Stewardship Across Boundaries

Richard L. Knight, Peter Landres, Richard L. Knight, Peter Landres

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559635165
  9781559635158
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610911085
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Biological Sciences

Every piece of land, no matter how remote or untrammeled, has a boundary. While sometimes boundary lines follow topographic or biological features, more often they follow the straight lines of political dictate and compromise. Administrative boundaries nearly always fragment a landscape, resulting in loss of species that must disperse or migrate across borders, increased likelihood of threats such as alien species or pollutants, and disruption of natural processes such as fire. Despite the importance and ubiquity of boundary issues, remarkably little has been written on the subject.

Stewardship Across Boundaries fills that gap in the literature, addressing the complex biological and socioeconomic impacts of both public and private land boundaries in the United States. With contributions from natural resource managers, historians, environmentalists, political scientists, and legal scholars, the book:

develops a framework for understanding administrative boundaries and their effects on the land and on human behavior examines issues related to different types of boundaries -- wilderness, commodity, recreation, private-public presents a series of case studies illustrating the efforts of those who have cooperated to promote stewardship across boundaries synthesizes the broad complexity of boundary-related issues and offers an integrated strategy for achieving regional stewardshi.

Stewardship Across Boundaries should spur open discussion among students, scientists, managers, and activists on this important topic. It demonstrates how legal, social, and ecological conditions interact in causing boundary impacts and why those factors must be integrated to improve land management. It also discusses research needs and will help facilitate critical thinking within the scientific community that could result in new strategies for managing boundaries and their impacts.

PART I

UNDERSTANDING ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THEIR EFFECTS

A broad perspective is needed to comprehend how boundaries delineate landscapes that, in turn, define humans and societies. Our introductory section takes this approach with chapters that address the human, ecological, and legal and institutional aspects of boundaries. We begin with an insightful chapter by Eric Freyfogle titled “Bounded People, Boundless Land.” This chapter explores the seeming contradictions within our society that impose boundaries on our lives and our affairs, yet at the same time require cooperation across boundaries for individuals and communities to flourish.

Using Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” and Wendell Berry’s short story “The Boundary,” Freyfogle explores the contradictions created by walls and fences. With “Mending Wall” Freyfogle reflects on our culture’s fascination with walls. Yet, using Frost’s poem as a metaphor, Freyfogle suggests that nature has a different view, “The frozen-groundswell spills the upper boulders in the sun and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.” “Something there is, that doesn’t love a wall . . . that wants it down.” The singular beauty of this powerful poem, however, is how it illustrates that the stone wall, the boundary between two neighbors, also unites them in community. It requires them to cooperate each year, to walk the wall, each on his own side, and to put back the stones that nature has spilled during the winter, with one neighbor commenting that “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Freyfogle concludes his evocative chapter with an examination of Wendell Berry’s short story “The Boundary.” Here, an aging farmer, Mat Feltner, is taking one last walk along his farm’s fenced boundary. Freyfogle writes, “The fence, he worries, might have fallen into disrepair and gone unnoticed. The younger men, rushing to get the harvest done, perhaps have been too busy to check the fence and mend it. So cane in hand Mat sets out to inspect his physical boundary, with a weariness in his bones that, for the moment, he seems to shake.” Mat finds the fence in good repair, a reminder that he had no reason to fear, for those who will remain on the farm after he has died are imbued with the same love and responsibility for the farm that he has. Freyfogle uses this story to illustrate the positive values of boundaries. Berry, Freyfogle argues, speaks highly of private land ownership carefully bounded. Berry says that “land cannot be properly cared for by people who do not know it intimately, who do not know how to care for it, who are not strongly motivated to care for it, and who cannot afford to care for it.” And so, Freyfogle suggests, bounded people may feel a responsibility for land within fences that, in time, allows them to feel responsibility for people and land across their own borders.

By reaching to the humanities and drawing forth writings by those as thoughtful and gifted as Frost and Berry, Freyfogle introduces the often contradictory nature of boundaries. Initially one might think that boundaries are bad, that they blur and distort the real lines across the land that nature bestows, those created by watersheds and vegetation. But Freyfogle sees the uncertainty inherent in this thinking as humans also inhabit these lands and inevitably draw their own lines. Freyfogle offers questions that later chapters address in greater detail. Are artificial lines bad? Do bounded lands also delineate levels of responsibility for people that might, in turn, foster stewardship and responsibility? Can people promote community by working together along their shared edges?

The three chapters that follow Freyfogle’s chapter explore boundaries from ecological, social, and legal and institutional views. Collectively these chapters address the natural and human constructs that comprise our book. Peter Landres and his coauthors begin with a chapter titled “Ecological Effects of Administrative Boundaries.” Intentionally or otherwise, “When different land-use practices are imposed on either side of the thin line of the administrative border, a distinct ecological boundary zone is inevitably created that can filter, block, or concentrate the movement of such diverse things as animals, plant seeds, fire, wind, water, and nutrients.”

