WHO OWNS
THE ECOSYSTEM?

by

Charles C. Geisler and Barbara L. Bedford

LTC Paper 157
Land Tenure Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
October 1996

Copyright © 1996 by Charles C. Geisler and Barbara L. Bedford. All rights reserved.
Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT AS BIGGER-IS-BETTER MANAGEMENT

NEW GEOGRAPHY OF ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

ECOSYSTEM INHOLDERS

GREATER YELLOWSTONE ECOSYSTEM

THE HIGHLANDS

"LEGACY INHOLDERS"

TOWARD A SECOND QUIET REVOLUTION?

CONCLUSION

ENDNOTES

REFERENCES

All views, interpretations, recommendations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the supporting or cooperating institutions.

ABSTRACT: This paper is about how human society organizes its proprietary relationship to the biosphere and, in particular, the property implications of ecosystem management. Our premise is that ecosystem management is endangered by its "bigger-is-better" bias, the potential source of public backlash among landowners. We document both the expansionary nature of ecocentric management and the magnitude of inholdings (encumbered property interests) which accompany it. We contrast "ecosystem inholders" with inholders who, historically, have dotted our national parks, and show the complexity of entitlement in two ecosystem cases, one old and one new. We draw historical parallels between current ecosystem management and the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1970s and, in conclusion, point to the National Environmental Policy Act as an underutilized way to reduce conflict between ecosystem rights and property rights.

Who Owns The Ecosystem?*

by

Charles C. Geisler and Barbara L. Bedford**

Introduction

This paper explores the property implications of ecosystem management, hailed as a new conservation paradigm (Cortner et al. 1994; Jackson and Wyner 1994; Lubchenco 1994) and as a promising next step in federal land management (GAO 1994, p.20).(1) Ecosystem management yields many benefits to society, including the protection of watersheds and soil, maintaining viable populations of plants and animals, improving environmental conditions in surrounding areas and extending vital services to society as a whole, such as soil replenishment, surface and groundwater protection, oxygen generation and climate amelioration, new scientific/medical/touristic opportunities, and the sheltering of replacement cohorts of many life forms on which civilization depends (NPCA 1988b). Added to this are a vast array of aesthetic pleasures, economic stocks, and the broad platform of biodiversity without which evolution itself would languish. These imposing attributes suggest a new "estate of mind" with respect to how human society organizes its proprietary relationship to the biosphere.

What is striking about ecosystem management is the unprecedented scale of its reach onto private lands beyond its core protected (usually public) areas. If accomplished in a fashion laid out in assorted conservation manifestoes and legislative agendas, ecosystem management promises to redraw the metes and bounds of ownership in America in fundamentally new ways. We concern ourselves here with these ownership changes and with their unintended consequences. Foremost among these is a burgeoning number of ecosystem inholdings, that is, ownership units that fall within expanding ecosystem management units. This phenomenon has been likened by Grumbine (1992) to the English Enclosure Movement of bygone centuries. What is unintended is not the enclosure per se nor the alterations in property rights that follow, but the alienation felt by large numbers of threatened property owners toward the theory and practice of ecosystem management.

The property implications of ecosystem management have attracted the prior attention of scholars (Caldwell 1972; Carlton 1986; Cortner and Moote 1994; Geisler and Kittel 1994; Ireland 1994; Albrecht 1994; Trott 1995), not to mention a vast amount of popular writing and editorializing in mainstream media as well as the newsletters of groups opposing and supporting ecosystem management. Combined, these efforts offer a rich archive of debate on the possible effects of ecocentric management on property rights, on property taxes, and on communities depending on both. What is lacking is a full account of the property effects of reorganizing conservation policy on a regional scale in a society generally accustomed to pursuing such ends through public ownership or public control of land, often at a local level.

In what follows, we document both the expansionary potential of future ecosystem management and the magnitude of inholdings likely to accompany it. By inholders we refer to ownership interests that, because they are enclosed by or adjacent to managed ecosystems, have some or all of their property rights encumbered. We suggest that, both in numbers and in background profile, "ecosystem inholders" are distinct from inholders who, for more than a century, have dotted the national parks. To illustrate the complexity of entitlement within managed ecosystems, we offer two contrasting case studies, one old and one new. This provides ample opportunity to comment on both the consequences of ecocentric land-use planning on property owners and, conversely, of private property ownership on ecosystem management. It leads, perhaps predictably, to a historical parallel between ecosystem management and the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1970s. Our conclusion looks to the National Environmental Policy Act as an underutilized way to reduce conflict between ecosystem rights and property rights.

Ecosystem management as bigger-is-better management

Ever since Arthur Tansley (1935) used the concept of "ecosystem" six decades ago to capture the regional array of biological and physical forces shaping organisms in nature, there has been gradual adoption of the term among resource managers. Similarly, there has been a concerted effort on the part of conservation biologists to move from de facto to de jure recognition of ecosystem units as superior management frameworks. Bills have been proposed to protect ecosystems (Hunt 1989; liverman 1990; Noss 1991; Grumbine 1992; Jontz 1993; Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project 1996), federal agencies managing hundreds of millions of federal acres have pledged themselves to ecosystem management, and the administration's 1995 budget included funding for the initial stages of a government-wide ecosystem management policy (Jackson and Wyner 1994). The White House's Office of Environmental Policy has established an Interagency Ecosystem Management Task Force to advance the concept (GAO 1994; Cortner et al. 1994).

