Director, Network for Landscape Conservation
July 2025
We often think of conservation as an exercise in technical expertise. If asked, ‘What is conservation?’ we consider it a clear-cut and straightforward question. It is data analyses and detailed geospatial mapping, it is the careful negotiation of real estate transactions and leveraging of funding streams in stitching together project finance, it is the skillful designing and delivery of ecologically appropriate restoration treatments and on-the-ground interventions. It’s all of the mechanics that go into things like parks and protected areas, wildlife crossings, riparian restoration, forest thinnings, tree plantings, and more.
And it’s not that all of this is untrue—conservation (and stewardship and restoration) does require expertise and technical know-how.
But focusing there obscures a more profound truth: At its most basic level, conservation is nothing more than a human decision about how we will (or will not) use a natural resource. It is a human construct, the weighing of our wants and needs, and of those things that we value and hold dear—all to consider what the future of the biophysical world around us will be. Conservation is our human capacity to navigate this complex decision space—yes, knowledge and expertise should guide how we move forward, but first and most fundamentally, conservation is a decision we make about our interaction with the world around us. A decision made by a person, or between people.
This may well be tautological, but if you believe—as I do—in the notion of a shared human project aiming towards greater human dignity and a better, more just future, it should be clear that how we make such decisions—and who gets to make them—matters. And therein is the kernel of what I want to consider: Conservation, done well, is an exercise in democracy.
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The notion of conservation as decision is most profound and multidimensional when thinking about conservation, stewardship, and restoration at a landscape scale, and indeed my reflections here emerge from my vantage point within the landscape conservation and stewardship field.
The parlance of ‘landscape conservation’ has grown increasingly common in recent years, but this language is often loosely and somewhat ambiguously applied. A common reflex is to use this language to convey a meaning that is primarily geographic: This is conventional conservation and stewardship simply applied to a larger parcel. Grammatically speaking, ‘landscape’ is a modifier: Its use describes some attribute—in this case, the size—of the conservation activity. Landscape conservation as the acquisition of a 30,000-acre commercial forest property rather than a 40-acre family woodlot.
But I want to draw out a deeper meaning, where ‘landscape’ functions as object rather than modifier. That is, it tells us what is receiving the conservation action: A landscape is what is being conserved (or stewarded or restored) when we talk about landscape conservation.What then is a landscape? Landscapes are not formal units of measure of course but instead emerge (inexactly) out of ecological function and social perception. They transcend jurisdictional boundaries—they are a tapestry of land owners and land uses—yet function and are perceived as a single unit because of ecological, geographical, cultural, and/or other social reasons. Put most simply, a landscape is a complex amalgamation of interwoven biophysical and sociocultural systems that meld together in a way that holds recognizable meaning to us.[1]
We default, in conservation, to a bounded, specific parcel of land as the object of attention—the acquisition of a parcel for a new park, or invasive species treatment at a specific property. It is a subtle shift to say that the object of attention is a landscape—but an important and powerful one in two critical ways that are relevant to reflections on democracy.
First—and most obviously—we must acknowledge that no single organization and entity can alone conserve a landscape. Given the way that landscapes transcend parcel lines and political boundaries, it is no longer a decision by a person (or between a small group of people), but a decision among people. The landscape perspective pushes us to center our work on a deeply inclusive and participatory collaboration.
Second—and more subtly—we must acknowledge that landscapes are complex systems. The whole of a landscape is more than the sum of its parts, and it is the interactions amongst the parts—more so than the parts themselves—that gives meaning to a landscape. We know this to be true of course biophysically, as we can point to any number of differing examples of the beautifully intricate web of relationships that shape our landscapes—for instance, researchers have tracked, since their reintroduction in Yellowstone, how wolves shift elk browsing habits in ways that impact aspen regeneration…which in turn impacts beaver distribution…which in turn shifts hydrology, and so on.
The complexity of landscapes is even more evident though when we consider the extent to which our sociocultural systems are grounded in biophysical reality. Our lands and waters are the substrate that gives shape and possibility to where and how we produce food; where and how we find shelter and housing; where and how we produce, transport, and use energy (renewable or otherwise); where and how we move ourselves (and goods) across geography; and on and on. From our lands and waters too we draw mental well-being and spiritual meaning. The biophysical reality is the scaffolding on which our sociocultural reality is built; our sociocultural dynamics emerge out of our interaction with the material, biophysical reality of our landscapes.
Yet, our prevailing epistemology—and the institutions that have emerged from our dominant culture—is premised on compartmentalizing, in the belief that by narrowing our focus to a separate component of a broader system we can more readily solve a specific problem. The landscape perspective reveals the fallacy of this approach: We can’t disentangle one part from a complex system without reverberations through other parts.
