Mark Tercek, the head of the Nature Conservancy, recently took a tour of the largest chemical-manufacturing facility in North America: the Dow plant in Freeport, Texas. The Nature Conservancy, which is responsible for protecting a hundred and nineteen million acres in thirty-five countries, is the biggest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world. Tercek, accompanied by two colleagues, had come to Freeport because the facility—a welter of ethylene crackers and smokestacks built next to a river that flows into the Gulf of Mexico—is at the center of a pilot collaboration that he hopes will reshape conservation. The key idea is to create tools that can assign monetary value to natural resources. Tercek, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, thinks that environmental organizations rely on fuzzy science and fail to harness the power of markets. With the help of sound metrics drawn from the world of finance—“a higher level of accountability,” in his words—some of the ecological harm caused by the very same corporations can be undone. Nudging big business in a green direction, he believes, can do far more good than simply cordoning off parcels of Paradise.
It was a chilly February day, the wind coming from the west. On the horizon, smoke curled from a brushfire; some of Dow’s tankers, part of the largest privately owned rail fleet in the country, trundled down their tracks. Tercek, who is fifty-seven, is a practiced listener: during his decades as an investment banker, he has sounded out a lot of executives. He seemed engrossed while a Dow operations manager explained proudly that the chemicals produced in Freeport ended up in “upstream intermediate products that go into all sorts of applications.”
The pilot program centers on finding ways to help the chemical plant save money by enacting environmental reforms. Tercek’s staff had worked with Dow to produce hard numbers: the rate at which certain trees absorb pollutants; the extent to which a plot of restored wetland can slow a storm surge. “Have we achieved any breakthroughs, to Dow’s way of thinking?” Tercek asked. Calm and conciliatory, he doesn’t question the logic of committing billions of dollars—and using hundreds of tons of dangerous chemicals—to create shatterproof lenses, de-icing fluid, and liquid-crystal displays. In front of us was the Brazoria Reservoir, which is run by Dow; it both cools the plant and makes its way through the local water authority to the taps in surrounding towns. I wondered how safe the arrangement was, but Tercek asked the Dow team about the numbers: “As businesspeople, you obviously think a lot about the cost of water versus the utility of water. Is that a big deal?”
Retail environmentalism—coaching individuals to be eco-minded consumers—isn’t his thing. At one point, we discussed whether the train or the plane is the better way to get from Washington, D.C., where the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters are, to New York, where much of the money Tercek needs to raise is made. He told me that he was “something of an expert” on the commute, and brought up speed and weather considerations, but not carbon emissions. “Should you have a fake or real Christmas tree?” he said. “I have no idea.”
He is six feet four, with an upright carriage and a good smile. The silver Patagonia fleece jacket he wore accentuated the perception that he was someone you were more likely to meet on the chairlift at Telluride than chained to a power-plant fence. He told the Dow people that Nature Conservancy staffers weren’t “egghead conservationists not in touch with the real world.” He went on, “Do we need to get better at putting our analysis and science together? Or did we make the data available—the evidence—that would allow an engineer to be confident?” The numbers were helpful, he was told; the biggest challenge was making Dow employees receptive to the project. “There’s some educating, convincing, that needs to go on,” the operations manager explained. Both sides agreed that a cultural gap was being bridged, and that this would take time. When Tercek asked if global warming preoccupied Dow managers, the vice-president of sustainability answered, “They’re not thinking about climate change—they’re filling railcars.”
Dow’s red-diamond logo is everywhere in Brazoria County, and the company’s reach extends from the Dow Academic Center, a large event space at Brazosport College, to the local aquarium, whose tanks the company fills. After the visit to the reservoir, Dow loaded Tercek and his team onto a bus and gave them a tour. Dow’s Freeport facilities date from the era when nature was something to be openly played with. For a time in the nineteen-forties, the company housed workers in a development called Camp Chemical. One local street is named Chlorine Road, another Glycol Road.
The bus stopped on top of an earthen levee near a marsh that feeds into a saltwater canal. There were fishing stations, though nobody was out. A Dow publicist said, “The water that comes out of our plant is actually cleaner than the water that comes into it.”
The Freeport plants began operating during the Second World War. When the Japanese captured much of the Far East, where most rubber-tree plantations were, the U.S. government turned to industry to develop an alternative. Making synthetic rubber requires a lot of water, so a riverside site was ideal. The complex prospered over the ensuing decades, producing millions of gallons of chlorine as well as chemicals used to make paint cleaners, Scrubbing Bubbles, and Saran Wrap. Lately, though, Dow has contended with extreme weather in the region. In 2011, a drought sent the water level in the Brazoria Reservoir down eight feet lower than normal, and a resulting “salt wedge”—Gulf water seeping up the river—put the reservoir out of commission for months. The company traditionally dealt with such problems by reining in nature—building seawalls and other stopgaps—but Dow wondered if longer-term remedies were possible. “We will be here forever,” the operations manager said. “We have to make this work.”
