Ecological Boundaries as Community Boundaries: The Politics of Watersheds

Ecological boundaries are increasingly used as practical boundaries for land use planning. This shift requires new forms of community interaction and often new social institutions, such as special-purpose committees and boards, that cross traditional political jurisdictions. These institutions offer the promise of more coherent and holistic approaches, transforming problem-solving paradigms based on isolated issues and technical solutions into a search for solutions to necessarily interrelated problems. Building lasting social institutions, however, requires careful attention to political avenues for citizen involvement and representation. As centers of power and influence shift to accommodate a new sense of ecological boundaries, we must ask how this shift will affect our political rights. Certainly the urgency of resource conservation and protection militates for efficient action. But energizing new social responses to environmental problems at appropriate ecological scales, as positive as this may seem, must not bypass the necessity of reaffirming hard-won democratic freedoms.