As presently interpreted, ecosystem management implies a radically new and expanded geography of conservation.(2) The quest for increased scale by ecosystem management proponents has antecedents in a seminal report to the Ecological Society of America by Victor Shelford in 1933. Shelford called for the expansion of reserve boundaries to match species habitat needs, to achieve representation of ecosystem types, to manage for ecological fluctuations and disturbances, and to accomplish a core-buffer approach to conservation planning. In 1972, the National Park Service released its first-ever National Park System Plan. An early form of gap analysis, this plan identified discrepancies between what was within national parks and what, from the standpoint of "natural regions," was not (see map 1). In 1985, a report by the National Parks and Conservation Association stated: "The primary justification for adding new areas to the System should be to preserve nationally significant ecosystems, land forms and cultural resources to the maximum extent possible" (NPCA 1988b, p. 1-10).

Two years later, in 1987, further analysis by the Park Service came to the following startling conclusions (NPCA 1988b, p. 1-11):

• 41 percent of the ecosystems identified using the methods in the 1972 Plan are probably not represented adequately in the national park system;
• 42 percent of ecosystems identified using potential natural vegetation maps of the United States are probably not represented adequately in the system; and
• 60 percent of the ecosystems assessed at a still-higher, detailed level of ecosystem diversity are probably not represented adequately in the system.

Map 1: Natural regions/physiographic provinces and their representation in the National Park System Two maps of the U.S., the first labeled with the natural regions and the second showing four percentage ranges of adequacy of representation of the natural regions in the national park system. (Illustration available only in the published paper) Source: National Park Service, National Park System Plan, Part One/History, Part Two/Natural History (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1972).

Despite aggressive federal land acquisition in the 1970s, some still considered the National Park System (NPS) to be more empty than full from an ecosystem standpoint (for example, see Foresta 1984). This skepticism was rooted less in NPS efforts to expand than in continuing threats to biodiversity. Species extinction today is occurring at rates faster than ever before in the history of the planet (Bird 1989). Two years after Shelford's report, other researchers concluded that the national parks were not fully functional ecosystems by virtue of boundary and size limitations (Wright and Thompson 1935). Since that time, the U.S. National Park System has doubled in size, a national wilderness system has been created, and protected areas worldwide have grown by a factor of six (Grumbine 1994). Yet, of the nearly 900 species (plants, birds, and mammals) listed under the Endangered Species Act, only a quarter can be found on the 91 million acres of National Wildlife Refuges (GAO 1994). Public forestlands are a relatively small proportion (27 percent) of the total forestland base and cannot be expected to adequately protect biodiversity in ecosystems (Sample 1994). Moreover, federal lands are unevenly distributed [less than 1 percent of some states such as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, and Oklahoma (GAO 1995)]. Grumbine (1994, p. 211) concludes that "ecosystem management restricted to government lands is a prescription for extinction."(3)

Thus, conservation biologists today have broadened their management interest to ecocentric units beyond park boundaries-to whole river basins, watersheds, and landscapes, rather than to homeocentric units such as ownership or governance units. They argue that managing broader geographic areas for multiple rather than single species may be more efficient and effective, reduces the risk that viable species will become endangered, and results in fewer limitations on human activities (GAO 1994). Still others rely on the bigger-is-better approach to sidestep difficult ecosystem delineation issues(4) and contend that ecocentric management must be large enough to capture the complexities and linkages among the components and processes of the ecosystem (Keystone Center 1991; Turner et al. 1995). As Grumbine (1992, p. 187) states:

[T]hink big and think connected. Bigness and connectivity across our wounded landscapes must be bolstered by a moratorium on habitat degradation and more conservation-biology research. In the present political landscape, bans on old-growth logging coupled with expensive research, expansive wilderness and biological corridors are considered utopian. That may be so. But if they are, then we had better be very clear about the consequences of pragmatism for both species and ecosystems: They will soon disappear, along with Earth's habitability for Homo sapiens.

In sum, all else being equal, large reserves are among the few almost universally accepted principles within conservation biology (Noss 1992).

New geography of ecosystem management

The property implications of ecosystem management would be unremarkable if the spatial requirements just referred to could be satisfied by those lands of the United States in federal ownership. By 1988, more than 500 boundary adjustments had occurred on nearly 200 national parks (NPCA 1988b). Most were relatively minor in size, however. More importantly, ecosystem managers diversified their conservation approaches and fashioned an extraterritorial strategy extending well beyond national parks. On the one hand, this relied on partnerships among federal landholding agencies administering vast extensions of public land (see map 2). On the other, it relied on managing and co-managing nonfederal lands through a host of techniques. The Wildlands Project, a vision of how the United States might look after two centuries of ecosystem management, is a notable example of the latter.

Map 2: Land managed by 4 primary federal land management agencies in the 48 contiguous states A map of the U.S. showing the areas managed by the four primary agencies. (Illustration available only in the published paper) Source: USGS data, in GAO, National Wildlife Refuge System: Contributions Being Made to Endangered Species Recovery (Washington, D.C.; U.S. General Accounting Office, 1994).

Conceived by David Foreman of Earth First and elaborated by respected conservation biologists, the Wildlands Project (also called the North American Wilderness Recovery Project) is the most ambitious proposal for land management since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (Mann and Plummer 1993). If accomplished, it would encompass hundreds of millions of acres, or just under half of the continent (see map 3). A distant descendent of the Shelford blueprint, 23.4 percent of U.S. land would be wilderness, and another 26.2 percent, corridors and buffer zones. The result would be an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural areas. Noss (1992, p.13) translates the Wildlands Plan into a macro land-use manifesto consisting of four interwoven strategies:

• rare and endangered species are identified and protected;
• species valuable for pragmatic reasons are maintained (for example, they play critical roles in the ecosystem; they require large areas to survive, thus serving as "umbrellas" for other species; and they are charismatic species that serve as popular symbols for conservation);
• high-quality examples of all natural communities are secured from destruction; and
• greater ecosystems or landscapes are identified and managed for biodiversity conservation and sustainable human use.

