‘Conservation easement conundrums’ are the tip of the iceberg
Felice Pace
Was anyone surprised by the article about the abuse of conservation easements which appeared in the March 31st edition of HCN? If you were, you have not been paying close attention to what has been going on in our society.
In a country where energy traders collude to rip off customers, corporate leaders cook the books to deceive investors, brokers sell mortgages to folks they know can’t afford them and federal regulators wink at usury and worse, what else should we expect?
Stay tuned for the carbon credit scandals to come.
This is all the product of a society in which the highest good is making obscene amounts of money and in which one can sin all week and get forgiven on Sunday without penance or consequences.
Do we really want a different society? The evidence suggests we are comfortable with “THE SCAM SOCIETY” up until the point where we become the victim.
The victim in the conservation easement case is the environment. And this situation is not limited to conservation easements. Have you noticed, for example, that although river, watershed and habitat restoration have grown exponentially in the last two decades there is precious little that is being restored? On the Klamath River where I live we just ended a 20 year restoration effort under the 1986 Klamath Act. The goal was to restore Klamath River fisheries but those fisheries are at greater risk now than they were when the restoration program began. There are, of course, several reasons for this but prominent among them is the fact that our multi-million dollar spending served the interests of landowners, tribes and restoration program staffs more than the fisheries. We did the easy things that benefited our interests; the hard things the fish needed done were left readdressed.
If you really want to see egregious self-interest packaged as “conservation” take a close look at federal Farm Bill “Conservation Programs”. An example was Klamath EQIP in the 2002 Bill. It was supposed to conserve water on farm for return to rivers and streams. Six years and $50 million later there is no sign of more water in streams or the Klamath River; the funds were, for the most part, ripped off to serve the self-interest of irrigators. Now these same irrigators want $200 million more from taxpayers to (you guessed it) conserve water.
Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland and her colleagues have documented the lack of standards and effectiveness evaluation in river restoration programs nation-wide. Only 15% of the projects they looked at nation-wide had any form of evaluation. There calls for standards have gone largely unheeded. You can check out Palmer’s work and that of her colleagues at: http://www.palmerlab.umd.edu/; of special interest is a 2006 article co-authored with Dave Allan of Duke with recommendations to Congress on how to make river restoration programs more effective. Here’s the link: (http://www.palmerlab.umd.edu/docs/Palmer_and_Allan_Federal_Policy_And_Restoration_IST_2006.pdf).
Due diligence, standards and accountability are the antidote to unrestrained greed and its by-products - including the co-optation of ‘conservation”. Will we take that path? Only when the People demand that we do.