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Beyond Stewardship: Public Lands as a Catalyst for Social Change By Kevin Damstra Abstract Stewardship, as it relates to public lands, is the management of public areas by professionals for the preservation of the land and public access. This being stated, one must ask the obvious question; what causes the need for this preservation? Such an apparent question is easily answered just as obviously; the natural environment needs preservation from the impacts done to it by human cultures, societies and the individuals that comprise them. As sentient beings participating in our culture and society, this is not news; we have long known that our impacts force us into the role of protector. As Wendell Berry stated in Another Turn of the Crank, "To answer to the perpetual crisis of our presence in this abounding and dangerous world, we have only the perpetual obligation of care (Berry in Gardner, 115)." However, stewardship acts as a life-ring does to a person drowning in the ocean. It may keep them afloat but does not save them. We are fighting to keep our natural areas afloat, endangered species are not all saved (at best some are), entire ecosystems are altered or lost, even our protected areas are impacted by overuse, misuse, and a thousand other things. How can managing the natural environment keep up with the changing human impacts that bombard these environments? Will the stewardship practices that have gotten us this far be able to save the natural environment, or as David Brower pointed out are we just "slow[ing] the rate at which things are getting worse (quoted in Hamilton)"? It is time to recognize that as stewards of the natural environment, we are still propagating a domination and control over nature that differs from our extirpation of predators only through the fact that we now manage the environment in a manner that we feel best protects it. As professionals charged with both protecting the natural environment and the human interactions with that environment, we must recognize that the best way to maintain the environmental integrity and the human societal interactions with the biotic community is not to manage the land, but rather to change the social norms that allow our domination of nature to continue. As the leaders responsible for protecting the environment's integrity, we must be the leaders to form the ethical ground needed to stand to upon to push our society and culture back into living within the biotic community. Our public lands are set aside for a large variety of reasons, but the underlying reason for them all to be preserved is that something about that location is special and holds a deeper meaning to the public than other areas. This deeper meaning allows for individuals to connect with our public lands in ways that they do not with other lands, it opens them to different emotions and senses, allowing them to embody a part of what makes that place special. For a moment they find themselves feeling their natural surroundings, through observations and experiences they feel a part of nature, a member of the biotic community. It is in our public lands that people feel a part of the biotic community, so it is from our public lands that a movement to truly become a part of the biotic community must emanate. The professional steward must push our society and culture to alter our political and social structures to create a paradigm of living as a participant of nature and not as a controller of it. This paper will briefly look at the current issues surrounding the development of an environmental ethic and the attempts to change society into a more environmentally conscious one. It will then go on to define the role that our public lands play in the need for social change and the role that our profession, as resource managers, resource protectors, environmental interpreters, and stewards, needs to play in the development of an environmental ethic and the accompanying social change. "No society just happens. By allowing society to get like this, we become a part of its creation. We like to think we had no active role in getting to this point. But we all have roles to play. We either do something to prevent situations, or we sit back and do nothing, and by doing nothing we become participants by neglect." -Pastor Albert Aymer at Pastor Accelyne Williams funeral (in Fitzgerald) Introduction As professionals working within public lands and parks in particular, we find ourselves in the role of stewards, managing and caring for the public's land, protecting it into the future for the use, enjoyment, and betterment of all people. Recently, both the public and the professionals have begun to realize the increasing necessity to manage for the betterment of the biotic community and natural processes if we are to act in our role as good stewards of the land, protecting and ensuring all life, not just the dominant species. This dominant species has historically placed itself in the role of controller of nature, and we as stewards are the newest manifestation of this control. Stewardship manages and alters natural processes for the betterment of the entire biotic community, but the belief that any one race has the knowledge and ability to manage any species but their own is foolhardy. As professional stewards, we must use our knowledge and understanding of the resources we protect to be the leaders of this change in our society and culture. Rather than be stewards of the land, we must become stewards of