The Return of Uncertainty: Public Lands in an Increasingly Unpredictable World

BY LAURA ALICE WATT

In October 2019, my campus at Sonoma State University experienced an epidemic of uncertainty. Repeating cycles of fire weather—high winds, low humidity, and warmer than usual temperature—triggered two massive public safety shutdowns of electricity across much of California, timed about two weeks apart. Both outages lasted for several days for most customers, and for some as long as a week or more. During the second shutdown, a wildfire already broken out in northern Sonoma County drove evacuations of nearly two hundred thousand residents, fearing a repeat of October 2017’s destructive Nuns and Tubbs fires or November 2018’s Camp fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in the Sierra foothills. Faculty, staff, and students from Sonoma State were among those who scrambled to get out of the potential fire’s path, ending up as farflung as San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

Once the huge mobilization of firefighters from across the state got a handle on the Kincade blaze and our utility company PG&E began “reactivating” neighborhoods, we slowly returned to our homes and, as the anxiety levels subsided, resumed the fall semester. Many classes had missed at least two weeks of meeting times, and the disruption of repeatedly stopping and starting instruction so abruptly meant the loss of even more valuable in-class time; instructors found themselves needing to cut up to a quarter of the semester’s material from their syllabi, as well as to find ways of bringing their rattled students’ attention back to the course, all while maintaining academic integrity and rigor. And this was not the first time; for three years in a row now, October and November have brought campus closures due to wildfire and poor air quality from smoke. Looking forward, Sonoma State faculty and students are now reluctant to plan any conferences or special events during these months and are looking for strategies for adapting our syllabi to the “new normal” of not only a volatile and heightened fire danger in autumn, but also the new strategy of preemptive power blackouts to address that risk. With classes structured increasingly around online learning management systems and assigning pdfs to read instead of actual books, any power outage brings instruction to a screeching halt, often for days on end.

As an environmental historian focused mainly on public lands in the American West, I am increasingly considering how unpredictability in the face of a changing climate is forcing us to adapt in ways we may not foresee. But I have also been thinking about the presumption of predictability—the astonishment of some of my neighbors and colleagues that shutting off electricity could be an acceptable solution to wildfire risk! Electricity has become almost as essential to modern life as water or oxygen, and its sudden removal seemed to some to be almost as severe a deprivation. And this presumption extends to many people’s sense of the natural world around them—that ecosystems ought to be stable through time, and that natural disasters like wildfires or floods are abnormal events that, if only we could find the “right” solutions, could be avoided with better management.

It could be argued that our public safety shutdowns fit the definition of a “first-world problem” if ever there was one. Amitav Ghosh has observed that while “power failures, for instance, are so rare in advanced countries that they often cause great disruption . . . In many parts of the global south, breakdowns are a way of life, and everybody is used to improvisations and work-arounds.” 1 This kind of predictability is also a historically specific assumption; as historian John McNeil has chronicled, across the twentieth century, especially post–World War II, the harnessing of fossil fuels and other technological innovations allowed many societies to expand beyond historical constraints on both growth and consumption. 2 These accomplishments created an impression that greater certainty was actually possible, where our inventions and economic growth have made predictability seem “normal”—when really it has been highly abnormal for most of human history. 3 Now climate change is bringing wider swings of unpredictability back into the mix; bigger swings than either our current infrastructure (hence shutting half of California’s grid down is a “better” solution than the risk of catastrophic wildfire), public policy and legal frameworks, or cultural expectations of certainty can accommodate.

And the issue is not just wildfires in California, but wildfires exploding across the entire West. It is also more damaging hurricanes in the South, 4 proliferations of white-tailed deer helping to spread Lyme disease in the Northeast, 5 and sea level rise on all the coastlines. 6 Similar increases in extreme events are breaking out across the globe, like the brushfires that, at the time of this writing, are torching a vast swath of Australia.

In his new book on the politics of climate change, Bruno Latour writes about the collective sense of vertigo, or panic, that humans seem to be experiencing, “owing to the fact that the ground is giving way beneath everyone’s feet at once, as if we all felt attacked everywhere, in our habits and in our possessions.” 7 Unpredictability is becoming increasingly predictable—and yet represents something of a challenge to much public lands management, which for the past hundred years has been heavily influenced by two flawed concepts: that the natural world has an innate stability and balance, and that the “true” nature exists separately from human influence.