It is with this context that we can start to appreciate the nature of the decision space that exists when we think about challenges and opportunities associated with the lands and waters in which our communities exist. As we become more familiar with the notion that we are facing a ‘polycrisis’—the cascading collision of multiple, interconnected crises—this reflection, offered by a speaker at a Aspen Challenge event in 2017 seems truer by the day:
“There is practically no really ‘big’ problem these days that still exists because of a lack of information, a lack of technology, or a lack of knowledge about solutions. Almost all large problems in the world persist due to a lack of coordinated action, a lack of compassion, or a lack of interest.”
The systems-level and interwoven 21st Century conservation challenges that we are wrestling with are not technical in nature: Biodiversity loss and climate change are not happening because we lack knowledge or technical know-how. Rather, these are challenges of governance. They exist because, both within communities and at a societal level, we haven’t found a way to effectively navigate decisions to manage collective actions to address them.
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Governance invites reflections on geography, as we often default to political boundaries as the organizing frame that structures our societal decision-making processes. And it is reflexive to think about the national geography. As I write, America’s democratic institutions are fraying under the weight of technology and algorithms and the notion of politics as a zero-sum game to stay in power—even as our interwoven crises of biodiversity, climate, and environmental injustice reveal that these institutions (structured around epistemological compartmentalizing and arbitrary political boundaries) are poorly suited to addressing today’s systems-level challenges.
Yet, this we should know: Democracy is not a top-down decision nor strictly a formal system of government. Instead, it is as much a bottom-up ideal, a dynamic and ever-evolving process rooted in a belief in the equality of individuals and in the honoring of the freedom and rights of those individuals. Democracy, most simply, celebrates the manner in which the relationships we share with one another create the capacity for us to collectively solve problems together. As has been said before, democracy recognizes that individual freedom does not absolve us from responsibility but instead graces us with responsibility—responsibility for one another, for the common good, and for the notion of reaching for a better shared future.
I would suggest that democracy withers in the absence of truth and trust—and should truth and trust be absent for too long, democracy perishes. This existential moment for American democracy is in part a reflection of this, and in many ways the critical question we face is: How do we find our way back to truth and trust? Where can we find some notion of shared, commonly-held objective truth? And how do we rekindle the trust—at an individual, community, and institutional level—so that we can effectively navigate complex interactions?
As I reflect on such questions, I am struck by the daunting and seemingly insurmountable task of tackling these at the national level. Truth and trust build best through person-to-person connection, through human relationships. A national geography pushes us towards generic and ungrounded connection, sidelining the power of specific and granular relationships. This indeed is why we talk about democratic “institutions,” for at a national level we must rely on formal mechanisms to backstop and sustain the principles of democracy.
But does this task become more manageable at a scale of geography that allows grounded human connections and relationships? In the geography of a landscape, might we find hope for finding our way back to truth and trust?
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It likely sounds overly simplistic, but I am a firm believer in the notion of “home”—of people caring about where they live and wanting for it a positive future. And I believe this extends beyond the four walls of a house: The deep connection that people feel to the landscape in which they live—and their hopes and desires for its future—has given rise to a collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship movement. In landscapes across the country, partnerships, networks, and collaboratives have emerged organically from local energy and ingenuity, each bringing together a diverse mix of partners to work across jurisdictional boundaries to advance conservation, stewardship, and restoration of lands and waters—and the complex ways these intersect with, inform, and shape our sociocultural systems.
It is this movement that gives me hope—both for the future of the landscapes in which we live, and for the future of our capacity to come together and exist as communities. For what collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship is, most simply, is a means of bringing people together to build a collective conversation—and concomitant action—around how we wish to shape our future relationship with the lands and waters that we care about. Much beyond strictly technical elements, it is a shared process for navigating our interactions with the complex, interconnected biophysical and sociocultural systems in which we live. There is no need to be coy here: In its highest forms, this is fundamentally an exercise in democracy.
And in many ways this is a uniquely powerful exercise in democracy, given that it is rooted in the notion of common ground. I mean this literally of course: What a landscape offers is a shared physical foundation, a biophysical reality that we can see and touch and smell and hear and yes, even taste—a reality that we can share and walk through and live upon. There is a visceral truth in that. In an increasingly digital world where the notion of objective truth is more malleable and increasingly harder to pin down, there is something profound about a terra firma truth.
But I am also pointing at figurative common ground. The invitation of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship is for people to reflect on what they want and need, what they care about, and what they value—and to hear back from others, ‘This is what I care about.’ Let’s be clear-eyed here: The reality of life is that there will be difference—we all do not care about the same things and the differing uses we hope to draw from our lands and waters will at times be in conflict with one another. But this difference, the space between individuals, is where the potential of our work rests—because there is connection here too, most simply around the shared sense of caring, that shared acknowledgement that a place is meaningful, important, cherished. From these connections—built over time and on the foundation of a shared, visceral truth—grows trust.
