If we imagine, as a recent commentary in the Light asked us to do, that there is no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong, if we decide we have nothing to rely on, that anything we think we can fall back on to make decisions or explain things is of our own fictitious creation, we end up confused and lost in a nihilistic world where nothing matters.
But everything matters. For 30 years, I have worked as a hydroecologist, using cooperative solutions to restore streams and rivers and watersheds across California. And I’ve learned that every little thing matters.
When you start with a world severely degraded from its healthy functioning condition, you must go back to look at pristine conditions to understand what the system is capable of. Only then can you decide if it is worth the effort—and the human impacts—to restore it.
If it is a lot of effort and impact for little benefit, it might not be worth doing. If it is a huge benefit, bigger impacts become more justifiable. There is no one-size-fits-all equation. We all tend to share the same values; the weight we put on each and how we apply them is where we differ. Laudable goals sometimes conflict. You can’t always have it all.
In getting my degree in forestry and natural resources, I had to take a lot more philosophy classes than I would have expected. The reason is clear: In natural resource management, decisions are not just about what the land is capable of sustaining, but also about people—their needs, values, desires. Those decisions require reasoned, principled and thoughtful analysis. There are usually winners and losers. Rapid change is difficult, and sometimes we make mistakes, even when we have good motives. Including experts and all interested parties as much as possible is key to avoiding mistakes.
When you start with a near-pristine system and apply good resource management, you don’t get into as much trouble with these trade-offs. If no one depends upon the resource, allowing only a truly sustainable portion of it to be harvested hurts no one and maintains ecological health. But all of us were born into a degraded state. To achieve long-term sustainability, degraded systems must be restored to ecological health, and unfortunately, taking away some portion of those resources from people is often necessary.
The right solution can’t be determined simply by “some humans are so goddamned impactful” and “the seashore just doesn’t seem that degraded,” as Call Nichols put it in a recent op-ed. These are good guiding principles, but different people would draw the line in different places, informed by different information sources. It all comes down to the details, and degradation isn’t always easily seen.
Take California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, a 2014 law that requires overdrafted aquifers to reach sustainability by 2040. In many cases, this means the loss of productive farmland that was pumping unsustainable volumes of groundwater. Losing farmland is not easy—and some areas of the San Joaquin Valley look a lot like what Point Reyes is going through now. But the alternative is unacceptable: taxed aquifers, ecological degradation, loss of infrastructure, with serious impacts to low-income communities and future benefits flowing only to those with deep enough pockets to drill deeper wells.
California’s rivers have been so excessively diverted that we’ve lost 95 percent of our wetlands and riparian areas. Fisheries are going extinct. How we rectify those problems is not a mystery—we know scientifically what to do, and releasing water just takes the turn of a valve. But politically and economically, irrigated agriculture is powerful, and the governor is preventing the state water board from doing a good job. Depleted, polluted rivers and degraded fisheries will be his and our legacy.
As a long-time rural resident, I too have seen urban environmentalists get distracted by enticing projects that have unintended impacts on rural people. My mantra to avoid that pitfall: “Respect the land and its inhabitants.” You can’t cheat nature in the long run, and we have to align our activities with it. But respecting natural limits can result in an unkindness and hardship to people who depend on an overallocated resource. We should minimize hardship wherever possible, especially where people have few alternatives. If we retract our overextraction of resources from the land, future generations will thank us. But the present generation will have mixed reviews.
Is ending ranching in the seashore the right decision? Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is always a good touchstone: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” That guiding principle doesn’t fully answer the question, since various outcomes could meet it to varying degrees. The outcome would have been worse if the park had been developed in the 1960s, or if the decision had been left to Trump, or if the Nature Conservancy hadn’t stepped in to ease the pain. And the process could have been better, with a kinder transition plan that sustained local agriculture and kept communities more intact.
My teenage son, when he was little, was picking blackberries and was about to eat a tart one with more red druplets than I would have chosen. In response to our warnings, he enthusiastically said, “May be good!” You can’t know the future. But it is up to us to work together with hope and kindness to make it as good as we can.
Gregory Reis is a river restoration hydrologist who lives in San Geronimo.