State Conservationist’s Corner

September 2005

Helping people help the land

By Cecil B. Currin

Conservation is about cooperation with your neighbors—with people from your community—with people who live with you on landscapes that you all share—that you all depend on for a living. It’s about respect for each other and about dignity and equality as you work together toward some common goals.

The great conservationist Aldo Leopold, even before he coined the term “land ethic,” wrote in the 1930s of the need for cooperative conservation on America’s farms. He used that very term. He argued that the future of conservation depended on private landowners and that looking too much to government for solutions could be a distraction.

USDA has embraced an alternative vision of conservation—one more consistent with Aldo Leopold’s vision. It’s based on the belief that those who depend on the land to make a living have a vested interest in its sound, sustainable stewardship. It’s a vision of cooperative conservation—of working with our farmers and our forest landowners instead of against them.

In our vision of cooperative conservation, government has a strong role to play—not as a top-down regulator of everything that happens, but rather as an enabler and facilitator of community-based collaborative approaches from the bottom up. It’s about both improving the environment and strengthening the economy by helping people help the land.

Toward that end, we’ve made some good progress in recent years, including restoring forest health; recovering wetlands; and protecting working farms and forests from development.

As Chief Bruce Knight put it recently, cooperative conservation is all about helping people help the land. Those who depend upon the land to make their living have a vested interest in sound, sustainable stewardship. NRCS is here to encourage and enable their efforts to conserve natural resources on private working lands.

Cooperative conservation is the best strategy to encourage and assist landowners in conserving the land, for the benefit of all of us today as well as the next generation.

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