our species, our interactions with the land, and ourselves. In order to have an honest discussion of the need to develop a new form of stewardship, one that extends beyond the park boundaries and touches all people, we have to understand what must happen. If we are to move from managing the natural environment, to managing ourselves and our interactions with the natural environment, a fundamental social change must occur. We must bring ourselves into a relationship with the land that allows our culture to return to what Aldo Leopold refers to as the biotic community, the community to which all organisms living in harmony with natural processes belong. This social change has the ability to start through our public lands, lands that have already been set-aside as special places in which the public has a connection to the land. As professional stewards, we are the people that must lead this social change. I realize that the last paragraph may concern some; the thought of public servants actively working to change society is a bit uncouth. However, every person who interacts with the public on any level is either propagating or changing society, we just haven't accepted that we have this ability and have not coalesced our profession and our messages to make us affective promoters of social change. Professional stewards have the knowledge, experience, and ability to change society and help push us towards living within the biotic community; we are the professionals who have already committed ourselves to working to preserve and save the land as well as our cultural connections to the land. This is not to say that we are to take to the woods and force change through conflict like Ed Abbey's Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith from The Monkeywrench Gang, however we must work in subtler ways. Social change is created through many different ways including a change in ideology, demographic change, cultural change, change through conflict, and change through an organized social movement (Macionis, 424-425). Following are some brief examples of these types of social change: Change in ideology: The repopularization of the environmental movement with the change in beliefs and ethics brought about by Rachel Carson and her essay, Silent Spring. This has also been refered to as a paradigm shift, by follows of Deep Ecology and others. Demographic Change: Population, population density, and travel between and among societies, such as that supported by tourism, promotes social change. Cultural Change: The introduction and growing trend to use low impact and Leave-No-Trace techniques when camping represents the changing thoughts and beliefs of a culture towards their impacts within natural settings. Change through conflict: Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! as well as organizations such as Earth First! and Greenpeace give us a good example of what change through conflict looks like. Change through a social movement: A social movement is an organized, though often loosely organized, attempt to change society. Social movements often encompass multiple aspects from all of the above methods of change, and use them to work towards specific goals. Any of these methods has the ability to create change and alter a society, each may be appropriate at some point in time; however as professionals working for the public we should concern ourselves with change through culture, ideology, and social movements. These subtle forms of change occur every day and can have lasting affects throughout society. Specific examples and methods that our profession can use to promote social change are discussed later in this paper. When Leopold spoke of our society returning to the biotic community, he was not stating that we need to abandon all of our technological achievement and return to the woods wearing nothing but a bearskin. Rather, he was acknowledging the fact that our human community was deliberately living outside of the natural order, and that we need to alter our community to bring us into living within the biotic community. Leopold maintains that in order to do this a land ethic needs to be created. I believe that while a land, or environmental, ethic is necessary it is merely the first step. Although ethics have the ability to maintain moral standards, this is not enough to alter society and all of societies constructs (governments, bureaucracies, etc). The social norms of a society dictate how its members interact and behave. Therefore, in order to change society the ethics of a culture must develop into social norms. The social norms of how our society interacts with the biotic community have begun to change, but mainly within the "special places," our parks and protected lands. Just as having 'island' parks that are not connected to one another is harmful to wildlife, having 'island' parks where people's behavior differs from when they are outside the park is harmful for our society and the biotic community as a whole. We, as park professionals, must extend the boundaries of our parks into society as a whole and actively promote social change to bring us back into the natural order. Special Place Our parklands, whether municipal, state, or national, are parts of the country that we have set aside as special places. The public has acknowledged these lands as different from the rest; they are the spectacular vistas or historical locations requiring that they be set aside and protected. As stewards of these lands, our profession has propagated this belief; we