Peter Forbes’ intro
to
Whole System Conservation Retreat
for
The Nature Conservancy
July, 2013
I’m here to provide context, perspective and questions on this important theme of innovation and
change. Here are my questions:
You are the innovators. How will you need to innovate in the next 25 years in service to your
mission, how might that be different from the previous 25 years, and from where within TNC
does innovation arise?
What does this Whole System work feel like to you?
What are the practices that will foster it, and what are the practices that will diminish it or
prevent it?
And what’s a whole leader … in the world at large and within the Nature Conservancy?
Here’s the context part:
First and foremost: I deeply respect The Nature Conservancy because of your courage. You took
science out of the academy and put it near the very front of your organization. And then you set
off on a rigorous sixty year long scientific journey from preserves to bioreserves to ecoregions to
whole systems.
What’s courageous is that that scientific journey had to start in your heads but wouldn’t have
continued had it not also been in your hearts. Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leaders said, the
longest journey any person will ever make is the journey from their heads to their hearts. I feel
that were the Nature Conservancy a person, it would be kind of person for whom others naturally
stand when they leave a room.
And, yet, I don’t think you can succeed with Whole Systems Conservation, using your primary
tools of science and law. The challenges facing your work are not just scientific and legal; they
are also cultural and social. You know this and it’s why Joni Ward, your North America science
director, acknowledged with some difficulty “great science is not enough!”
Whole Systems Conservation requires a bigger shift than this acknowledgement. And it requires
a bigger shift than even placing people and community firmly within the global system you are
seeking to protect. This bold work you have set out to do requires that you view your
relationships as important as your knowledge and your transactions.
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This is the crux of the challenge: how you are with yourselves and how you are with others is
now as important as all your science, money and influence.
Whole Systems Conservation re-imagines conservation as the ability to inspire and move others
to do what you could never do alone. It requires that you work effectively across your own
borders so that you may cross even bigger borders with others.
And these are not just organizational borders or political borders; they are gender borders, class,
educational level, ideological borders.
I want to share two things I’ve learned over the last 15 years.
First, what’s practiced inside is what’s practiced outside. From all my experiences working for,
with and alongside many different conservation groups, it’s nearly impossible to do externally
what you are unable to do internally. Put another way, your capacity to connect to, inspire, reach
new people is largely dependent on how you model that first within the Nature Conservancy.
Second, to practice Whole system Conservation you will need to express and live by a much
deeper understanding of the phrase that appears so often in your framework, “people are part of
the system.” The harder and more complete analysis may be something like the health of the
biological system is dependent upon the health of the social system. Conservation and human
community share a single destiny. Let me go further. Everywhere I’ve worked, I have tried to be
a good student of the relationship between people and nature. I care about both. And this is
what I’ve learned: No organization (even one as innovative as TNC) can protect land and water
from a suffering humanity.
It’s as Linda Hogan, the Choctaw writer, wrote 30 years ago: “What happens to the people and
what happens to the land is the same thing.”
Many sociologists concur that healthy land leads to healthy human culture. Many understand, for
example, that kids need nature to fully develop into healthy, respectful citizens. But what about
this: how do bad relations between people affect the health of the land? When we are greedy,
when we are at odds, when we fear each other, when we are under the influence of myths and
lies, we hurt nature as much as we hurt ourselves.
This is not philosophy or poetry. It’s the same as your ecosystem science but with a deeper
acknowledgment of the role of the keystone species, you and me.
I know that TNC arose from the minds of the best ecologists of the era. One of those great
minds died long before his influence was fully felt. I’m talking about Aldo Leopold. He
understood these people-nature connections and called it out. He named it a “land ethic” and he
saw a connected system where the health of one affected the health of the other. His famous
statement about this was: “There are two things that interest me; the relationship of people to
each other, and the relationship of people to land.” Leopold has helped me to see that nothing
affects the health of nature more than the quality of relationships between people.
