Spring 2000 Volume 9, Number 1
Ecological Sustainability, Consumption and NIMBYism
Enlightened Conservation Illuminates Need for a Personal Consumption Ethic
by Douglas W. MacClerry, Assistant Director of Forest Management, U.S. Forest Service, Washington, D. C
Over the last two decades there has been a substantial shift in the management emphasis of public lands in the United States. This shift has increased the emphasis on managing for biodiversity protection and amenity values, and reduced commodity outputs. Terms like "ecosystem management" and "ecological sustainability" are used to describe this change in management emphasis, which is often referred to as a "paradigm shift."
While the shift in management emphasis on public lands is occurring in response to changing societal preferences, that same public is making no corresponding shift in its commodity consumption habits. The "dirty little secret" about ecological sustainability is that, in the face of stable or increasing resource consumption in the U.S., the effect is to shift the burden and impacts of that consumption to ecosystems elsewhere. For example, shifting to increased timber harvesting from private forests in the U.S. or forests of other countries.
Over the last decade or so, federal timber harvests dropped 70 percent, from about 13 to 4 billion board feet annually. Since 1990, U.S. softwood lumber imports from Canada rose from 12 to 18 billion board feet, increasing from 27 to 36 percent of U.S. soft-wood lumber consumption. Much of the increase in Canadian lumber imports came from native old growth boreal forests in northern Quebec. The increased harvesting of Quebec's forests has become a public issue there.
Harvesting on private lands in the southern U.S. also increased after the reduction of federal timber in the west. Today, the harvest of softwood timber in the southeast exceeds the rate of growth for the first time in 50 years. Increased harvesting of fiber by south-eastern chip mills has also become a public issue.
The U.S. public consumes more resources today than at any other time in our history, and consumes more per capita than almost any other notion. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the average family size in the U.S. has dropped by 16 percent, while the size of the average newly constructed single family home has increased by 48 percent.
The U.S. conservation community and the media have given scant attention to the ecological transfer effects of the management shift on U.S. public lands. Yet, the ethical or moral foundation for ecological sustainability is weak unless there is a corresponding focus on the consumption side of the natural resource equation.
Today, less than two percent of Americans are farmers, and even people who live in rural areas are disconnected from any direct role in the management of land. While few people are resource producers, all remain consumers. Personal consumption is one area where individuals can act and have a positive effect or resource use, demand, and management. Yet, few people connect their resource consumption to what must be done to the land to make it possible.
The disjoint between people as consumers and their interest in protecting the land is reflected in the discord and alienation between producers and consumers. Loggers, ranchers, fishers, miners, and other resource producers have all at times been subjected to scorn and ridicule by the society that benefits from the goods they produce. What is absent from much environmental discourse today is a recognition that urbanized society is no less dependent upon the products of forests and fields than were the subsistence farmers of America's post. Witness, for example, that rural communities traditionally engaged in timber production are commonly referred to as "resource dependent" communities, while resource dependent communities such as Denver, Detroit, or Boston are seldom referred to as such. Many people have attributed the move to ecosystem management as a belated recognition of Aldo Leopold's land ethic - the idea that management of land has, or should have, an ethical content. Leopold also spoke of the need for responsible consumptio. In 1928 he wrote, "A public which lives in wooden houses should be careful about throwing stones at lumbermen, even wasteful ones, until it has learned how its own arbitrary demands as to kinds and qualities of lumber, help cause the waste which it decries ... The long and the short of the matter is that forest conservation depends in part on intelligent consumption, as well as intelligent consumption of lumber."
If management of land has an ethical content, consumption should have one as well. Perhaps it is time for a "personal consumption ethic" to go along with Leopold's land ethic. Ecological sustainability will never be a truly holistic approach to resource management until the consumption side of the equation becomes an integral part of the solution rather then an afterthought as it is today. The true test as to weather a paradigm shift has really occurred in the U.S. will be whether our society begins to see personal consumption as having an ethical and environmental content as well - and then acts upon them as such.