employ it to get people to behave in a manner more fitting for these locations than they typically would behave. In many cases we have been amazingly effective, such as asking people to carry their trash out of the parks and back to their homes. Imagine what people would say if the cashier at McDonald's did the same. Within the parks, people become conscious of their trash and understand exactly how much they produce, yet many times this revelation remains within the park, forgotten once people exit its boundaries. Two years ago, due to budgetary constraints, The Boston Harbor Island NRA was forced to remove all the trash barrels and stop its garbage disposal service for the main island in the harbor. George's Island, which can receive up to 3000 visitors per day to its 40 acres, had been removing visitor's trash since it opened to the public in 1961. The switch to requiring visitors to remove all of their trash from the island was initially not well received; people began to throw their trash into the woods and all over the remains of Fort Warren. After this first difficult summer, management made the decision to continue with the park's new carry on/ carry off policy throughout this season. This season I have observed the public being much more receptive to this management decision. Perhaps this change is partially due to a switch from the staff telling people that they had to remove the trash because the agency could not afford to do it any longer, to explaining to them the benefits of removing their own trash. These benefits include a reduced number of gulls and rats, as well as an overall improvement in the aesthetics of the park. These statements are further reinforced when the visitors either witness or are informed that the Park Rangers adhere to the same regulations. People recognize the park as a special place that requires different behaviors than their everyday lives. As our parks are recognized as locations in which societies behaviors are altered and individuals are expected to act differently, then it is logical to think that it is from within our parks that societies' thoughts and behaviors can be altered to affect life outside the parks. If people can take away from their park experience something that changes how they view the world around them or how they live, then we have affected them and through them the overall society. This view of using the parks to effect how people interact with their surrounding world is nothing new. However the idea that stewardship should be specifically focused on altering society, and managing people, rather than managing land, is one that we have not yet adopted. Let us move beyond being stewards of the environment, and move to becoming stewards of ourselves. As we all recognize the environment does a fine job of taking care of itself when no one interferes with it. Parks, by their very nature, exist in a fluid state, there are very few aspects that remain solely within designated park lands; visitors come and go as they please, as do the wildlife and plants, mountain ranges and rivers pass into and out of our parks, only ideas and beliefs seem to get stifled at the borders. We have spent so much time developing the belief that our parks are special places that the public (ourselves included) believes that parks are separate from society. Yet, if we expect to ever live in harmony with nature, and return to the biotic community, we must push the ideas cultivated within the parks out into our society. We open our park borders and actively influence society, culture, and the environment in a positive way through leadership, promoting the current best environmental practices, and showing people how the natural world and the parks connect to their own lives and the global community. Stewards: leaders in a Social Movement Using our parks as a catalyst for social change is a logical step for our profession to make. Through our parks, particularly through interpretative programs though also through other means, we can connect people to the parks, then to their own lives outside the parks, and eventually to the connections of all life on the planet. Our parks are social entities, all forms of life pass through them, interacting with and influencing one another. Currently the human society influences all other forms of life much more strongly than they influence us; as such it is necessary that we understand how we can influence our own society in order to limit our intrusions on other species. Many words and phrases we use when discussing how we influence society, such as ethics and social norms as well as social movement and social change, while similar in definition have powerful and distinct differences. Words such as culture and society are used so often that their definitions have become vague, and their interactions almost imperceptible. It is important to remember that culture and society are very different concepts that interrelate and affect one another. A major change to one will inevitably affect the other. Lloyd Burton, in Worship and Wilderness, describes this interaction by stating that culture is a system of learned patterns of thought and behavior, which helps members of a society to understand and relate to themselves, each other, other groups, and their environment (Burton, 19). Mirroring this, John Macionis tells us that society refers to a group of people interacting with an environment while being guided by their culture (Macionis, 35). Basically, people's thoughts and behaviors influence culture