years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received a petition to list the Louisiana black bear as a threatened species. Within its range in Louisiana, Mississippi, and east Texas, the bear was in trouble, partly because its habitat was disintegrating. Ninety percent of the Louisiana black bear's habitat is on private land, most of it commercial timber land. Many communities in the region depend on that timber for income. People in the region and in the timber industry feared that listing the Louisiana black bear would hurt their economy. On the other hand, the bear is an indicator species for hardwood bottom land ecosystems. Conserving its habitat would also help many other species. Environmentalists were determined to protect the bear, and landowners were determined to protect their rights. The situation had all the makings of another classic environmental showdown.

What actually happened did not follow the script. A group of eighteen people -- representing industry, federal and state agencies, landowners, and conservation groups -- started meeting, calling themselves the Black Bear Conservation Committee (the "BBCC"). They set some important ground rules. They agreed to respect each other, to set aside as much as possible their personal agendas, and whenever possible, to let scientific data and theories be the primary criteria for decisions. Meanwhile, biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the bears' habitat needs could be compatible with normal forest practices in the region.

Since then, the BBCC has enlarged its membership and continued to work on behalf of the bear in issues involving habitat, management, education, research and funding. They have produced a management handbook for landowners. They have launched a public education campaign to persuade people in the region, especially landowners, that the black bear is an asset. The Endangered Species Act requires that the Fish and Wildlife Service draft a recovery plan for the bear. At this time, the BBCC is completing a restoration plan that will be the core of that draft recovery plan.

The BBCC is only one example of community-based initiatives that are blossoming all over the country, dealing with a wide range of issues. For issues of recreation on public land, look at the Community Sand Flats Team in Moab, Utah. For water issues, the Clark Fork Basin Steering Committee of Western Montana. For forestry issues, the Applegate Partnership in Oregon and the Quincy Library Group 'in California. These and hundreds of other examples are part of a new and important movement by which people in local communities are setting aside their differences and taking charge of their shared environment. Not all will succeed, but their ferment is creating new ideas and capacities. Among the people leading those efforts, we will find some of our new heroes.

I have focused on forestry not just because it illustrates changes. Our attitudes about forests carry a heavy load of mythic ideas about America. In the stories we tell about America's history, forests are paradox: haven and danger, problem and solution, economic boon and economic problem. On a deeper level, our stories depict forests as habitat for uncontrolled, satanic, libidinous, uncivilized energy. They are a barrier to community. In a forest, you are alone and savage; in a clearing, you can be a community.

For three hundred years, our attitudes toward forests have shown a tension between two deep values: individual freedom and community. To be human is to suffer this tension, but in America, it has taken on some unique qualities. We have developed it to an art form, and we have embedded it in our public policy.

The tension is implicit in our founding documents. They assert two propositions, both of which are illogical. The Declaration of Independence asserts as self evident the obviously crazy idea that all men are created equal. Then the Constitution asserts a mystical idea, that the world's most diverse group of people and interests can be governed as a unity. E pluribus unum. Our country is based on two absurdly impossible ideals: equality and unity. These ideals have pulled us toward our present glory and present angst.

We have tried to resolve the difficulties in these two ideas. For equality, we have substituted liberty: Everyone is not equal but is equally free. For unity we have substituted pluralism. We are united in our embrace of separate cultures. By trading votes, balancing constituencies, serving diverse markets, we find harmony if not unity.

Questions about equality, freedom and community have resonated starkly in the American west. Our country's explosive experience of growing up, the severance of the colonies from their English parent, reinforced the one story we retell compulsively: the story of someone who leaves home and moves west. But one person in the wilderness is one person lost, and our story wants community.

An Indian activist once told me, "You guys talk about rugged individualism but you didn't come out here individually. You came out in groups. If you had come one by one, we would have stood on the hills and picked you off " He was right, of course. Yet in our mythic stories, it's the loner Clint Eastwood who dominates, not the mayor or the banker. The west means freedom, in our mythology, and we lack the cultural vocabulary to picture freedom within groups. The closest we come is to talk about the freedom of one group versus another, but that is not the same. So our legends began with loners.

