Conservation is Good Work by Wendell Berry

THERE ARE, as nearly as I can make out, three kinds of conservation currently operating. The first is the preservation of places that are grandly wild or "scenic" or in some other way spectacular. The second is what is called "conservation of natural resources"-that is, of the things of nature that we intend to use: soil, water, timber, and minerals. The third is what you might call industrial troubleshooting: the attempt to limit or stop or remedy the most flagrant abuses of the industrial system. All three kinds of conservation are inadequate, both separately and together.

Right at the heart of American conservation, from the beginning, has been the preservation of spectacular places. The typical American park is in a place that is "breathtakingly" beautiful or wonderful and of little apparent economic value. Mountains, canyons, deserts, spectacular landforms, geysers, waterfalls-these are the stuff of parks. There is, significantly, no prairie national park. Wilderness preserves, as Dave Foreman points out, tend to include much "rock and ice" and little marketable timber. Farmable land, in general, has tempted nobody to make a park. Wes Jackson has commented with some anxiety on the people who charge blindly across Kansas and eastern Colorado, headed for the mountains west of Denver. These are nature lovers and sightseers, but they are utterly oblivious of or bored by the rich natural and human history of the Plains. The point of Wes Jackson's anxiety is that the love of nature that limits itself to the love of places that are "scenic" is implicitly dangerous. It is dangerous because it tends to exclude unscenic places from nature and from the respect that we sometimes accord to nature. This is why so much of the landscape that is productively used is also abused; it is used solely according to standards dictated by the financial system and not at all according to standards dictated by the nature of the place. Moreover, as we are beginning to see, it is going to be extremely difficult to make enough parks to preserve vulnerable species and the health of ecosystems or large watersheds.