Please take this discussion to a new thread. I do not want to get into it. I’m sick of the forest management mantra. We are all from different types of ecosystems with different ideas on forest management. I disagree with most of it and can debate it but do not want to get into it here.
Sure, mum’s the word as far as that goes.
You had mentioned the National Wildlife Refuge System, I haven’t looked into if there’s an equivalent for large endowments, but the Federal Duck Stamp Program sells stamps that are required of duck hunters but anyone can purchase them, and 98% of the purchase goes directly to land conservation as part of the National Wildlife Refuge System. This is mostly centered around waterfowl so much of the land purchased is some form of wetland, but many other species in addition to ducks benefit, and NWRs are visited by many, many people annually and often feature tours, programs, etc.,.
As far as local agencies, I share your sentiment with some having more ‘glut’ than others. There are small organizations protecting more acres of land with better outreach and not charging for events (making them more accessible and thereby more diverse) than larger organizations doing the opposite. A good way to keep tabs on this is to look at fiscal reports each year. Of course, higher-ups in organizations deserve to be compensated but obviously there’s a threshold for that.
As @earthknight said it’s more of a personal preference than a one-size fits all situation, and it sounds like you have a rough idea of what you want your funds to go toward, which is half the battle. I’m sure any organization will be appreciative of your donation and it’s very kind of you to consider such a philanthropic act.
Good luck!
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A one-time donation generally doesn’t lead to hires. It may lead to a temporary contract hire for a short project, but in general donations don’t lead to hires because hiring someone means an ongoing expense that a one-time donation doesn’t really cover.
One of the things that people often don’t understand about conservation (and other fields that work in a similar fashion) is that donations for specific purposes can lead to ongoing core expenses that the organization can’t afford to maintain once the donation runs out. Donations generally aren’t used to increase capacity as a result. It obviously depends on the stipulations that come with the donation, but they’re often applied to one-time type expenses (these may be single payment things, or projects that end within a given time period), and there are times when an organization may actually turn down funds with attached stipulations due to being unable to use them completely due to capacity issues.
Regarding the human-wild issue, at this point most organizations have made it a core principle to involve the human side as there are few truly “wild” places anymore, and even the concept of a “wild” place is based on an erroneous and colonial assumption. The idea of “wild” in the way people in Western nations generally think of it, and especially in the history of the conservation context, comes from European colonists entering areas of the Americas that had been depopulated due to diseases and such and were going through a radical ecological transformation away from what they had been for thousands of years. Coupled with this was a blindness to how native people all around the world managed their land, Europeans often literally could not see that the lands they entered were heavily managed, but were done so with a different philosophical approach to doing so than Europeans were familiar with.
All across the world, and going back to Homo erectus in Africa and Eurasia, landscapes and people have been deeply intertwined and there have been no real “empty” areas, with a few exceptions like some of the deep deserts, ice caps, and a few small, remote islands.
Like it or not, humans are integral to any conservation picture and most conservation organizations have that as a specific portion of their mission statement, as most conservation grants now require a human portion as well.
All that said, you still haven’t given an area or field of interest. By the mentioning the US NPS and NRDC I’m assuming your interest is in the US, or at least North America, but is that the case, or were those just the initial examples?
It’s worth considering that one of the major challenges we face in this field is that ecosystems are changing and moving. This means that we can’t be trapped by the idea of “fixing” an environment into a specific location in space and time, we need to be conserving the ability of environments to react to changing environmental conditions while remaining resilient, robust, fulfilling ecological roles, and serving as habitat for their ever changing cadre of species.
We can’t be preserving the present by trying to replicate the past, we have to be protecting the future using the present as the stepping off point and learning from the past rather than trying to replicate it.
Ecological connectivity is one of the most important tools for long-term conservation, If that’s something you’re interested in I can recommend a few organizations.