and culture guides society. Both of these affect our interactions with, cognition of, and relations to the environment. This brings stewards into the equation; if the steward's job is to manage and protect an environment influenced by society and culture, then it becomes the stewards job to manage the society and culture in such a way that best protects that environment (i.e. to enact a social change). Having identified this, we must further understand how culture and society influence each other in order to take advantage of the system for the betterment of the environment. Culture, being a system of learned thoughts and behaviors, influences society through the creation of social norms. Social Norms are defined as, "the rules and expectations by which a society guides the behaviors of its members" (Macionis, 449). Norms are created through authority, typically, the traditional authority of long-established cultural patterns. However, we have the ability to alter this traditional authority, in fact this happens constantly without us thinking about it. As Edward Hall tells us, in Beyond Culture, "it is typically the most obvious and taken-for-granted and therefore the least studied aspects of culture that influence behavior in the deepest and most subtle ways" (Hall, 17). If culture influences society and represents how a group of people interacts with their environment, one must consider that an individual person's understanding and connection to the environment can have an influence on the society as well. Culture influences society through social norms, and norms are created through individuals with common personal ethics. As more people develop a particular ethic, the norm being created becomes stronger. Eventually a social norm developed from personal ethics becomes so common and wide spread that it changes society, as in the case of recycling. The 5-Cent Deposit In certain states a five, or ten-cent deposit is placed on particular beverage cans and bottles. This deposit encourages people to return their bottles to receive their nickel back, thus promoting recycling. In the states with this program a cultural pattern has developed where many people return their bottles, therefore a norm has been established where people expect bottles to be returned. To see the difference one merely needs to drive down Rt. 3 in Massachusetts and Rt.76 in Georgia counting the bottles found on the side of the road, GA which has no bottle deposit has a much higher number of bottles on their roads. Though not a law, the social norm exhibits such strength that it can cause ridicule of and disgust with the non-conformer. A park interpreter that I work with related to me this story of a prior job that appalled her: While working as a waitress at an affluent restaurant in the area, she would be required to bring glass bottles the basement, place them in a large plastic tub, and crush them. The shards of glass would then remain in the tub until it was full and would then be hauled off to the dump. Her reaction to this practice shows how strong the social norm to recycle these bottles has become. An individual's personal ethics are extremely important in the development of social norms. Ethics are the moral standards that guide a person's life; social norms are in effect the mean of society member's personal ethics that are then used to guide social pattern through thoughts and behavior. Social norms dictate how a society behaves, so if we are to change how a society behaves, our goal is to create new social norms. To this end, an individual's ethics are extremely important. They are the start of this process. Personal Ethics and Social Norms As they are personal ethics, I can only speak for my own, so I present this example of a personal ethic yet to become a social norm. I do not shop at Wal-Mart. I have nothing against those who do; however, for both social and environmental reasons I refuse to shop there. Wal-Mart's record of monopolizing local economies as well as their deliberate contempt for the environment appalls me. Others agree with my sentiments and have also boycotted Wal-Mart for ethical reasons. As the number of people who boycott Wal-Mart increases the strength of the social norm being created likewise increases. If the social norm becomes strong enough, it will force Wal-Mart to change their business ethics and practices. Likewise as a social norm is created to build stronger connections between human society and the natural community, our society will be forced to change to adapt to the altering beliefs. The web of interconnections between all of these words and phrases stem from two related and intimately connected things: humans and the environment (i.e. the biotic community). In order to protect the environment we must use the connections among our society, culture, the environment and ourselves to promote a way of life that places us as participants, and not controllers of the biotic community. Working to bring our society into the realm of the biotic community is in essence a social movement promoting social change. As has been stated by many environmentalists, naturalists, biologists, and others, if we do not alter our society and its impact on the natural world, none of that world will be able to survive. As Peter Forbes states, "We are all stewards of the land, so we might re-imagine our work as creating all the possible doorways through which we and our neighbors might walk to begin to mature our relationship to the land (Forbes, 68)." Pathways to social change