This may sound Pollyannaish in the current context, where the notion of ‘common ground’ may seem a dream born of naivety and hopeless idealism. But I am indeed hopeful that literal common ground is a wellspring for figurative common ground.
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I want to end with a final reflection—presaged throughout—that serves as a call to action. Collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship is not merely an exercise in the democratic process. What I want to suggest is that the exercising of democratic ideals is actually a fundamental purpose and core objective of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship.
Remember, conservation, at its most basic level, is a human decision. When we talk about the value of our work in the conservation and stewardship space, we nearly always talk about outcomes. We focus on the end, the what of the decision—what does the decision mean for the ecological reality on the ground? We typically spend much less time focusing on the means, the how of the decision. What I am driving at is that the subtle but crucial shift that happens when we think about conservation at the landscape scale includes in it the invitation to focus just as much if not more on the means (the how) as we do the ends (the what).
I worry I am being imprecise here: If the above seems to suggest that we in conservation focus too much on the ends and not enough on the means, that perhaps isn’t quite right. It is not that we focus too much on the ends—we do care, deeply, about on-the-ground ecological outcomes. I do want a future where my children’s children can see fox cutting through the meadow, can search for red-spotted efts amongst the dappled light and leaf litter of the forest floor, can swim in the pooled brook behind the house. More precisely though, what I am pointing towards is the realization that the means and the ends are inseparable, are inextricably interwoven. This isn’t sliding the scale one way or the other between two competing dualities, the means and the ends are actually one and the same. Here again our prevailing epistemology has failed us, as it constrains us to very narrowly and very simply conceive of the ends of our endeavors. The world is complex, the work of landscape conservation and stewardship is complex: Democracy is the work, just as much as is ecological connectivity and climate resilience.
At a moment when we are acutely aware of the fragility of democracy, and when we are thirsting for models and examples that suggest pathways for replenishing and preserving democracy, the hope that I hold is in the unique power of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship to offer one such model—a model for creating authentic mechanisms to stretch the muscles (increasingly atrophied in today’s world) of seeking out shared truth and trust, and of navigating difference towards the common good.
It is hard not to despair in this fractious present that we—at a national geography—may be past the point of no return, and to find it impossible to conceive of how we might find our way back to the shared truth and trust that is so foundational to democracy. But just as Wendell Berry—when weighted by “despair for the world”—turns to the granularity of a wood drake, so too may we find purchase at a smaller scale. This is what the geography of the landscape offers: The space to accrue and strengthen over time the human-to-human connections, relationships, and trust that undergird our capacity to work through the complexity of difference. This is the life force of democracy—and such work has never been timelier or more needed.
We do not typically talk about our work in this vein, but—this is what I have been driving at—we should. The recognition of conservation as decision underscores how our work of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship drives at the foundational challenge we face as humans: How to exist and operate in a complex world full of others, human and more-than-human. In so many ways I see this as the highest calling of our work: Our ability to cultivate the truth and trust—across difference—that allows us to build the relationships needed to navigate the decisions we confront when we reflect on how we relate to each other and to the broader world in which we live.
If indeed, as I am suggesting, shared truth and trust are foundational underpinnings of democracy, in places and communities throughout the country people are building these in the geography and common ground of landscape. If what you care about and your work is the preservation of democracy, then you should be paying attention to such efforts. This is not to suggest that collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship is a panacea—it, like democracy, is hard work and messy, and let us not diminish the challenge of building a more comprehensive common ground that can ‘scale up.’
But let’s also be clear that, in so many ways, common ground and the capacity to collectively seek out common good is the heart of democracy and our shared human project. In landscapes all around us, people and communities are coming together to root this capacity in the literal common ground that they share. We need to water these roots.
[1] There is a question of scale left as of yet unanswered. It should be clear that I am pointing upwards in scale—landscapes transcend jurisdictions and are large enough to allow for outcomes that realize far-reaching ecological and social impact. Yet, this is not an unbounded push upwards in scale; for the purposes of what I am exploring here, the landscapes that I am interested in cover a geography that also is small enough to allow for authentic human-to-human connection, interaction, and relationship. Landscape then of a ‘goldilocks’ scale—not too small, not too big: Not “the Columbia River landscape” but the “Upper Willamette landscape.” Or not the “Mississippi River landscape” but the “St. Louis River landscape.” Context matters of course, but a geography, on average, of perhaps 1-2 million acres.