As I'm sure most of you are aware, Obama's transition team has put up the Citizen's Briefing Book, where people can propose policy ideas to be voted on, with the 'best' ideas rising to the top and eventually being put into the hands of policy makers. It's an excellent idea, but the structure of the site makes it hard for good ideas to rise on their own - you need both good ideas and good organizing to keep an idea from being completely buried.
This is where we come in...
The community here is an excellent source of bodies for both finding and voting for good ideas. My focus is on the environment and I have my own proposal that I'd like you all to consider, but any other good ideas that need support should definitely be pointed out in the comments.
Anyways, I'm first asking you to consider voting for my proposal, Nationally Coordinated Conservation and Restoration (a slightly modified and expanded version of a similar proposal that can be seen in my earlier diary). The full text of it goes like this:
Among the many challenges facing us today, one of the biggest (at least on the environmental side of things) is that of ecosystem destruction and fragmentation. Destruction of habitat has resulted in problems such as loss of biodiversity and made species and whole ecosystems much more vulnerable to additional changes, from global warming to invasive species, ultimately greatly contributing to the human-caused mass extinction event we are currently seeing.
To deal with this ecological crisis, we must engage in two basic activities:
- Conservation as we usually think about it, which means protecting existing threatened species or places, and
- Restoration of damaged ecosystems, thus creating more habitat and, more importantly, reconnecting fragmented landscapes to allow for gene flow between currently isolated populations and to protect them from being wiped out by local events.
Among the political problems we face in attempting to combat habitat fragmentation is that the issue by its very nature crosses political boundaries. More bluntly, nature doesn't respect borders. But the way things are currently setup, decisions are made within and for those various politically defined borders. Because of this, efforts are often restricted in scope to some particular level of organization - a particular county forest preserve, a national park, etc. And while these conservation/restoration projects are often valuable, they cannot really solve the problem without coordination between them. We are left with a scatter-shot of projects and policies, when what we need is something much more unified.
As such, we should work to develop a national system for coordinating between the various stakeholders and governmental levels and organizations to make sure that we are doing the most effective ecological restoration and conservation work we can. This will have to involve:
- Creating a framework for bringing organizations and other stakeholders together to discuss possible projects
- Collecting and sharing information
- Figuring out methods for determining the most valuable or necessary projects (including coming to terms with questions about what our restoration and conservation goals should be)
- Making sure that projects are adequately funded in order to actually work
Because of the structure of our political and social system, this framework for coordination would have to be a national organization acting in partnership with other entities for many (probably most) of its projects. In effect, this coordinating body would be an umbrella organization, looking out for the good of the entire nation's environment by combining and efficiently allocating the resources, skills, and ideas of other organizations around the country.
Please consider voting for it, and then helping to find more worthy proposals to bring attention to. Or at the very least offering some constructive criticism. If enough people are interested, I would really like to make this diary a hub for kossack idea advocacy.