Chemical plants are volatile places, and individual components are separated from one another and buffered from residential areas, allowing nature to thrive in the gaps. We resumed touring the marsh; looking out the bus window, we saw egrets, blue herons, and roseate spoonbills, their stalky legs bathed in the froth whipped by the wind. Deer live inside the plant’s fence, and alligators can be found in a sediment pool just inside the gates. Nevertheless, according to the most recent Environmental Protection Agency data, the Freeport plant is the third-worst dioxin polluter in the country.
A goal of the collaboration between Dow and the Nature Conservancy is to create software that helps a company assess its natural resources so that they can be compared with man-made assets. What is a swarm of wild bees worth? One way to answer this question is to determine the cost of pollinating a crop with managed honeybees. To assess the value of a clean river to a soda bottler, you could tabulate the price of purifying a gallon of polluted water. The assumption is that if you want companies to care about nature you must put a price tag on it. Otherwise, as one Nature Conservancy economist told me, “it implicitly gets a value of zero.” The idea is not new: for two decades, New York City has been buying up land in its watershed or paying property owners to stop polluting, because the cost is lower than building the purification plants that it would otherwise need. But the Dow collaboration extends the principle much further. The key piece of software, still under development, is the Ecosystem Services Identification and Inventory program, which will make it easy for engineers—ideally, in the field, with a tablet—to enter data about a company’s natural resources. The Nature Conservancy plans to make the software publicly available. “There is no other tool like it,” Tercek told me.
Dow, partly through its foundation, paid ten million dollars to fund the partnership. Upon announcing the collaboration, in 2011, a Conservancy spokesperson declared that “nature is a source for sustainable business value,” and the chairman of Dow expressed hope that the partnership would provide help in “operationalizing sustainability.” Such rhetoric sounds abstract, but the Nature Conservancy has given Dow some very practical advice. The ground ozone level in the region exceeds the legal limit, and the Nature Conservancy calculated that, for what it would cost Dow to furnish the Freeport facility with an additional smokestack scrubber, it could reduce smog by planting a thousand acres of trees: green ash, hackberry, water hickory, Texas cedar elm. In addition to absorbing the pollution, the trees would suck up carbon dioxide—the primary cause of climate change—while beautifying the landscape and providing wildlife with food and sanctuary. Moreover, a mechanical scrubber needs to be replaced every two decades, but a forest is self-regenerating. “The idea to look at trees—it would never have crossed our minds,” the Dow manager told Tercek.
Standard projections anticipate that by 2100 the local sea level will have risen nearly four feet. The Nature Conservancy proposed that Dow confront this challenge by restoring marshlands. It turned out that the marshes weren’t intact enough to make much difference—the Nature Conservancy scientist in charge of the project called them “patchy, a mix of grass and open area”—but the strategy impressed Dow executives, who are considering using it at other coastal facilities. “It was very positive, very successful,” the Dow scientist who headed the program told me. Tercek clearly knew how to win over the people at Dow. At one point, he told them, “The old model would be ‘We’re doing it for conservation’s sake.’ The new approach would be ‘No, no, we’re doing this for business’ sake, and we get the conservation, too.’ ”
“I’m a humble guy,” Tercek likes to say. He was born in Cleveland, the third of six children. His father was an insurance salesman and the leader of a local polka band. Mark got a scholarship to Western Reserve Academy, a prep school in Hudson, Ohio, where he ran track, played center on the football team, and helped edit the school paper. His high-school friend Mitch Nauffts told me that Tercek “was then, as he is now, this can-do, glass-always-at-least-half-full kind of person, willing to do the hard things and not procrastinate about them.”
Tercek attended Williams College, where he published poetry and wrote a “mini-thesis” on the modernist novel, then moved to Japan to teach English. But he was restless, he remembers. In 1980, he took a job at Bank of America in Tokyo. “I kind of snapped out of my stupid college reverie,” he said. “My image of a businessperson was, you know . . . you’re actually doing something, putting these deals together.” He went to Harvard Business School and, in 1984, he received offers from Salomon Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. He chose Goldman because its employees seemed “most like me—team-oriented, with backgrounds that were not fancy ones.”
In 1986, at the age of twenty-nine, Tercek was made a partner. When the firm went public, three years later, his share was thirty million dollars. He was living with his family in a large house in Irvington, a Westchester suburb, and he bought a vacation home in Nantucket. But success didn’t narrow Tercek’s interests the way it does for some people. He became a vegetarian and started practicing yoga; for a while, he taught classes at Yoga Zone, in Irvington and Manhattan. Tercek, who votes for moderate Democrats, never planned to spend his life at Goldman. And by the mid-aughts the firm was shifting from investment banking to trading, which didn’t engage him.
At this point, Tercek and his wife, Amy—a former photo editor at Spy—had four children, and they started taking a lot of nature vacations. “Low-budget trips booked by Thomson Family Adventures,” he remembers. “Belize, Costa Rica, the Galápagos, some place in Pennsylvania.” They made so many trips that the travel agency put the family’s picture on a brochure. When he journeyed to rain forests, Tercek took note of logging and deforestation, and began to wonder whether the same capitalistic forces that were damaging nature might be turned around to protect it.