Map 3: The plan to protect biodiversity A map of the U.S. showing the areas of no human use, human buffer zones, normal use, and those not yet mapped. (Illustration available only in the published paper) Source: Map used with permission of Environmental Perspectives, Inc. (207) 945-9878

Noss adds that the heart of the Wildlands Project lies in breaking down the continental geography into subregions such as those proposed in Omernick's (1987) 76 ecoregions (see map4). Ecoregions and bioregions, for which Noss says many grassroots groups have developed conservation plans, are a convenient scale for planning and "often inspire feelings of belonging and protectiveness in their more enlightened inhabitants" (Noss 1992, p. 13). Protected areas and buffer zones would be planned and executed within these regions and then connected via conservation corridors, hence the importance of connectivity as well as size.

Although no single piece of legislation envisages all components of the Wildlands Project, a sampling of recent legislative initiatives suggests that ecosystem management's expanded scale is not hypothetical. In 1989, Congress considered American Heritage Trust Fund legislation that sought to set aside one billion dollars annually for environmentally significant land acquisition.(5)

Map 4: Ecoregions of the United States A map of the U.S. showing the seventy-six ecoregions. (Illustration available only in the published paper) Source: J.M. Omernik, "Ecoregions of the Coterminous United States," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987).

The Ancient Forest Protection Act of 1991 sought to establish an ancient-forest reserve system based on a year-long scientific study of all unprotected old-growth acres on the federal lands of the Northwest.(6) The American Heritage Areas Act of 1995, following the recommendations of the Mississippi River Parkway Commission and other initiatives going back to 1984, projected 2,500 miles of the Mississippi River as a semi-protected corridor.(7) The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 became law and was the single largest land withdrawal for conservation in the continental United States.

To this list could be added numerous other broad gauge ecosystem projects such as the four-state Northern Forest in the Northeast, the multi-county Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project of California, the thirteen Adaptive Management Areas in the Northwest, a host of private and private-public ecosystem management schemes in the Texas Canyonlands (Beatly 1994), as well as various "greater ecosystem" projects and biosphere reserves. These illustrations say nothing of the myriad smaller-scale ecological action plans and projects which, cumulatively, add up to millions of additional acres. Noss, LaRoe, and Scott (1995), in the first full review of the health of the American landscape, conclude that major stretches of formerly vibrant habitat, once amounting to over half of the continental United States, have declined to the point of endangerment. Combined, the formal and informal plans to bring about the Wildlands Plan amount to an ecosystem management manifesto for North America.

Ecosystem inholders

What for conservation biologists is prudent extension of the managed landscape is for many private property owners leapfrog conservation. It is a major impetus for the expanding Wise Use Movement, a response to growing public ownership and control of land (Helvarg 1994), and for kindred groups such as the National Inholders Association, the National Federal Lands Conference, and the American Land Rights Association, among others. The Alliance for America counts over 600 local property rights groups in its ranks, and the National Inholders Association has well over a million members (NRC 1993), a membership long in the making and accelerating in its growth. Inholder status(8) will apply to more and more people as ecosystem management, expressed in formally protected parks, reserves, preserves, sanctuaries, and their connecting corridors, redefines the geography of American conservation.

Inholders became an important set of stakeholders over a century ago with the emergence of the national parks system and were a perennial concern on Capitol Hill (Runte 1990). By the 1930s, when the Taylor Grazing Act officially ended the federal land disposition outside of Alaska and the Depression forced many Americans back to the land to survive, inholders became an obstacle to federal land planning. Just after World War II, the director of the National Park Service noted that inholder complications were a major impediment to discharging his NPS mandate (Drury 1946).

By the 1970s, roughly half the land within the 51 national forests in the eastern United States remained in private hands, and, nationally, inholder conflicts flared in places as diverse as the Cape Cod National Seashore, the Columbia River Scenic Parkway, the Shenandoah National Park, the Indiana National Lakeshore, Yosemite National Park, the Delaware Water Gap, the New Jersey Pinelands, and New York's Adirondack Park (NRC 1993). Mindful of such conflicts, the federal government made the re-acquisition of private lands within federal holdings a priority in the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras through the Land and Water Conservation Fund (Glicksman and Coggins 1984). The overall amount of land owned by the four major federal landholding agencies increased in 46 states between 1964 (when acquisition started) and 1993 (GAO 1995). In terms of quantity, the great majority of new federal land occurred in Alaska, a substantial portion of which later passed to the State of Alaska and to Native Alaskans.(9) But this acquisition favored new conservation coverage rather than buy-outs of existing inholders, and the number of inholders actually grew.

Not only has the publicly owned land base grown, but the proportion of this land legally encumbered for conservation purposes consistent with ecosystem management has expanded as well through legislative or administrative restrictions. In fiscal 1964, such lands stood at 7 percent (or 51 million acres); by fiscal 1993, they had risen to almost 44 percent (or 271 million acres) of federal lands (GAO 1995). In 1964, with few exceptions, land thus encumbered was exclusively managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service. By 1993, the two largest federal landholding agencies (Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service) had similarly encumbered appreciable portions of their holdings (see table 2). Given the federal government's interest in ecosystem management stated earlier in this paper, the federal lands now in strict conservation status (271 million acres, or roughly 12 percent of the entire United States) will continue to grow and, with it, the population of inholders affected by such growth.