Uncertainty has not always seemed so unusual in nature. George Perkins Marsh, considered by many as the progenitor of conservation thought with publication of his book Man and Nature in 1864, expressed what David Lowenthal described as a “humbling awareness of uncertainty,” particularly contrasted with present-day attitudes: “Unlike most modern environmentalists, Marsh had come to terms with nature’s ‘baffling complexity, its inherent unpredictability, its daily turbulence.’” 8 More recently, in 1990 biologist Daniel Botkin wrote that when looking at ecological evidence, “we find that nature undisturbed is not constant in form, structure, or proportion, but changes at every scale of time and space. The old idea of a static landscape, like a single musical chord sounded forever, must be abandoned, for such a landscape never existed except in our imagination.” 9

Yet most scientists in the then–new field of ecology in the early twentieth century, such as Frederick Clements, while embracing Marsh’s idea of “man the disturbing agent,” abandoned the inherent uncertainty that Marsh saw in the natural world, describing nature instead as predictably transforming over time toward stable climax states. They also overlooked the previous presence, and wildly underestimated the influence, of native Americans and their land management practices; in part due to racist attitudes of the time, indigenous peoples were exempted from having been disturbing agents, and instead were presumed to be part of nature’s innate harmony. 10 The metaphor of balance was written into the very definition of ecosystems in Eugene and Howard Odum’s classic textbook in the 1950s, Fundamentals of Ecology, used as a basic text for decades. 11 And the first sentence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which contributed greatly to the popularization of ecological concepts in the 1960s, reinforced the perceived stability of the natural world, introducing a town “in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” only to be blighted by the disappearance of birds due to DDT. 12 While more recent ecologists such at Botkin have rejected the “balance of nature” notion, it remains remarkably persistent in general public attitudes about the environment.

Similarly, the preservation movement, most represented by John Muir and enshrined in the 1916 establishment of the National Park Service, aimed at preserving landscapes for scenic enjoyment of generations to come, or fifty years later as wilderness areas, defined in 1964 as places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 13 Preservationist attitudes presume that if the disturbing agents are removed from the picture, except as observers, nature will prevail harmoniously in perpetuity—just as Clements’ vision of plant succession inevitably led to climax states that, if undisturbed, would remain in place indefinitely. This “nature as stable balance, humans as disturbers” ethos also informs the 1970s-era laws and policies that govern U.S. public lands, written when this more simplistic—and static—conception of nature still held sway.

A modern presumption of certainty underlies a huge number of decision-making processes that we take for granted, and increasingly can lead us astray. For example, in his essay “Climate and Capital,” historian Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses how the dominance of probabilistic thinking in modern life inhibits economists’ and policy makers’ abilities to confront the uncertainties associated with climate change, which he describes as “inherently unknowable.” 14 Similarly, Ghosh observes that 2012’s Hurricane Sandy “was an event of such a high degree of improbability that it confounded statistical weather-prediction models,” and because risk models are also based on probabilities, officials underestimated the threat and thus delayed emergency responses. 15

Yet almost all public lands planning and associated environmental impacts analysis is also based on probabilities—on what likely outcomes of this or that action in the landscape might cause. The U.S. National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) requires federal agencies to complete environmental assessments (EAs) before taking any major action that might cause substantial impacts to the environment, including major planning documents; in cases where environmental impacts are considered likely, agencies are required to issue a formal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Choosing environmental baselines for any such analysis has always involved an element of arbitrariness, depending on the circumstances in which the baseline is determined—for example, the Colorado River Compact’s initial allocation of water rights in the 1920s happened during an unusually wet period, meaning the river’s output has been chronically overallocated ever since. 16 NEPA was designed to require a “no action” alternative to establish a current-conditions baseline, yet that presumes that current conditions are stable and unchanging, and that environments will respond in predictable ways to changed circumstances. How can we write public lands management plans, and their associated NEPA compliance documents, when future western landscapes will be riddled with more and more unlikely events? Particularly because EISs also usually take years to complete—the Council on Environmental Quality’s recent analysis found an average time of four and a half years across all federal agencies. 17 With such lengthy completion times, it is entirely possible that fast-changing circumstances and/or wide swings of variability could alter the environmental analysis between the start and end of the process—but this procedure-based law is not designed for a world full of environmental uncertainty, so there is no mechanism for correction.

