Land Ethic Leaders Training Coming to Sagehen

April 26, 2012 By
people examining a bug net
Inter­est in nature can spark reflec­tions about con­ser­va­tion. Image credit: Aldo Leopold Foundation

In A Sand County Almanac, pio­neer­ing con­ser­va­tion­ist Aldo Leopold set forth his endur­ing idea of the “land ethic.” The ethic is a shift from con­sid­er­ing humans to be con­quer­ers of the land to being ordi­nary mem­bers of the nat­ural world. Leopold always resisted defin­ing the shift itself. Instead, he believed it should evolve “in the minds of a think­ing community.”

The Aldo Leopold Foun­da­tion has devel­oped a train­ing to carry this con­ver­sa­tion about humans and the land into the twenty-first cen­tury. The Foun­da­tion will offer a Land Ethic Lead­ers Train­ing on June 1–3 this sum­mer at the UC Nat­ural Reserve System’s Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion. The work­shop is pre­sented in part­ner­ship between the Aldo Leopold Foun­da­tion, the North­ern Sierra Part­ner­ship, and Sage­hen Creek Field Station.

The two-day pro­gram will teach com­mu­nity lead­ers how to lead reflec­tive dis­cus­sions on com­plex and chang­ing envi­ron­men­tal issues. Par­tic­i­pants will learn new ways to dis­cuss col­lec­tive val­ues and crit­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal issues using lit­er­a­ture, film, and artwork.

people sitting in a circle of chairs talkingWork­shop par­tic­i­pants learn to lead dis­cus­sions about con­ser­va­tion val­ues and envi­ron­men­tal issues. Image credit: Aldo Leopold Foundation

Work­shop par­tic­i­pants explore the rela­tion­ship between human com­mu­ni­ties and the land at a deeper level. Paired with nature obser­va­tion and land restora­tion work, these dis­cus­sions offer a new way to engage and build the “think­ing com­mu­nity.” The work­shop focuses on giv­ing par­tic­i­pants the skills, tools, and con­fi­dence to help oth­ers explore their indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive con­nec­tions to the land.

The Value of Dis­cus­sion
Much dis­cus­sion of envi­ron­men­tal issues in Amer­i­can soci­ety today focuses on iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lems and for­mu­lat­ing solu­tions. It is pre­scrip­tive rather than reflec­tive. Lit­tle time or space is given to con­tem­plat­ing the root causes of these prob­lems, their eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions, or per­sonal and com­mu­nal con­nec­tions with the nat­ural world. Work­ing on conservation—whether through edu­ca­tion, com­mu­nity out­reach, research, or restoration—can be grat­i­fy­ing, but it can also be emo­tion­ally drain­ing. Deep under­stand­ing and knowl­edge of the full impli­ca­tions of the eco­log­i­cal prob­lems before us can lead to a feel­ing of help­less­ness and dis­en­gage­ment, a sen­ti­ment that affects pro­fes­sion­als and con­cerned cit­i­zens alike.

Crim­son columbine (Aqui­le­gia for­mosa) Image credit: NRS Collections

The Land Ethic Lead­ers pro­gram attempts to directly address this issue by giv­ing you a chance to explore, ques­tion, and reaf­firm your beliefs and val­ues, deep­en­ing your com­mit­ment to con­ser­va­tion and your com­mu­ni­ties. The pro­gram also aims to empower you to cre­ate sim­i­lar dia­logues in your own towns and work­places, and get peo­ple talk­ing about con­ser­va­tion in deeper, more mean­ing­ful ways.

Goals of the Pro­gram
• Learn to use your own car­ing and con­nec­tion to the land to inspire oth­ers and help to cre­ate reflec­tive dia­log about our col­lec­tive con­ser­va­tion val­ues.
• Learn to use obser­va­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion, and reflec­tion as a sys­tem­atic method for con­nect­ing or recon­nect­ing peo­ple with the land. Explore, renew, and deepen your own per­sonal con­nec­tions to the land.
• Engage with a com­mu­nity of your peers from a vari­ety of places and back­grounds. Learn to guide reflec­tive dis­cus­sions that build com­mu­nity around shared con­ser­va­tion values.

What You’ll Take Away
• Skills and con­fi­dence in lead­ing reflec­tive dis­cus­sions on con­ser­va­tion val­ues;
• Tools to orga­nize community-based events that con­nect peo­ple and land;
• A pub­lic screen­ing license and resource kit to help show the film Green Fire, about Aldo Leopold and the land ethic,  in your com­mu­nity;
• The abil­ity to express your own def­i­n­i­tion of a land ethic and the con­fi­dence to help oth­ers develop theirs;
• New friends and links to a net­work of Land Ethic Lead­ers across the coun­try and around the world.

backpacker in the Sierra NevadaInter­est in the out­doors can be an entry point for reflec­tive dis­cus­sions about the land ethic. Image credit: Max Eissler

Your Com­mit­ment
Par­tic­i­pants are asked to plan an event or series of activ­i­ties using spe­cific tools and tech­niques from the work­shop, within one year of attend­ing Land Ethic Lead­ers. The goal is to engage with var­i­ous mem­bers of the com­mu­nity not only to intro­duce Leopold’s ideas, but to dis­cuss them in depth. Tar­get audi­ences for events may range from the gen­eral pub­lic, to co-workers or stu­dents, to groups or clubs.

Costs
The $350 work­shop fee includes all meals, lodg­ing, pro­gram mate­ri­als, and a pub­lic screen­ing license and kit for Green Fire ($150 value).