Various studies have sought to profile traditional inholders (NRC 1993). Generalizations are hard to come by, because these profiles vary greatly by location and region of the country. The inholders range from marginalized minorities (Hispanic Americans on various national forests in New Mexico, African-Americans in the Virgin Islands National Park, and Osage Native Americans in the Tall Grass Prairie Reserve) to well-healed urban and suburban second-home owners (in the Adirondacks, Yosemite, the Blue Ridge Parkway). The former have relatively insecure titles (Spanish land grants frequently unrecognized by the United States, clouded titles in the case of former slaves in the Sea Islands and the Virgin Islands, and Indian Trust land status, which can be overridden by Congress at will). What traditional inholders have in common, in the end, is their heterogeneity.

Ecosystem inholders are not lacking in diversity but differ from traditional inholders in both quantitative and qualitative terms. There are vastly more inholders today that a generation ago, a consequence of demographic trends colliding with the new geography of ecocentric conservation. The demographic "turn-around" of the 1970s (net population gain of nonmetropolitan over metropolitan areas) appears to be returning in the 1990s, possibly as a long-term trend (Lichter 1993). Adding to this is the fact that the so-called "wilderness counties" (proximate to wilderness areas) are among the highest growth counties in the United States (Rudzitis and Johansen 1989). Bullish ecosystem management is encountering swelling population enclaves attracted to the amenities of remote rural areas, greatly increasing the density of inholdings.

The qualitative differences between new and old inholders are many, particularly of social class and social status. Given the demographic forces currently at work, inholders likely to be captured by ecosystem annexations are apt to be relatively prosperous, well educated, and interested in environmental amenities. They are less likely to produce a living directly from primary sector pursuits (mining, forestry, agriculture, hunting, trapping, and so forth) than to "consume" the environment in more passive (recreation, aesthetic, touristic) ways, a condition fostered by their widespread retirement and semi-retirement status. They are apt to commute physically or electronically to urban places for employment, education, or in-service training and to reside in the managed ecosystem seasonally or temporarily. They have, in short, alternative options for sustained livelihood and enjoyment, making their property rights important but not an irreplaceable survival entitlement. Their tolerance for planning and for the regulation of these property rights is generally high, given their retirement or temporary retreat from urban and suburban places where such social controls are taken for granted.

These generalizations are illustrated in the two case studies that follow. One is the oldest and largest initiative in ecosystem management in temperate North America, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). The other is among the newest ecosystem experiments, the Highlands Project of New York and northern New Jersey. Both are "in progress," the latter being far less consolidated in its geographical base and identity. The GYE is in a relatively remote location undergoing intense in-migration, development pressure, and subdivision of ownerships. The latter is immediately adjacent to the nation's largest metropolitan area. In both cases, urban sprawl and conservation sprawl collide.

Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Yellowstone National Park, christened the world's first national park in 1872, is the core of the GYE, which is nearly 20 million acres, or 7 times the size of the park and roughly as big as West Virginia.(10) Interagency management coordination for the region began in the 1960s, but delineation as a greater ecosystem came nearly 20 years later when Craighead's (1979) grizzly research first appealed for conservation of a larger natural system. The U.S. National Park Service controls 2.5 million acres (Yellowstone and Grand Teton combined), the Forest Service accounts for roughly 11 million acres (7 national forests), the Fish and Wildlife Service manages 89,000 acres in 3 refuges, and the Bureaus of Land Management and Reclamation control scattered parcels (map 5). Some 28 federal and state agencies and committees from 3 states share GYE management duties (Goldstein 1992).(11)

Map 5: Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem A map of Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding areas showing the ecosystem core and transition zone. (Illustration available only in the published paper) Source: GAO, National Wildlife Refuge System: Contributions Being Made to Endangered Species Recovery (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 1994).

The GYE is a mosaic of ownership, growing ever more complex as its ecosystem vision expands. State and county lands intermingled with federal holdings make public inholdings. Private inholdings are extensive, ranging from 8 to 24 percent of the total system, depending on the definition of GYE used (table 3). Some of these are checker-boarded, a holdover of railroad lands granted in the last century. As Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands have joined the GYE effort, the owners of permits (timber), leases (oil and gas), and split estates (grazing) have assumed inholder status as well. For example, by the mid-1980s, nearly 5.4 million acres of national forestland (or almost twice the entire national park land within GYE) was available for oil and gas leasing. This constitutes 55 percent of national forestland within GYE (table 4).

Many owners of partial or full property interests within GYE claim to be self-styled environmental stewards (Hage 1990; Leal, Black, and Baden 1990). But so do they pose threats to GYE by their growing numbers and by their behavior (Kwong 1990) and beliefs about privatization, deregulation, and local ownership (Ekey 1994). Although one in four GYE acres may seem an inconsequential ratio of private to public tenures, inholdings often have disproportionate effects on the ecosystem because of where they settle:

People chose to settle in valley bottoms and other level terrain at lower elevations and along watercourses where they found milder climates, deeper soils, and a mix of vegetation types. While these lands appeal to people, they also are important habitat for wildlife and birds. For example, in Teton County, Wyoming, half of all bald eagles nest on private land and 90 percent of mule deer migrate onto private lands in search of winter forage (Harting et al. 1994, p.12).

