CONSERVATION PERCEPTIONS

28 September 2007
Houston Advanced Research Center
The Woodlands, Texas

Dr. Priscilla Weeks, a cultural anthropologist at HARC, spoke about the diverse vision and goals that people hold for land protection in the Big Thicket.  She has interviewed a variety of stakeholders there, including large and small timber producers, oilmen, conservation organization representatives, state and federal resource managers, and community leaders (county judges, teachers, and older residents). 

She asked them a number of questions, including, “what is the Thicket for?”  She wanted to find out if there were any agreed “highest and best uses” that might speed conservation progress, or perhaps sticking points that could impede agreement and derail conservation work.  She wanted to know what we could expect to get from the land, why we should save land.  The responses varied.  Some saw the Thicket as resilient, while others saw it as fragile.  Some saw it as a resource-extraction site for timber and minerals.  Others saw it as a managed landscape for some end in mind.  Still others saw it as a pre-settlement wilderness, neither a developed urban area, nor an agricultural rural area.  Others described it as outside a human context, as God’s gift.  Some of the interviewees focused on preserving particular elements of the Thicket – a limited area or species, while others were more interested in protecting the entire ecosystem.  Feral hogs give an example of how disparate people’s views can be of the same resource:  some see the hogs as a source of food and remnant of pre-Park heritage, dating back to the days when neighbors hunted hogs with dogs, while others see the hogs as a invasive scourge that wrecks landscapes.

Dr. Weeks also asked her group about what they saw as the key threats to the Thicket.  Many agreed that fragmentation was a serious risk.  Others worried about the younger generation’s distance from nature, about their lack of exposure to the outdoors that Richard Louv decries in Last Child in the Woods.   Some saw the risk as one of preservation itself, seeing the spread of the pine bark beetle as tied to the less aggressive pest control in the public lands of the national forests and parks of east Texas.  Still others viewed urban and suburban development of roads and buildings as a severe concern, while some were concerned about agricultural impacts, particularly clearcutting in the forest.  Finally, some were less specific, just pointing to greed as a threat to the Thicket.

Dr. Weeks’ third major set of questions revolved around the issue of, “what is land conservation?”  The camp that might be considered to be made up of consevationists saw the issue as a moral imperative.  The group of mineral and agricultural producers saw the goal as one of providing the greatest future harvest of goods and services that would be of use to society.  Public officials saw it from still another angle:  of following agency mandates and taking various stakeholders’ views into consideration.  Meanwhile, leaders of local communities saw land protection from another vantage point:  of saving a way of life, of “letting my kids see what I saw”, of passing down a legacy of shared experience.

The fourth set of questions looked into people’s favored strategies for conserving land.  Some argued for setting land aside, and letting nature simply take its course without human intervention.  Others felt it was important for humans to be much more involved, but to exercise best management practices.  Many believed that rules and regulations were not productive, but that incentives were better, though the specifics of which incentives would be acceptable quickly grew cloudy (perpetual conservation easements made people uneasy).

Dr. Weeks concluded by stressing that it is important to recognize the social and cultural  values of land conservation, and to remember the economic roots of many people’s views  on how land should best be used.