Mark Schwartz

In 2011, Steven Pinker borrowed the closing line “better angels of our natures” from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address to set the stage for a book arguing that humanity has become more peaceful, law abiding and less murderous through time. Pinker's compelling argument goes that some combination of governance, law, education, globalization and trade have allowed four better angels (empathy, self-control, a moral sense, and reason) of our natures to increasingly dominate five inner demons (practical violence, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology) resulting in decreasing human violence across millennial time scales.
 
Let me try an analogy in those angels for how, when, where and why societies work well, and when they break down into argumentative stalemates. Today’s counterproductive angel of human nature is our need for team identification. Apparently, our angels love team colors, jerseys and the spectacle of sport as much as the rest of us.
 
Sure; humans evolved in small groups and  well-being within our tribes relied heavily on sticking together as a team. This may help explain the seemingly inexplicable propensity for young men, in particular, to voluntarily put their very lives on the line for the well-being of the larger tribe (the nation) without a fair assessment of the very high personal risks involved (i.e., patritoism). 

Mark Schwartz

I just wrote to lambast Mike Noel for this quote: “When we turn the Forest Service over to the bird and bunny lovers and the tree huggers and the rock lickers, we’ve turned our history over. We are going to lose our wildlife and we are going to lose our scenery, the very thing you people wanted to try to protect. It’s just plain stupidity.” Mostly, I focused on what he got wrong.

Today I take a more positive look at what he could have said that would have been constructive and more accurate, and likely accomplish what he wanted to in the process.

Mark Schwartz

Utah State Representative (73rd district) Mike Noel recently blamed US Forest Policies for the 70,000 acre Brian Head fire. Specifically, he said, “When we turn the Forest Service over to the bird and bunny lovers and the tree huggers and the rock lickers, we’ve turned our history over. We are going to lose our wildlife and we are going to lose our scenery, the very thing you people wanted to try to protect. It’s just plain stupidity.”
 
This quote is wrong, and wrong-headed for three important classes of reasons: (a) factual errors; (b) process errors; and (c) ethical transgressions. 

​It is now roughly 30 years since I started a project in the forests of the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Reserve (TNC) as a PhD student at Florida State University. I still haven’t published a paper on this particular portion of my dissertation. The irony is that remains my intention to write such a paper. Bottom line: I wrote a crappy dissertation. I appreciate all the help I got in graduate school. I worked with some truly great people who helped me enormously. Nevertheless, I look back and think that rather than being fueled by my graduate education, I survived my youthful naivete. Now that I have been a professor for more than a quarter century, I feel I have a perspective on what is a good approach to graduate studies and what is not. I also know that, like myself, most students do not indulge in enough critical thinking about their own graduate studies. Hence, below is some unsolicted advice.

Mark Schwartz

​Approaching 8 billion people, it has never been more apparent that environmental management requires difficult discussions about this tension between individual freedom (e.g., to exploit) and societal interests (e.g., to protect). Population growth has meant that nearly all decisions in the environment are contested in this crowded world where people are everywhere, exploiting everything. I suppose that it is inevitable that conservation groups look around and see population growth as the root of the problem, and the key to long-term solutions.

Mark Schwartz

 There are a bunch of books on science and the ivory tower and how scientists need to actively paticipate in reversing the pattern of scientists isolating themselves from public discourse. There are also a bunch of books on scientific illiteracy that speak to the need to increase the generaly understanding of science among people.  Conservation Science (CS) and Natural Resource Manaement (NRM) are ideal participants in this important venture to build a populace that acknowledges science as an important way of knowing; that there are rules to to good science; that we individually can and should look to science and judge whether what we read meets the criteria of good science and not let some website dictate to us whether some scientific finding is valid, important, trivial or malicously false. I believe that CS and NRM are ideally situated to foster healing the divide between science and society through deliberate integration of science and society in understanding and managing natural resources. 

Mark Schwartz

Why do I argue that the world, particularly the US,  needs environmental conflict. The US has some of the strongest environmental legislation in the world. The US has some of the largest, most well-funded resource conservation NGO’s in the world. The US has the most robust network of local land trusts doing local conservation in the world. The US has, arguably, among the best public natural resource agencies in the world. OK, all of that smells just a little too patriotic. It probably isn’t all true. But, my point is that if we are worried about protecting the environment, the US, on a global scale is doing pretty well. It is ahead of many nations and the legislation passed in the US is often used as a template for other regions of the world.
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​A primary problem with environmental conflict is that it does not elevate into the American psyche enough for most people in most places, most of the time. Surveys of environmental concerns generally place these in the top five, but never #1. Studies also show that voting for representatives usually focuses on the top 1-3 issues, and generally not their environmental positions.
 
Thus, the large, diffuse populace of American citizens as stakeholders usually have under-represented voices; local citizens whose lives are affected by the promise of jobs or the fear of loss of quality of life are heard; and he typically small suite of financial stakeholders often get a large voice relative to what we might think appropriate. A vanishingly small number of large corporations have a large interests in outcomes and can influence outcomes when the public is not paying due diligence. A small number of local people have a large interest in the outcome. The battle, then is often waged over the benefits (ie, jobs) of resource exploitation versus the cost (ie, environmental degradation).  ​

Mark Schwartz