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Think about what is important to you. Is it a local park or preserve? Is it elephants? Snails? Trees? Is it something else? Give to something that works to protect/preserve something that means something to you personally.
I have supported the local Nature Conservancy for the state where I live because I feel like they do the most important thing: they acquire land (habitat) and put it in the hands of organizations that will keep it wild.
I have also supported the local Friends Group of a U.S. National Park that is close to where I live. They depend on contributions from locals whether it be time or money.
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While of course this is true, there is still a big difference between conserving nature with the specific intent of preserving its usefulness to people (as fish stocks, clean water supplies, or beautiful scenery, for example) and a more ecocentric approach that recognises that other species have a right simply to exist, and protecting them from harm for their own sakes. Of course it’s often possible to do both. I don’t know if that was what the original poster was getting at.
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The Environmental Forum of Marin. In California. It’s founders were instrumental in stopping the over development of the western part of Marin County and they run a program now that teaches people how to advocate for the environment
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I’ve researched the pre-colonized Americas and beyond. I’m no stranger to human-nature interaction before colonization and would argue that this isn’t a good argument to bring up because you simply can’t compare pre-industrialized humans to today’s world.
While that’s true it kind of misses the main point which is that the very idea of a “wild”, “virgin”, or “untouched” landscape is, with very few exceptions, a myth that we’ve told ourselves.
@subalpine is correct in that comparing traditional ways of interacting with the environment with today’s ways is, on the surface, difficult, but it’s not true that you can’t compare them.
For as long as there have been humans we’ve modified and changed our landscapes around us, ancient people as well as modern people. My ancestors in the Americas, for example, made radical landscape level changes and quite a few civilizations wiped themselves out as as result of making changes that were too drastic to allow them to survive when the bill for making those changes was finally due. In many cases the people, or a portion of them, survived, but their civilizations collapsed. This is something we see in the ancient world all across the planet and is something that is very much directly comparable to the modern world and something we need to learn from.
The focus on “wild” areas is dangerous in a conservation context as it reinforces the idea that nature and something that’s somehow separate from us. That we can relegate nature to little reservations and point to them saying, “that’s nature over there, see, we left a little bit of it.” Instead we need to be recognizing that we all live within and rely on nature, even if we are living in some maze of concrete canyonlands. We need to be encouraging nature all around us. Yes, large areas that are protected against development and over-use of any kind are very important, but the connections between them are vital, all the areas that we assign to “greenspace” or just ignore need to be addressed and looked at from an ecological perspective, the edges of roads and fields, medians on highways, home yards and gardens, urban and suburban parks and green strips adjacent to sidewalks, etc, etc, etc all need a makeover with native species and habitats in mind.
Nature isn’t something that’s separate from us and the “wild” is all around us if we let it be. Humans aren’t good at that though.
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Meh, I don’t agree with your anthropocentric thinking but thanks for your input.
I have emailed the local nature conservancy to find out a couple things.
I looked them up at the local online assessor office and they do already own some parcels in my area.
You don’t have to agree with it. It’s a fact that’s well documented across a wide range of applicable fields, and at present there is literally no place on the planet that doesn’t have some level of serious human impact.
It’s one of those things that’s annoying, particularly as humans have a bad track record on a lot of things regarding the environment, and it would a lot easier if it wasn’t true, but it is true and is something that those of us in conservation and in environmental studies have to be aware of and take into account.
I can certainly relate to the idea that it’s displeasing though. No disagreement there.
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Yes that’s a fact that I don’t agree with your anthropocentric attitude. I’m putting you on “ignore” now as you haven’t really caught onto what I said in my posts anyway. I Tried to be nice but give it a rest. You said your bit.
Regardless of whether you are choosing to ignore either me or the issue, it’s important for people to realize that recognizing and working to address an issue (human impact in this case) is not the same thing as having a perspective based solely on that issue, and that if you ignore a vital part of a problem you will be unable to solve or deal with it, indeed, you’ll be unable to even understand it.
