The courage to connect

Excerpt

This summer, the Soil and Water Conservation Society (SWCS) invited me to deliver the keynote lecture at its international conference in Fort Worth, Texas. (The full text of the 2012 Pritchard Lecture is available on the SWCS Web site at http://www.swcs.org/documents/filelibrary/12ac/2012_Meine_Pritchard_Lecture_CAFD0AA4FD40F.pdf.)

I felt especially honored given the theme of the conference: “Choosing Conservation: Considering Ecology, Economics, and Ethics.” I began my remarks by thanking the SWCS for its courage in highlighting that theme. It is no small challenge to explore the complex connections among these “three Es.” To do so is to ask fundamental and often uncomfortable questions of ourselves. It is so much easier to ignore the questions or to fall back on conventional answers.

The theme could not be more timely. To be reminded of that, all one had to do was step outside the conference center in Fort Worth. As in much of the continental United States, it was very hot and dry outside. On the way to the conference, one witnessed it. The effects of extreme heat and drought were evident across the land—in countless stressed farms and desiccated corn fields, in cottonwood leaves turned prematurely yellow, in ponds at half capacity and rivers of sand…