Literally thousands of possible pathways exist to connect people to the land, affect their lives, and begin this social change. Each person and each locale brings in a new opportunity and must be cultivated individually; there is no handbook to enacting social change. Our most important work is to interact with individuals on a local and personal level, much of this we already do, however we just have not tied our work into the larger picture yet. Programs such as Leave-No-Trace and Junior Ranger programs must extend beyond park boundaries, not just into schools and classrooms; but rather into individuals, changing how people live and what they expect. The programs that we offer and run within the park should promote lifestyles that are sustainable, rather than those that go against the reasons why our parks were set aside. In some cases this may require redirecting at least part of the goals of our interpretive programs. For example, the draft Boston Harbor Islands Junior Ranger Handbook is set up in such a way as to highlight the historical and natural environments throughout the harbor on an island by island basis. When looked at as an entire program with the goal of promoting the historical and environmental integrity of the park the handbook does a wonderful job of interpreting the harbor. However, if we recognize the need for our profession to help promote social change it becomes apparent that we must alter our goals to connect these historical and environmental themes to society and the future. One place to draw out these connections is to look for existing connections to people's lives and society. Within the Boston Harbor Islands places such as the waste water treatment plant on Deer Island, the social services on Long Island, the landfill that is Spectacle Island, and the residents who still live within the park on Peddock's Island are excellent connections between the park and society. Each of these locations has the ability to show people a different way of living and interacting with our society. In addition to looking at the historical uses of our lands and how our ancestors interacted with their environment, let us begin to look towards our future interactions with the land and the environment. The most important thing for professionals within our field to do is present consistent messages; we cannot discount and counteract one another. If our goal is to take historical and environmental resources and use them to create new connections to the land then we must work together and present definitive objectives to work towards. In addition, all the tools we have at our disposal must be used in the most effective ways possible. From our different backgrounds and different resources, we must pull together onto one cohesive, yet multifacited force. If professional stewards are going to play a role in cultivating this social change on the lands that we are entrusted with, then we must develop a definitive goal and set principles to help us achieve this goal. Our goal, though not yet clearly stated, could easily be determined by getting all of the supporters and interest groups together. It could look something like this; Our goal is to move our society and culture from a paradigm of living apart from the natural world and controlling it, to living within the natural world as a member of the biotic community, while still maintaining our cultural identity. In order to do this we recognize that it is more important to manage ourselves than to fool ourselves into thinking we can manage the land. Principles of creating social change from within our parks
Let us now work through each of these principles, further developing them and presenting examples for each. My hope is that this will make these principles not only easier to understand, but more importantly to implement. Implementation is the most important step, for no matter how good the theory or the plan, if it is not put into practice than it may as well not have been created. Consistency of our messages in needed to make certain that stewards are not contradicting each other, and that other people working within the parks that are not professional stewards also understand what it is we are working towards. This will help our profession avoid looking like the Scare Crow from the Wizard of Oz, standing there with our arms crossed pointing in two different directions. However this does not mean that we have to say or practice the same things, rather just the concepts. It is up to individuals to accept social change in their own manner, just as it is up to those pushing social change to do so in their own manner. An example of this from the Civil Rights Movement would be Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both working to create a social change, yet each had very different views and methods as to how to achieve it. Perhaps a more pertinent and much smaller example would be from many debates that I had while in college. During my years at the University of Maine, I worked as an experiential educator in the university's adventure education component. On our overnight trips we were strongly encouraged to teach and model Leave-No-Trace (LNT) camping, a component of our camping experience that I gladly took part in. My co-leaders and I would not only explain the basic tenents of LNT, but also model them and help others do the same. However, one thing that you would never hear me say was that we were doing Leave-No-Trace camping. I would always refer to it as low impact camping. While I support