Other problems resulting from intermingled and adjacent ownerships include trespassing livestock, industrial pollution, poaching, and the encroachments of roads, power line corridors, waste disposal sites, fire, and land development for recreation, housing, and concessions (Jarvis 1982).

Another way of conceptualizing inholder interests is in terms of longevity and intensity. The first group-long-term permanent residents-consists of 300,000 inhabitants of the 20 counties within and adjacent to GYE. They own, rent, and lease land within the system and depend on grazing, timber, and oil and gas extraction in the GYE for employment and livelihood (Glick et al. 1991), though this may not be their sole source of income. During the early 1980s, when the urban-to-rural population reversal ebbed for much of the country, these same 20 counties grew 33 percent faster per year than Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho as a whole. This led observers to warn of a private land rush in GYE (Smith 1993). At the other extreme, 34 million tourists a year have an ephemeral yet high-intensity user interest in GYE for its recreational amenities.

Strains between GYE expansion and the property interests of a proliferating population seem unavoidable. This likelihood increases as population expands or as GYE extends its territorial reach. Both seem plausible. Demographers project an increase of 70,000 residents by the year 2010 (Harting et al. 1994). If some version of the Wildlands Project is successful, GYE will eventually be connected to other ecosystems through corridors at a minimum. Consider the management implications of the 1988 Yellowstone fire, which swept through just under half (1.4 million acres) of Yellowstone Park; ecologists believe that land areas at least 50 times the size of catastrophic disturbances should be used to define a minimum scale of the protected ecosystem (Shugart and West 1981; White 1987; Baker 1984). If followed, this formula would yield a managed GYE of an additional 10 to 15 million acres, or more than twice the acreage acquired by the Land and Water Conservation Fund from 1964 to 1989 (NRC 1993).

A final reason to anticipate further expansion of GYE is the appearance in the region of greater numbers of inholders who willingly accept federal land encumbrances. Some private owners view conservation easements, deed restrictions, restrictive covenants, and other limitations on their ultimate use and disposition of land as the "price of admission" to live in an unsullied, high amenity area of unique beauty and value. Like the Highlands, to which we now turn, conservation easements are spreading via land trusts and other conservation groups which view inholders as potential allies of GYE (Smith 1993).

The Highlands

Two thousand miles to the east of the GYE, and within an hour of the country's largest metropolitan complex, lies the New York/New Jersey Highlands, a new federal venture in large-scale ecosystem management. The 1990 Farm Bill called for the U.S. Forest Service to conduct a study of the Highlands region, a million acres stretching from the Delaware River across most of northern New Jersey to the Hudson River in New York (map 6), for which Congress appropriated $250,000 in 1991. In the absence of appropriate planning, according to the Forest Service, the area's environmental legacy was at significant risk (Comanor n.d.). In 1992, the New York-New Jersey Highlands Regional Study was completed for public and congressional review (Michaels et al. 1992) and bills to begin purchasing critical habitats within the region went before the Senate.(12)

Map 6: New York-New Jersey Highlands Regional Study Area A map showing the study area in the northwest corner of New Jersey (Illustration available only in the published paper) Source: J.A. Michaels et al., N.Y.-N.J. Highlands Regional Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Forest Service, 1992).

In contrast to the relatively low population density of GYE, the 31 county region surrounding the Highlands (extending into Connecticut) is home to some 20 million people, 2.8 million of whom live in the 9 counties adjacent to the study area (table 5). According to the 1992 Regional Study, the tri-state area has seen a 6 percent rise in population and a 60 percent increase in the amount of urban land in the last 25 years. Unlike the West, where federal land forms a significant nucleus of land for ecosystem management and planning, there is virtually no public domain and only 147,800 acres of public land amid 1.1 million acres targeted for protected and buffer zone ("greenway") status. Federal, state, and local public land constitutes a mere 15 percent of the target area-public inholdings in a sea of private holdings. Like GYE, private holdings here are under dramatic subdivision pressure. At current rates of land conversion, 15,000 acres of farmland and over 17,000 of forestland will be densely settled by the year 2010 and parcel fragmentation will alter physical, biological, and cultural resources (Michaels et al. 1992).

Assuming the Highlands study area induces special designation and protection beyond what now exists, who will be its inholders and what resemblance to do they bear to those of GYE? The largest single land use (nearly 50 percent) of the Highlands is forestry. Private ownership dominates, whereas in GYE public forestlands make up slightly more than half the system. A study of New Jersey forestlands within the study area indicates that in 1988 some 25,000 individuals owned forestland compared to 16,500 in 1972 (Zipperer 1992). This is an increase of 48 percent in 2 decades and is accompanied by a dramatic increase in holdings of less than 10 acres, particularly by people of retirement age who want to live on or near their parcels and who plan to harvest timber in the next decade (table 6). Corporate and partnership owners have increased slightly since 1972, perhaps motivated by land speculation, but own less acreage than previously.

Absentee ownership, declining among individual owners of forestland, is a tenure category of major importance in both ecosystems. In GYE, it is structurally dictated by the nature of leases and permits for timber and cattle. With certain grazing exceptions,(13) these are transitory rights and, by their nature, invite remote management and control by distant individuals and corporations. Patents to mine, a more permanent property right, open the door to absenteeism after a usually short burst of prospecting/extractive activity. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition claims that GYE is afflicted by over 12,000 active and abandoned hardrock mining claims on its federal lands (Glick, Carr, and Harting 1991), claims that threaten to contaminate ground and surface waters and indirectly jeopardize the food chain and visual quality in the system. A prominent case is the (Canadian) Noranda Corporation's proposed gold mine less than 3 miles from Yellowstone National Park in the Gallatin National Forest. Protected by the 1872 Mining Law, Noranda's 200-acre mine hinges on acquisition of 27 acres remaining, valued at $500 million (New York Times 1995). Clearly, inholders are not always small-scale, second-home owners or extractive interests in GYE, the Highlands, or many other protected ecosystems of the country.

