DB 10 PLM
Week 10 Narratives - Education
Mandates vs. Education
As we read at the beginning of the semester in Our Limits Transgressed and then vilified in Break Through, there is a notion that the public will not merely comply voluntarily to what is beneficial with nature and the environment. Neo-Malthusiasts contend that an authoritarian government in one form or another needs to exist in order to compel, or at least push, people in the right direction.
Whether you agree with that notion or not, how do you get people to care for the environment? In Break Through, the authors contend that technology and prosperity are the answers to our problems. What if we aren’t prosperous though? What if an environmental issue is just the “right thing to do”? Can something be done without infringing on people’s personal liberties?
Case Study
In my professional capacity as manager of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument (from 2011-2015), I had the privilege of working with The Peregrine Fund. “The Peregrine Fund is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to saving birds of prey from extinction. Throughout the world, birds of prey are threatened by shooting, poisoning, and loss of habitat. Saving these birds is an effective means of conserving the rich diversity of life that is critical to the future health of our planet and the well-being of generations to come.” (www.peregrinefund.org (Links to an external site.))
One of their many conservation projects is the California condor reintroduction. California condors are highly endangered. Only 22 individuals remained alive in 1982. Since 1996, The Peregrine Fund has produced condors at its captive breeding facility at the World Center for Birds of Prey in Idaho and released them in Arizona as a “non-essential experimental population” under a Memoranda of Understanding and applicable special permits with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department, and others. The location of the release site for the captive bred birds is on Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. As of July 2015, there are 425 California condors, including 74 in northern Arizona and southern Utah.
The biggest issue hampering the full recovery of the California condor and the primary contributor to condor mortality is lead poisoning. You can explore the scientific literature conclusions on your own, but the research is pretty compelling that a majority condors are getting poisoned from lead fragments of spent ammunition in dead animal carcasses. The lead comes from bullets used by game hunters.
What’s interesting is that The Peregrine Fund has taken a very unique approach to this issue. Instead of advocating for a mandatory ban on lead ammunition, in partnership with the Arizona Game and Fish Department (Links to an external site.) and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (Links to an external site.), they have implemented a very successful voluntary non-lead ammunition campaign with big game hunters. In fact, research as shown that hunter compliance in this voluntary program is just as effective as the mandatory lead ban for big game hunting in California.
Read the following two research papers that quantify the success of the voluntary lead-reduction program: