12/4/23: Conservation as Public Service, MPAs Mitigating Climate Change, Ghost Rivers, and more
Elizabeth Moore
Author | Consultant | Conservation, Parks, and Recreation Expert | [email protected]
Every week I share feature articles, news, tools, and actions to help everyone protect and enjoy our wonderful planet, from the sea to the sky and everything in between. In this week's issue:
#bluegreenbetween #theoceanisforeveryone #conservation #parksandrec
Something Important: Conservation as Public Service
It's a quip I heard many times--and used sometimes myself--in the course of my civil service career with NOAA: you'll never get rich working for the government. Not that I'd turn down lottery winnings or an inheritance from a long-lost wealthy uncle, but getting rich was never the point of my career. Protecting the ocean was.
People can approach a marine conservation career in numerous ways: conduct research and teach as a scientist for a university, become an activist for an environmental organization, serve as a consultant for the public and private sectors, or work for a corporation as a sustainability expert. But working for a government agency at the local, state, tribal, federal, or international level is different because it involves having responsibility for the public trust.
There's a bureaucratic phrase that occasionally crops up in discussions about what work should be done by agencies vs. what should be done by contractors: inherently governmental. When something is so important to the public interest or public trust that it can only be entrusted to government employees tasked with those responsibilities it is considered inherently governmental. The protection and conservation of our natural heritage and environment is one of those functions.
The employees who carry out these conservation missions do so on behalf of the American public. Superintendents of national parks or national wildlife refuges or national marine sanctuaries, for example, make their decisions based on the best available science, community input, and laws and policies, not making money. They are about restoring and enhancing the sustainability and functionality of the environment, not maximizing profit.
As the old saying goes, you don't put the fox in charge of the hen house. Imagine if a petroleum company or mining outfit was given charge of a national wildlife refuge that has resources of interests to it. Do you think they would be more worried about drilling and digging to get those resources or preserving the environment? Imagine if a shipping company were put in control of a national marine sanctuary. I think they would be more worried about moving vessels quickly to reduce costs than to divert out of the way of migrating whales. Imagine if companies were allowed to buy their way into becoming sponsors of national parks. Do you really want to visit a protected area that bears the name of a corporation (for example, god help us, Google Yellowstone National Park?)?
Not every company is avaricious or dishonest but the restoration and preservation of our wild places and wildlife is too important to entrust to anyone other than the governments we create to support our common good. We should never consider selling or ceding control of our public lands and waters and, as I wrote in the 10/9/23 edition of this newsletter, we should "[p]rioritize public ownership and stewardship of every bit of land and water that we can, at all levels--local, state, federal, Indigenous, and international--and rewild and otherwise restore them to healthy, sustainable ecosystem functioning."
For well over a century, the people who work conservation agencies have stood as stewards and guardians to our public lands and waters. As our future faces a growing entwined environmental calamity, our lands and waters, and those who watch over them, will only become more important.
Something New: Solar Tipping Points
A recent study has found that we've reached a desirable tipping point: the costs of solar and other alternative power sources have plummeted so much, that they now make more financial sense than fossil fuels. It now makes more sense--environmentally and financially--to hasten our transition to alternative sources.
Read more here.
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Something New: How MPAs Can Mitigate Climate Change
Most of the marine protected areas in the US that are managed by federal authorities are "one-offs" in the sense that each has been designated based on its individual merits. They might be part of networks (as national marine sanctuaries are part of the national marine sanctuary system and national parks and monuments are part of the national park system) but they are usually not designated because of how they interact with other sites in that network. They are even less often designated for their role in building resilience to and helping mitigate the impacts from climate change (though that is changing as NOAA and the Department of the Interior bring more resources to bear on the issue). I was happy to see then a new study on building climate resilience into the design of marine protected areas through such mechanisms as ensuring the recovery of harvested species, protecting all the habitats that marine organisms might need in all their life stages, and working across political and legal boundaries.
Read more here.
Something Haunting: Reminders of a Ghost River
How many streams, creeks, and rivers have we channeled, filled in, and buried? It's impossible to know, to measure the miles of water, the years of physical and spiritual sustenance, the landscapes and river companions we once might have been gifted by them. Artist Bruce Willen is helping remind us of one waterway lost to Baltimore, in an extended, walkable art installation called Ghost Rivers. Sumwalt Run, now channeled into culverts that run beneath the city, lives again as a running blue line marked with interpretive panels letting people know what they they can't see.
Read more here.
Something To Do: Become a Better Coach
Many of us serve as coaches or mentors in our personal or private lives, wanting to pass on the wisdom and experience we have gained from life and help other folks find ways to their own goals. But we can stumble if we don't approach it in the right way. A new study pinpoints one way of doing so: helping mentees and others we may advise to focus first on their aspirations and not on their immediate problems. Being aspiration-forward provides more motivation for people to want and respond to criticism and advice, rather than attacking problems and shortcomings first.
Read more here.
Something To Do: Become the Hero of Your Own Story
Science has established that humans are creatures of story. We share stories with each other to entertain, educate, and establish and maintain social bonds. But thinking about and within a narrative structure can help us in another way. A new study has demonstrated that seeing ourselves as heroes engaged in our own heroic journey can help us find more meaning in our lives (and you don't even have to put a cape on if you don't want to!).
Read more here.
That's it for this week - see you next week!