Similarly, species will increasingly be evolving in response to climate changes, such as shifting territories and/or adapting their behaviors, yet the Endangered Species Act (ESA) may have a hard time keeping up. 18 This law, signed in 1973, takes a list-based approach to protecting ecosystems, listing species as threatened or endangered and barring “take” in various forms of harm. Yet the law, and its implementation through habitat conservation planning, has not adapted easily to a more landscape-based scale of management. 19 Peter Alagona’s excellent book After the Grizzly chronicles how many rare species are already behaving in some unexpected ways—like endangered San Joaquin kit foxes maintaining a stable population in downtown Bakersfield, yet struggling in nearby protected areas. Alagona argues that most endangered species management relies on the presumption that protected areas offer the best value for science and conservation when maintained in their “original” condition, yet the results of this approach are mixed, in part because all protected areas are “legally bounded but ecologically porous.” 20 A recent essay by Jack Ward Thomas, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service during the Clinton administration, finds that two decades of management for the northern spotted owl has “revealed problems with the underlying logic,” as the ESA did not include any recognition of the constant evolutionary pressures and processes that most species and ecosystems face. 21

To avoid misinterpretation of this essay, I want to be clear: I am not advocating for abandoning any of these important laws. Instead, the challenge will be to interpret or amend these laws and policies to adjust to the changing environment—often changing in ways that cannot easily be foreseen by land managers or planners. In his most recent book, Botkin has come to a similar conclusion, arguing that major environmental laws that focus on species—he cites the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act—could be more effective “if they could take into account the non-steady-state character of nature.” 22 I would add that laws requiring land management planning would also benefit from a more thorough reconciliation both of the inherent unpredictability of natural processes—particularly under the strain of climate change—and also the fact that, at least for the last ten thousand years on the American continents, nature and humans have never been as separate and distinct as has too frequently been presumed.

And, of course, environmental history can help; useful lessons can be gleaned from an earlier era when certainty and predictability were far less of a reasonable expectation. The best environmental histories can remind us of nature’s unpredictability, and of the ways in which adapting to changing conditions in turn drives unexpected cultural shifts as well. For example, in Andrew Isenberg’s accounting of the Destruction of the Bison, everything is in flux—the Great Plains’ grassland environment was inherently volatile and dynamic, with wide swings in the location and volume of rainfall, game animals, and predators in a given year. After Europeans’ introduction of the horse, infectious diseases, and the fur trade, some native peoples adapted by becoming nomadic and increasingly dependent on bison hunting. 23 Most of these shifts were driven by people’s attempts to overcome unpredictability, yet Isenberg argues that one can only see the region’s history clearly with recognition of the inherent dynamism and instability of both the Plains ecosystem and the social systems interacting with it, in which societies adapted to uncertainty while at the same time driving further ecological and cultural changes.

Similarly, my colleague Margaret Purser, a historical archeologist, describes many mid-late nineteenth-century western settlers as “boomsurfers,” actively migrating from one boom to the next and living opportunistically in an uncertain economic environment. Their ability to “surf” to new economic opportunities was entirely dependent on both adaptable materials and flexible social institutions. 24 Purser argues that what may appear in the archeological record to be anachronistic attachment to older technologies (which could be more easily modified or repaired) or frequent relocation of settlements actually points to the “ubiquity of material impermanence as a deliberate strategy” to ameliorate uncertainty. 25 For example, Purser’s excavations of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century river landings in the Sacramento River delta reveal farmers repeatedly rebuilt “brush landings,” consisting of a few wooden pilings with orchard prunings and other brushy material filled in behind. These structures would be washed away by each winter’s flood cycle but were cheap to reconstruct; investing in sturdier and more expensive materials meant facing a similar risk of washout at much greater cost. She emphasizes that “this impermanence had nothing to do with [a lack of ] intention to stay”; the same landing sites were used year after year by the same families, built adaptively to conform with the particular patterns of change along the river. 26 By accepting impermanence and presuming that the unusual, the extreme, or the unpredictable would eventually come along, these settlers were able to persist in the face of environmental and economic variability.

Yet many ideals about nature, heritage, and public lands in the United States, particularly in our national parks system, run in the opposite direction—we tend to value permanence and consistency over time, imagine nature as possessing an inherent balance and stability, and celebrate wilderness as pristine natural areas untouched by humans, except as visitors. The preservation ethos of keeping everything the same through time fundamentally does not fit a world of rampant unpredictability and is a relatively recent idea, one that presumes an ability to control change. 27 In reality, maintaining or returning to some state of natural purity is simply an assertion of control—a kind of control that has always been only a veneer and never actually possible, but had been presumed based on the perceived stability of nature since the early twentieth century, and particularly in the postwar era. Increasing environmental uncertainty contributes to stripping that veneer away. We need to relearn from our past history how to expect the unexpected and be adaptive in our approach to the environment and our relationships with it.

