Remarks as Prepared for Delivery for the Honorable Lynn Scarlett,
Deputy Secretary of the Interior
Outdoor Writers Association of America Annual Conference
Roanoke, Virginia
June 17, 2007
Good Afternoon. I am delighted to join you. I have the great privilege in my job to experience America’s magnificent backyard. I have watched grizzly bears just 5 yards away feasting on salmon at Wolverine Creek in Kenai Peninsula. I stood in the Yukon River catching salmon by hand to weigh and measure them at a Fish and Wildlife Service Research Station. I paddled the Cache River in search of the elusive and iconic ivory-billed woodpecker. This week, I just returned from Veracruz, Mexico where I stood in a plastic cage within a shark tank at an aquarium feeding sharks—one a tiger shark of prodigious proportions.
Interior manages 507 million acres, one in every 5 acres of this great Nation. The portfolio includes 547 Wildlife refuges, 391 park units, and 262 million acres of multiple use lands. These lands attract some 450 million visitors.
Our land management context is dynamic and in transition. We are experiencing an accelerating pace and dispersed incidence of urbanization. Cities are spreading into the countryside and once-rural outposts and small towns are blossoming into urban centers. Some economists describe the advent of what they call a “footloose economy”—one not tied railroad lines and raw materials as we see the advent of economies focused on financial services, health care, information technologies, and knowledge-based products. The result is a decentralizing and dispersing of urban hubs to places like Missoula, Bozeman, Tucson, Jackson, Reno, and elsewhere.
Through urbanization, cities are expanding into the countryside and the countryside is becoming urbanized. This trend leaves us yearning for open space and wild places to hunt, to fish, and to experience Nature.
This trend also heightens the imperative of collaboration and cross-jurisdictional coordination. Nature itself, of course, knows no boundaries—wildlife and their associated habitat, water, and fire all present management requirements that stretch beyond lines on a map. This landscape is giving rise to cooperative conservation—no mere bumper sticker phrase, but an imperative in a world of landscape-scale issues. We are also seeing, in this context, an evolution from site-specific decisions to holistic, landscape-scale management.
Also at the heart of our deliberations is an age-old conundrum. How can we manage public lands to fulfill the expectations of many publics with varied values, purposes and priorities? Hunters, ranchers, energy developers, wildlife advocates, and others all have hopes, expectations and endeavors tied to public lands and their management.
Many here have tales to tell of conflict and sometimes resolution of that conflict. In the Henry Mountains of southeast Utah, hunters and ranchers faced off on who had the greatest claim to rangeland forage—hunters, who needed range for large game, or ranchers, who needed it for livestock. The sporting community worked with the Bureau of Land Management to find ways to compensate ranchers for lost forage. And ranchers worked with the hunting community to ensure quality hunts.
This age-old conundrum of accommodating competing uses is, perhaps, especially acute as we strive to assure energy production and enhance energy security, while maintaining wildlife conservation and hunting opportunities. This interface is the subject of our chartered Sporting Conservation Council; it is also the subject of a recent survey of the hunting community.
The nexus of wildlife and energy puts cooperative conservation to a great test. Cooperative conservation is easy where folks join together to achieve a single land restoration purpose or shared goal. Collaboration is much tougher where different land expectations converge and conflict in one place.
The relevance of more integrated and collaborative decision making presents questions of geographic scale. What is the spatial scale in which we might effectively work to incorporate wildlife, energy and other values?
Take energy development. Often, we work at a scale of individual production sites, or sometimes on a scale that spans clusters of wells. We mitigate well-site by well-site. Yet wildlife corridor protection and habitat conservation benefits from what Secretary Kempthorne calls a ridge top to ridge top perspective.
Our Healthy Lands Initiative, launched in our 2008 budget, is striving to achieve a landscape-scale management through three components. First is a budget focused on achieving conservation and restoration through partnerships. Second are policies such as conservation banks and other tools to expand opportunities for private stewardship. Third is the development of planning models centered on large, landscape-scale units. This planning focus is the centerpiece without which the other two elements cannot succeed.
The prospect of achieving cooperation in the context of competing values and purposes puts center stage another set of issues, issues pertaining to goals and outcomes. Which goals? Who decides? And how might we measure success? In the past, success often has been defined as compliance with well-site stipulations. How might we pivot our focus not merely on process and compliance but on outcomes—some notion of landscape health?
Fifty-six states and territories have generated Wildlife Action Plans. Interior sees these plans as a possible platform upon which to build common goals and set priorities. The plans all display some shared issues such as invasives, land fragmentation, land transformation and water quality and flows.
The same forces influencing energy, conservation and land management decisions are also significant forces influencing outdoor recreation experiences. We see complexity, challenges of scale, and challenges of integrating decisions across large landscapes and among completing goals.
This is the backdrop against which Interior’s decisions unfold. Those decisions also unfold in context of existing programs, projects and policies. There is an old saying that, “in order to know where to go, you need to know where you’ve been.” Consider, for a moment, the Endangered Species Act and its implementation.