I find that statement as provocative as this No Trespassing sign. Leopold suggests that one
cannot meaningfully and durably address loss of biodiversity, destruction of our landscapes,
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climate change, without also being in direct relationship with the causes of these problems which
are human poverty, the destructive forces of race, class and privilege, and aspects of the
American dream itself. Leopold suggested that one of the most important and durable ways to
help the health of the land, to be a good conservationist, is to focus on healing relationships
between people.
Now before your eyes roll right out of your heads, I’m not suggesting that TNC focus on healing
relationships between people. No one wants the Nature Conservancy to be anything but itself,
but I am suggesting that the work of Whole System Conservation is dependent on sociology as
much as biology. Are you ready for that?
Let me tell you a story. Remember Michael Pollan, the food writer? Leading up to the
millennium in 2000, the New York Times spent several years creating a 1,000 year time capsule
to be opened in the year 3,000. They spent years deciding what should go into this time capsule,
but their toughest decision was where to place the time capsule. What would really protect it
best over a thousand years?
Do they bury it in the ground like a dog bone? Do they create a law from Congress that legislates
future generations to protect it? Do they raise a ton of money to endow 20 generations of
stewards to stand guard beside it and to check on it every few years or so? Each one of these
plausible solutions was examined thoroughly and tossed out for being insufficient to actually
protect this time capsule over 1,000 years.
Then the New York Times asked themselves a very helpful question, what’s still here today that
was here in 1,000 AD? They could come up with only two answers: the Catholic Church and
several examples of beautiful art. So, they decided that they very, very best way to truly protect
this time capsule for 1,000 years was to make it as beautiful as possible and to place it in an
obvious and very visible public place so that people would love it, cherish it, and call it their
own.
The best way to protect something for 1,000 years is to help people to be in relationship with it.
The Nature Conservancy has done beautiful, important work for well over 50 years, how will
you make it last 1,000 years? What are the relationships that will be necessary?
And when you speak about “broadening the constituency for conservation” which is one of our
global solutions, how might that come about? Will you expect people to see conservation
differently and walk closer toward you, or will you see yourselves see nature differently and
walk closer to the people?
I think what you’ve already done is amazing. You’ve protected millions of acres of land, and
you exported the idea: there are 110,000 protected areas across the world.
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Honestly, I believe you have helped to create a nation, and now that nation may be asking
something new of you.
Here’s a Harpers Index for this moment in time:
180
That’s the number of acres in 2012 that get developed every hour of every
day
6% growth rate
a new study by the demographer Richard Benjamin has found that the
fastest growing parts of our country are also the most segregated. We are
increasingly dividing ourselves into enclaves of whites and enclaves of
people of color.
24
That’s the number of states with recorded eminent domain cases of
conservation being taken for other community uses.
47%
that’s the number of land trusts who report a legal challenge to their
conservation easements.
17%
that’s the number of land trusts that have been successful in their legal
challenges.
1%
The top one percent of our nation now controls a full 40% of the nation’s
wealth. According to the New Economics Institute, the average corporate
CEO now makes 380% what the average employee makes.
2050
38% (percentage of Americans who don’t believe that climate change exists and is caused by
humans)
2042
40% under 24
12% Percentage of voters who are people of color in 2000
28% (percentage of voters in 2012 who are people of color
It’s a very different world than in 1980 when this picture was taken of your regional directors.
The world is more diverse, more complex, less connected to one another, but no less connected
to nature and the meaning of what you provide. The words, the music, the emotion to describe
this connection to nature can be really different.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
Can we see this expression of place as different, but no less meaningful or sincere or important to
conservation? Must conservation only look like this?
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The changes that are happening around us have created a moment in time, a moment of
transition, that every successful, durable, long-term organization needs to face.
(Science, Power, Community)
In service to you mission, you have proven the ability to innovate on many occasions: you
changed conservation for the better by integrating in the science of biodiversity. You used your
significant power to create new tools in our legal systems and new public policy into our political
systems. What needs to come next? I believe that the new innovations will come from how you
bring your vision of nature to the people, and how you allow their vision for health to shape
nature.
