Transformative Conservation: Learning to Live with Nature

Our monthly Transforamtive Conservation Coversations grew out of the Parrot Conservation Corps where we learned to be parrot conservation transformers!

Humans have yet to learn with nature in ways where maximum flourishing and freedom is available for all. We do know how to set up structures of people interweaving commitment and conversation that will bring about the transformation the earth needs, and for this reason, we have monthly Transformative Conservation Conversations open to everyone. For more information and to register, go here. Our recent guest was Mike Jones,  a conservationist who has worked in the field for 40 years in protected area management and community conservation in Africa and the USA before becoming a lecturer in systems thinking for sustainable development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. The entire conversation can be found here, where he told us that transformative conservation is learning to live with nature. During our time together, he expanded on this by presenting stories and information that exemplified and summarized in simpler terms an article of which he was coauthor, "Transformative Conservation of Ecosystems." Today I highlight just one prominent take-away.

There is No Simple Scaling Up

Scaling up is expanding the reach and impact of conservation initiatives beyond their initial scope. Mike posited that because cultures and ecologies vary, what works in one place may not work in others. Even though funders put pressure on conservation organizations to produce a  provable model that can be scaled up to more communities, to an entire region or ecosystem, or the globe, it can’t be done (in a simplistic fashion). “The world doesn’t work like that.” Mike later wrote to me explaining the nuances in scaling, including scaling up, scaling out, and scaling deep.

Scaling out means an innovcation is replicated while being applied to other villages, towns, or countries. It can work very well in landscapes inhabited by communities of similar land users. But if it is applied in a simplistic and cookie-cutter fashion the success will be limited. Scaling up is a process whereby success in one project "leads to changes in policy that support more of the same kind of innovation. The more widespread the success on the ground and the greater the public pressure for supportive policy, the more likely that scaling up will occur." More recent research has led to the concept of scaling deep, which refers to the need for education and learning as part of a scaling-up process. "The more widespread the success on the ground and the greater the public pressure for supportive policy, the more likely that scaling up will occur."

One of the participants and a member of One Earth Conservation's Parrot Conservation Corps in El Salvador, Maritza Guido, reflected further on this key point,

"It's important to note that the evolutionary processes of change and methodology are inherent to human beings; we fluctuate in our thoughts, habits, customs, and cultures. Therefore, success stories are specific to the place, time, and people who developed them, and cannot be transferred and replicated for everyone at the national level, much less at the international level. I have personally proven, in my years of community work in natural areas, that thinking and attitude will depend 100% on the change in a community's leaders and their conviction to take the step that changes actions in favor of conservation!”

But, these changes, “last only as long as the thoughts and attitudes last,” and “until another change in thinking occurs, which happens all the time. For that is how we humans who form communities are. We fluctuate!”

During the conversation I agreed with this sentiment of Mike and Martiza and portrayed it starkly, but ultimately hopefully, "Not only can we not scale up, nothing works! There is no “plan” that we can foresee upon which to assure changes at the community or global level. Yet we know that we can save lives now, and in our relationships under the intense pressure of caring for so much so deeply, we are transformed and this a seed for the future.”

Maritza inspired me with her finishing thought. "Small successes, as Mike says, make a difference in the advancement of knowledge, and as our grandparents say, as long as we don't understand that we are a whole, we will continue to stumble and become extinct."

Conservation then is not just a learning, but a relearning process – to know that we live in nature and that we are a whole.