In this time of peril and anxiety, we at Southern Conservation Partners offer our best wishes for health and security to our community of friends, supporters,website visitors, and all stewards of nature. None of us know the forthcoming full dimensions and consequences of the expanding pandemic on our society, on the economy, on our own families and loved-ones. The quarantines, travel curtailment, and cancellations further stress and isolate us. We can only hope for recovery and return to better health and sensibility.
            The current global human health, economic, and political crises—and the cascading deterioration of the Earth’s biota and ecosystems generated by our altered global climate—hopefully give us pause and cause for reflection and sincere thought about how we humans are profoundly interconnected with the health of our Earth’s environment and its support systems. A central lesson to be learned or reinforced is to more keenly realize the interconnections among us humans and with the natural world.
            We recommend that you and your family and loved ones find solace and inspiration outside in nature. Without access to most of our regular activities—with our work places, schools, restaurants, stores, museums, public libraries closed—try to increase your time in nature. Find outdoor recreation and restoration of spirit in a local park, walk a trail, bike a greenway, paddle on a favorite pond or stream, cultivate and expand your home garden and native wildlife-friendly plantings.
            It’s extraordinary to step outside and reconnect with nature. You will find solace and satisfaction and peace in the “wild places” that are immediately close by. Nature and wild things around us offer to stitch back together the health of our planet and communities—the place we know as Home.
            Take a pledge in these unsettled times to be a better friend of nature and better citizen of your whole human and natural community.  Slow down, breath deeply (best done on a natural trail or even in your own backyard),  and recommit to preserving and restoring wild and natural places.  And help your neighbors and community to survive and recover. Keep on fighting the battles for right thinking and actions. Be hopeful and contribute to making your community and country and Earth more healthy and resilient.
            Now step outside into your own piece of nature!
[And if the weather or time isn’t right for outside spiritual restoration, we suggest you add reading more of our website’s Viewpoint essays, along with re-reading from your stockpile of favorite inspirational books at home or on the internet.]                                             —Chuck Roe, president, Southern Conservation Partners

We post below excerpts from an essay by Paul Kingsnorth titled "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist," which appears in a 2017 collection of essays of the same title. Kingsnorth is a Brit and cofounder of the Dark Mountain Project, a global network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of “new stories for a world on the brink.” We found the following words to be remarkably thought-provoking. Please visit Kingsnorth’s website and consider buying and reading his books. And let us know what you think!

“I became an ‘environmentalist’ because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places and the world beyond the human. . . . But these are not, I think, very common views today. Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. In this country, most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called ‘sustainability.’ What does this curious, plastic word mean?  <<continued . . . >> 

Nick Haddad, previously a professor of ecology at NC State University and presently senior ecologist with the W.K Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan, recently authored a fascinating and thought-provoking book, The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature (Princeton University Press, 2019). His quest involved determining which of half-a-dozen butterfly species is most at risk of extinction—regrettably, most of them barely clinging to survival in southern U.S. habitats. <<continued....>>

​Populations of the world’s wild animals have fallen by more than 50 percent in recent decades and humanity is to blame. The popular news magazine, THE WEEK, reported on February 22, 2019, that the swelling human population (now 7.5 billion and mushrooming) has already had devastating impacts on the Earth’s wildlife. We’ve driven thousands of species to the edge of extinction through habitat loss, overfishing and hunting, trophy animal collection, introduction of harmful invasive species, toxic pollution, and climate change. Over the past 40 years, the number of wild animals–mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and marine life–have plunged by 50 percent. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that populations of higher-order vertebrate animal species have decreased by an average of 60 percent since 1970.   <<continued . . .>>

This year, with clear evidence that the Trump Administration is jeopardizing many U.S. environmental conservation and protection programs and policies, with hugely damaging consequences, Gary E. Machlis, former National Park Service science advisor (and Clemson University professor of environmental sustainability), and Jonathan B. Jarvis, retired NPS career professional and national director from 2009 to 2017, co-authored an important and inspirational book. The Future of Conservation in America: a Chart for Rough Water (University of Chicago Press) asserts that we are in a period of “rough water,” affecting many environmental assets and conservation programs. The authors identify three major environmental and social threats (and the dangerous irresponsibility of denying them) confronting America: climate change, species extinction, and economic inequality. Actions are required to navigate through the very rough waters facing us. It is essential to assure that the conservation movement is understood by Americans (and especially by young people) as critically relevant to public health and interest. A general re-commitment to environmental conservation and protection is necessary.  <<continued>>

With ecological systems being altered and assaulted at unprecedented scale and rate, it is time to increase our focus on ecological restoration and renewal. Our fragile ecological systems in the southern U.S. and across the entire Earth are damaged and imperiled. Preservation and conservation are not enough; we need to work more intensively to restore abused ecological systems and natural habitats.
    In an essay by conservation biologist and Aldo Leopold biographer Curt Meine, re-published in the summer 2018 issue of The Leopold Outlook, the author reminds us that the relationship between humans and the world is reciprocal. “As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us.”
    Meine recalls that Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife conservation in America and pioneering figure in ecological restoration in the 1930s and 40s, noted that “Conservation, viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.” Meine observes, “Conservation has evolved continually over the last century in response to the complex realities of social and environmental change. . . . Now, however, conservation finds itself caught in an intense and persistent vortex. Much of the debate involves our understanding of ecosystem change, the human role in affecting those changes, and the perils and potential of new technologies to respond to change.”  <<Continued>>