Sept. 25, 2018
Metro Housing Bond Event at ENSO Winery
I’m speaking as an Intertwine Alliance Board Member and until very recently a program and project manager for The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit organization that exists to connect people to nature by creating parks and conserving land.
I’m here to talk about why this is important to the conservation community.
There is a fairly simple reason. Contrary to the “no” arguments I recently heard at the City Club, the fact is that we can’t simply sprawl our way to affordability. As conservationists, we don’t want sprawl eating up nature, and we don’t want economically segregated communities forcing everyone to drive to work and services, with associated greenhouse gas impacts. And since citizens routinely express concern about conservation but rank it below economic and social issues, long-term success only happens in coalition.
This is all true, but it’s a shallow reading. There is a deeper reason.
The conservation community cares about housing because we are all searching, urgently, to find a healthy balance between people and the natural world. And a balance that only includes fortunate people is not a balance at all.
Put differently, conservationists advocate for and maintain nature’s role in our community. Note I said “in our community.” While I acknowledge there is a huge philosophical debate within the conservation community as to whether we should value nature for its own sake or for the benefits it provides people, in practice I think this is a meaningless distinction. Our actions occur within and affect our community,
and we need to think about how they affect everyone in that community.
It’s true that advocates for parks and conservation have sometimes been blind to the unintended impacts of our work. (I always cringe a bit when the Trust for Public Land includes on its inventory of why parks are beneficial the economic fact that parks cause adjacent property values to appreciate. That happens to be true, but to borrow a phrase from the kids, it’s as much a bug as a feature. And while that’s a great reason for a developer to support parks, it’s not what really matters for parks.)
So yes, we have our blind spots. Sometimes we conservationists get overwhelmed by the seeming enormity of our challenges and opt for an overly narrow and self-defeating focus on “our” issues. But it’s also true that conservationists in this region have a long history of seeing the bigger picture.
I think conservation community has increasingly come to understand that big-picture, existential challenges like climate change and long-standing social, economic, and racial inequities are fundamentally linked. As a participant in some of the equity engagement and training that The Intertwine Alliance and others have advanced in recent years, I can’t help but recognize more urgently how inequality and exclusion have affected the trajectory of conservation in this community. And I find myself struggling to focus on my chosen work when all around me I see people sleeping outdoors or experiencing a mental health emergency.
So, to me, the real reason why the conservation community cares about this issue is contained in that simple but very slippery word: community. We conservationists conceive of our community broadly to include the nonhuman parts. And it’s clear to me, and nearly every conservationist I know, that when some people in our community can’t find a place to live, the very nature of our community is at risk.
I don’t like talk of “nature” as some force or thing independent of people any more than I like talk of “the market” as some independent force. We are deeply implicated in the creation and maintenance of both. A housing crisis and the loss of habitat are both failures of the imagination. And both can be solved.
My work for the last decade was all about supporting community-based efforts to conserve land, create parks, and improve access to nature. For me, there was little distinction between a project that protected habitat for an endangered species and one that transformed a vacant lot into a community garden. They were both ultimately about using our collective will and resources to create the kind of place we want to live in.
In the world we live in today, equitable and inclusive communities don’t simply happen, any more than flourishing ecosystems simply happen. We create or degrade them by choice – even, and especially, when we don’t realize we’re making a choice. Half the challenge of land conservation is convincing people that they actually can choose – that the landscape they see, for better or worse, is not inevitable.
A housing crisis is not an inevitable byproduct of population growth, any more than habitat destruction is. We can, in fact, do something about it. This measure does something.
And like a good conservation project, it does more than help the people who are going to visit and enjoy that park. It also signals to the entire community that people care about the future and about the commons.
That’s what this measure does. It demonstrates that we – not some disembodied, distant entity we call “the government” – as a community actually do care about our collective future and everyone’s place in it. I hope the money is leveraged to the hilt through community partnerships and maximal engagement. I hope that the leaders in charge of implementing it will make it clear to everyone that they are not just addressing a housing crisis but are doing the citizens’ work of building a community – just like when we conserve land, we’re not just protecting something abstract called “nature.” We’re actively building community by creating places – civic spaces – with room for everyone, human and nonhuman.