Last fall, the Administration held 25 cooperative conservation listening sessions across the nation. At these sessions and in written comments, the single most mentioned issue was the Endangered Species Act. It was mentioned six times more than any other specific issue, with most participants indicating that they believed improvements in the implementation of the Act are warranted.
Through the Act, some successes have unfolded. The Act has helped to prevent the decline of many species. But species recovery has eluded us, with just one percent of listed species recovered to the point of delisting. We are contemplating improvements in implementation of the Act, though we have made no final decision on whether to proceed with proposed regulatory changes. We believe any proposed changes need to focus on strengthening partnerships with states, enhancing cooperative conservation, emphasizing species recovery, improving the consultation and permitting processes, and clarifying terminology and information requirements for listing and delisting. How we implement ESA is relevant to the broader realm of conservation and outdoor enjoyment. How can the ESA help us emphasize holistic and habitat-centered species protection?
More broadly, we are also looking at other policy tools and their relationship to cooperative conservation. We plan to unveil new cooperative conservation legislative on June 19.
As Interior grapples with dynamic landscapes and the imperative of landscape-scale decisions, cooperation is important. So, too, is science. Informing our decisions with what science can illuminate is critical to our ability to maintain healthy lands, thriving communities, and dynamic economies.
Yet the interface of science and policy is complicated. We face the complexity of nature itself. As economist Tom Sowell has noted: “reality is tricky.” Land management contexts involve multiple variables and trade offs. For example, in California, we face challenges in managing waters to meet the needs of Delta smelt that benefit from one water flow regime and salmon, which benefit from a different regime.
We also face challenges that spring from ever-present change. Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote that: “All is flux, nothing stays still.” Human action is dynamic; so, too, is the natural world around us. Knowledge itself is a perpetual discovery process. Thus, whatever course of action we embark upon requires monitoring, adaptation, and resilient management to adjust to change and to emergent information.
The Interior Department created an adaptive management guidance to assist all our bureaus as they respond to complexity, change and incomplete knowledge that combine to present uncertainty. Land and resources managers must make daily decisions, often in context of inconclusive, even ambiguous information.
One set of looming changes already unfolding in lands and waters we manage may have notable implications for outdoor recreation, conservation, and resource management. Those changes are the significant and observable effects of a changing climate.
What are these changes? We see movement of species from traditional stomping grounds to higher latitudes and elevations. Our refuges are sited for the habitat they provide and are fixed in place, but species are not. Then there is the matter of water flows, timing of flows and precipitation levels. What will these changes mean for species protection, for fishing prospects, and for water delivery for irrigation?
Secretary Kempthorne created a Climate Change Task Force, which I chair, to consider these issues. In this dynamic setting, with problems that transcend land ownership and jurisdictional boundaries, as decision makers we face the complicating issue of compass—the scope and scale of our problem set. Is the relevant scope a backyard, a stream, a watershed, or a continent? How do we draw appropriate boundaries for our decision focus and who decides? Answering these questions demands scientific insights, but these are as much questions of human communities, values and social constraints, as they are matters of scientific distinctions and determinations.
Beyond spatial scale, we also face issues of time scale. Often, we measure impacts at one moment in one place. This orientation has implications both for wildlife management and resource use. For example, we can see neither long-term impacts, say, of energy development nor the long-term prospects of reclamation if our planning and decision time frame is near-term only. Energy development landscapes are a shifting mosaic of disturbance and restoration. Do we have a decision context suitable for considering both short-term risks and longer-term risks and gains?
We have not been idle at Interior these past six years, drawing upon wisdom of philosopher Bertrand Russell, who observed that sometimes it is important to hang a question mark on things long taken for granted. There is a lot more we can do, and do differently. It requires invoking the proverbial admonition to step outside the box.
In many ways that is what cooperative conservation is all about. Consider Buffalo Creek or the Duck Trap River in Maine or the National Fish Habitat Initiative. Each of these brings together sometimes unusual coalitions who work together across jurisdictions and land ownerships to achieve conservation, recreation, and land use goals simultaneously.
As a kid, I had the good fortune of living next to a 27-acre woodland. My mom inspired me and my sisters to bird watch. I spent my summers daily tracing along trails past underbrush of wild blackberries, seeking deer sightings, or hoping to see a rose- breasted grosbeak, a scarlet tanager or a yellow warbler. I went down to the creek to find crawdads under the rocks.
As Richard Louv so beautifully expounds, children need Nature. Yet, for many, it lies outside their grasp or beyond their daily doings. We believe the Interior Department and a nation of citizen stewards, including the outdoor sporting communities, hold the future of our children and grandchildren in our hands. At Interior, we are striving to assure a future for our children, grandchildren and their children beyond in which they can paddle down a stream, cast a fishing line, listen to the melody of a meadowlark, know the feeling of putting food on a table through a hunt in the forest, or see a fox scamper across a field. Louv’s book is something of a clarion call to action; the good news is the resonance of that call to this Nation.