In stark contrast to GYE, the core of the Highlands management plan is the privately owned 17,500-acre Sterling Forest. It is the second largest parcel of relatively undeveloped land under one ownership in the Highlands and the centerpiece of the aforementioned legislation before Congress. Regrettably for those who seek to slow the subdivision and fragmentation in the region, Sterling Forest is owned by the Sterling Forest Corporation, a subsidiary of The Home Insurance Company, which, in turn, is a subsidiary of Home Holding, Inc. The latter is owned by a consortium of European investors led by Trygg-Hansa Insurance of Sweden (Michaels et al. 1992). At present, Sterling Forest is being targeted by a consortium of Swiss investors whose primary interest is speculative gain and real estate development. In both the Highlands and GYE, then, powerful foreign corporations are important inholders to reckon with.

"Legacy inholders"

The Highlands has the potential to serve as a recreational refuge for urban populations, a priority among administrations for at least three decades (NRC 1993). But it comes of age at a time of fiscal austerity and resistance in many quarters to extended federal ownership or control of property rights. Total acquisition of the Sterling Forest's 17,500 acres alone would cost about $70 million. Furthermore, with a 1994 backlog in federal land acquisitions of $1.1 billion, the National Park Service itself opposes diversion of scarce moneys in the Land and Water Conservation Fund toward projects not part of the NPS (Finley 1994). Thus, one might expect a proliferation of approaches that control development at a reduced cost, such as conservation easements.

The 1990 Farm Bill introduced the Forest Legacy Program, an approach to conservation that authorizes the U.S. Forest Service to acquire perpetual conservation easements from consenting landowners. Legacy is a federal-state cost-share program and targets a variety of pilot areas in the Northeast and the State of Washington.(14) In the 1993 Appropriations Bill, Congress provided $3,000,000 for the initial acquisition of Sterling Forest lands and other critical parts of the Highlands. The Legacy program funds cannot be used for eminent domain but can be used for other conservation techniques such as covenants, voluntary deed restrictions, and full fee acquisition on a willing-seller basis. It thus yields a new type of inholder who, in theory, accepts ecosystem management where there is compensation of foregone property rights.

The Legacy Program is fundamentally tied to ecosystem management principles and, if successful, may spread to other regions of the country where buffer zones, critical corridors, and vulnerable core areas remain unprotected, particularly in forested areas. The words of New Jersey's Forest Legacy Committee (1994, p. 24) are prophetic in this regard:

Because of the significance of biodiversity, the use of both fee acquisition and conservation easements will be required to protect the biological integrity of selected areas. Timber rights will be acquired on all tracts. Development rights will be acquired on all lands adjacent to streams or wetlands. All subdivision rights will be acquired on all tracts and access will be acquired when property is adjacent to existing parks.

Some will be skeptical that forest landowners will accept encumbrances on their land, even with material incentives. However, over 70 percent of landowners surveyed in the New York-New Jersey Highlands Regional Study mentioned aesthetics and enjoyment as the primary reasons for forest ownership (Michaels et al. 1992). Easements addressing the particular needs of such inholders could be successful in protecting forested ecosystems elsewhere.

Toward a second Quiet Revolution?

The Land Rights Advocate, the newsletter of the American Land Rights Association and the National Inholders Association, recently characterized ecosystem management as old wine in new bottles. It alleged that ecosystem management "won't just stop on the edge of Federal lands. The Forest Service has already been told that this 'planning' will now include any private property 'within the ecosystem.'...This is really National Land Planning and Zoning" (Allman 1994). It is accurate to claim that ecosystem management is more than a new conservation paradigm. It remains an open question, however, whether the land use planning implied herein is old or new. Certainly it evokes parallels with the so-called "Quiet Revolution" in land use controls of the 1970s-the broad legislative effort to provide uniform land use controls at the state and federal levels in the name of environmental necessity (Bosselman, Callies, and Banta 1973).

The important parallels are these. The Quiet Revolution had antecedents in the 1930s, was national in scale, challenged prevailing notions of public and private interests in property, and, in the end, offered lessons about balancing local and nonlocal interests in pursuing environmental integrity. Indeed, the Quiet Revolution made ample reference to the land ethic of Aldo Leopold (1949), and its mainstay, the National Land Use Policy Act of 1970, cited ecological factors as criteria for sound land use planning (Caldwell 1972). Although this bill was defeated, its principles permeated subsequent state-level laws and to some degree surfaced in the Clean Air Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1974.(15)

Yet ecosystem management differs from its predecessor in fundamentally important ways. The Quiet Revolution directed itself to the expanded regulation of private landholding and, arguing that no unconstitutional takings were involved (Bosselman, Callies, and Banta 1973), foresaw no budget-busting implications in its agenda. This contrasts sharply with the efforts of ecosystem managers to reconstruct the countryside by reformulating both public and private land policy around ecosystem priorities. It concentrates on buffering and protecting privileged ecosystems rather than on uniform protection of the environment across the national geography. And what it seeks to safeguard is defined by nature rather than political jurisdictions or the marketplace. In some ways, ecosystem management is quietly revolutionary.(16) Instead of further empowering government, as was done in the 1970s, however, it renders it semi-obsolete. As "ecosystem" replaced political jurisdiction, the public interest terms of reference shift to management units without prior legal standing, legal representation, taxing authority, or budget to carry out their agenda. Of necessity, it requires new partnerships, alliances, and social compacts.

