Customer Reviews

Why Conservation Is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground

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This book takes us to the fundamentals of conservation and what we need to get good land use that promotes healthy lands and people. Freyfogle tells us that conservation needs an overall goal, it needs new ideas of private property, it needs new mechanisms for making collective decisions. Those are the top three tasks he outlines. And, he argues persuasively, it will take changes at the level of cultural attitudes and values to bring them about. Without fulfilling these three top tasks, society will not be able to solve environmental and land use problems, including agricultural desertification, suburban sprawl, biodiversity loss, air and water pollution and lots of other conservation challenges. This book is a must read for anyone calling himself or herself a conservationist or who is interested in learning more about becoming one. It points the way to the opening of a new chapter in American land use and a new more positive vision for conservation. And it's nicely written to boot.

If you have been following Eric Freyfogle's work, then you should probably get this book. It builds on his ongoing conversation about "land health" and our own responsibility. But it is not nearly as finely crafted as some of his earlier work--particularly "The Land We Share". Get that book first if you haven't read Freyfogle yet. In this book, Freyfogle continues to build on Leopold and Berry in searching for a coherent story for conservation and land health. Two weak chapters in my opinion mar this otherwise fine work. Chapter 2 is a critique of what Freyfogle calls the "tend the garden" mentality, which he appears to link to the "wise-use" and property rights movements. There are some merits to his arguments, but he takes it a bit too far. Leopold's work very much recognized the critical and unavoidable role of humans for building healthy land. See "Gardeners of Eden", by Dan Dagget, for what I would consider a Leopoldian use of the garden metaphor about using nature to heal the earth. Freyfogle's other mistep is an attack on the concept of sustainability. He considers the idea to be too broad to be useful, and too amenable to being corrupted by a "whatever works" kind of ethic. At one point he even criticizes the powerful "triple bottom line" of economy, ecology, and community. What could be closer to a real land health ethic than integration of those three areas?
These two digressions aside, the book is a stimulating read, and if you are part of this conversation or are following it, then you need to read this book. I don't think it is quite the full expression of the land ethic, but it moves us in that direction.
A section of "Conservations Central Readings" at the end is almost worth the price of the book (well--maybe the price when it comes out in paperback, anyway!).