Still, our most satisfying stories do not stop there. The most interesting hero of the mythic frontier is not a single person but a dyad, an independent man plus a civilizing woman, who in their metaphoric or literal marriage accommodate both rugged individualism and community, wilderness and civilization, justice and mercy, death and life. The marriage is not always consummated or successful. To learn why it is hard for our mythic couple to marry, see the movie High Noon. Yet when the marriage is successful, it reassures us that mediation is possible between the attractive opposites of freedom and community.

The myth has many different versions, and many are mutually inconsistent. One of the best -- both as a literary work and as a complex depiction of the myth -- is The Virginian, Owen Wister's story of the Wyoming frontier, the classic story of a young man of great magnetism, rising from humble origins, shaping a society with his energy and wits, and then risking it all for a woman. She is the civilized East, with roots in family and history. He is the wild West, an orphan with no name and a shadowy history. With the Civil War still fresh in memory, she is Vermont and he is Virginia. She has learned from books, and he is tutored by nature. The story is the hero's coming of age, getting civilized but not too civilized. So it also is the coming of age of America, through the healing power of community, friendship, and love. In this book, at least, we can have it all -- the utter freedom of the wilderness and the law and order of civilization.

Structurally, the myth recurs in some unlikely places. A generation later, after The Virginian was published, after the sobering First World War, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a parody: The Great Gatsby. Once again, an animalistic young man with a mysterious past uses his wits to rise to leadership in his community. Gatsby's community just happens to be as decadent and corrupt as the Virginian's is innocent. The Virginian has moved from east to west, while Gatsby has moved from west to east. Both men passionately worship a woman they perceive to be above their station. Gatsby's Daisy just happens to be married to someone else. And so forth.

Like most instances of the myth, both these books have a great deal to say about equality and unity. The Virginian ruminates on the difference between "quality" and "equality," and decides he prefers quality. Gatsby is obsessed with overcoming his poor childhood and attaining Daisy's upper-class status. As for unity, the Virginian's marriage is a high-spirited, sometimes comic, and richly romantic union of tradition-bound Vermont and wild and wooly Wyoming. It is also the marriage of North and South. The Virginian's father and brothers had died on the losing side. The Virginian draws strength and freedom from his community -- his employer, neighboring families, and eventually his wife. In the Great Gatsby, none of the main characters have a clue about unity or community, and that contributes to their downfall.

The dilemmas of equality and unity continue to keep us awake at night. School prayer, abortion, affirmative action, old-growth forest preservation, wolf reintroduction, immigration policy, the Equal Rights Amendment, welfare and work-fare, gay rights. These are not just intellectual, economic or political differences. They spring from deep differences in belief about how people should behave and even what it is to be human. These issues are not about ideas alone. They are about power, who gets more money, more jobs, or more influence than whom.

Where is the community? Where are the heroes who can bring us together in the freedom of community?

If you like peace and quiet, the 1996 elections are not encouraging. Despite what you might have read, Bill Clinton's election did not move the nation toward the center. If anything, partisanship will increase. In 1996, more Republicans voted for the Republican ticket, and more Democrats voted for the Democratic ticket, than in 1992. The Republicans who will assume leadership of the 105th Congress are more conservative than their counterparts in the 104th, and the ones who will control natural resource policy are among the most conservative. Meanwhile, the White House is feeling its oats. Its mission now is to stick it to Congress as artfully as possible, to launch Al Gore for election in 2000. The press says we have achieved balance, but for the next two years and beyond, so-called "balance" will look like a huge tug of war, as the White House and Congress will maneuver intensely but within a narrow range of choices.