This chapter introduces a conceptual model that examines the boundary zone and its structural and functional attributes. Structural attributes describe the physical aspects of a boundary and include such things as the width, height, and length of the boundary zone. Functional attributes describe the flows that occur across or along a boundary and include such things as animal movements as well as nutrients, seeds, spores, and soil that are transported in air or water. Because the boundary zone differs from the area further away from the line, these flows and movements may be impeded or accelerated, but in any case, the boundary usually acts as a selective filter.

Initially boundaries do little more than delineate responsibilities and ownership. Over time, however, the effects of different land-use practices produce different ecological effects on either side of the line. Landres et al.’s model stresses that (1) management goals and actions are the primary cause of these boundary effects, (2) altered flows either into or out of an area will likely be detrimental to that area, (3) boundary effects follow a distinct temporal sequence, and (4) once established, these effects may have long-term consequences.

These long-term consequences can affect the land along the boundary (called “boundary habitat”), as well as the area away from the line (called “isolation impacts”). For example, differing land-use practices on either side of a boundary delineating a forest multiple-use area from a wilderness area may result in quite different species composition, soil erosion levels, and microclimatic conditions on either side of the line. In addition to changes in this boundary habitat, isolation impacts occur far from the administrative border. These changes may alter the overall size of the core area, affect ecological processes, and also have an impact on plant and animal populations. Changes in fire management illustrate how administrative lines can have impacts far beyond the borders. By stopping fires at administrative boundaries, plant succession, species composition, and other ecological processes are altered far from where the fires are suppressed.

The chapter offers an agenda for boundary-related research that focuses on four topics: boundary structures, fluxes and gradients along and cross these structures, filtering mechanisms affecting these fluxes, and the ecological effects both along and away from the borders. The chapter concludes with an appeal to land-use planners to be aware of the ecological effects of administrative borders and the need to develop a landscape-scale perspective when formulating policy.

In his chapter titled “Social Dimensions of Boundaries: Balancing Cooperation and Self-Interest,” Mark Brunson addresses the nature of boundaries from a social perspective and describes the behavioral and attitudinal aspects of cross-boundary relationships. Just as administrative lines are human constructs to delineate ownership and jurisdictional responsibility, so too norms and mores are human constructs that dictate human behaviors across and within areas formed by borders. Boundaries exist because they achieve societal ends, yet societies also promote relationships that transcend boundaries. Brunson argues that “we can sustain ecosystems across boundaries only if we understand how humans behave with respect to places they claim as territory.”

Brunson begins with an examination of the social functions of boundaries. In this light he explores the concept of human territories and how their boundaries are maintained. Territorial boundaries may reflect more than ownership or administrative responsibility. For example, some groups or individuals consider portions of the public lands to be their territories and they may defend them as such. Accordingly, camping parties may send one member of their group a day early to secure a favored campsite. Ranchers who have grazed cows on public lands for decades may evidence a proprietary feeling for portions of a national forest or rangeland. Perhaps not surprisingly, agency employees themselves may form territorial attachments that may impede cross-boundary management. Because natural resource managers devote their careers to land stewardship, they, too, may develop an attachment to particular land settings or, almost as likely, cultivate an agency loyalty that makes working with other agencies or individuals difficult.

Surprisingly, the same social structures and institutions that serve to maintain territories also serve to encourage cooperation between territorial entities. Although a federal land management agency may post and patrol a wilderness boundary against certain activities, the agency also promotes access and compatible land management activities within the wilderness boundary. But Brunson believes that adherence to social norms is more important for compliance of acceptable activities within administrative boundaries than the maintenance of formal legal structures. Accordingly, birdwatchers who enjoy watching nesting falcons along a cliff may be more effective in censuring rock climbers from disturbing the birds during the nesting season than an agency-enforced ban against climbing.

It is along these lines that Brunson next discusses the role of attitudes toward boundaries. Attitudes are important because they influence whether agencies or individuals enter into partnerships that transcend jurisdictional boundaries, as well as how they behave within these partnerships. Because attitudes are strongly influenced by people’s values, the likelihood of cooperation in cross-boundary stewardship is enhanced if people share values.

Brunson discusses three types of cross-boundary relationships: (1) between public agencies and private property owners, (2) between two or more public agencies, and (3) between departments within agencies. When cross-boundary stewardship involves private property owners adjacent to public lands, the issue of private property rights becomes especially important. Yet cooperation among adjoining landowners is possible only if both public and private entities are willing to cede some control over their defended territories to the larger partnership. Brunson goes on to explain that the degree to which this will occur depends on attitudes toward stewardship objectives and toward the public and private entities that constitute the partnership.