Public lands management increasingly needs to recognize not only the “naturalness” of change and unpredictability, but also of incorporating elements of the interdependence of humans and nature. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts, public lands lessees and their surrounding communities will likely need to “boomsurf” increasing environmental and economic instability in the coming decades more than ever—which is a poor fit with fixed and inflexible land management plans and lease terms. In my own work at Point Reyes National Seashore, I find that the resident ranchers within the park are, through an ongoing general management planning process, requesting greater flexibility to diversify their agricultural production, to be less dependent on the volatile dairy or beef markets, and better able to adapt their production to wet years or droughts. Yet many environmental advocates interpret these requests as expanding commercialization of parks or possibly threatening wildlife, while often turning a blind eye to the ways in which a hands-off management approach—by presuming that nature, left alone and without human interference, will naturally find its inherent balance—can actually exacerbate environmental problems, such as increasing fire risk or the spread of invasive species.

As one part of unlearning the presumption of certainty that underlies many of the laws and policies currently in force, federal agencies should place greater emphasis on the direct involvement of local communities, and particularly native peoples, in land management planning and practice. People who live on—and depend on—the land itself often have a much longer view of its environmental variability than federal employees do. Especially in areas with high staff turnover, there is a tendency to presume that the way the landscape looks now is the way it has always been. 28 Both the current international heritage management literature and U.S.-based discussions of public lands management emphasize the importance of including local voices and landscape knowledge into planning processes. 29 While other parts of the world seem to have a stronger sense of traditional land uses “belonging” in protected areas, in the United States, private land uses, even fairly sustainable ones, tend to be assumed to be diametrically opposed to environmental preservation. Over twenty years have passed since historian Richard White identified the need to reexamine the connections between work and nature: “If environmentalists segregate work from nature, if they create a set of dualisms where work can only mean the absence of nature and nature can only mean human leisure, then both humans and non-humans will ultimately be the poorer.” 30

Both working agricultural landscapes, such as those I study at Point Reyes, and native peoples’ long histories of working with nature in their traditional homelands underline the potential for human and natural coexistence in the face of uncertainty. The example set by the establishment of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, which included two advisory committees—one comprised of local stakeholders including elected officials, land owners, recreation users, and other residents, including tribes; the other composed exclusively of members of five nearby tribal groups with deep connections to the landscape—is one that should be emulated going forward. 31 We can no longer indulge our twentieth-century assumption that ecological sciences will provide predictability for public lands outcomes, and taking local communities’ knowledge and connection with public landscapes seriously can only help buffer their management in an increasingly uncertain world.

1 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 147.

2 J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

3 Human history since 1945 has been recently described as “the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere,” see J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 5.

4 Theodore Steinberg, “Do-It-Yourself Deathscape: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in South Florida,” Environmental History 2, no. 4 (1997): 414–38.

5 Bob Wilson, “From Noble Stag to Suburban Vermin: The Return of Deer to the Northeast United States,” in The American Environment Revisited: Environmental Historical Geographies of the United States, ed. Geoffrey L. Buckley and Yoland Youngs (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 39–55.

6 Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2018).

7 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 8.

8 David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 426, quoted from Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 170.

9 Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 62.

10 Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

11 Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), esp. chap. 4.

12 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 1.

13 The Wilderness Act of 1964, Public Law 88–577, 88th Cong., 2d sess. (September 3, 1964).

14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41 (Autumn 2014): 6.

15 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 25.

16 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 209.

17 “Environmental Impact Statement Timelines (2010– 2017),” Council of Environmental Quality, December 14, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads /2017/11/CEQ-EIS-Timelines-Report.pdf.

18 For details of the speed at which evolution can occur— much faster, particularly under changing conditions— than Darwin first identified, see Jonathan B. Losos, Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), esp. chap. 4.

19 Laura A. Watt, Leigh Raymond, and Meryl L. Eschen, “On Preserving Ecological and Cultural Landscapes,” Environmental History 9, no. 4 (2004): 620–47.

20 Peter S. Alagona, After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013), 8.

21 Jack Ward Thomas, “After Preservation—the Case of the Northern Spotted Owl,” in After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans, ed. Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 161.

22 Daniel B. Botkin, The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 342.

23 Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

24 Margaret Purser, “Boomtimes and Boomsurfers: Toward a Material Culture of Western Expansion,” in Historical Archeology through a Western Lens, ed. Mark Warner and Margaret Purser (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and the Society for Historical Archeology, 2017), 3–31.

25 Purser, 20.

26 Purser, 14.

27 Laura Alice Watt, The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), esp. chap. 1.

28 Watt.

29 See Susan Charnley, Thomas E. Sheridan, and Gary P. Nabhan, eds., Stitching the West Back Together: Conservation of Working Landscapes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

30 Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 174.

31 See Jedediah Purdy, “The Shape of Public-Lands Law and Trump’s National Monument Proclamations,” forthcoming in Ecology Law Quarterly, for a larger discussion of the implications of the 2017 revocation of part of the Bears Ears National Monument.