Coon Creek Community Watershed Council hosts author and environmental historian Joshua Nygren

June 19, 2025

Last months meeting of the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council at Jersey Valley County Park featured a presentation and discussion with University of Central Missouri based environmental historian Joshua Nygren about his new book “The State of Conservation”.

Nygren shared insights from the book which examines the history of soil conservation in the Driftless and beyond to ask who and what conservation is for. The CCCWC gave away 60 copies of the book for free to meeting attendees.

Earlier this month, Josh told Watershed Coordinator Sydney Widell that one of the things he hope readers get from his book is that not all conservation is the same.

“Conservation is one of those words that everyone can get behind. It’s a big tent concept, but what exactly it seeks to do matters tremendously.

Reliance on expensive technofixes might solve one problem, but it often creates wholly new problems. Today, a lot of these fixes are promoted as tools of sustainability that are going to help farmers produce more from less land, with fewer inputs. That might be true, but that’s not the entire story.

If we took as a principle that a well-populated country side is good–not out of romantic attachment to family farmers, or that sort thing, but just as a sign of an equitable society–then I think we can view the rise of high tech, low populated farms as a testimony to the tendency of expensive technofixes to concentrate wealth in fewer people’s hands in the name of environmental conservation.

As a starting point, pay attention to how power works within agricultural conservation. Any time we’re talking about the protection of nature, we’re talking about those three big things that people were paying attention to during the New Deal. It’s about the environment, it’s about the economy, and it’s about who can actually afford to participate.”

You can read the full interview with Nygren on the CCCWC website