When Tercek told Henry Paulson, the head of Goldman, that he was contemplating leaving the firm, Paulson offered him the job of running the bank’s sustainability and environmental unit. Paulson had created the group to help the firm operate by green principles. It was also supposed to educate Goldman in avoiding environmentally unsound deals. There were business opportunities in conservation as well. The right to pollute was becoming a marketable commodity, through proposals like cap-and-trade, which would permit companies to emit a fixed amount of pollution and trade with others for their allotments. Goldman owned part of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which handled transactions involving pollution credits. The division was fuelled by “enlightened self-interest,” Tercek recalls. “Hank is a tough-minded businessperson.”
Tercek took the job, and promoted Goldman’s initiatives to environmental leaders across the country. In 2007, a group of private-equity firms bought the power utility T.X.U. and, in return for support from environmental organizations, reduced the number of coal-fired plants that it was planning to build. “I came up with the idea of going from eleven to three,” Tercek says. Goldman was both an investor and the investment banker for the private-equity groups. The deal was controversial and remains so. Many green activists felt that the environmentalists who offered support for the deal had been snookered, and argued that continued popular pressure could have eliminated the coal-fired plants. One environmental leader told the Wall Street Journal that the conservation groups supporting the T.X.U. deal “should be hung for what they’ve done.” Tercek’s response is “Should there have been no coal-fired plants? Well, fine, but then no one will have electricity.”
When Tercek was offered the top job at the Nature Conservancy, in 2008, he took a salary cut of roughly ninety per cent. (He makes nearly seven hundred thousand dollars a year, but since he started the job he has pledged to donate more than twice that amount to the Conservancy.) He wanted to manage a large organization and was eager to try out some of his ideas. The Nature Conservancy’s announcement of Tercek’s hire emphasized his skills at finding “innovative possibilities for aligning economic forces with conservation.” The transition was not seamless. At his first company-wide video conference, Tercek could be seen drinking from a plastic water bottle; the next day, one staffer after another gave him Nalgene bottles. Tercek had been known as a good listener at Goldman, but people at the Nature Conservancy began complaining that he didn’t listen well enough. He felt that he was “kind of struggling,” and found a C.E.O. coach to help. Nevertheless, he sees it as a strength that he’s in the arena, not in the woods. He recalls, “When I first got here, some people seemed to challenge me on this and say, ‘How can you be an environmentalist if you didn’t grow up fly-fishing and horseback riding?’ And I’d say, ‘Look. You don’t have an exclusive on this.’ ” He adds, “There’s an inner environmentalist in everyone.”
That fall, the Nature Conservancy, which relies heavily on donations, was hit hard by the financial meltdown, and had to cut its staff by ten per cent. It was fortunate that an experienced manager was in charge; the Nature Conservancy weathered the crisis well and was soon back at full strength. Tercek remembers the crash as “a good exercise,” albeit stressful. But what had the Nature Conservancy rebounded to do? From its inception, in 1951, the organization had focussed on buying parcels of land to preserve them from development. “Saving the Last Great Places on Earth” has long been one of its slogans. Over the years, it placed under protection land that, in aggregate, was roughly twenty-two times the size of Massachusetts. The goal was to wall off as many animals and plants as possible, to preserve biodiversity and ecological hot spots in the face of development. Tercek had two strong misgivings about the Nature Conservancy’s work. First, its budget was insufficient for its ambitions. “We’re, like, the masters of philanthropy,” he says. “We’ve raised more money than anyone, but I can tell you it’s not enough money.” And, second, if nature was a market share, environmentalists were losing it. The globe was warming, the ice caps melting. If you saved a great place or two every year, you weren’t affecting the larger dynamic of destruction. If climate change wasn’t checked, even land that had been walled off by environmentalists might lose much of its biodiversity.
The answer, for Tercek, was to unleash what had made him and his colleagues rich at Goldman: the power of the markets. A preference for financial thinking runs like an underground stream through Tercek’s conversation; he feels that accurate numbers can cut through illogical rhetoric and pinpoint the quickest path to a goal. He is a proponent of “impact investments,” in which money is given to a socially beneficial enterprise with a prospect of financial return. “The problem with donors is you hate to ever disappoint them, so you paper over your mistakes and pretend things didn’t go badly,” he explained. “You paper them over so well even you don’t realize it. With an investor mind-set, there won’t be room for that.” And he recalls with irritation the standard visit that he makes to foundations on behalf of the Nature Conservancy: “They always give you these lectures on accountability, but then they don’t hold you accountable. I say, ‘Ask me some questions!’ ” (In late April, Tercek announced a major project, financed by J. P. Morgan, to simplify impact investing. The bank declared that its goal was to “step up the scale and creativity of financial resources dedicated to the protection of natural ecosystems.”)