Train­ing Details
Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion
Fri-Sun, June 1–3, 2012
Pro­gram begins Fri­day evening and ends Sun­day afternoon.

Visit www.aldoleopold.org/Programs/lel.shtml to reg­is­ter or con­tact Jean­nine Richards at jeannine@aldoleopold.org or 608.355.0279, ext. 25 for more information.

Filed Under: Reserves, Sagehen Creek Field Station

Productive Habitat Isn’t Always More Diverse

September 28, 2011 By
Sedg­wick Reserve’s annual grass­lands were among the 48 world­wide sites mea­sured in the study. Photo credit: Christo­pher Woodcock

For decades, ecol­o­gists have toiled to nail down prin­ci­ples explain­ing why some habi­tats have many more plant and ani­mal species than others.

Much of this debate is focused on the idea that the num­ber of species is deter­mined by the pro­duc­tiv­ity of the habi­tat. Shouldn’t a patch of prairie con­tain a dif­fer­ent num­ber of species than an arid steppe or an alpine tundra?

Maybe not, says an inter­na­tional team of sci­en­tists that pooled its resources to re-evaluate the rela­tion­ship between species num­bers and habi­tat productivity.

Using a stan­dard­ized sam­pling pro­to­col, the sci­en­tists ana­lyzed pro­duc­tiv­ity and species diver­sity at 48 habi­tat sites on five con­ti­nents, includ­ing Hast­ings Nat­ural His­tory Reser­va­tion, McLaugh­lin Nat­ural Reserve, Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion, and Sedg­wick Reserve.

“Our study shows no clear rela­tion­ship between pro­duc­tiv­ity and the num­ber of plant species in small study plots,” says Utah State Uni­ver­sity plant ecol­o­gist Peter Adler.

Sam­pling Billy But­tons and other species at Falls Creek, Bogong Joslin Moore High Plains, Aus­tralia. Photo credit: Joslin Moore

Sci­en­tists say Adler’s and his col­leagues’ find­ings rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant advance in eco­log­i­cal thought. The find­ings appear in this week’s issue of the jour­nal Sci­ence.

“We chal­lenged a pre­vail­ing model devel­oped in the early 1970s by British ecol­o­gist J. Philip Grime,” says Adler, lead author of the paper. “He pro­posed that the num­ber of species rises then declines with increas­ing productivity.”

Though hotly debated, this “hump-shaped” model has remained a text­book stan­dard for nearly four decades.

“In the search for under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples of ecol­ogy in a very com­plex nat­ural world, it’s inevitable that even long-standing and accepted the­o­ries will be debunked as more data are accu­mu­lated and syn­the­sized,” says Henry Gholz, pro­gram direc­tor in the National Sci­ence Foundation’s (NSF) Divi­sion of Envi­ron­men­tal Biol­ogy, which funded the research.

In an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment, Adler remem­bers skep­ti­cal obser­va­tions about the hump-shaped model made by grad­u­ate stu­dents in his classroom.

The study sam­pled grass­lands from around the world, includ­ing this alpine grass­land site in Chengdu, China. Photo credit: Chengjin Chu

“‘Why do ecol­o­gists spend so much time on this model when the evi­dence to sup­port it is so weak?’ they asked me,” he says. “That was the kick I needed to pur­sue this question.”

The chal­lenge was daunting.

Exist­ing, dis­parate case stud­ies couldn’t con­clu­sively sup­port Grime’s uni­modal pat­tern. Incon­sis­ten­cies in data col­lec­tion meth­ods fur­ther ham­pered efforts to dis­till evi­dence to sup­port the hump-shaped model.

So Adler and fel­low ecol­o­gists formed the Nutri­ent Net­work, or “Nut­Net,” an NSF Research Coor­di­na­tion Net­work ded­i­cated to inves­ti­gat­ing bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem processes in grass­lands around the world.

Based at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota (UMN), the net­work is funded by an NSF grant to net­work orga­niz­ers and UMN sci­en­tists Eliz­a­beth Borer and Eric Seabloom, who have con­duc­tive exten­sive research at NRS reserves.

“Our work not only sheds light on this clas­sic ques­tion, it also demon­strates the power of a net­work approach,” Borer says. “Nut­Net data are poised to inform many press­ing eco­log­i­cal ques­tions. Sim­i­lar global, grass­roots col­lab­o­ra­tions could help set­tle other long­stand­ing sci­en­tific debates.”

The Cowichan Garry Oak Pre­serve study site in British Colum­bia, Canada. Photo credit: Andrew MacDougall

Says Gholz, “Research Coor­di­na­tion Net­works are designed to facil­i­tate these types of insights into the func­tion­ing of nature, insights that aren’t pos­si­ble in a focus on indi­vid­ual ecosystems.”

Adler says that NutNet’s data “empha­size the need to con­sider many fac­tors to explain pat­terns of diversity–not just pro­duc­tiv­ity alone.”

NutNet’s find­ings should spur ecol­o­gists to focus on other impor­tant fac­tors reg­u­lat­ing bio­di­ver­sity, he says, such as evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory, dis­tur­bance and resource supply.

“It’s time to remove out­dated mod­els from our text­books and con­cen­trate on more sophis­ti­cated approaches,” Adler says.

“That will improve our abil­ity to pre­dict the effects of envi­ron­men­tal change on biodiversity.”

—National Sci­ence Foundation

Filed Under: Hastings Natural History Reservation, McLaughlin Natural Reserve, Reserves, Sagehen Creek Field Station, Sedgwick Reserve