Natural Resource Conflict
Disagreement between two or more parties over the use or management of terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric systems, including their mineral, biotic, and ecosystem components. Within our economic system, natural resource conflicts occur primarily over the allocation and use of resources for human production and consumption. Within our political system, these conflicts occur more broadly over management and protection of natural resources, whether these resources are exploited for human use or not. This entry focuses on the sources and management of natural resource conflicts. It considers these questions from the perspective of both private and public systems of natural resource management. The entry also examines emerging processes used to resolve these conflicts.
Market-based Natural Resource Conflicts
Economic systems treat natural resources as marketable commodities. Natural resources are allocated by means of formalized private property rights, which clearly delineate ownership and provide for the transfer of that ownership from one individual to another. Property rights can be subdivided, with partial rights sold to multiple owners. Thus, a single parcel of land might be divided into mineral rights, grazing rights, development rights, water rights, hunting and fishing rights, utility access easements, and conservation easements, each belonging to persons other than the landowner.
Property rights over natural resources accreted slowly over time. During the 1800s, the United States Government went to great efforts to privatize public trust lands in order to promote economic and community development in developing territories. Over a billion acres of land was disposed from federal public lands, primarily through cash sales (27 percent), homesteading (25 percent), grants to states (24 percent), and grants to railroads (12 percent). Further complicating property ownership were alternative systems for laying claim to natural resources. Mining and water claims were based on prior appropriation, whereby public property was granted to the first individual to put the mineral or water resource to beneficial use. Grazing rights, in which livestock owners could graze animals on either public or private land traditionally used for grazing, eventually led to range wars in the late 1800s, the closure of free range grazing on private lands, and an auctioning of grazing rights on federal lands through the Taylor Grazing Act. Today, conflicts over competing claims to land are comparatively rare. Contention over other natural resource rights, especially water rights, remain, largely because the system of prior appropriation has proven ineffective at definitively allocating water during periods of drought and declining river flow.
Conflict over the private management of natural resources also remains significant because the public maintains an interest in protecting the long term viability of natural resource flows. Natural resources are sources of natural capital which, if depleted, might significantly impair the quality of life of future generations. The flow of these resources varies widely. Perpetual resources, such as solar radiation and wind, essentially provide an uninterrupted flow of services. Renewable resources, such as timber and water, are replenished through natural processes, but consumption can exceed replenishment in ways that reduce the future viability of the resource. Nonrenewable resources, such as copper and coal, are essentially fixed in supply, although technological innovations can improve the efficiency of their extraction and use.
Public concern about the long-term viability of natural resources goes back to the early 1900s when Gifford Pinchot advocated for managed use and planned regeneration of natural resources. His motto— the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time—initiated the conservation movement and its concern for the sharing of resources amongst current and future users. The modern concept of sustainable development, built on the United Nation’s 1987 Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, carries on this public concern with the use and management of natural resources. As a result, public policies promote more effective conservation and management of natural resources than would be provided by the private market seeking to maximize profits.
Over and above these market-based conflicts, privatization of natural resources has proven ineffective at resolving some forms of natural resource conflicts for structural reasons. First, natural resources such as air are public goods: collectively consumable resources that cannot be marketed because use by one individual does not preclude use by another and because individuals cannot be excluded from their consumption. Second, resources such as water in eastern states (where riparian water rights allow all landowners adjacent to water bodies to make reasonable use of the water) are quasipublic goods: collectively managed resources that could but be privatized, but are not due to public policy. Third, the use, extraction or degradation of natural resources can produce externalities: impacts caused by production or consumption of a good but not included in its price, such as groundwater contamination caused by mining leachate or loss of habitat diversity caused by cattle grazing). Finally, natural resources produce environmental benefits to humans and other species that are complex, with feedback loops, adaptations and uncertainties that encompass not just individuals but also ecosystems, biomes and our biosphere over extended periods of time not captured by market prices. For example, wetlands, which produce significant floodcontrol and water purification benefits through a complex set of interactions, are significantly undervalued by land markets because such benefits cannot be captured by individual property owners.
