Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America

3 | Why Save Land

3 W H Y S AV E L A N D ? “In what way does the sooty tern serve mankind?” someone asked one of my old southern Illinois chums, later on when he was curator of birds at a museum. The sooty tern is a graceful black-and-white bird of the Dry Tortugas and surrounding waters. Some people would save the sooty tern based just on its grace and beauty without worrying about how else it serves mankind . Some who would save the tern might not be so generous to a mosquito , a skunk, or a snake. Not just species but whole ecosystems may seem dispensable. Obviously, this was true of the bur oak openings, the mesic oak savannas of the northern Midwest, because they’re gone. Their close relatives, the tall-grass prairies , are not quite gone, but only because of the hardiness or wide tolerance range of some of their component species. The near-obliteration of the prairie was mostly a side effect of the settlers’ attempts to make all the land turn a profit, but a kind of anti-nature or antiwilderness ideology was also involved. John James Ingalls, senator from Kansas from 1879 to 1891, warned that the success of the state cannot be indefinitely continued on prairie grass. This will nourish mustangs, antelope , Texas cattle, but not thoroughbreds. It is the product of an uncultured soil. . . . If we would have prosperity commensurate with our opportunities, we must look to Blue Grass. It will raise the temperature, increase the rainfall, improve the climate, develop a higher Fauna and Flora, and consequently a loftier attendant civilization.1 Well, why should humans allow a species of plant or animal or a type of biotic community to exist? If poisonous snakes might bite us, why not get rid of them? Since it’s hard to tell poisonous and non-poisonous ones apart, it might be just as well to get rid of the whole suborder Serpentes. If a marsh stands in the way of building our dream house, on land we own free and clear, shouldn’t we be able to fill it in and get on with our life? Isn’t it true that all other species and the ecosystems of the earth exist on our sufferance? We are the dominant species of the Earth; in fact, it has been said to us that we have dominion over every living thing. We are, in short, the boss. At our convenience, we may let some wild nature survive, but if we say it goes, it goes. We may not hear this point of view from most of our friends. Few of them are likely to ask, “What is the sooty tern good for?” If they did, we might well respond, “What are you good for?” But sometimes a smart answer won’t suffice. Questions that may seem misguided to us may, nevertheless , be sincere requests for information. A land trust aiming to save cedar barrens or the habitat of the Santa Cruz long-tailed salamander should be able to give a satisfying explanation to the public—and to itself—why a piece of land or a species ought to be saved from obliteration or extinction. That’s why it’s well to look systematically at the philosophical and factual underpinnings of the mission of land trusts: Why save land? We can put the reasons into three categories—aesthetic, practical, and ethical or moral—though we could, of course, use a more complicated classi fication. Most of what follows deals with saving natural lands. Some trusts save farmland as part or the whole of their mission. The arguments for saving farmland, mostly in the practical and aesthetic categories, are discussed in chapter 12. Aesthetic Justifications Who has an aesthetic sense so deficient that they don’t appreciate the sight of a wood duck or the sound of a wood thrush? A sunset over a wild marsh, the cathedral look of a redwood grove or a beech-maple forest are beautiful. To many of us, this is a compelling reason to preserve them. Although a powerful inspiration, aesthetics has too many limitations to be a complete argument for preserving species and natural areas. To begin with, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If we showed a random sample of Americans a video tape of great egrets feeding in a coastal marsh or a bald eagle sailing above a wild lake, I’ll bet...