It is hard to read an editorial page without coming across the word "balance." The pundits say the recent election show that the people want balance -- between the Administration and Congress, between compassion and competition. Our obsession with balance shows that we do know what is going on. The bridge to the twenty-first century is actually a high wire on which are trying to cross from an old to a new society. The more we fret about balance, the more we show how thin and high is that wire.

With population growth and redistribution, people will spill over the landscape. In the Rockies, growth management will become the hot issue, with urbanization and rural sprawl consuming land and water and changing the culture. With limited public finances, states like Wyoming will lack the resources to protect their heritage. Having chosen devolution and market solutions, we all will search for ways to make them work in the real world. Understanding that the answers lie in managing whole systems, we will struggle to coordinate competing jurisdictions and interest groups.

Meanwhile, the most important stakeholders, the unborn, will look over our shoulders. They cannot come to the auction to influence our decisions. They have no dollars to spend and no votes to cast. They depend on our good will, even though we will not share in any benefits we preserve for them.

When Adam Smith described the cumulative benefits of self-interest, he revealed a marvelous mechanism, the invisible hand. As a mechanism it is necessary but not sufficient for sustainability. We also need appropriate values and habits of thought. A good start would be the attitude of my Montana neighbors in the volunteer fire department. We need to replicate that attitude in communities across the country.

Nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and individual people all can help. Yet they cannot fill the gap without a commitment from the whole community, indeed the whole country. The problems are too large and too complex. No one can promise that we will measure up to the crisis. It depends on leadership.

If we succeed, what qualities will our leaders need? Our new heroes will look more like the Virginian than like most leaders we see today. More accurately, they will look like the Virginian and his school-marm bride combined in one person. Heroes of the environmental movement, like heroes of business and government, have mostly been alpha males, and the drama has been the struggle for control and competitive advantage. The new leaders will be adept at political conflict, but they also will be nurturers. They will help us build communities in which people take care of themselves and take care of the earth. They will be activists and collaborators. That is a species of environmental leadership that has been threatened and endangered, but it is making a comeback. I am talking about champions and passionate defenders of wholeness: whole ecosystems and whole communities.

I cannot tell you where those leaders will come from or what they will do. Some may be in this room. Some are at work already. Whoever they are, you and I will have something to say about what they can and can't do. The kind of heroism I am talking about, the kind that helps redeem a society, is shaped by its mundane political and economic context. The Virginian would have been a different kind of hero without railroads and the Homestead Act. Our collective political and economic decisions will make all the difference.

Recall Anderson's requirements for a sustainable society. People need to understand their environment, how it works and what consequences their actions will have. They need to care, meaning they need effective mechanisms for guiding, directing or forcing behavior. Finally, they need to teach the next generation. Our society can take steps to meet all those requirements. All I can do here is suggest a few possibilities, as examples that I hope will spark your thinking

We can begin by investing in understanding how our natural and economic systems work. We have little organized information about the structure and functions of individual ecosystems. We also need a national data base or a national network of data bases that help us understand what will give us comparative and cumulative information about what is happening in our landscapes, and why. Then, to develop sustainable communities, to support our new heroes, we need to make the information available in forms usable for educated laymen. It will not be usable until people know how to analyze it, and we need to provide tools for that purpose.

As for caring and guiding behavior, for our society, that usually requires institutional reform. At the national level, we need to analyze federal laws that affect natural systems and local human communities, to minimize obstacles and create new opportunities for sustainability. We could begin by revising the legislated missions of federal land management agencies, so that they are aligned behind a common goal of sustainability. Then we could take some other small steps. Congress could amend federal inheritance tax laws so that people can afford to inherit farms and ranches without subdividing them to pay taxes. We could amend the Clean Air Act to allow carbon dioxide credits for forest owners whose trees are sequestering CO2. We could revive the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which recycles off-shore oil revenue, passing it to states and localities for acquisition of critical land. We could change the Internal Revenue Code to let states and municipalities issue tax exempt bonds for acquisition of commercial forest land by nonprofit organizations. With cheaper capital, those bonds would attract investors for sustainable forestry practices. These and hundreds of other practical steps are possible right now. They are steps the federal government could take not to tell communities what to do but to enable them to play their appropriate role in sustainability.

