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By Tom Dunkel
Mark Shaffer is seated at his dining room table in a Washington, D.C., suburb thinking big thoughts about...pasta.
“Picture a bowl of spaghetti,” says Shaffer, hitting upon a workable metaphor, “with meatballs and flecks of pepper.” But instead of pouring on marinara sauce, Shaffer ladles on some conservation biology, his area of expertise. His dish includes thin strands of green space, flecks of mini wetlands and the occasional big-lump wildlife preserve.
Behold, Shaffer’s favorite recipe for saving wildlife on a grand scale, for reshaping the future of land conservation in the United States.
As environmental program director at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Shaffer, 59, is in a position to play master chef, of sorts. Over the past four years, the foundation has directed $60 million in support of that recipe.
Shaffer’s end goal is to see 12 percent to 25 percent of the American landscape put into permanent “conservation status” for wildlife habitat—up from perhaps 6 percent today. Reaching that target will entail an epic combination of easements, stewardship agreements, land purchases, and new state and federal reserves.
That’s a lot of spaghetti and meatballs.
“This is a big public works project,” Shaffer admits. Some observers have called the plan Napoleonic (a comment on its scope, not his ego). For his part, Shaffer says, “I’ve called it the Interstate Habitat System.”
Indeed, in terms of the time and resource investment, such an undertaking would be comparable to the construction, begun in the 1950s, of the interstate highway system — President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s major domestic legacy. But highways proved a relatively easy sell back then, with local, state and federal governments smoothly partnering up to unspool long ribbons of roadway.
Shaffer’s interstate habitat concept is more nuanced and complex. And, therefore, harder to grasp. One of his “enduring frustrations” is that nobody has come up with a good catchphrase for it. “America’s conservation estate” and “geography of hope” get bandied about — even “the National Park System on steroids.”
You could add some bacon and egg to his analogy. Call it conservation carbonara, perhaps. Shaffer, however, prefers the straightforward, though less tasty, appellation “national conservation system.”
Piecing together a national conservation system might well be the mother of all jigsaw puzzles. Precisely which parcels of land should be saved? What tracts should be prioritized? Who would pay for acquiring and assembling them all?
Shaffer figures the cost of the plan — estimated at $360 billion to $980 billion over 30 years — is comparable to the money being spent anyway, in an uncoordinated way, on conservation; he would simply focus those expenditures on one bold long-range objective.
That objective has a familiar ring to The Nature Conservancy. “Realizing Mark Shaffer’s and the Duke foundation’s vision of a national conservation system,” says Craig Groves, the Conservancy’s director of conservation planning, “may well turn out to be one of the most influential forces in allowing the Conservancy to achieve its conservation goal in the United States.”
In fact, the Conservancy has already figured into that objective, benefiting from millions of dollars in land-protection grants from the Duke foundation and contributing scientific expertise toward fulfilling the foundation’s vision.
But what are the odds of a national conservation system becoming a reality? Shaffer is cautiously optimistic, though he warns that the clock is ticking: “Don’t forget — this isn’t a static landscape where we have forever to get to these places. The bulldozers are running every day.”
Nature picture credits: Photo © Stephen Alvarez (Southern Cumberland Plateau); Photo © Landon Nordeman (Mark Shaffer)
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