As an example, you can’t address issues of climate change without recognizing and understanding the role greenhouses gasses play in the climate. Any attempt to deal with climate change will fail, or make things worse, if you don’t enter it with that understanding and knowledge.
The same is true concerning our global ecosystem and the effect humans have on it.
When it comes to the environmental problems we face humans are quite literally the cause of them, and as such you can’t deal with them without dealing with humans.
It’s a simple as that.
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I think we’re in danger of getting off the original topic, but this is an interesting discussion (and relevant to the original question)
Absolutely, I agree. But this does not mean that such modifications were or are neutral for wild species. Ancient people caused a lot of extinctions - including most of the megafauna on most continents.
I have a somewhat different perspective. There are a very large number of species who do not tolerate anthropogenic changes in land use, and to a very real extent, they do best when separate from us - they don’t survive in places with much agriculture, or hunting, or logging, etc. It’s not the presence of humans per se that’s the issue, but what activities those humans engage in. While the concept of “pristine wilderness” is a myth, it is referring to something important - that without relatively large and relatively wild spaces (which can include indigenous-managed land), we’re going to keep losing a lot of species.
The historical and prehistorical impacts of people typically left large areas relatively undisturbed for large periods of time. Much of the biodiversity of the Amazon, for example, likely survived in spite of the large-scale presence of millions of humans, rather than because of it.
While I agree with you that we can bring a lot more wildness into areas already dominated by human activities, and that’s a good thing, we should not abandon efforts to maintain some areas where the human touch is as light as possible.
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This is absolutely true, and it’s also true that having large areas of minimal disturbance is critical for many species. This is a discussion I have with the politicians in the country I’m working in all the time as they are hell-bent on developing everything and turning it all into tourism destinations and resorts.
include indigenous-managed land
This is a key aspect of modern conservation, less “indigenous” than “local community” but the idea remains the same. The shift to a more community based approach to conservation was driven in part as a result of finding that areas set aside for conservation in an exclusionary manner were often winding up with higher rates of poaching and deforestation than they were when local communities used those areas, and that excluding people from using those areas often resulted in greater livelihood hardships and led to resentment against the conservation activities.
The reason given for things like increased poaching and deforestation was that if the community could no longer use those areas they had no reason to assist in protecting them from others or from over exploitation from within their community.
This sort of thing fostered the rise of Community Based Natural Resources Management, commonly known by its initialism CBNRM, where communities are considered stakeholders and given roles and a say in the conservation activities and resource management practices.
It’s an incredibly challenging approach that has to be tailored to each specific situation, and it doesn’t always work, but when it does work it can work really well.
The Amazon (and other similar regions) is an interesting situation, and it’s really difficult to parse out exactly what was going in there. Some areas had very heavy human activity, others far lighter, but we just don’t know enough about what was going on, and remains don’t last well in that climate, so its nearly impossible to make definitive statements about it. I worked on the edge of the Amazon and in the mountains above it for a while and there were areas where it was clear that the forest had been heavily influenced by past human use, but there were other areas where it didn’t appear to be the case.
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Still? What is your problem?
This is called thread hijacking. There are other people here that have a voice.
I guess I’ll just abandon this thread. Goodbye.
Thank you to the others that posted.
@subalpine, @earthknight was responding to me, and continuing the conversation within the thread. I apologise if we strayed a little bit from the original topic, but I think everything that’s been discussed here is relevant to thinking about what environmental organizations to support. Please remember one of the key principles of iNat - “Assume good intentions”. Hopefully some of the discussion and suggestions have been useful to you in making your decision.
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While I think things got a bit off-topic, I agree with @deboas that it was broadly relevant to environmental organizations and their efficacy. For future reference, one thing you can do when creating a reply that you think should branch off into its own topic is to is click on the gray arrow and choose “Reply as a linked topic”:
(I totally forgot about this option myself)
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(closing on request of OP)