And to work with people and community means the embracing things that are different.
Each of us started off as a single cell, right? Now we’re 30 trillion cells in 274 difference forms.
Your ability to stay at a body temp of 98.6 and a PH of 6.8 is because of diversity. Our bodies
are this rich example of difference and diversity at work. A key to our resilience, as human
bodies, as organizations, and as a movement, rests with our capacity to recognize and honor
diversity.
The Nature Conservancy’s resilience, then, comes from its own capacity to hold the tension of
difference: different people, different styles of work, different approaches, different cloths,
because that, actually, leads to the capacity for different partners, different ideas and different
tools.
The interesting thing, something I feel very strongly about, is that no organization is going to
become more inclusive from a slick messaging campaign that brings others to them. We become
more inclusive through practicing self-awareness, by making space for difference, by walking
toward others and seeking out a conversation.
The really good news is this. You are not the only conservationists. You are not the only ones
who care about this beautiful Earth of ours. There are lots and lots of people trying to hold up
the earth right now, and the question is how do we join them?
Our best estimate is that there are about 50 innovator conservation groups in the USA right now,
and about 150 more trying to follow them, doing their own smaller version of whole system
conservation.
Some are forced into it because of their success. For example, when conservationists control 20
percent of a state’s landmass, as they do in Maine and several other states, it’s no longer feasible
to assume that transportation, poverty, food security, or how your neighbors will heat their
homes is not your concern. The public is asking you, for whom have you done this work?
But other conservation groups are pulling themselves there because they recognize that the
outcomes are great conservation and more resilient human lives more connected to nature, and
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also the opportunity for conservation groups to be in service to different people, and for us as
individuals to grow personally from what the work has asked of them.
Whole System Conservation is about becoming something different.
You folks are great achievers, and everyone honors that. You set big goals and you accomplish
them. Whole System Conservation is definitely about doing big things, but it’s also about
allowing yourself to become something new. Here are the elements of that:
It’s about matching transactional strength with relational strength
It’s about communicating why you do nature conservation not just how you do it.
It’s about listening first to hear what people need, and then finding the sweet spot where their
need and nature overlap. We make ourselves bigger by responding to calls for help rather than
selling a conservation plan.
Whole System conservation does require new skills -cultural competency skills, partnership
skills, even community organizing skills, but it’s still all about saving nature.
I can’t imagine anyone wants the nature Conservancy to stop doing what you do best, and yet I
see how Whole Systems Conservation stretches you to put that work in service to larger
community goals. How will you measure success? What are the stories you will value the most?
This is a story that once met a great deal to me. It’s dated and it’s awkward at so, so many
levels, but I want to acknowledge that it inspired me 25 years ago. Why? Nature conservation
wasn’t just about tree-hugging. Conservation wasn’t just about advocacy but about action. I
grew up in blue jeans so there was something impressive about those 3 piece suits. I’m a man,
and these were all men.
What’s the new story that must immerge from The Nature Conservancy that will help you to live
and work at the very edge of your competencies? What’s the new story for the nature
conservancy that will allow you to step into new worlds and to fill what’s missing in your own
lives and the lives of others?
What’s the new story that inspires and rejuvenates?
Dr. King said “no social movement will succeed that cannot paint a picture of the world that
people actually want to go toward.”
Your own Craig Groves says Whole System Conservations “compels us to lead with inspiration
and follow with science.” What is the inspiration? What do you have to offer the community?
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This Whole Systems Conservation won’t be easy; it may be the most rewarding thing you’ve
ever tried to do. You risk moving beyond your competencies and your science, and you risk
being judged. But you stand to gain tremendous respect, experience, trust, a much broader
public. You stand facing the opportunity to fulfill Aldo Leopold vision for a land ethic in
America.
To succeed at this, we have to be human, we have to express our empathy, we have to be real,
and we have to be connected.
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