On keeping one’s heart in the land

Such preservation, at bottom, is one of the deepest symbols of our humanity.

– Rushworth M. Kidder

In world-scale events, the year 2005 was worse than the cruelest April. People suffered hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, suicide bombings, wars, insurgencies.

Fortunately, the misery toll has called forth record outpourings of charity, as with 9-11 and other wholesale tragedies. Philanthropy, which means “love of humankind generally,” continuously affirms the best of human character.

We have also witnessed generosity’s opposite – venality and epic greed – particularly in the business and government sectors. “The world is too much with us; late and soon, /Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” Wordsworth wrote. “Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Which is to say you can’t function in any charitable enterprise unless you are a natural optimist. Take conservation, the cause I know best.

Nonprofit conservation organizations see generosity every day in the form of monetary and property gifts and volunteerism. This is all the more remarkable because these organizations sell nothing tangible. They sell an idea: “Help us protect an asset you can’t take home.”

Yes, you might receive a magazine that explains how your donations are used, gins you up with beautiful photographs, and reminds you of the outstanding natural resources at stake in Maine and elsewhere. But these charities send few gewgaws or fancy premiums, and no stock certificates. Mostly they send more funding requests. Yet you give.

From 31 years in nonprofits, I have learned that a person’s impulse to contribute involves fine subsurface calibrations. When awful things happen globally or domestically that knock you dumb, the charitable impulse goes for stability, like roiled water finding its place of natural repose. Thus an ordinary individual answers colossal tragedy with immediate giving from a modest pool of resources, but the same person calmly remembers the claim of the future.

In conservation, such generosity extends a public land and water legacy left by prior

oresight. (The legacy model is true of many other charitable causes as well.)

In his book “How Good People Make Tough Choices” (1995), ethicist Rushworth M. Kidder, founder of The Institute for Global Ethics, in Camden, wrote: “No other species is gifted with such capacity for rational foresight and long-range planning. To defer immediate gratification for the sake of offspring we will never see is an intensely human act: To plant oaks beside your house on the frontier, knowing that a century later they will shade your great-grandchildren, is to show conscious respect for an environmental future in ways no other species can.”

If all philanthropy were drawn urgently and massively to humanity’s greatest single need until that need was utterly erased, we’d have a worse world than before. That’s because problems don’t queue up in serial fashion, one solved, ten thousand to go. The ten thousand would fester and multiply. So ethics cannot be serial, either.

The brainwaves that drive charitable impulse are always multi-tasking the issues, calculating a rapid response to mercy missions while not forsaking longer-haul causes. That is charity’s three-point equilibrium: a donor recognizes the abject suffering of people in crisis, the wisdom to keep self-enrichment from becoming overweening, and the value of social investments that may not be repaid in one’s lifetime except as psychic income. Giving is a means by which a person remains rooted, balanced and full hearted on a planet that sometimes seems to have no stable axis.

Despite the upheavals of 2005 that might reasonably have called your generosity completely away from the land, you supporters of conservation in Maine – who number in the scores of thousands – have kept this cause within your charitable compass, to the benefit of a still magnificent landscape. Those of us in nonprofit land protection thank you. You exemplify the optimism of Kidder’s words: “Conservation … is not simply a luxury we can overlook if we choose. It is part and parcel of our very humanity.”

You see much in nature that is yours – and much that belongs to unknown others.

Ken Olson is retiring in 2006 after a decade as president of Friends of Acadia, which has raised $17 million in private endowments to benefit Acadia National Park. In 2005 he received an honorary degree in human ecology from College of the Atlantic and a Lifetime Achievement award from the Natural Resources Council of Maine.