Charles  G. Curtin

Charles G. Curtin

Charles G. Curtin is a senior fellow for the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy on the University of Montana campus in Missoula. In his work he seeks the nexus of science and policy, with a long-term interest in environmental change, large-scale socioecological experiments, and conservation design. His work focuses primarily on community-based conservation and restoration of rangeland ecosystems; he helped design some of the largest place-based collaborative research programs on the continent, including the million-acre Malpai Borderlands conservation area and cross-site studies spanning the Intermountain West. He has also worked with fisheries policy and co-management through development of the 750,000-square-mile Downeast Initiative in the Western Atlantic and anadromous fish restorations on the coast of Maine. He has helped established academic programs in governance and policy design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Antioch University with a focus on collaborative approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Curtin has also worked internationally, coordinating large-landscape collaborative conservation projects in the Mexico, East Africa, and the Middle East.

Photo credit: Flock/bandada by Flickr.com user Rafael Edwards

Breaking Down the Human-Environment Barrier

While sitting in a board meeting of the Great Northern Large Landscape Cooperative recently the perennial question came up of if the organization that was working on a vast landscape from Yellowstone National Park to northern Canada needed more biological or social science in their program development. As I reflected on the question the answer came to me that my response would be that we need more of neither.
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Conservation in a world of uncertainty and change

What does it mean to conserve is an era of ever growing rates of cultural, social, and ecological change? One dictionary definition of conservation I found defined it as the act of preserving, guarding, or protecting. But what does one guard or protect when gone is the certainty that even a particular habitat, species, park or preserve will remain viable in the relatively near future (next 100 or so years). What does that mean for how we conceive of conservation?