THE ENVIRONMENT

Networks and Nature

James N. Levitt, Director, Internet and Conservation Project, Taubman Center for State and Local Government

In the coming year, Americans will kick off a series of bicentennial events commemorating the remarkable achievements of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The official celebrations will, with justifiable pride, highlight the broad vision of Thomas Jefferson in conceiving and assembling the exploration in the years leading up to 1803, the courage and level-headedness of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in leading the mission between 1804 and 1806, and the grit of the diverse Corps of Discovery in making the arduous journey. Politicians and pundits will likely explain that, like Lewis and Clark, present-day Americans have a distinctive willingness to venture into uncharted territory and identify vast new opportunities.

What is less likely to be emphasized is the idea that, in carrying out Jefferson’s instructions to identify the most “direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purpose of commerce,” the expedition also created a powerful vector for environmental and cultural disruption. For example, with Jefferson’s enthusiastic endorsement, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company blossomed across the continent in the early decades of the 1800s, in the process scouring the Missouri River Basin for beaver pelts. The population of that keystone species went into sharp decline by the early 1830s, forever changing regional ecosystems and ways of life.

The subsequent spread of new generations of communication and transportation networks in North America have been associated with comparable disruptions. Expanding systems of transcontinental railroads and telegraphs in the last half of the 19th century, critical to the growing nation’s economic growth, were closely associated with the near-extirpation of the American bison population and the disturbance of vast prairie ecosystems. The historic expansion of interstate highway, passenger air, and broadcast communications systems in the last half of the 20th century has been tightly intertwined with the era’s rapid suburban population growth, sprawling land use patterns, and the atmospheric accumulation of global warming gases. And, despite the predictions of optimistic technologists in the 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of networks, exemplified by the Internet and advanced logistics systems, appears to be associated with a new set of thorny environmental challenges.

Of particular concern to land and biodiversity conservationists is the ongoing stream of in-migrants to formerly remote and environmentally sensitive places such as central Oregon, the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and the Great Smokies in the United States, and to such international biodiversity hotspots as Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. Many of the new residents coming to such natural and recreational amenity-rich sites do not intend to farm, mine, or timber, but rather to pursue their nonextractive livelihoods in the midst of seemingly Edenic settings. In the process, they may well be diminishing the quality of biodiversity habitat critical to protection of rare species, and degrading critical resources such as fresh water supplies — particularly in jurisdictions that have only modest institutional capabilities to support land use planning and environmental quality monitoring programs.

As John Holdren, now a Kennedy School professor, explained more than three decades ago, environmental impact is a product of changes in population, affluence, and technology. The good news is that in the context of rapid demographic, economic, and technological changes, including changes associated with the spread of new networks, Americans have repeatedly come up with landmark conservation innovations that have proved to be novel, significant, measurably effective, and transferable to nations across the globe — the very characteristics used by the Kennedy School’s Institute for Government Innovations to designate outstanding innovations in the public interest. Furthermore, American conservation initiatives, such as the creation of novel national parks, land trusts, soil and water conservation districts, and designated wilderness areas, have demonstrated their ability to endure over the course of many decades.

Today network entrepreneurs such as Ted Turner and Gordon Moore, with the advice of biodiversity scholars such as Harvard’s legendary Edward O. Wilson, are supporting ambitious efforts to advance conservation science, education, advocacy, resource protection, and stewardship from California to China. Not surprisingly, many of the innovative efforts being launched are constructively employing advanced information technologies to pursue ambitious land and biodiversity protection goals. The hope behind present-day innovations, of course, is that future generations will remember the conservationists active during the early adolescence of the Internet Age as being, on balance, successful in protecting the natural heritage that has evolved on earth over hundreds of millions of years.

James N. Levitt is the editor of Conservation in the Internet Age: Threats and Opportunities, published in October 2002 by Island Press.