Moreover, by using politically rather than ecologically defined boundaries as its point of conceptual departure, the Quiet Revolution sought to centralize authority over land use planning to state, regional, or federal levels of government (Darin-Drabkin 1977; Popper 1979a; Heiman 1988). For the most part, it was an assault on unfettered private ownership of land and on the local control of land use planning (Geisler 1980). Ecosystem management is principally focused on biodiversity and habitat protection and does not presuppose centralization of authority. Its control mechanisms can be local or nonlocal, private or public, or combined. Ecosystem managers are packaging diverse public ownership mandates with an array of inducements intended to attract private owners to participate, including compensation, incentive, and benefits' sharing options (for example , Michaels et al. 1992).

In sum, the former revolution sought sweeping separations of ownership and control in land through macro-zoning of the landscape. Landowners were asked to relinquish certain rights of use in light of a newly defined public interest that emphasized a clean environment. Ecosystem management proposes a new geography of ownership and control potentially but not necessarily reaching the backyard of most landowners. Caldwell (1972, p. 412) clearly hoped that the first Quiet Revolution would go beyond broader land use regulation, stating that, "An ecosystem's approach to public land policy assumes a scope that embraces all land regardless of its ownership or custody under law." This hope is more likely to be realized through ecosystem management than the Quiet Revolution, which held little to attract most landowners to its camp.

Conclusion

The rapid expansion of ecosystem management and its bigger-is-better operating bias makes the property-ecosystem interface a pressing research target at many levels. As the ecosystem management paradigm expands in practice, it subsumes more ownership units and creates new ranks of inholders. As this occurs, Popper's (1979b) injunction that ownership factors such as concentration, absenteeism, and owner background and values are an important though often hidden dimension in land use planning bears repeating. Anyone who doubts this influence need only recall the sovereign hand of railroad companies a century ago in locating, on a national scale, settlements, public infrastructure investments, thoroughfares and major national parks (NPCA 1988b). On a regional and local scale, competing ownership claims can cloud title, obstruct land assembly, and stymie property transactions. Prior ownership patterns such as checker-boarding prefigure where settlement and subdivision occur and, of course, the degrees of management freedom retained by ecosystem managers. Monopoly ownership patterns, surprisingly recurrent in the United States (NRC 1993), raise the cost of land for housing, for local livelihoods, and for such basic tools as conservation easements. They also dictate which lands will be exempted from protection and where planning windfalls and wipeouts will occur. The personal values of inholders, turned political, can stampede public opinion for or against ecosystem management.

At the outset of this study we expressed concern over the unintended social consequences of ecosystem management. Chief among these, given real and potential expansion, is the public backlash against the principles of such management and against conservation biology more generally. Is compromise possible between the advocates of property rights and ecosystem rights? We believe it is. Where successful to date, ecosystem management rests on environmental education and what Orr (1992) aptly calls "ecological literacy." It evokes innovative land assembly and compensation strategies, as outlined in Michaels et al. (1992), Endicott (1993), Northern Forest Lands Council (1994), and Wiebe et al. (1996), and invites debate on the public interest in an era of unprecedented environmental stress. Finally, it requires no-nonsense citizen participation and review of alternative approaches to achieving ecosystem management before they are prescribed. Herein, we believe that the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (P.L. 91-190, 42 U.S.C. 4321-4347, as amended P.L. 94-83) has much to offer ecosystem management.

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, has great potential in reducing unintended backlash insofar as it is valued both by environmentalists and, in its concern for cultural welfare, by followers of the "wise use" movement.(17) As noted by Keiter (1990, p. 46), "The heart of NEPA is the requirement that federal agencies prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) whenever they contemplate any action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment." NEPA [Section 102 (A)] provides for social impact assessment which, like its EIS provisions, are to be executed in the beginning stages of the environmental review process. It requires that "affected" agencies must be notified of the proposed action and afforded an opportunity to comment on the proposal (here, federally assisted land assembly), and that the EIS include discussion of "possible conflicts between the proposed action and the objectives of Federal, regional, State, and local land use plans, policies and controls for the area concerned" (Keiter 1990, pp. 47-48).

Perhaps most relevant to ecosystem management, NEPA recognizes the importance of cumulative impacts, including those extending beyond established boundaries to adjacent and sometimes distant landscapes. In plain terms, this well-established federal law requires that both the social and environmental impacts of significant federal proposals be analyzed in their full geographic scope and be subject to public involvement and participation (Keiter 1990). This investigation must consider alternative ways of achieving a policy objective and include the status quo as a legitimate option. NEPA regulations require full disclosure of serial development proposals and a comprehensive examination of transboundary impacts (Keiter 1994), certainly the baseline for informed public debate. And, where land assembly for ecosystem management does not emanate from federal mandates and initiatives, there are "baby NEPAs" in virtually every state with at least some of the above provisions. Energetically applied, environmental and social impact assessments are a prudent first step in ecosystem management and a way of incorporating the stakeholders who Slocombe (1993) correctly views as essential to such management. Finally, NEPA requires that mitigation be fully considered, from prevention of harm to compensation (Interorganizational Committee 1993).(18)

We trust this study offers convincing evidence of Grumbine's (1992) charge that ecosystem management constitutes a modern enclosure movement, one which is federally significant in a cumulative sense and which, in its own way, amounts to a quiet revolution in land use planning. Grumbine's concern is that ecosystem management runs the risk of being top-down, of homogenizing people and places, of distancing rather than connecting people from their real interests in the land. The solution he poses is place-based management which respects local culture just as it respects biodiversity (Grumbine 1992, p. 245). Among NEPA's policy goals is the preservation of important historic, cultural, and natural aspects of our national heritage (Keiter 1990). Surely this includes the local culture of which Grumbine speaks and is one of the hard-won lessons of the Endangered Species Act (Carlton 1986). Ecological coherency at the landscape level will expand and endure in American cultural landscape to the extent that local property cultures are recognized as management partners.