Tercek thinks that the nonprofit mind-set can be too timid. When he heard another Nature Conservancy slogan, “Quietly Conserving Nature,” he asked himself, “Why not save nature loudly?” In February, I sat in on an executive-team meeting, and when climate change came up Tercek asked why Conservancy scientists didn’t express the anticipated temperature increase in Fahrenheit instead of centigrade. “It would be a lot scarier,” he pointed out. In general, he finds the organization’s reluctance to take the lead on climate change a frustration, as if he were missing out on the I.P.O. of a lifetime.
In one way, Tercek and the Nature Conservancy are a natural match. The organization has never aspired to be as confrontational as Greenpeace, and has accepted donations from companies that are far from pure. Patrick Noonan, the C.E.O. of the Nature Conservancy in the seventies, once responded to a reporter’s suggestion that corporate money had a taint by replying, “It may be tainted, but ’tain’t enough!” The idea that nature should be viewed as a market had intellectual antecedents, too, going back almost as far as the competing idea of nature as priceless. In the nineties, the prestige of market-based solutions rose in tandem with the stock market. In 1997, a widely read paper published in Nature put the value of the annual output of nature at thirty-three trillion dollars; human-created value, by contrast, was worth only eighteen trillion. The paper also asserted that nature was an ideal business partner for humanity: a coral reef did the work of nurturing fish more economically than a fish farm did, and it was pretty to look at, too. “Biosphere I (the Earth) is a very efficient, least-cost provider of human life-support services,” the paper concluded.
Tercek found an ally on the Nature Conservancy staff in Peter Kareiva, its chief scientist. Kareiva, then in his mid-fifties, had long been writing the way Tercek was thinking. After receiving conventional training as an ecologist, Kareiva had two experiences that made him question orthodoxy. The first was when he was studying the arrival of exotic ladybugs in the Mt. St. Helens area. He was surprised to find that this invasion had not harmed local beetle populations: the new beetles had found a place for themselves without displacing the native ones. “It in fact had increased biodiversity,” he recalls. “That’s not the normal narrative.”
Then, in 1991, Kareiva gave testimony at a federal hearing about efforts to preserve the habitat of the spotted owl in Washington State. He looked out at loggers sitting with their children in the back row of the courtroom and thought, “Their needs have value, too.” He extended his observation to include other people outside the traditional conservation movement and concluded that the battle for nature was being fought on the wrong terrain and in the wrong language. If you saw nature as having unlimited and unquantifiable rights and humans as having none, you turned environmentalism into a form of class warfare. And a movement that ignored the needs of loggers and their children would fail, because it would never have enough supporters to protect nature on a scale that would actually matter.
The idea of wildlife as a sacred and self-evident good was under pressure on other fronts. Stories by paleo-ecologists and archeologists began revealing how extensively humans have reworked the landscape over the past several thousand years. Postcolonial-studies scholars recast the conservation movement as part of a coercive ideology foisted on the developing world. Critics even questioned the logic of a seminal 1985 essay by the American ecologist Michael Soulé, “What Is Conservation Biology?,” which asserted that “species have value in themselves, a value neither conferred nor revocable, but springing from a species’ long evolutionary heritage and potential or even from the mere fact of its existence.” Kareiva asked if there really was a scientific basis for this pronouncement. Where were the data to support the belief that maintaining biodiversity was crucial to ecological well-being? And how did you weigh Soulé’s insistence on the inviolability of nature against, say, the rights of children dying from hunger in Africa? In 2010, Kareiva published a textbook, “Conservation Science,” whose cover featured a photograph of a peasant walking through a rice field.
New conservation science, or eco-pragmatism, as this set of principles and concerns was coming to be called, had been gathering strength for some time, and various environmental organizations had adopted some of its ideas. But such efforts were scattered, and the biggest force in the field, the Nature Conservancy, had not put much of its weight behind them. Within a few months of Tercek’s arrival, he and Kareiva were e-mailing constantly, and he had promoted Kareiva, adding him to his executive team. “Peter reminds me of the Wall Street approach,” Tercek told me. Kareiva, in turn, appreciated his boss’s insistence on data: “Someone would tell a story—there are a lot of conservation stories and environmental stories—and that wouldn’t satisfy Mark, and it wouldn’t satisfy me, either.” Tercek, who had moved to Washington, held a party at his Georgetown home to introduce Kareiva’s book to the city’s science-policy leaders.
Bolstered by Tercek’s support, Kareiva promoted his views by giving talks, writing blog posts, and publishing magazine articles. The new science of conservation would be data-based, corporate-friendly, and anti-élitist. It would not fetishize biodiversity. It accepted a world more like, say, the Meadowlands, in New Jersey—where MetLife Stadium shares space with twenty thousand acres of wetlands—than Yellowstone National Park. In “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” an article published in February, 2012, Kareiva and two co-authors, Michelle Marvier and Robert Lalasz, wrote, “By its own measure, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.” They went on:
Nature, the authors argued, would survive, in one form or another. Not every species was irreplaceable: the extinction of dodos and passenger pigeons had caused no more damage, from a scientific point of view, than had the arrival of exotic ladybugs on Mt. St. Helens. Even the polar bear, “that classic symbol of fragility,” might well survive global warming, because, as the Arctic ice melted, the seals that are its food source would also move north; they’d crowd together in a smaller but still viable habitat. If worse came to worst, global warming would reunite the polar bear’s gene pool with that of the brown bear, from which it had evolved two hundred thousand years ago, during a period of global cooling. The conclusion of Kareiva and his co-authors was sanguine: “As we destroy habitats, we create new ones.”
One day last summer, five old-school conservation biologists—among them Michael Soulé and E. O. Wilson—sent a letter of complaint to Tercek. They were tired of hearing about their obsolescence. For too long, Kareiva had been accusing them of poor science and irrational alarmism. In the letter, they denounced his ideas as “wrongheaded, counterproductive, and ethically dubious,” and added, “It is hard to believe that they are coming from the chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, an organization formerly, and heroically, dedicated to conserving nature, not merely natural resources for people.”
From other quarters, Kareiva had received support for his critique. A group of young businessmen invited him to a weekend retreat to discuss the “Anthropocene” article and raised twenty-eight thousand dollars for the Nature Conservancy. Many people working on sustainability issues in the N.G.O. world felt that the Nature Conservancy had finally woken up from a fantasy. The head of an international organization that focusses on global food issues told Tercek recently, “You’ve gone from buying hectares and putting fences around it to realizing there are people in there.”
But when Kareiva’s co-author Michelle Marvier, an ecologist at Santa Clara University, gave a talk at San Francisco State University, shortly after the “Anthropocene” article appeared, an audience member approached her, weeping. The hashtag #OccupyTNC appeared on Twitter and powerful Conservancy backers tried to get Kareiva fired. In the summer of 2012, at a Society for Conservation Biology meeting in Oakland, Marvier gave a talk about the hardiness of ecosystems; afterward, Soulé stood up and said, “Your resilience argument is so misleading that it boggles the mind.” At an Aspen Institute conference on the environment, Wilson clashed with another new conservationist, Emma Marris. When she suggested that environmentalists accept some nonnative species as a legitimate part of the ecosystem, he said, “Where do you plant that white flag you’re carrying?”
That October, thirty-five traditional conservationists and their funders gathered at a hotel in Denver. The Weeden Foundation, a small environmental nonprofit, helped pay for the meeting, which focussed on generating a coördinated response to the new conservation. Among other things, the participants decided to write the letter of complaint to Tercek; to begin work on an essay collection, “Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth,” which has just been published; and to take their case to the Nature Conservancy’s funders.
Taking on the Nature Conservancy was a daring act. Many conservation biologists have drawn funding from the organization or worked with it. (The Weeden Foundation helps pay for a Conservancy project in Chile.) But when several big Nature Conservancy supporters contacted Tercek to express dismay over its new ethos, he knew that he had to do something. Soon after receiving the letter, he invited his antagonists to a meeting at his office. A small group came in the fall, among them Soulé; Don Weeden, the head of his family foundation; Stuart Pimm, of Duke University; and Reed Noss, of the University of Central Florida. A former Conservancy scientist told me that it was the “Come-to-Jesus meeting.” Wilson, who is eighty-four, had wanted to attend but is in poor health, and Bruce Babbitt, the former Secretary of the Interior, cancelled at the last minute. “I think he decided he didn’t want to get involved,” Tercek told me.
The meeting took place on October 21st, at the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters, in Arlington, Virginia. An eight-story building constructed in the late nineteen-nineties, it has sage-green-and-tumbleweed-yellow carpet that evokes the savanna, and there is a sustainable garden in the courtyard. But the offices could easily be those of a trade group, and a plaque in the lobby thanks “generous” corporate friends, among them Dow, DuPont, and Georgia-Pacific.
The summit meeting started at 9 A.M. Tercek had on a suit. Kareiva looked rumpled in an academic way. Soulé and Noss, both lean, with trim beards, had the self-contained manner of people who had spent a lot of time in isolated places; Soulé wore fleece.
A few weeks before the meeting, Soulé had published an opinion piece, in Conservation Biology, in which he declared that it was time to stop calling classical environmentalism a “dysfunctional, antihuman anachronism.” He went on, “Conservationists and citizens alike ought to be alarmed by a scheme that replaces wild places and national parks with domesticated landscapes containing only nonthreatening, convenient plants and animals.”
Tercek and Kareiva had agreed in private, as Kareiva put it, that “making fun” of opponents would be “a mistake,” and that “the important thing is not to misbehave.” So Tercek—Kareiva silently by his side—began by apologizing for the tone of his chief scientist’s publications, and by acknowledging that he was the odd man out in the room. “I haven’t spent as long in the field as you,” he said. His instinct is always to find common ground—that’s how you do a deal—but when he offered the platitude “We’re winning a lot of battles and losing the war” some of the conservation biologists bristled.
“You are simply repeating what Peter is saying,” Pimm said. “What, exactly, are we failing at?” He noted that nearly fifteen per cent of the land on earth had been preserved for conservation. “We’ve reduced species extinction rates by three-quarters,” he added.
The conservationists wanted to know why they were the targets of so many attacks and why, as Soulé said, he kept hearing that “biodiversity is shit.” He went on, “You’re demeaning national parks and protected areas. Those are the things that bother me. And you’re doing a lot of damage to the conservation movement.” He called for a renewed focus on species-and-land preservation.
Kareiva then spoke: “When I say, ‘I’m not a biodiversity guy,’ I say, ‘I’m an ecologist.’ That’s the second part that gets dropped.” He told a story about Forever Wild, a 2012 ballot initiative in Alabama to preserve rivers and wilderness: when the plan was promoted as environmental, only a quarter of the public expressed support; after advertisements highlighted photographs of children drinking clean water, the plan’s popularity tripled. The program was paid for with fees assessed from companies extracting natural gas in Alabama.
The biologists weren’t impressed by this win-win. They smelled the implication of their own unpopularity. Weeden pointed out that nearly all charitable donations in America were “purely humanitarian”; barely two per cent went toward protecting biodiversity. Why take this away?
Pimm said that it had been wrong to bash other environmentalists, adding, “You don’t have to queer our pitch.”
“We don’t do that anymore,” Tercek interrupted. In his view, he had already reined Kareiva in.
“It’s still out there,” Soulé responded.
Kareiva then admitted that “Conservation in the Anthropocene” had been a mistake. Tercek, trying to be light-hearted, pointed out that the entire dispute appeared to center on an article that was almost two years old.
“Not enough has changed,” Noss said.
Tercek, growing impatient, complained of the counterattacks: “They are hurting T.N.C.—hurting Peter, hurting me a little bit. If that’s your goal, so be it.”
Soulé said, “We might have no power compared to you, but we can have an influence on your fund-raising.”
Noss warned Tercek that his own scientists were seething over the sort of apologetic conservation they were being made to practice. Tercek dismissed the point, though outside the meeting he told me, “Are some people unhappy? Hell, yes, because we’re changing T.N.C. dramatically.”
The spat continued. The biologists wanted less corporate influence, more protected places. Pimm complained that the Nature Conservancy’s new chief political strategist was a former Bush Administration official. Soulé added that the organization’s board was seen among scientists as too full of “Wall Street and corporate people, and you’re an example.”
Tercek, his mouth tightening, said, “We get that.” But he was sorry if feelings had been hurt, and Kareiva pleaded for a focus on “outcomes, not strategies.” Weren’t they all working toward the same goal?
Soulé quoted C. P. Snow, coolly: “The problem with getting on a moral escalator is it is hard to get off.”
The gathering began breaking up. “I don’t like conflict, believe it or not,” Soulé said, promising to “stop lobbing mortars.”
An entente was reached: Kareiva would write only in peer-reviewed publications; Soulé would return to his book on human wickedness and its impact on nature; Noss would focus on the effects of rising sea levels; Pimm would study South American birds. All appeared to part friends, but later that day Noss sent me an e-mail promising that his cohort would continue opposing the Nature Conservancy’s “schizophrenic anti-biodiversity, anti-protected-areas rhetoric.”
Soon, it was as if the meeting had never taken place. Last month, Soulé and two other scientists published a letter to the editor of Animal Conservation. It is titled “ ‘New Conservation’ or Surrender to Development?” and cites Kareiva twelve times.
The Nature Conservancy, which has an annual budget of nearly six hundred million dollars, is not a nimble organization. It consists of fifty state boards, with thirteen hundred trustees. Since they raise most of the money, they have most of the power, and they still focus heavily on saving land from development. Tercek, who often speaks of “big-tent environmentalism,” praises the states’ work, pointing out that the Nature Conservancy still sequesters more land “than anyone.” Since he became chairman, he is quick to observe, the Nature Conservancy has protected another twenty-five million acres. His innovative work, he emphasizes, “is ‘in addition to.’ . . . The beauty of the new stuff is it doesn’t take very much money.”
Colombia is a good place to see the new stuff, and in December I joined Tercek on a visit there. The country is poised for growth and international investment: terrorism is receding, the drug war has largely been pushed to Mexico, and the FARC, the main insurgent group, is in peace negotiations with the government. Colombia is now projected to grow 4.7 per cent annually.
Nature can be helped by our careful stewardship, but it does even better when we leave it alone. During our visit, a Colombian Nature Conservancy naturalist drove me around the Valle del Cauca region and talked about what he had seen in previous years in the mountains to the south. “The FARC came there, the people disappeared, and the animals returned,” he mused. Until recently, it had been dangerous to travel the roads we were on, which traversed the most fertile valley in the country. The war had been good news for the region’s many frog and butterfly species.
Colombia’s new factories will need energy and water, and new homes will require power for lights and televisions. Tercek had come to Colombia, at the government’s invitation, because the state is looking for ways to generate that power. It has principally turned its attention toward what new conservationists would call an “undervalued natural asset”—its waterways. Two powerful rivers, the Río Cauca and the Río Magdalena, start in southern Colombia, join to form a vast floodplain, and meander into the Caribbean. In the era before highways, they offered the main route through the country; my driving companion remembered his grandfather telling of floating down the river all the way to a new job in Barranquilla, on the coast.
Dams are responsible for sixteen per cent of the world’s electricity. “Environmentalists generally hate dams, even though they’re clean energy,” Tercek told me. But dams have serious ecological consequences. More than half the world’s rivers are artificially interrupted, and this fragmentation causes huge die-offs of fish and changes local ecosystems. Dams remake coastlines and cause sedimentation in the wrong places; drowned vegetation releases a lot of methane.
Because Tercek is, above all, a pragmatist, he willingly engages with least-bad alternatives. He does not oppose genetically modified food, nuclear power, or fracking, hoping only to play a role in easing their environmental impacts. Colombia has proposed to build seventeen new dams, and has begun a major one at Ituango, which is on the main stem of the Río Cauca. The country has a significant history of environmental activism; roughly ten per cent of its territory is national parkland. For some local environmental organizations, the eventuality of a blockaded river system is unacceptable. They see a missed opportunity: according to a 2010 World Bank report, Colombia’s wind-power availability is “among the best in South America,” and the country has great potential for both biomass and solar energy. There have been protests at an unfinished dam at Sosomango, where fishermen and local farmers feel that their livelihoods are threatened. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has called for an investigation into the recent murder of a leader of Movimiento Ríos Vivos Antioquia, which opposes the construction of the Ituango dam.
Nevertheless, the Nature Conservancy has agreed to consult on the dams. Tercek found the decision easy: the dams are likely to be built no matter what, and even wind and solar power have drawbacks. “We work in a gray place,” Tercek says. “You have to accept some ambiguity.” Although this all sounds reasonable, it can seem strange that the Nature Conservancy is supporting a very large intervention in a delicate water system, especially given that, in the States, it is celebrated for its efforts to remove dams. Colombia ranks second in the world in biodiversity, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and classical biodiversity biologists do not support more dams. In October, 2013, Michael Soulé warned against them in Conservation Biology, noting that “the globalization of intensive economic activity has accelerated the frenzied rush for energy and raw materials and is devouring the last remnants of the wild, largely to serve the expanding, affluent, consumer classes in industrialized and developing nations.”
No ground had been broken on many of the proposed dams, but Tercek and his colleagues were getting involved already, because they knew from experience that if they waited to be consulted it might be too late. They wanted to offer advice on how and where to build, so that the dams would disrupt as little as possible. Tercek came to Bogotá the day after he attended a benefit dinner in Miami. He immediately met with technocrats who are involved in making decisions about Colombia’s waterways. He noticed that the ministry dedicated to the environment was also the ministry for economic development, and drew a didactic point from it: “Fine, you can be on your biodiversity kick,” he told me. “But good luck getting the attention of the decision-makers in Colombia.” He next sat down with the official administering Colombia’s multimillion-dollar climate-adaptation fund, for which the Nature Conservancy consults. The fund will resettle populations, restore wetlands, and make other decisions that affect both livelihoods and nature. The visit confirmed Tercek’s belief in the importance of good data. “We better really accelerate our science, because these are big bets we are making,” he said. “People’s lives are at stake. We better be right.”
The next day, Tercek, in khakis and a golf cap, toured several projects in the countryside, accompanied by the Nature Conservancy’s Colombian staff. They looked not at large swaths of undeveloped land but at human-occupied property that had been misused in the past. First, they went to see El Hatico, a cattle ranch near Cali, that is pioneering sustainable husbandry in the midst of vast sugarcane fields. The owners’ innovation was simple: by planting trees and grasses, they helped the land stay cooler, which meant that the cattle needed less water. One member of Tercek’s entourage pointed out that this “three-thousand-year-old knowledge” had been forgotten. As Tercek walked along, the well-fed cattle eyed him, content in what looked like overgrown prairie rather than denuded pasture. They stretched their muzzles upward, like giraffes, to eat from bushes and trees. Coconut leaves had been laid on the ground, concave side up, to capture moisture. Tercek was impressed. “Does this really work?” he asked the owners, whose ancestors started the ranch in the eighteenth century. He stood under a huge ceiba tree. “See how comfortable this is?” the clan’s grandfather told Tercek. “Cattle like this, too.”
On a tiled veranda, one of the ranchers, Carlos Hernando Molina, launched a slide presentation on his laptop showing how ecologically friendly El Hatico had become. Even though the cattle ranch was in a dry semitropical zone, it no longer had to pipe in water. Tercek perked up when he heard that profits had increased under the new regimen, and was thrilled to learn that the surrounding sugarcane growers were beginning to follow the ranch’s example of using cut-down stalks to fertilize the land instead of burning them. Tercek asked how the project could be “scaled up.” El Hatico occupies around twenty acres; the sugarcane growers tend half a million. He held out the possibility of impact-investment money and emerged excited. “They were hardly trendy people who go to TED conferences,” he told me afterward. “The old grandfather seemed immensely proud.”
Next, we drove about ten miles into the foothills of the Central Cordillera, to an area called El Bolo, where some of the water used by the sugarcane growers originates. The issue was how to capture more storm runoff for farming. Wooded upland areas retain rainwater longer and release it more slowly, lessening the need for pumped-in water downstream. For the past three years, the sugar growers contributed to a water fund that paid hilltop farmers to return parts of their land to forest. The water came downhill more gradually, and the sugarcane planters now had lower water costs. Tercek admired this virtuous circle, and he wanted to expand it. Over lunch at a local restaurant, he suggested that the water fund might borrow against future revenues to scale up the planting more quickly. “That’s a classic ‘me’ intervention,” he said. But it turned out that the growers’ contributions were voluntary and impossible to securitize.
We next went to a small river where, along an embankment wall, an oversized gauge measured how much water and sediment levels had changed since upstream farmers began their planting program. Tercek, excited to see hard data being collected in the field, asked a staffer to take a photograph.
The standard history of the Nature Conservancy, published in 2005, is titled “Nature’s Keepers.” Last year, Tercek published a book called “Nature’s Fortune.” Clearly aimed at business executives, it asserts, “Every farmer knows you should not eat your seed corn, and every banker knows you should not spend your principal. Yet that is exactly what we are doing. . . . Natural capital is not inexhaustible.”
When the Nature Conservancy collaborates with corporations, its reports assess the economic impact of the project, the environmental impact, and the effect on the common good. If Dow saves money by planting a thousand acres of trees and buying fewer smokestack scrubbers, there’s a benefit to Dow, to the local birds, and to Dow’s human neighbors. There is an obvious limitation to this approach: business logic often doesn’t line up with green logic. In Freeport, planting trees turned out to be a viable alternative to modifying smokestacks. But what if it hadn’t? When I asked Tercek about this, he said, “I don’t think you can persuade me that learning things can ever be bad.” He sounded like the well-intentioned Walter Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” an activist who leaves the Nature Conservancy for a more agile and less scrupulous group that is willing to use the money from surface-mining rights to fund bird sanctuaries.
Tercek’s optimistic salesmanship—“Investing in nature is a great deal” is one of many slogans in his book—and his reluctance to challenge people baffles many environmentalists. Being a conservationist is different from being, say, a chemist. “It is emotional,” the seventy-seven-year-old Soulé told me. “At my age and stage, I don’t mind admitting I’ve just always been in love with wild nature.” Michael Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has pointed out that when you put a price on something you change your relationship to it. Mostly, you weaken the bond, making it contingent, even dispensable, if the terms are good enough. Although the new conservationism claims that it can expand the pool of environmentalists, it’s hard to imagine thousands marching in the name of Tercek’s apps.
Henry Paulson pointed out to me that many companies are ahead of the government in their environmental thinking. Dow accepts climate change as a fact, whereas almost half the Texas congressional delegation does not. Yet there’s something dubious about trusting the main forces behind ecological ruin to reverse it. Dow and Coca-Cola and Rio Tinto, to name three Nature Conservancy partners, are motivated not by public spirit but by a survival instinct. If business goals overlap with ecological impulses, so much the better, but if they don’t, most companies will continue on a polluting path. This leaves little room for conservationists to operate. Recently, Tercek wrote an editorial on climate change for the Conservancy’s magazine. He considered it “pretty banal, hardly radical,” but some of his red-state trustees were unhappy and requested a meeting. “My guess is some of the trustees will be so uncomfortable they’ll leave,” Tercek said.
Business may be more efficient than government, but it is less suited to upholding principles. Dow may be now working happily with the Nature Conservancy—and I did not doubt that the employees I met wanted to make it a greener corporation—but it’s still doing harm to nature. According to the most recent E.P.A. data, Dow’s Freeport plant remains the ninth-highest emitter of bromine, the eighth-highest emitter of chlorine, the fifth-highest of cumene, and the sixth-highest of hexachloroethane, which causes cancer in mice.
While I was in Colombia, I realized that I had never really looked at a dam. A small one, built in the nineteen-sixties, sits at a strategic point on the Río Calima, about an hour away from Cali. In 2011, FARC guerrillas killed a police officer there, but when I arrived at the facility a guard seemed happy to have company. A local man stood by him, his poncho draped over his left shoulder.
Dams are curious things when you see them up close; their impact on the environment is not as obvious as that of a chemical plant. Many dams are silent, and once construction is done the intruders disappear and nature seems to return. Clouds scudded just above a set of high-voltage wires, which conveyed electricity from unseen turbines to Cali and beyond. I stood on a small road atop a fifty-foot-high embankment, the structure below me largely invisible. “Become part of the countryside without leaving a trace,” a faded roadside sign commanded, in Spanish.
To my left was Lago Calima. Windsurfers were enjoying this artificial lake, and second homes were creeping up the surrounding mountains. To my right, just past a few shacks and a small athletic field, was an astonishingly lush ravine. Although it looked primeval, it was altered land: this was where the river had flowed, uninterrupted, for thousands of years. Quereme flowers, mano de osos, flores de mayo, and scrub trees cascaded down the ravine, a natural wonder that was not natural at all. ♦
