Community, Culture and Conservation: Forging Ahead

I write this blog entry on a sunny afternoon, serenaded by the sound of a vacuum and the scratching of dog paws racing to flee the sucking onslaught of our wooden floors. I have a smidge more time for writing and reflecting since I shifted my role at The Tributary Fund from Executive Director to President/Founder. And now I am in the process of writing my dissertation.


My studies are focused on the roles of religion and science in western culture. It is an immense topic and one that keeps me busy but fascinated. My research has helped to better understand the origins, function, and impact of The Tributary Fund model. Stephen Jay Gould, eminent evolutionary biologist, saw religion and science as non-overlapping magisteria—realms that could reside independently, even compatibly, without interfering with each other. A self-professed agnostic, Gould felt that Abrahamic religions ask that one have faith in the unknown, while science seeks to empirically discover the unknown. Science and religion are both human constructs aimed at understanding our universe and both define our modern perspectives of the world in which we live.


The Tributary Fund works within three fundamental arenas: culture, community and conservation. We understand that culture is a result of layers of influence, including environment, economic opportunities, religion, colonialist influences, education, politics, and generational experiences. Communities are groups of people who live together, sharing a common culture, a set of values, and behaviors. The modern concept of conservation has arisen from our relatively recent understanding of the finite. Water, wildlife, and vegetation are sensitive to over-harvest, climate change, and habitat destruction. The threat of collapse has been made clear through the science of conservation biology, but response to this threat and subsequent behavioral changes haven’t yet permeated the cultures of many communities throughout the world. As we work to protect taimen, trees, or even tigers, we know that people are more likely to change bad habits as communities, together shifting to sustainable traditions and practices,


I read in today’s Wall Street Journal that people are better conservationists through tactics of shame and peer pressure. We all know religion is great at encouraging guilt! But people are social animals and behaviors are changed when leaders adopt new values for others to follow. Local poaching of elk, taimen, and musk deer has virtually stopped in the Eg-Uur because the nomads have their eyes on one another. A herder who killed a snow leopard in Bhutan on the Tibetan border is in jail because neighbors turned him in due to the fear of bad karma. In Washington DC, clean-up crews picked up 66% fewer plastic bags because grocery stores have customers ask for plastic sacks instead of automatically providing them. Community and culture come in all shapes and sizes: in schools, churches, even at the corner store. As science changes our understanding of the world, culture, as forged by everyone from Aristotle to Augustine to Darwin, must adjust to maintain the long-term viability of our oceans, forests, rivers and wildlife.Betsy Gaines Quammen