In his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club Louis Menand quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes as stating "all the pleasure in life is in general ideas, but all the use of life is in specific solutions (p. 342)." We seek, through our study of the Adirondack Park, to produce both general ideas and specific solutions about how we might best protect what remains of nature. One general idea that has emerged from our study to date is that there is great benefit in taking a pragmatic view of nature when considering environmental policy. It is important to note that in this context "pragmatic" is not simply a synonym for "compromise." Instead, it expresses the belief that ideas, including the idea of nature, "should never become ideologies--either justifying the the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it (Menand, p. xii)." Sometimes useful ideas will emerge from compromise, and at other times from the application of just principles.
Unfortunately, environmental policy is often decided in a political arena where nature is defined in ideological terms by anti-environmentalist seeking to justify the status quo, or radical environmentalists seeking transcendent change. The result is often conflict, gridlock and policy failure. The Adirondack Park is one of the world's oldest and largest attempts to protect nature through public policy, and our research suggests that this experiment has usually worked best when it has taken a pragmatic and democratic view of nature, and often failed when it has not. Some specific solutions that have worked in the Adirondack Park and promise to be useful elsewhere are: land use planning, affording nature extra protection in the political process through delay and referendum as mandated by the "Forever Wild Clause", stewardship and citizen science, and paying local government taxes on state land. The failure of the Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century, on the other hand, confirms that effective policies for protecting nature must be forged in the crucible of democratic politics, no matter how frustrating or imperfect that route may sometimes seem.
Elsewhere in The Metaphysical Club Menand explains that the usefulness of pragmatism in the modern world rests on "a kind of skepticism that (helps) people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-market society (p, xii)." It is no accident that pragmatic skepticism emerged on the scene at the same time as modern scientific methods since science, democracy, and capitalism are the three pillars of the modern world. It is also important to recognize that those pillars are sometimes at odds with each other. Democracy and capitalism, as Robert Dahl demonstrates in his 1998 treatise On Democracy, " are locked in a persistent conflict in which each modifies and limits the other (p. 173)." Similarly, recent events in the field of biomedical research have demonstrated that capitalism is fully capable of distorting the scientific process in its quest for profit. It is, however, the conflicts that sometimes emerge between science and democracy that are most important for those who are concerned with the fate of nature in the modern world.
Where the environment is concerned, the mismatched language and time-frames of science and democratic politics present a serious barrier to effective policy making. The language of science is modest and probabilistic, characteristics that allow political partisans to create illusions of doubt when scientific findings are cited in public discourse. Further, the painstaking methodology and redundancy of results required by science creates a slow-moving process that is at odds with the election-driven time frame of democratic politics. Recognizing the mismatch between the language and time frames of science and democracy is essential to creating environmental policies that eschew ideology in favor of weighing and assessing the full-range of empirical evidence.
A general theme that emerges from the study of Adirondack Park history is that its policies work best when they embrace the pragmatism embodied in the park's founding (see my post titled "The First Modern Forest). Both of the recent comprehensive histories of the park reached similar conclusions. In his 1978 book The Adirondack Park: A Political History Frank Graham writes of the Adirondack Park Agency: "There were public relations blunders that ought to serve as warnings for regional planning groups in the future {my emphasis}.To its capable staff of planners, lawyers, and ecologists, the agency might have added a community relations expert--and even a psychologist--who could have bridged the gap by interpreting goals and techniques of the planning effort for local government officials, the press, the business community, and the public at large (p. 261)." Phil Terrie expands on this theme in his 1997 Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks when he concludes that "..the difficulties involved in protecting both human and natural values reflect the continuing value of narratives to define the land and influence people's understandings of the land's meaning. (The) failure of the legislature to resolve the dilemma posed by private land in the Park (represents)...a great opportunity to...find just the unifying narrative we need forge a hopeful story for the future (p. 183)".
Adirondack Park history strongly suggests that defining nature in ideological terms yields policies that are controversial and counter productive, whereas taking a pragmatic view of nature results in policies that are flexible and effective. For pragmatists, ideas are "tools that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves (Menand: p. xi)." Examining the Adirondack Park from a pragmatic perspective yields a "tool kit" that can be adapted to the task of nature conservation in a wide range of circumstances. This kit includes: land use planning, delay and referendum, deed covenants, landscape design, tax payments on public land, variable tax assessment, stewardship, and conservation easements.
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