NATURAL PERSPECTIVES: Conservation should suit everyone

I’ve been asked by the Orange County Conservation Corps to provide staff training on the importance of conservation. Vic is helping me prepare a PowerPoint presentation.

First, we had to agree on what conservation is. Basically, to conserve means to save. A definition that suits our purpose is that conservation is the preservation, protection, management and restoration of the environment and its natural resources.

Many things can be conserved. We can conserve land by removing it from private use and holding it in trust for wildlife and the enjoyment of the public. We can conserve the biological resources on the land by improving the habitat. That usually means removing non-native plants and sometime animals, and replanting with native plants.

We can conserve resources by frugal and wise use. These resources can be mineral resources such as oil, water and metals, or they can be living resources such as marine fish or redwood forests. But what I see as the basic importance of conservation is protecting species’ diversity.

As I’ve been working on my presentation to the corps, I realized that what Vic and I have been doing in this column over the last eight years is to educate our readers about conservation issues. We’ve made the assumption that you’re in favor of conservation and would like to do more to promote conservation. What we haven’t done is give you a suggested reading list that will help support a conservation lifestyle. We’re going to start today with two books.

A well-educated conservationist will have read the writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), specifically “Walden: Or Life in the Woods.” In this seasonally based series of essays, Thoreau espouses simplicity in living. Conspicuous consumption, as is often practiced in Orange County, is the antithesis of Thoreau-style conservationist living.

From Thoreau, we get the saying: “Beware enterprises that require new clothing.” Think about how many acre-feet of water and pounds of fertilizer it takes to grow a bale of cotton, to say nothing of cloth and clothing production and transportation. The more clothes we buy, the more resources we use. Every T-shirt carries a cost in fossil-fuel use.

Buying more clothes when your closet is already full is anti-conservationist. Vic and I sometimes wear our clothes literally to shreds. Case in point: I have one pair of pants that I wear to do my restoration work. I’ve worn them in the field for many years now. When they ripped a couple of years ago, I mended them. We’re afraid that more people follow the adage in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” that “ending is better than mending,” than follow the advice of Thoreau to make do. Many people don’t mend clothing any more.

All things, however, come to an end eventually. The fabric on my beloved restoration pants is so thin that they literally fell apart on me in the field yesterday. I caught a pants leg on a snag of Brazilian pepper that we were removing at Bolsa Chica, and my pants ripped from thigh to ankle. Guess I’m finally going to have to get some new pants.

After you read “Walden,” get a copy of “The Audubon Reader,” edited by Richard Rhodes. A new edition was published last year. This series of essays by John James Audubon (1785-1851) covers his life on the Kentucky frontier back in the early 1800s. He describes scenes from a world long gone — passenger pigeons being killed by the millions as they came to roost at night, and Carolina parakeets killed by the dozen with every discharge of a farmer’s shotgun.

“The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies screaming as loud as ever,” Audubon wrote of the parakeets, “but still return to the stack to be shot at until so few remain alive that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition.”

Passenger pigeons, which were the most numerous bird species in North America, and Carolina parakeets are now both extinct. Reading Audubon’s essays gives us a glimpse of life when the wilderness seemed limitless. The mindset of the time was to conquer the wilderness and turn all of the land to human purposes. Audubon was wise enough to foresee what the mad sweep of humans over the frontier would do to the land and its wildlife.

The wilderness is now gone. Fragments of wild lands remain in public trust, but the remainder has been grazed, graded, fenced, farmed and urbanized. It is our responsibility to conserve what little is left.

Earth Day is this weekend. You can help the Bolsa Chica Stewards and Amigos de Bolsa Chica plant from 9 to 11 a.m. Saturday, or come to the Earth Day event sponsored by the Bolsa Chica Conservancy and Amigos de Bolsa Chica from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday. You can count migrating birds, explore marine invertebrates in touch tanks, learn about habitat restoration and native plants, test water quality, and more. You’ll learn about being a conservationist and enjoy yourself at the same time.