One of the toughest obstacles to sustainability is the lack of institutional frameworks for coordinating multiple Jurisdictions within a region. We know watersheds are important, but we don't know how to govern them. Again the federal government can help. The Department of Transportation can use its policies of highway grants to encourage systematic regional initiatives, building on the Intermodal Surface Transportation Act, or "Ice Tea." Congress can look at the promising model of the Northern Forest Lands Council, which it created for citizen-driven forest planning in New England. In California, federal, state and local governments, and businesses and nonprofits, can take seriously the findings of the federally funded Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project. If that is too ambitious, they can look at semi-spontaneous efforts like Montana's Clark Fork Steering Committee.

Brock Evans, an experienced and savvy environmental activist, argues that the most important environmental laws of the twentieth century are the 19th Amendment, the GI Bill of Rights, and the "one-man-one-vote" decision. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote, following Wyoming's lead, of course. Since then, women have provided crucial support for environmental causes. The GI Bill of Rights, passed near the end of the Second World War, granted higher education to a generation of veterans, and it made universal access to higher education an American goal. Environmental issues always do better with well educated voters. The one-man-one-vote decision in federal court in 1962 required equal representation in the apportionment of districts in state legislatures. The effect was to reduce the political power of moneyed interests who controlled natural resources like grazing land, timber, and minerals.

I agree with Brock Evans that those laws were a boon to the environment, but I would add another point about them. They were also a boon to the economy. Say it how you will, what is good for the environment is good for the economy,

As I look ahead, I see one other piece of legislation that could have similar effect: the effective reform of campaign financing. Campaign finance reform is especially important as we shift responsibility from the federal government to state governments. Big money will follow the action. We already are seeing huge amounts of new money flowing into high stakes races in state elections. This year in Alabama, for example, two competing interests have spent five million dollars on a ballot measure for tort reform. In Congress, five million dollars is big but not overwhelming. In most states, it is a wrecking ball. Will ordinary Wyoming residents, armed with a soap box and a telephone, be able to counter that kind of influence?

So, we need to understand our systems, and we need to respect them. The third requirement is that we teach all that to the next generation. Among the skills and attitudes we should teach are the qualities of leadership. None of these ideas will amount to much unless our communities have leaders, people who -- often to their surprise -- get the idea, convene the meetings, make the phone calls, persuade their friends and befriend their enemies, and generally conduct the business of democracy. Yet having such people in our midst is not enough. These days, they better know something. The issues I have been discussing are daunting. Lobbyists get good money to study these issues and devise ways to bend the public will toward their employers' money market accounts. We need to start thinking yesterday about how we will educate tomorrow's community leaders.

The success of sustainability will depend on community leadership. As it has been for the past two hundred years, our challenge is to develop an educated and active citizenry and to assure they have the information to make good decisions. That will place new demands on education, for teaching children, training professionals, and providing life-long learning for citizens. We have most of the infrastructure for those institutions in our public education systems, our community colleges, and land grant colleges like the University of Wyoming. University graduates who want to advance sustainability will need skills in collaboration. They will need experience in working with teams of people with multiple disciplines and multiple interests. Whatever their own disciplines, they should have achieved a threshold of ecological and economic literacy.

A generation from now, when the people of Wyoming ask whether this university has been a success, an important measure will be the extent to which it has helped Wyoming communities deal with change, resolve conflicts, and collaborate with each other. If the results are positive, you will know that the tension between freedom and community is still creative, You will have preserved natural assets, in Wyoming and beyond, undiminished for future generations. You will have helped conserve the spirit of community, so that those who follow will have an easier time with the most important decisions of their lives. Then, for at least one more generation, both freedom and unity may flourish.

© Copyright 1996, by G. Jon Roush
All Rights Reserved