Bandit with a Chain Saw

The 10/6/08 issue of The New Yorker contains an interesting article by Raffi Khatchadourian that describes how illegal foresting is responsible for much of the deforestation that is happening in the world today. He closes the article with a tense account of a Russian "special officer" chasing an illegal forester through the woods. The officer fires several shots at the fleeing poacher before finally capturing him, but I was struck by the fact that the "middle-aged, visibly out of shape" bandit did not drop his chainsaw during the chase. Given the context of the article it seems unlikely that Khatchadourian's readers will see the poacher as a sympathetic figure, but he was to me. The sympathy I felt for this "bandit with a chainsaw" has its roots in a presentation I attended at the World Wilderness Congress in Tromso, Norway several years ago.

I was part of a large U.S. delegation to the Congress, and for the first few days my pride in being part of the this group grew day by day as I attended session after session where members of our delegation described marvelous GIS and GPS applications for wilderness protection, successful noise abatement policies in the Grand Canyon, etc. It grew even more after my colleagues and I made a very well-received presentation about lessons for protecting natural areas that might be learned by studying New York's Adironcack Park. But my reverie came to a screeching halt when I chanced upon a session presented by a forest ranger from a national park in India. I can't remember the name of the park or the ranger, but I've never forgotten his message.

His presentation started with wide-angle photgraphs of forest framed by the Himalayan Mountains in the background. This, he told us, was his park. He then began to show closer shots of the park, and it became apparent that his park was experiencing severe deforestation and errosion. He explained that the damage was initially caused by local people who entered the park to harvest branches for cooking and heating, and leaves for browse for their animals. He and his fellow rangers had responded by enforcing a strict ban on such activity. Soon, representatives from the local villages visited park headquarters and explained that their children were suffering from the cold and their animals were dying of starvation. Might it be possible, they wondered, for the local people to enter the park and take only leaves and branches that had fallen to the ground? The rangers felt sympathy for their plight and agreed to their request. That, he explained, was when the real damage started, since people literally came to park with brooms and swept the forest floor clean of fallen leaves and branches. Stripped of ground cover and seeds, the forest was dying, and the topsoil was washing away. He closed by asking us what, short of shooting the people who would inevitably continue to come to the park is search of leaves and wood, should he do? We had no answers.

Upon returning home I decided that I had to refocus my Adirondack research in a way that addressed the underlying factors exposed by the Indian forest ranger's presentation. It has not been an easy process, but I believe that answer lies in adopting a pragmatic philosophy when it comes to devising and implementing policies to protect nature. In this context pragmatic does not simply mean "practical," and it is not just an excuse to compromise, althoug compromise is often the result. It means instead that ideas, as Louis Menand explains in his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club, are not "'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools--like forks and knives and microchips--that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves (p. xi)." Since, in this formulation, ideas are "provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutablity but on their adaptability (and they)...should never become idelogies--either justifying the status quo or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it (p. xii)."

I seems to me that failure to adopt a pragmatic view of nature has too often led to policy debates being dominated by those determined to justify the environmental status quo at any cost (anti-environmentalists) and those wedded to a transcendent imperative for renouncing it (radical environmentalists). In the Adirondack Park the failure to adopt a pragmatic view of nature was responsible for the failure of the Governor's Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century, while the success of subsequent efforts to protect important natural areas through land acquisition and conservation easements is the result of politicians and policymakers taking a pragmatic approach. This recent history illustrates a larger theme: the Adirondack Park has succeeded in protecting nature in one of the most heavily developed parts of the world (60 million people live within a days drive of the Adirondack Park) because it has generally taken a pragmatic view of nature. Looking back at the successes and failures of the world's oldest and largest attempt to marry public and private land to protect nature may yield the answers the park ranger from India, and the rest of us who care about nature, need.