Evolution of the Land Ethic

Our growing understanding of humanity’s connection to the natural world is reflected in our evolving approach to its care, management, and restoration.

In the 1940s, biologist Aldo Leopold published A Sand County Almanac, a series of personal essays that is a classic of American nature writing. It was here that Leopold defined “the community concept” and identified the need for a “land ethic”:

“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him to co-operate…

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”

Leopold wrote of seasons, places, and species, always in the context of “interconnection.” An outspoken proponent of conserving wilderness, he prompted the establishment of the nation’s first designated wilderness area, and he himself modeled the practice of living “lightly” upon the land. He also recognized the importance of restoring the environment to its natural state, initiating the first restoration of a native prairie in 1935.

Six decades later, Brian Richter, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Sustainable Waters Program, restates Leopold’s philosophy in terms of our contemporary plight and need:

“During the past two centuries, the American people have been quite industrious in developing the country’s natural resources. As a nation, we have attained a high level of agricultural productivity, developed extensive electricity generation systems, built an expansive transportation network, and harnessed the flow of rivers to supply water to farms, cities, and industries. However, in recent decades we have come to understand some of the things we have lost along the way. We have degraded many of our natural ecosystems to the point where they no longer sustain healthy fish and wildlife populations, and the recreational and aesthetic qualities of many rivers and streams have been compromised.

“Now we are asking our natural resource managers to embrace a broader mandate. We want to manage our ecosystems in a way that provides reliable water supplies, allows for the production of important commodities, and supports local economies, while also sustaining natural ecosystem services including recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual qualities. And we are asking that these qualities be restored in many places where they have been lost.”

Both Leopold and Richter, though separated in time, articulate an idea of respecting and managing our natural resources in an endeavor that today we call “ecosystem management and restoration.”

Understanding the Holistic Earth

“It’s been incredible how our body of knowledge dealing with our ecosystems has evolved,” says PBS&J’s National Environmental Service Director John Shearer, P.E., DEE. “Even as recently as 40 years ago, we didn’t comprehensively understand how river systems functioned. Our national priorities were on public health, safety, and economic development; we weren’t thinking about protecting our natural systems for their own integrity or because we didn’t fully appreciate how large rivers and their watersheds worked. Consequently, our basic laws and regulations did not deal effectively with natural resource management.”

The crisis of Chesapeake Bay was one of the first to raise public consciousness about the impacts of large-scale declining ecosystems. Famous for abundant oyster and blue crab harvests that delighted seafood aficionados across the country, the Chesapeake Bay was once “the nation’s great estuary.” It supported both fish life and human livelihoods. Gradually, declining fish and shellfish populations forewarned problems, until a final horrendous collapse of the oyster industry in the late 1960s set off a public alarm that led to political action. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, a huge milestone in the history of the environmental movement in America, with the ultimate goal of protecting our nation’s water resources. And it turned the national mind-set to ecosystem management, says PBS&J Scientist and Division Manager Eric Dillé, P.G.

“This was the first program that really recognized the need for holistic management,” Dillé explains. “People realized that we couldn’t protect our water resources without looking at the constituents moving through and into them. It was not just a matter of counting up pipes that discharge into a particular place, but rather looking at the watershed—in this case, as far as three states away—and assessing what was happening with land uses, fertilizer, erosion control, and things that are far removed from the water body.”

In addition to important new regulations, the Clean Water Act established 28 National Estuary Programs that targeted water-quality treatment and habitat restoration at the watershed and ecosystem level. It also became clear to proponents that the watersheds of many of the larger estuaries transcend the political boundaries defining states and counties, and that state and local governments involved had widely varying levels of regulatory protection for critical natural resources. According to Dillé, the management of competing and often conflicting interests across layers of government continues to be one of the major challenges of restoration.

New Tools Fill the Knowledge Gap

With a better understanding of what makes an ecosystem work has come a recognition of the difficulty involved in tracking all of the variables that comprise an ecosystem. This knowledge gap is being redressed daily by experts in system modeling who are crafting new ways to track and understand aquatic ecosystem responses.

PBS&J’s Don Deis is one such professional. A scientist supporting the Restoration Coordination and Verification (RECOVER) program of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), Deis examines alternate ways that ecosystems respond to man-made and natural forces. Deis uses systems models and computer model output to project the biological, chemical, and physical changes likely to occur from the implementation of CERP projects and alternatives.