LNT, I find the name to present an unachievable ideal and would therefore refer to the principles as low impact. By doing this I maintained my own thoughts and beliefs about how to camp while also supporting the professionally accepted attempt to alter how others think and behave. People come to parks to interact and connect with the resource, not to meet and connect with a ranger. This is one of many things that make a park different from a singles bar; people come to the park for the park, and they go to the bar for other people. As silly an example as this seems it is important that we remember it. While the public may want rangers to be present in the parks and be there to speak with, the ranger is not the reason they came. We are merely facilitators, helping people connect with the resource that originally brought them to the park. As with good interpretation, if anything that we do does not connect with the audience and affect them in some way, then our efforts were ill spent. This is merely an extension of Tilden's first principle of interpretation, which stated that "any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile (Tilden, 9)." Instead of only dealing with interpretive opportunities and programs, this concept must be extended into Law Enforcement, management decisions and all other interaction between the public and ourselves. The need to connect to our audience is not lacking for examples, most people can remember a teacher that truly connected with them and made them care more for a subject than they ever thought they could. For that matter, an equal number can remember one that failed to connect with them and pushed them into a dislike of some subjects. In order to act as good stewards, our profession, and in fact our entire society, relies heavily on science. Yet as David Suzuki points out in The Sacred Balance, science is an ever changing and evolving field of study, making it difficult to use science as a benchmark to manage anything as complex as our natural environment (Suzuki 17-20). Though necessary to use the best scientific knowledge that we have at the time, we cannot believe that we can and should be making discussions as to the life and welfare of all other species based upon incomplete and ever-changing science. "We are a long way from being able to make even an educated guess as to how to manage natural systems, especially ones as complex as forests, wetlands, prairies, oceans or the atmosphere." -David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance Science cannot be used to substitute the natural order of things; however science must still play a role in management. Like other management tools, science is most effective when used in the moment. By this I mean that I cannot say that parks should always strive to remove themselves from public electric and sewer systems, for I cannot say what public electric and sewer systems will look like in the future. However, I can say that as of right now our parklands should be taking such steps. We should be showcasing the most environmentally friendly and sustainable technologies, showing people that these technologies are as good as the traditional ways. To this end we must make certain to promote these technologies and make certain that the ones we are using function to the standards that people expect. For example, on Peddock's Island, in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, if you were to stand beside the Visitor Center, you could look out at the self-composting toilets and the solar power system on the island, as well as the windmill that helps to power the Town of Hull. I find it disturbing that visitors to Peddock's typically leave dismayed because of their experiences with the sustainable technologies on the island. Peddock's has three trailhead self-composting toilets built to compost limited amounts of solid waste, yet the island can easily see three hundred visitors per day. As these are trailhead models they are overused and misused, representing a clear misapplication of the technology. While the effort to use sustainable technologies is admirable, these toilets do not promote the public to look into the use of such technologies outside of parks and other natural areas. Other, larger versions of these toilets are made that would work better within the park and would show people another form of toilet that is equally sanitary as flush toilets, but with less of an impact. The same is true about the Peddock's solar power system, while it has been promoted as one of the first to be put into use in the area the system has fallen into disrepair and is now outdated. Instead of running the four buildings it was designed to run, the solar power system now runs lights to two of the buildings for almost two months out of the year if rangers are very frugal with their use of the electricity. In contrast, the windmill in the Town of Hull is only a couple of years old and appears to be working quite well. It diminishes the message that rangers are trying to tell people if the only positive example of sustainable technology within sight of the visitor center is the one that occurs outside the park. In short, our commitment to sustainable technologies must consider all aspects of the park and does not end once the technology is in place. We must remain on the front edge of these technologies and commit ourselves to upgrading when necessary. The use and development of language is an important part of any social change. "We can't hope to change culture without