Beyond Knee-Jerk Environmental Thinking: Teaching Geographic Perspectives on Conservation, Preservation and the Hetch Hetchy Valley Controversy

Abstract

Attention to scale, use of space and connections between places and regions are general, yet distinctive, geographical concepts that may be employed in introductory level human-environment geography courses to distinguish them from other environmental studies offerings. This article demonstrates how attention to the aforementioned concepts provides fresh insight into the notions of exploitation, conservation and preservation for many environmental studies students. Furthermore, it is suggested that the Hetch Hetchy Valley controversy, commonly used in many US environmental studies textbooks to demonstrate the difference between conservation and preservation, is actually quite problematic when critically assessed from alternative geographic perspectives.

Keywords:

• Conservation
• Gifford Pinchot
• John Muir
• preservation
• scale
• Hetch Hetchy Valley

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as Dave Lanegran, Erika Jerme, Paul Robbins, Eric Perramond and Helen Hazen for useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Cara Haberman, a past student, is also acknowledged and thanked for questioning the author in class about the Hetch Hetchy Valley controversy. The author is also grateful to students in geography 232 and 488 during the fall of 2007 who discussed this material with him and answered a related questionnaire.

Notes

¹ The IUCN defines category Ia as “Strict Nature Reserve: protected area managed mainly for science”, and category Ib as “Wilderness Area: protected area managed mainly for wilderness protection”. Category IV is defined as “Habitat/Species Management Area: protected area managed mainly for conservation through management intervention”. Definitions of all of the IUCN categories may be found on its website at: http://www.unep-wcmc.org/protected_areas/categories/index.html

² There is a large literature on the human appropriation of net primary productivity (NPP). In a well-cited article in the journal Science, Rojstaczer et al. (2001) estimated that humans appropriate 10 to 55 per cent of terrestrial photosynthesis products.

³ Biodiversity is often conceptualized at three different scales: (1) genetic diversity (genetic variety in an organisms' gene pool); (2) species diversity (variety of species within an ecosystem or the world) and (3) ecosystem diversity (the number of functioning ecosystems in an area).