Environmental Stewardship as a Civic Value

This year we have written about two federal proposals to remove safeguards on land that all Americans own. In June, the Interior Department proposed rolling back oil and gas safeguards on public lands, and we wrote about how a public comment period becomes a campaign. In August, the Department of Agriculture proposed rescinding the Roadless Rule, which has restricted road building and logging in roadless areas of the national forests since 2001, and we wrote about why some public lands do not need another use.

The first was sold as "cutting red tape." The second was offered as "flexibility." Underneath both is a question about environmental stewardship that rarely gets asked directly: who pays?

When a safeguard is removed, the cost it was preventing does not disappear. It moves.

Weak safeguards may benefit a company or landowner in the near term, while taxpayers, downstream communities, farmers, hunters, anglers, and future generations inherit the cleanup costs, lost habitat, reduced water quality, or damaged public lands.

That is why we treat stewardship as a civic value. We have seen where the cost lands, and the lasting benefits of keeping wild places wild and public lands in public hands, which prevents cumulative costs and irreversible harm.

The public pays when polluters do not

How weak safeguards shift cleanup costs from companies and landowners to taxpayers and local communities.

Remember when the Exxon Valdez disaster hit Alaska? In 1989, a supertanker ran aground in Prince William Sound. Despite Exxon executive Don Cornett promising a distressed crowd of Alaskans that the company would "make you whole," the legal battle dragged on for nearly two decades.

In the spring of 2008, as the Supreme Court considered Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, we supported the Whole Truth Campaign. By then the spill was being treated as a past event. The campaign put scientific evidence, community testimony, and unresolved damage back in front of reporters while accountability was still being decided.

That June, the Court reduced a $2.5 billion punitive award to $507.5 million.

The ruling capped the penalty. It did not cap the damage. What the spill left behind stayed with the communities around the Sound.

Downstream communities inherit upstream damage

How poor land and water management affects drinking water, farms, flood risk, recreation, and community health far beyond the original site.

PCB contamination in the Housatonic River carried long-term environmental, economic, and public health consequences across Massachusetts and Connecticut. As probable human carcinogens, PCBs damage the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems and are linked to lower IQs in children.

By the time a cleanup was being planned, the debate had narrowed to a technical remediation decision. One proposal called for local disposal, which would have moved the risk from the original polluter to nearby communities, particularly those downstream.

In our work on Save the Housatonic, residents led. The questions they put to reporters and officials were plain ones. Who is exposed? Who decides? Who bears the long-term consequences?

A river makes the point on its own. The people who live with a decision are often not the people who made it.

Public lands are public assets

Why damage to forests, rivers, wildlife habitat, and recreation areas represents a loss borne by everyone, not simply an environmental concern.

A loss on public land is easy to undercount, because it rarely gets recorded as a loss. A rule that lets a road into a roadless forest, or leaves a well for the public to clean up, goes into the record as an administrative change. It is also a withdrawal from something held in common.

These places already do work for the public. They hold headwaters and drinking-water sources, fish and wildlife habitat, recreation, and ground that matters to Tribal nations. When they are damaged, there is no other owner to send the bill to.

We made the longer case in The Roadless Rule: Some Public Lands Do Not Need Another Use.

Hunters, anglers, and farmers depend on stewardship

How healthy land, clean water, and functioning habitats support rural economies, food production, outdoor traditions including recreation, and local livelihoods.

When Clean Water Act protections for wetlands and streams were narrowed, the change was described as a technical revision.

For the National Wildlife Federation, we put hunters, anglers, and conservation leaders alongside the lawyers and scientists. They could tell a reporter what the revision meant in a place they knew.

The hunters and anglers spoke as people whose season depends on land and water that work the way they should. The same is true of the farms and rural businesses that draw on those streams. We wrote about why those voices carry in How Strategic Communications Turns Audiences Into Stakeholders.

Short-term savings create long-term liabilities

How avoiding safeguards or regulation and enforcement today leaves future generations with abandoned oil and gas wells, contaminated water, lost habitat, and restoration costs.

A safeguard has a cost that shows up this year. What it prevents usually shows up later, and for someone else. That is why a rollback is easy to present as a saving.

The Interior proposal is the current example. As we wrote this summer, the question is whether it cuts red tape or hands taxpayers the bill to clean up abandoned wells.

Enforcement works the same way. In the Save the U.S. EPA Campaign, run for the union that represented roughly 9,000 of the agency's scientists, engineers, and public-health professionals, the pressure fell on people: budget cuts, forced retirements, and the loss of institutional knowledge that goes with them.

The budget line shrinks that year. The protection shrinks with it, and nobody books that as a cost.

Who decides who pays

Every one of these costs is written down somewhere: in a docket, a court record, or a budget table. What is usually missing is anyone outside the process who can see it in time to weigh in.

That is the part we work on. Reporters need the consequence stated in terms their readers will recognize, and agencies and legislators need to hear it from the people who will carry it. Both have to happen while the decision is still open.

Stewardship is not sentimentality about nature. It is a decision about value, cost and who bears that cost. The public is entitled to make that decision with the full tradeoffs in view. Development can diminish wilderness rather than add value to it. Some resources are valuable precisely because they remain intact.