Conserving Lands in Rural Areas
The Big Thicket and Chesapeake Bay Eastern Shore are valued rural landscapes, threatened by urbanization and changing markets for their resource-based economies – timber and oil in the Big Thicket and farming and fisheries on the Eastern Shore.
Both regions are home to rural communities dependent on natural resources to make their living. In the Big Thicket, the resources are timber, oil and gas. Along the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, the resources are agricultural and fishery based. Both regions are ecologically important and contain at least one protected area such as a state or federal park or nature preserve. Because they are near to large metropolitan areas, they face heavy land development pressures. Land conservation is being promoted in these regions to help maintain ecosystems, rural livelihoods and the regions’ cultural identities and heritage.
Despite similarities between the Big Thicket and the Eastern Shore, their approach to land conservation is very different. In addition to conservation organizations, the Eastern Shore benefits from the leadership of the state government in developing an array of land conservation programs with different missions and implementing organizations. In contrast, conservation in the Big Thicket has been mobilized by local conservationists and community leaders with the aid of national level conservation organizations but with little guidance from state government. These similarities and differences in land conservation programs and cultural perspectives provide a rich context from which to elicit and evaluate the role of cultural models.
Explore the history and ecology of both sites, and then read about our Cultural Modeling Research.