REASONS FOR CONSERVATION FAILURES

Conservation failures in poor nations result from inadequate political commitments, inadequate financial support, inadequate administrative and scientific capacities, and inadequate popular constituencies  for the protection of nature.  These problems persist because the conventional means for attaining conservation--- international environmental law, national environmental law, and environmental education---have very seldom been able to overcome the high priority placed on economic development in virtually all poor countries.  These generally-accepted conservation measures have clearly failed to inspire effective conservation on a broad scale in developing nations, and we believe they cannot succeed in comparison with the current pace of global ecological degradation.

WHY DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENTAL DESTROYERS IS NOT ENOUGH

Environmental protection is inherently a complex, expensive, difficult, and uncertain process that must be undertaken on a continuing basis into the indefinite future.   Consider this list of critical  requirements that must be present before nature conservation programs have a reasonable chance to succeed:

Which of these political, administrative, social, and legal requirements are unnecessary to create a foundation for environmental protection programs?  Which of these requirements can be discarded without significantly reducing the prospect of  desirable conservation outcomes?    We believe in the great majority of settings that all, or nearly all, of these requirements are necessary to promote meaningful long-term conservation.    And all, or nearly all, of these essential conditions do not exist in the vast majority of developing countries.  In all but a small handful of developing countries, these environmental protection prerequisites are almost entirely absent.    After more than two  decades of international environmental law initiatives and countless environmental education programs, the conditions needed for effective conservation programs simply have not been created where they are needed most, and there is no reason to imagine that conventional conservation strategies will ever succeed in fostering the essential political, social, economic, administrative, and legal climate.   If readers agree with these conclusions, the need to devise different and better conservation approaches should appear compelling.

For a more extensive critique of the common, but unsatisfactory, conventional conservation approaches, click on the following three links:

International and National Environmental Law

Environmental Education

"Sustainable" Development Projects

The global destruction of environmental systems and features constitutes a CREEPING CRISIS certain to grow worse over time.  Human populations in many developing states are growing rapidly, but this is only part of the problem.  In recent decades, many people who once consumed natural resources only for subsistence purposes have become active in local, national, and international markets that provide incentives for increased natural resources exploitation.  At the same time, expanded access to low-tech innovations such as refrigerators, chain saws, motorboats, flashlights, and synthetic fishing nets have enabled greatly increased resource exploitation. As a result of expanded communications, tourism, media, and transportation, people in the remotest areas of the world have been exposed to images of "western" materialistic life styles. Many people in poor countries want to own Reeboks, ghetto-blasters, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and satellite antennas for their T.V.s.  They also want access to better medical facilities, better schools, greater mobility, and other attributes of a higher standard of living.  If most people in wealthy nations want more and still more prosperity, why would anyone believe that citizens of developing states will be content if  they attain minimal subsistence levels?  People everywhere know what goods and amenities are available in wealthy states, and inescapable demands for comparable economic prosperity in developing nations will impose correspondingly greater pressures for nature exploitation. 

The crucial point is that further delays in the implementation of effective conservation programs are certain to make protection of ecosystems and species progressively more difficult in the long run.   Increasing populations, aspirations for higher standards of living, increasing marketization that is transforming natural features into economic commodities, and increasing diffusion of natural resource exploitation technologies are "ratchet effects" entailing irreversible trends that will impede the creation of successful conservation programs.  These genies cannot be put back into their bottles, especially if the ecological "bottles" have already been shattered.  Future generations will be forced to confront hard environmental choices our society has been avoiding, and they will undoubtedly have fewer healthy ecosystems and species capable of conservation.

Current conservation approaches--environmental law, education, and sustainable development programs--must be assessed in light of this creeping crisis.  The critical issue is not whether these conventional approaches have achieved some kind of positive results in some settings, but whether they are capable of attaining significant success relative to the magnitude of global ecological degradation.  Environmental law and education have not proven sufficiently powerful mechanisms for behavioral change to overcome pressing demands in poor nations for improved economic conditions even at the cost of serious environmental damage. 

Given the dismal implementation records of most previous conservation programs and the rapid pace of global ecological degradation, why should anyone believe environmental policymakers "got it right" the first time: that the strategies chosen in the earliest phase of environmental protection efforts would still be the best available approaches a quarter- century later? If our goal is to preserve a substantial level of nature's bounty while also meeting human needs for sustainable natural resources uses, environmentalists should discard the belief that law and education by themselves can be the central agents of change. 

Conservation proponents will have to establish a more favorable climate by creating new conservation-oriented businesses, educating people in developing nations about the benefits for them of conservation and the perils of non-sustainable resource uses, linking conservation commitments to preferential market treatments and other kinds of economic and social benefits that people in poor states do want, training environmental entrepreneurs and natural resources managers who must learn to combine economic and conservation opportunities, and sometimes by directly paying people in the developing nations to make ecologically desirable choices that otherwise would not be in their self-interest.

There is no short, simple, inexpensive way to protect the world's remaining natural systems and features, no way that relies on semantic formulations without confronting underlying causes of environmental harm, no way in which legal or education words can serve as substitutes for tangible conservation actions based on people's perceived self-interest.  Preservation of ecological vitality on a broad scale depends on our ability to devise environmental strategies and institutions able to create the essential, but difficult-to-attain, political, social, and economic conditions that conventional conservation programs have manifestly been unable to foster.