Endnotes

* Paper commissioned for conference, "Who Owns America? Land and Resource Tenure Issues in a Changing Environment," sponsored by Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 21-24 June 1995.

** Respectively, Department of Rural Sociology and Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853.

1 Although only recently coming to the fore legislatively and administratively, ecosystem management is clearly not new to the scientific community (Jackson and Wyner 1994).

2 Not all ecosystems are inherently large. Grumbine (1990) views ecosystems as scale neutral. Nonetheless, conservation biologists typically seek the protection of more rather than less habitat when circumstances permit.

3 Gap analysis, a means of identifying critical ecosystems still in need of ecosystem-level conservation, has confirmed the inadequacy of current public lands for ecosystem protection and spurred efforts by private sector conservation groups to augment public protection efforts (Grossman et al. 1994).

4 Grumbine (1992, p. 118) hints at the problems of ecosystem delineation in California: "Depending on where we draw ecological boundaries...there are anywhere from 15 to 375 natural ecosystems in the Golden State." Bailey (1995) recently updated earlier government mapping of ecoregions of the entire United States for use in ecosystem management.

5 H.R. 876 was sponsored by Congressman Morris Udall and 179 co-sponsors; S. 370 by John Chaffee had 38 co-sponsors. Funds would come from cigarette taxes and go to federal, state, and local governments and nonprofit organizations for land acquisition and outdoor recreation development.

6 H.R. 842 was introduced by Jim Jontz of Indiana and had over 100 co-sponsors. Congressman Bruce Vento of Minnesota sought similar protection (H.R. 1590), extending to 50 percent of remaining old-growth ecosystems.

7 This bill (H.R. 1301) and others like it are cost-sharing initiatives intended to accomplish protection through heightened public awareness, education, and economic assistance to promote environmentally appropriate development such as tourism.

8 Inholdings are the private or state parcels remaining within federal boundaries (Lambert 1982). This definition can be easily extended to nonprofit holdings (churches, scout troops) or to any of these property types within state lands as well (for example, within the Adirondack Park of New York). Technically speaking, Native American tribes in those parts of North America which succumbed to Manifest Destiny, along with Spanish, French, Russian, and various other Old World enclaves surrounded by American public domain, were the earliest inholders.

9 Public Law 85-508, the Alaska Statehood Act of 1958, as amended, stipulated this transfer. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, as amended, provided for the latter transfer.

10 This claim rests on whose estimate of GYE is used. Estimates of area included vary widely from 6 to 18 million acres (Grumbine 1990, p. 115).

11 Budd (1991) takes exception to this portrayal of broadly shared management, claiming that, of the 12 members of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, 9 are Forest Service employees and the remaining 3 are employees of the National Park Service.

12 Two examples are S. 223 and S. 1683, both of which would authorize the Secretary of the Interior to provide funds to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission for acquisition of land in the Sterling Forest area of the two-state Highlands, as well as for other purposes.

13 Some believe that grazing permits are a long-term right that runs with the land, land that is often contiguous to a private holding and cannot be strictly thought of as "absentee owned" (Foresta 1984; Hage 1990).

14 A partial list includes the Northern Forest Lands Study Area (9.8 million acres), the Adirondack Park (6 million acres), the Tug Hill Plateau (1.28 million acres), the Taconic Ridge (39,005 acres), the Long Island Pine Barrens (131,461 acres), and the Battenkill Corridor.

15 A prominent example is the recent court decision by the Supreme Court granting the Fish and Wildlife Service the power to regulate practices on private lands in relation to the Endangered Species Act in Sweet Home Chapter of the Communities for a Greater Oregon v. Babbit, DC Court of Appeals, No. 92-5255, 1993 (Sample 1994, p. 42).

16 Grumbine (1992, p. 11), among others, makes this "revolutionary" inference: "The dilemma posed by the relationship between public and private lands is the beginning of the story of how boundaries drawn in the past are no longer suitable today." Another potentially revolutionary aspect of ecosystem management, not treated here, is the claim that nonhuman organisms in the ecosystem have rights (see Rolston 1990).

17 For example, the County Movement, presumably a foe of ecosystem management, uses NEPA to justify its bold protection of local cultural diversity as recognized by NEPA. As a policy goal, NEPA seeks to ensure "esthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings" and to "preserve important historic, cultural, and natural aspects of our national heritage" (Keiter 1990, p. 58).

18 The true sense of mitigation, as elaborated in the Council on Environmental Quality guidelines governing NEPA, requires a sequence of procedures that, first, prevents harm, reduces it to a minimum if it must occur, and, lastly, compensates for damages (Interorganizational Committee 1993, p. 15). Elsewhere, we have discussed the merits of applying NEPA to protected area planning and commented on its potential for public participation among diverse property interests (Rao and Geisler 1988; Geisler 1993; NRC 1993).

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