Conditions of interdependence often limit the efficacy of market systems because either natural resource values cannot easily be incorporated into markets or society chooses to manage these resources publicly. Complexities challenge markets because these systems focus on direct, short-term consequences associated with profitability rather than the indirect, long-term consequences of importance to environmental quality. For these and related reasons, many natural resource conflicts are managed through political systems of decision making rather than economic markets.
Public Policy-based Natural Resource Conflicts
Public management of natural resources has deep roots in the United States. As noted above, most natural resources were managed publicly, both by the indigenous peoples of North America and by European settlers, until widespread privatization of lands in the mid 1860s. It is not surprising, then, that efforts to maintain some public control over natural resources stems from the same period. In 1864, the publication of both Henry David Thoreau’s Maine Woods and George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature laid the foundation for public stewardship of natural resources. Unlike Pinchot’s utilitarian claim to conservation (a claim based on maximizing benefits to humans), Thoreau and Marsh provided more sweeping arguments based on the intrinsic worth of nature and its resources. These themes were expanded upon by environmental leaders such as John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, in his 1890s call for preservation of wilderness and Aldo Leopold, an U.S. Forest Service ranger, in his 1949 A Sand County Almanac, which called for a land ethic based on the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.
The modern environmental movement grows from all of these strands. For some environmentalists, the commercialization of natural resources is acceptable if managed for long-term sustainability. For others, nature is to be preserved within the public sphere and protected against market exploitation. These two strands interact with the workings of private markets and the decision processes of public agencies to produce a crucible for conflict.
With a historic preference for natural resource exploitation, federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forestry Service created policies that promoted the widespread construction of dams and water projects for flood control and irrigation and expanded opportunities for grazing, mining, and timbering on public lands, and other forms of exploitation of natural resources. Efforts to alter these resource exploitation policies extend back to the 1880s, with the creation of a state forest preserve in the Adirondack Mountains to protect the water supply of New York City, but these efforts largely challenged particular projects and policies.
Since the rise of the modern environmental movement in the mid 1960s, efforts by environmental groups to protect natural resources have become considerably more influential and widespread. Groups such as the American Farmland Trust, Defenders of Wildlife, Environmental Defense, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, The Wilderness Society, and Waterkeeper Alliance bring a wide range of financial, legal, scientific and political skills to bear on resource conservation and preservation. Controversy over public resource development projects, as well as efforts to control private exploitation of natural resources, has consequently grown significantly. These groups are aided considerably in their efforts by laws such as the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and widespread changes in legislation governing water projects; grazing, timbering, and mining; pollution management; and endangered species protection. Litigation to protect natural resources and the environment, which in 1969 consisted of fewer than 25,000 environmental Federal District Court lawsuits, increased six-fold by the late 1970s.
Opponents to environmentalism, at first caught off-guard by the new-found assertiveness of environmental organizations, formed their own counter-movements. By the 1980s, the Wise Use Movement served as a focal point for property owners and industrialists; resource users such as loggers, ranchers, farmers, and miners; and recreationalists such as off-road vehicle users to oppose efforts by environmentalists to expand protections for natural resources. Major organizations promoting Wise Use ideas include the Alliance for America (an umbrella organization for the Wise Use Movement), the American Land Rights Association (a defender of property rights), the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation (think tanks for libertarian and conservative causes), and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (the organization generally recognizing as initiating the movement). Under the Reagan administration and again under George W. Bush’s administration, concerns of this movement garnered considerable federal agency support.
Managing Natural Resource Conflicts More Proactively
The increasingly contentious nature of natural resource management in the United States has led to significant changes in how public agencies and private interest groups work to resolve their differences. Traditional models of resource management, in which public agencies plan and decide before consulting the public, and where environmental groups and private utilizers of natural resources worked in opposition to each other, often proved incapable of balancing the complex array of interests associated with natural resource management. In response, more collaborative approaches to decision making and implementation have been developed. These efforts have primarily taken two forms: cooperative conservation partnerships and environmental consensus building processes.
