Conservation Is One of the Easiest Things to Greenwash – By Colin Jerolmack (Slate) / July 7 2021
Joe Biden’s conservation plan is ambitious. But is it specific enough to work?
In May, the Biden administration released its “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful” report, outlining the president’s vision for conserving 30 percent of the U.S.’s lands and waters by 2030. It’s an ambitious plan—currently, about 12 percent of the U.S.’s lands and 23 percent of its waters are permanently protected in a natural state. The so-called 30×30 plan was cheered by many environmental advocacy groups who have coalesced around the goal of protecting and restoring at least 30 percent of the planet’s terrestrial and aquatic habitats by 2030, as scientists have argued this is necessary to prevent catastrophic wildlife extinctions and stabilize the climate. And in June, the other six leaders of the G-7 joined Biden in committing to that objective by signing on to the historic “Nature Compact.”
Some hard-right politicians have made disingenuous arguments that 30×30 is a federal land grab, but these only serve to underscore the most remarkable feature of Biden’s conservation plan: that it favors incentivizing voluntary, community-led stewardship of private property and tribal lands, instead of a dramatic expansion of national parks. The conservation practices of landowners on so-called working lands—farms, ranches, hunting grounds—can be counted toward the 30 percent goal, as can Indigenous-led efforts to sustainably manage traditional homelands. Progress will be cataloged in a federal atlas that will track, map, and tally conserved areas.
There’s just one problem: In an effort to telegraph President Joe Biden’s commitment to bottom-up nature stewardship and appease as many stakeholders as possible, the administration has failed to provide the kind of specificity that would make the plan work. It has avoided even defining conservation or explaining how success will be measured. Even without that clarity—or perhaps as a result of that lack—it’s already apparent that Biden’s plan lowers the bar from what conservation scientists have called for: setting aside 30 percent of lands and waters as “well-managed reserves.” As advocacy groups jockey to advance their constituents’ version of conservation and compete for federal resources, the risk is that projects that don’t actually restore or protect biodiversity and fragile habitats will get counted in the atlas. This means that if Biden doesn’t set robust, science-based benchmarks soon, 30×30 may well facilitate greenwashing.
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