Thank God Some Americans Still Give a Duck

Ducks Unlimited has announced a plan to raise $1.7 billion to buy and protect critical wetlands habitat. This is, without a doubt, the largest wetlands conservation campaign in world history -- and hunters are initiating it.

Ducks Unlimited's program will focus on nine major areas, and donors will have the option of directing their gifts toward regions and projects where they have a particular interest. Gifts can be made online at www.ducks.org.

Even as Ducks Unlimited is trying to save wetlands, the Supreme Court appears amenable to draining them. In their latest decision, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court said they are willing to consider allowing shopping malls and condominiums to be built on wetlands -- provided those wetlands do not actually connect to a navigable body of water. Under that standard, you can drain and pave over most of Alaska.

I guess that's what happens when you replace the fly-fishing Sandra Day O'Conner with corporate toady John Roberts. Hello shopping center, good bye frog, salamader, turtle, fox, raccoon and duck. Goodbye heritage. We have sold our birthright for a few more Bed, Bath and Beyond's.

Government has done a lot to help protect and preserve wildlife and wild lands, but politicians and courts are fickle and turn more often than the leaves.

Aldo Leopold saw this political turn of events back in 1949 when he wrote his great essay framing a new American Land Ethic, and called for private ownership of land by men and women capable of looking past a quarterly profit statement. "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land," he wrote.

Leopold went on to note that a new American Land Ethic could not be sustained by "consevation education" alone.

"... Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail's pace; progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory. On the back forty we still slip two steps backward for each forward stride.

"The usual answer to this dilemma is 'more conservation education.' No one will debate this, but is it certain that only the volume of education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as well?

"It is difficult to give a fair summary of its content in brief form, but, as I understand it, the content is substantially this: obey the law, vote right, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land; the government will do the rest.

"Is not this formula too easy to accomplish anything worth-while? It defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values. In respect of land use, it urges only enlightened self-interest. Just how far will such education take us?"

Aldo Leopold argued that education and government parks and set-asides alone could not do it all -- that without a new land ethic there would come a time when the burden of government would grow too heavy and its ability to manuever would be too compromised:

"At what point will governmental conservation, like the mastodon, become handicapped by its own dimensions? The answer, if there is any, seems to be in a land ethic, or some other force which assigns more obligation to the private landowner."

What land was most in need of "more obligation" being assigned to it? Leopold argued that, contrary to popular belief, it was the land that was valued least.

"Lack of economic value is sometimes a character not only of species or groups, but of entire biotic communities: marshes, bogs, dunes, and 'deserts' are examples. Our formula in such cases is to relegate their conservation to government as refuges, monuments, or parks. The difficulty is that these communities are usually interspersed with more valuable private lands; the government cannot possibly own or control such scattered parcels. The net effect is that we have relegated some of them to ultimate extinction over large areas. If the private owner were ecologically minded, he would be proud to be the custodian of a reasonable proportion of such areas, which add diversity and beauty to his farm and to his community."

The Clean Water Act, and the various pieces of wetlands protection legislation that followed, did what Leopold called for: they assigned more obligation to the private land owner.

Now, however, we have a deeply divided court that is contemplating removing those obligations.

The good news, if there is any, is that in the late 20th and early 21st Century, we have found a new type of American land owner to stand as antidote to the wetland-draining mall developer -- the philanthropist, both large and small.

A new American "land banking" movement is being led by groups like The Nature Conservacy and Ducks Unlimited, and by hunter-conservationists like Ted Turner and his son Beau, as well as millions of Americans simply giving $50 at a time. This is America at its best, and America's hunting community is leading the way.

If there is a motto to this new movement, it is this: "We preserve land the old-fashioned way; we buy it."

Will it be enough? I don't know. All I know is that America is snake-bit by too many people, too much avarice and too little connection to wild lands and wildlife. Entire lifestyles are manufactured in China and sent to us shrink-wrapped and bar-coded. Most cooks have never gutted a fish or plucked a chicken. When Americans go "camping," most never go more than 300 feet from their car.

In such a climate, those who love America's lands and wildlife need to fight for every protection they can get, and thank every protector that comes forward.

Count me a hunter, and count me a fan of Ducks Unlimited.

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