Boundaries between agencies are almost as common as those among private landowners and agencies. Brunson argues that because approaches to management differ greatly among agencies, cross-boundary cooperation is challenging. Not only do agency mandates differ, but also agency cultures may place differing emphases on loyalty to the agency, as well as responsibility to visitors and surrounding communities. Brunson believes that, although agencies may have problems working together in practice, their policies are geared toward cooperation. Cross-agency cooperation is enhanced, Brunson believes, if agency representatives attempt to understand partner agencies’ viewpoints and constraints. This is particularly important when the agencies involved are state and federal and disputes are framed as federal domination versus states’ rights.

Similar pressures that operate between agencies also operate within them. Whereas historically natural resource agencies had relatively few missions, today they are being asked to address an increasing number of goals. Accordingly, different groups within agencies tend to show loyalty to their professions and resource uses that can lead to intra-agency friction. Can a silviculturist and wilderness manager find common ground when discussing a logging operation adjacent to a wilderness boundary? Will recreational planners and wildlife and fishery biologists find a way to ensure the protection of biological diversity across multiple-use landscapes that are increasingly gridded with administrative lines? Brunson has no easy answers to this conundrum but stresses the importance of maintaining permeable intra-agency boundaries by ensuring that all partners in a collaborative project understand and discuss relevant differences that may exist within an agency.

To be successful, Brunson concludes, cross-boundary stewardship should be designed to acknowledge the existence of territories, to recognize the various mechanisms of defense that territorial claimants employ, and to accommodate the need for these claimants to maintain an acceptable level of territorial control. One way to do this, he argues, is for agencies and individuals to yield rather than impose control, thereby taking advantage of humans’ tendency to behave in ways that can resolve potential conflicts between territorial self-interest and community cooperation.

To conclude this section, Errol Meidinger in his chapter titled “Laws and Institutions in Cross-Boundary Stewardship” examines how laws and institutions contribute to cross-boundary issues. Both the ecological aspects and the social dimensions of cross-boundary management have their underpinnings in law and institutions. Laws determine a society’s response to an issue and institutions carry out laws and contribute to public policy. Meidinger examines first the social actors in cross-boundary issues, then the rules and institutions affecting the issues.

Private, corporate, and government landowners are important players whose mandates and practices vary enormously. Only some government and a few private and corporate landowners have mandates to practice cross-boundary stewardship, but most probably have the capacity to do so. Whether they do depends largely on laws and institutions structuring landowner relationships with each other and society.

Under laws pertaining to cross-boundary management, Meidinger examines common law, environmental law, and nonenvironmental law. Aspects of common law, such as trespass, nuisance law, and the plethora of laws pertaining to easements and covenants all have the potential to contribute to cross-boundary management, although presently they have done little to promote it. Regarding environmental law, most federal statutes on air pollution, water pollution, hazardous chemical production, and endangered species management, as well as laws targeting coastal zones, wild and scenic rivers, and wetlands, are efforts to control cross-boundary problems through rules. Finally, nonenvironmental laws can contribute, either positively or negatively, to cross-boundary issues. For example, high federal estate taxes and local property taxes that reflect the development potential of land can encourage rapid resource liquidation, sale, or development that can, in turn, create new cross-boundary problems.

Meidinger next visits institutions and fundamental changes taking place within them. These changes embody a variety of goals and consequences to cross-boundary cooperation. Among these, recent judicial interpretations of uncompensated “takings” of private property and laws defining acceptable public participation in formulation of government policy both support growing private involvement in policy formulation. Conversely, Meidinger states that the most important change in public–private relationships is the growing amount of “public” policy making occurring almost entirely outside of government processes. Recent watershed and landscape planning efforts involving multiple landowners and agencies working to develop cross-boundary stewardship plans certainly support the concept of cross-boundary stewardship. As Meidinger states, these developments are “creating new local, national, and international environmental programs because they shift policy making outside governmental processes. Thus, like it or not, governments are placed in the role of being participants in local, national, and global policy networks, rather than near-exclusive makers and enforcers of public policy.”

Meidinger concludes with the suggestion that laws and institutions cannot be expected to make cross-boundary stewardship mandatory. Indeed, because cross-boundary stewardship cannot be defined with sufficient clarity, it is probably best not to attempt to legislate it. Meidinger believes that rules cannot be written precisely enough to produce appropriate outcomes in every real-world situation. Accordingly, he concludes that the trend for government institutions to show increasing discretion accord...

Table of contents

• ABOUT ISLAND PRESS
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I - UNDERSTANDING ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THEIR EFFECTS
• PART II - TYPES OF ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES
• PART III - CASE STUDIES
• PART IV - BUILDING BRIDGES ACROSS BOUNDARIES
• About the Contributors
• Index
• ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS