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The Public as Agents of Policy: Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project
From this document:
Abstract:
"Looking at landscape alteration as the basic evidence of human activity is a far more effective technique for capturing policy change than relying on written laws or formal policy documents. Changes on the land are generally vernacular—driven from the ground up—and such changes are a sophisticated barometer of policy need and local ideology. Accepting the vernacular environment as a basic analytical unit has an added advantage; it bonds scientific investigations and expert efforts at establishing baselines to the visible and concrete expressions of human artifice in material culture. Although policy periods are often ossified into dated eras as a simple bounding device and a historical convenience, concern with the evolution of landscape—something that is much akin to “an ecosystem”—requires accepting different, especially physical and cultural, evidence. Vernacular policy is fashioned by local people to meet their everyday needs for order and resource exploitation, and to protect residents and landscape. Because policy throughout much of the Sierra is at best inchoate, the biggest contributor to policy has been official and administrative abstinence and abdication. Yet policy by inattention and inaction paradoxically is an active form of policy making, and inaction is not always picked up in a formal policy analysis or history; these are, after all, generally produced by policy analysts, economists, or historians, who are most comfortable evaluating written fact rather than changes on the land. The advantage of landscape-level studies is that they examine the substance of change, regardless of the initiator. Ultimately, there are dual authorities, producers of quite different kinds of landscape change: the influential establishment forces and the vernacular “doers.” These two vessels for policy assessment, and their direct implications for the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, are examined."
"The basic task for this chapter is to look at the Sierra Nevada ecosystem from a geographer’s perspective, focusing impressionistically on a single, policy-based question, “how did it get to be this way?”
public policy, landscape modification, landscape change, policy-rangeland, Taylor Grazying Act, policy-wildlife, policy-mining, policy-forests, policy-water, existence value (biodiversity)
June 01, 1996 02:00 AM
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