“Our job is to evaluate and assess proposed changes to the ecosystem. We look at the current situation and enter data suggesting what it would be first, without the projects, and then with them. We apply performance measures to areas within CERP and then project the results based on performance benchmarks that teams of experts have designed.”

Monitoring is supposed to validate the modeled results, says Deis, but the statistical models are only an interpretation of existing data. “In reality you find discrepancies, because nature is dynamic. We will be looking towards adaptive management strategies to cope with these variables.”

The Nature Conservancy’s Brian Richter states it this way: “We know that we cannot know everything about a river ecosystem with perfect certainty, and we never expect that our restoration recommendations will be perfectly right. We implement our restoration designs experimentally, tracking the response of the system carefully and learning from what we see.

“Because of the inherent complexities, ecosystem restoration should be perceived as a long-term process of deliberate (adaptive) learning. We should not expect to someday arrive at a point where we can proclaim that we are ‘done.’ Instead, we can draw satisfaction from knowing when the system is doing better.”

Engineering Guided by Science

It’s an irony of ecosystem restoration that the very need for restoration comes from the human desire—and will—to improve. The drive that led to such engineering marvels as the Hoover Dam (built to water a desert), the drainage of the Everglades (intended to create more agricultural land), and the chaining of our great rivers and lakes with locks and dams (to facilitate navigation to bring goods, services, industry, and recreation to our expanding populations) have contributed to many of the problems we face today.

Now, environmental professionals like Dillé believe that same drive, combined with a better understanding of the science of ecology, can help to restore balance. “Engineers are working hand in hand with aquatic biologists, riparian ecologists, hydrologists, fluvial geomorphologists, water quality specialists, computer modelers, statisticians, and many other types of experts to build judiciously within the rhythms of nature,” explains Dillé. “Sometimes that means dismantling old systems and replacing them with more natural ones.”

Major General Don T. Riley, director of Civil Works for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has overseen many successful “re-engineering” projects. “We are constantly learning from experience how we might better design for natural resources restoration,” he says. Riley cites the restoration of Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where the island footprint has been restored to 1,140 acres including wetlands and upland habitat, as a case in point.

“We have 20 species of nesting birds there now with 185 terrapin nests counted last year,” recounts Riley. This success comes from the cumulative experience gained in working in marine/estuarine environments and “serves as a wonderful example of the beneficial use of clean dredged material from the approach channels to the Port of Baltimore,” he says.

More natural sheet flows of water are bringing the Everglades back to significant functionality, thanks to construction design that reflects “our increasing expertise in handling hydro-geomorphic processes,” Riley adds. He also credits a deeper appreciation of science with engineering’s growing interest in dam removal, where the dam is no longer needed and removal is a cost-effective way of achieving environmental benefits. “One example of this is the recently completed study of Matilija Dam on the Ventura River in California. This project would restore natural sediment transport and fish passage in this watershed,” he says.

Science, in essence, helps engineering set priorities. According to Riley, “Society may view some resources as more or less significant. Our ecosystem restoration planning and design have to be based on sound science so we can assess the potential for restoration and the needs that can be met, at least in part.”

Who Pays For It?

With ecosystems that cut across boundaries, the work of restoration must be shared—“among locals, states, federal governments, and others,” says Riley. “One of the most important aspects of restoration efforts like the Chesapeake is that it has encouraged local communities and groups to get involved with their valuable water resources in ways we had not seen previously. This encourages citizens to take direct responsibility for the resources, helping to ensure a long-term focus on the issues.”

As to whether people will continue to finance a billion-dollar proposition, given changing priorities and a national budget that is supporting the Global War on Terror, Riley is optimistic. “Since all Corps projects require a cost-sharing partner and the program has many willing sponsors, the evidence is that, yes, people will pay for environmental initiatives. Problems that seem ‘far away’ today have an amazing ability to come home quickly. And with today’s very mobile society, few problems remain far away for long.”

PBS&J’s John Shearer agrees. “There is no doubt that the issues of ecosystem restoration are complex, highly charged, costly, and layered with uncertainties. We must recognize that it will take time, together with cross-regional cooperation, partnerships between the private and public sectors, good communications processes, and the application of new technologies and practices. More than 2,500 years ago, Confucius wrote, ‘It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.’ I think that as a society, we are ready to recognize and assume our responsibility to restore our most valuable natural assets. And we can never stop trying.”