first changing how people talk. The civil rights and equal rights movements figured this out. In order to evolve beyond a technical movement capable of changing laws into a cultural movement capable of changing how people lived and acted, they had to evolve the words we used (Forbes, 32)." This evolution of words has to start from people that are well respected within the field in question; within the field of land management stewards are among the most respected people that exist. Because of the confines of the language that we use to describe stewardship and land management it is nearly impossible to discuss any change to the dominant paradigm. "You cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it (Einstein, in Forbes, 89)." Our language is steeped with scientific and professional terms that we use to manage the land, such as carrying capacity, visitor experience, land degradation, and numerous others. While such language is needed, it does not express individual people's true feelings for the land and therefore does not connect people to the land. Just as Tilden refers to love as the priceless ingredient of interpretation (Tilden, 89), the language that we are currently using fails to adequately portray the love we have for these resources to the public. Interpretation and law enforcement are the two main aspects that rangers within our parks focus on. The two are by no means separate, but rather overlap in a multitude of areas, such as George Wallace's Authority of the Resource Technique (ART) that brings the realm of interpretation into the realm of law enforcement. Likewise as a Park Interpreter I have no power of enforcement, yet I am expected to take part in rules education, telling people about the rules and why they exist. These crossovers between the two show that the involvement of both is needed for the profession of stewardship to begin to truly work towards changing how society thinks and behaves. The use of interpretation in helping people connect to the land is represented in more than one of Tilden's principles; specifically in his first principle, about connecting the resource to the audience, and in his fourth, when he states, "The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation (Tilden, 9)." Thus the field of interpretation will come easily to the task of connecting people to the land in order to catalyze social change; the field of law enforcement within parks will be harder. The easiest way that I can see for law enforcement rangers to help connect people to the land is through methods such as the Authority of the Resource Technique, which is designed into a four step process: 1) Introduce yourself and initiate an ice-breaker conversation, 2) Give an objective description of the undesirable behavior, 3) Reveal the implications of the undesirable behavior, 4) Describe the desirable behavior, explain how to do it, and model the behavior if possible (Wallace, 48). The fact that ART was developed specifically for use in backcountry areas does not diminish its usefulness in all parks. However, it is important to note that ART is only affective on non-malicious behaviors and that traditional law enforcement techniques are still needed. Conclusion Elements of our society believes that it has the knowledge and ability to manage and control all other forms of life and natural systems. This belief has withdrawn us from the biotic community and endangered the rest of that community. As the professionals charged with protecting and managing the places that our society has deemed special, we find ourselves in place to create a social change to bring our society into the biotic community. In order to accomplish this social change, our profession must commit itself to continue setting goals and developing guiding principles. Throughout this paper I have attempted to provide the groundwork to move beyond the current view of what stewardship is to what stewardship can become, to move beyond being managers of the natural environment to influencing and managing ourselves. Only through determination and conscious actions will our society be brought into harmony with the natural world. As stewards, we have the ability to take the first step in this journey, and it is time that we begin. Works Cited 1975. Abbey, Edward. The Monkeywrench Gang. Perennial Classics. 1990. Abbey, Edward. Hayduke Lives!. Back Bay Books. 2002. Burton, Lloyd. Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion, and Law in Public Lands Management. The University of Wisconsin Press. 2003. Fitzgerald, Joe. Perhaps We're all to Blame in Molly's Brutal Death." Boston Herald. June 11, 2003. 2001. Forbes, Peter. The Great Remembering. The Trust for Public Land. 1998.Gardner, Jason. Ed. The Sacred Earth: Writer's on Nature and Spirit. New World Library. 1976. Hall, Edward. Beyond Culture. Anchor Books. 2000. Hamilton, Bruce. Remembering the Archdruid. Bangor Daily News. November 20, 2000. 1966. Leopold, Aldo. The Land Ethic. A Sand County Almanac. Ballantine Books. 2000. Macionis, John J. Society: The Basics. Pages 35-37, 424-427. Prentice Hall. 1997. Suzuki, David. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our Place in Nature. Greystone Books. 1957. Tilden, Freeman. Interpreting our Heritage. The University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Wallace, George. An Evaluation of the "Authority of the Resource" Interpretive Technique by Rangers in Eight Wilderness/ Backcountry Areas. Journal of Interpretation Research. Volume 7, Number 1. Page 43-68. |