Soil and water conservation is essential for ecosystem management

Excerpt

Public relations experts tell us that attention-grabbing metaphors go a long way toward advancing public support for and understanding of new concepts and ideas. Public support for soil conservation in the 1930s was greatly enhanced by the Dust Bowl metaphor. The devastation of the Dust Bowl spawned the Soil Erosion Service and its eventual successor, the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Most conservationists would agree that Aldo Leopold's “land ethic” was a metaphor that had profound and long-lasting impacts on the conservation movement. When, over 10 years ago, managers of Yellowstone National Park decided to let self-governing natural processes play a greater role in the Park, they chose to label their new management philosophy as “natural regulation.” In recent times, a relatively new metaphor has been used to usher in a new philosophy of resource conservation and management, called ecosystem management (EM). I would like to describe this metaphor and its implications for soil and water conservation.

EM emphasizes large spatial scales, longer time periods and many variables (Thomas 1997). While EM is applicable to both public (state and federal) and private lands, public land managers and environmental groups are its strongest …