Efforts to promote cooperative conservation of natural resources through partnerships were highlighted by the 2005 President’s Conference on Cooperative Conservation. This conference, the second presidential conference to focus on conservation (with the first sponsored in 1908 by Theodore Roosevelt), showcased nationally prominent efforts at collaborative natural resource management. These included collaboratives such as the Central Shortgrass Prairie Ecoregional Assessment, Central Texas Sustainability Partnership, Malpai Borderlands Partnership, and the alliteratively named Water Without War Walla Walla Watershed Partnership. Each brings together multiple state and federal agencies with nongovernmental organizations and private landowners to support environmental restoration while enhancing the long-term sustainability and productive use of natural resources. These partnerships work to enhance natural resources not only at the level of individual properties, but also across ecosystems.
Environmental consensus building (ECB) draws on many of the principles used in cooperative conservation partnerships to more effectively manage natural resources, but does so in the face of more significant conflict. ECB draws on the collective wisdom of interested parties and professionals to design more effective and implementable natural resource plans and policies. Each party brings considerable knowledge and experience in their own field of interest. Through ECB’s four major principles—agencies work collaboratively with interest groups, all affected parties are included in structured dialogues, the process is open, transparent and impartial in its management, and consensus amongst all the stakeholders is sought as a basis for making decisions—parties challenge each other to design solutions that best meet the needs of all the parties.
As an illustration of the application of ECB, the San Francisco Estuary Project is a complex set of processes seeking to resolve highly contentious issues associated with water management in Northern California. The watershed feeding into the estuary covers over half of the state of California, including rivers that drain the Sierra Mountains and the Central Valley and drain out through the San Francisco Bay. The estuary, with its fresh-to-salt-water gradient, provides unique habitat to many species, while upstream diversions provides flood control and water to agriculture in the Central Valley and to towns and cities in both southern and northern California.
The consensus-building process brought a wide range of stakeholders and interest groups together to design a plan for managing the estuarine system and the water system that feeds it. These included Federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, and Fish and Wildlife Service; corresponding state agencies; regional agencies such as the Central Valley and San Francisco Bay Regional Water Boards; local municipalities and counties and their regional affiliates; and a wide range of public interest groups. The size of the affected area, the complexity of the issues, the diversity of the stakeholders and the number of local, state and national agencies involved in watershed management all posed significant challenges to the ECB process. The process, initiated and funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was divided into three committees involving over 120 individuals: a Sponsoring Agency Committee consisting of state and federal agencies, a Public Advisory Committee consisting of citizen and interest group representatives, and a Technical Advisory Committee consisting of scientists and engineers from agencies, universities, and other research settings. The Sponsoring Agency Committee was responsible for developing projects and policies. It sought consensus amongst agency officials, but also interacted with participants of both the Public and Technical Advisory Committees through co-membership on those committees. This somewhat loose network of agencies, interest groups and scientists effectively developed a plan of action and coordinated decision making for the estuary and the rivers feeding into it for over twenty years, managing conflict through consensus building and directly involving all the interested parties in the management process.
As a social innovation, ECB takes seriously the potential for disputants to collaboratively design good environmental solutions, while also more effectively networking public agencies, communities and organizations for the complex work of adaptive and sustainable natural resource management. ECB is altering the relationship between public agencies, interest groups, private organizations and the public-at-large as to their relative understanding of, access to, voice in, and power over natural resource decision making. By transforming political and civic interactions, ECB provides an alternative mechanism by which natural resource conflicts can be resolved.
— Michael L. Elliott
See also
Conflict, Water; Environmental Protection; Environmental Regulations; History, Environmental; Natural Resources Management; Policy, Environmental; Policy, Water
References
- Crowfoot, James E. and Julia M. Wondolleck. Environmental Disputes: Community Involvement in Conflict Resolution. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1990.
- Dukes, Franklin, Marina Piscolish, and John Stephens. Reaching for Higher Ground in Conflict Resolution: Tools for Powerful Groups and Communities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
- Durant, Robert F., Daniel J. Fiorino, and Rosemary O’Leary. Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices and Opportunities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
- O’Leary, Rosemary and Lisa B. Bingham, eds. The Promise and Performance of Environmental Conflict Resolution. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2003.
- Susskind, Lawrence, Sarah McKearnan, and Jennifer Thomas- Larmer. The Consensus Building Handbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.
- Wondolleck, Julia M. and Steven L. Yaffee. Making Collaboration Work: Lessons from Innovation in Natural Resource Management. Washington, D.C: Island Press, 2000.
