Science Quote by Jim Fowler

Fowler’s line is conservation stripped of incense. It’s not anti-nature; it’s a deliberate refusal of the “save it because it’s pure” script that often loses the room the moment budgets, property rights, or jobs enter the chat. By putting “for the creek’s sake” in the crosshairs, he’s calling out a moral style of environmentalism that can sound like scolding. Then he pivots to the utilitarian pitch: what does the creek do for people?

The intent is strategic, almost clinical. Frame the creek as infrastructure rather than scenery: clean water, flood control, groundwater recharge, fisheries, recreation, even mental health, even higher property values. In the late 20th-century American context Fowler comes out of - and helps shape - a conservation movement increasingly forced to justify itself in the language of cost-benefit analysis and public policy triage. It’s the era when “ecosystem services” becomes a survival tactic: translate ecology into returns humans recognize.

The subtext is sharper: nature doesn’t get standing in court unless we smuggle it in under human self-interest. Fowler is also tacitly acknowledging political reality: if you can’t show “what’s in it for human beings,” the creek will lose to short-term extraction every time. That makes the quote both pragmatic and a little bleak. It doesn’t celebrate our capacity to care; it bets on our capacity to calculate. And in doing so, it exposes a modern conservation paradox: we often protect what we can monetize, not necessarily what we love.