28 Restoration: Creating Consensus

Each year, I listen to multiple talks addressing restoration while at a conference focused on the upper Mississippi River. For young presenters, restoration seems to be an almost Biblical before-the-fall concept, a Garden-of-Eden time before Europeans arrived and screwed up everything through destruction of wetlands and prairies, construction of dams, mass murder of indigenous species and peoples, and introduction of invasive species and agriculture. Seldom do they remember that the horses that Plains Indians rode are an invasive species brought by the Spanish, though they recognize the Spanish as invasive. But a long time ago, the Plains Indians were themselves an invasive species and before that, Homo sapiens radiated out of Africa to invade Europe, not a great time for Homo neanderthalensis.

All this talk of ice ages and invasive species leads to the question of whether there is a best time to restore things to. Mathematics seems to offer us the best objective standards upon which to base decisions, but that is an illusion. For example, Excel will perform a best fit of a line to a cloud of data points. Straightforward, eh? Anyone who has been through calculus can generate the equations, and anyone who has taken statistics can find the line, no Excel needed. But underlying the best in best-fit is an assumption about what best means. Generally, in math we mean a minimization of squared deviations—a least-squares approach. But why that? For a simple reason—it’s mathematically easier to find derivatives of squared deviations than the absolute value of deviations. But easy math (an oxymoron to some) is no justification.

I have been unable to find any example of best that doesn’t involve some sort of value judgement. I have a Christian-philosopher friend who argues otherwise, but ultimately, his statements shift to something based on faith. God created a world with objective truth at its foundation, providing guidelines for living that maximize human flourishing. And as best I can tell, the system holds together—if you accept the fundamentally religious foundation. (Perhaps accepting that religious foundation is why do so many conservatives love the 1950s.)

Unfortunately, I don’t accept the religious foundation. I say “unfortunately” because to do so would make much that follows a lot easier. However, I see the concept of best as socially constructed—humans made it up. Don’t get me wrong—that doesn’t devalue it, as far as I’m concerned. In fact, it makes it more precious and hard fought, generating consensus, at least for a short time, about what is important to our community. And that we choose to agree to abide by a community decision about best is humbling—we as a group think better than each individual. What an accomplishment it is if we can bring together environmentalists, accountants, libertarians, public health officials, stock brokers, the Corps of Engineers, hunters and fishermen, and all the others who might care about a little piece of wetland along the Mississippi River and hammer out an agreement on the way to manage it.

Consensus-building is not group-think, the sort of people-pleasing behavior I spent years in therapy and self-help groups dealing with. People-pleasers struggle with conformity, loss of creativity, and helping design camels that were meant to be horses. But people-pleasing is not consensus-building. In the Quaker college where I studied, I saw that consensus isn’t easy nor does it mean that we all agree. Nor is it a nimble way to make decisions and get ahead of the market. Building consensus is usually slow, sometimes tedious, and can be blocked by any individual who is unwilling to go along with the decision of the community. But going along does not mean agreeing with. It simply means a choice not to actively oppose the community’s decision nor to work against it once the decision is made. For me, it took years for that Quaker lesson to sink in.

At its root, building consensus is far more respectful of all views than a top down or even each-vote-counts approach. It guarantees each person is heard, their many diverse views carefully considered, and that the decision arrived at can be supported by the entire community. In the environmental field, we’re more likely to talk about interested parties or competing users than about diversity, but the concept is the same—get as many viewpoints as are available, consider as many people affected by a decision as possible, and work toward an agreement all can support. Diversity becomes a strength. And given today’s political climate, we must get people together to calmly discuss alternatives and agree on a path forward.