Like so many things, a person’s understanding of environmental issues can depend on different factors, from economic status, to race and ethnicity, to politics and culture. An upcoming seminar hosted by the Puget Sound Institute on March 22nd at 10:00 AM will look at these perspectives and will talk about some of the ways that disenfranchised voices can be increasingly heard in environmental policy discussions. The seminar features UW Tacoma Nursing professor Dr. Robin Evans-Agnew, who will describe the ‘Voices Unbound’ project. The project surveyed more than a thousand people in Pierce County about their environmental concerns. Voices Unbound: Amplifying Perspectives of Disenfranchised Communities to Provoke Environmental Change
What do people think about environmental challenges and what do they do every day to survive those challenges?
A considerable gap exists among the discourses of those who implement environmental policies and the underrepresented communities that disproportionately experience environmental issues. In order to address this, Voices Unbound asks people throughout Pierce County to document environmental challenges that are impacting them and their community by using enviro-postcards.
Over seven months between 2019 and 2020, we stood in the street, behind booths, in the sunshine and the rain, asking passers-by to fill out a postcard to answer these two questions. We chose places where we wouldn’t necessarily find the sorts of people who already had a voice: outside the State Fair, in senior centers, amongst those experiencing homelessness, in parks, outside an ice-skating rink, and in local outdoor markets. We collected over 1000 postcards before the coronavirus outbreak took over everyone’s consciousness. Now, we invite you to listen in as we present selections of the postcards we collected and discuss our experiences.
The project also created a podcast series to amplify community voices.
Co-Principal Investigators: Christopher J. Schell, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma; Robin A. Evans-Agnew, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership, UW Tacoma.
Co-Investigators: Tom Koontz and Joel Baker, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma.
When: 10:00 AM
Where: Join by Zoom https://washington.zoom.us/j/97391827146
Meeting ID: 973 9182 7146
One tap mobile
+12063379723,,97391827146# US (Seattle)
+12532158782,,97391827146# US (Tacoma)
Like so many things, a person’s understanding of environmental issues can depend on different factors, from economic status, to race and ethnicity, to politics and culture. An upcoming seminar hosted by the Puget Sound Institute on March 22nd at 10:00 AM will look at these perspectives and will talk about some of the ways that disenfranchised voices can be increasingly heard in environmental policy discussions. The seminar features UW Tacoma Nursing professor Dr. Robin Evans-Agnew, who will describe the ‘Voices Unbound’ project. The project surveyed more than a thousand people in Pierce County about their environmental concerns. Voices Unbound: Amplifying Perspectives of Disenfranchised Communities to Provoke Environmental Change
What do people think about environmental challenges and what do they do every day to survive those challenges?
A considerable gap exists among the discourses of those who implement environmental policies and the underrepresented communities that disproportionately experience environmental issues. In order to address this, Voices Unbound asks people throughout Pierce County to document environmental challenges that are impacting them and their community by using enviro-postcards.
Over seven months between 2019 and 2020, we stood in the street, behind booths, in the sunshine and the rain, asking passers-by to fill out a postcard to answer these two questions. We chose places where we wouldn’t necessarily find the sorts of people who already had a voice: outside the State Fair, in senior centers, amongst those experiencing homelessness, in parks, outside an ice-skating rink, and in local outdoor markets. We collected over 1000 postcards before the coronavirus outbreak took over everyone’s consciousness. Now, we invite you to listen in as we present selections of the postcards we collected and discuss our experiences.
The project also created a podcast series to amplify community voices.
Co-Principal Investigators: Christopher J. Schell, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma; Robin A. Evans-Agnew, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership, UW Tacoma.
Co-Investigators: Tom Koontz and Joel Baker, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma.
When: 10:00 AM
Where: Join by Zoom https://washington.zoom.us/j/97391827146
Meeting ID: 973 9182 7146
One tap mobile
+12063379723,,97391827146# US (Seattle)
+12532158782,,97391827146# US (Tacoma)
Occasionally, this space includes reports and essays from guest writers on the subject of Puget Sound ecosystem recovery. Biologist and author Eric Wagner has this look at the federal government’s recent decision to decline special protection for the tufted puffin under the Endangered Species Act. While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that the puffin has “robust populations across the majority of its range,” the bird’s numbers in Washington, including Puget Sound, have dropped severely in recent years. Wagner recalls what it was like when things were different and the colorful bird known as the “sea clown” could be spotted more easily. By Eric Wagner
In the December 3, 2020 issue of the Federal Register, tucked between a correction from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and a NOAA decision on Pacific cod fishing permits, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a notice saying the agency was declining to list eleven species as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Many of the species I had never heard of: three types of pyrgs (snails), the relict dace (a fish), the Clear Lake hitch (another fish). But one I knew well: the tufted puffin.
I grew up near the northern Oregon coast watching tufted puffins nearby at Cannon Beach, where a few dozen pairs nested on Haystack Rock. They were closest thing the town had to a local celebrity. Come April, all sorts of people—not just birders—would go down to the rock to start the annual puffin vigil. Before long the birds would oblige. First one, then two, then more and more would appear, their stubby shapes flying circuits around the 235-foot-tall coastal monolith among the clouds of gulls. Eventually they would land on the rock’s grass-covered summit and disappear into their burrows to breed. Throughout most of the year, the plumage of nonbreeding tufted puffins is all black. Photo: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Tufted puffins are striking birds in the auk family. With their two congeners, the horned and Atlantic puffin, they are sometimes called sea parrots, or the clowns of the sea. Adults can grow up to sixteen inches long and weigh more than two pounds. They wear a sleek cloak of black feathers throughout the year, but when breeding their face turns so white it looks painted. Their large bills, too, become a brilliant orange, and they grow long thick creamy tufts above their eyes. Standing outside their burrows and gazing into the middle distance, the wind ruffling both the grass around them and the tufts on their heads, they could cut comically serious figures. Or maybe it was seriously comic. Whatever the case, everyone loved the puffins.
The sea clowns, alas, have become increasingly rare of late, not just in Oregon, but all up and down the West Coast. In Washington, tufted puffins were once common in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and along the outer coast, with 25,000 birds spread among 44 known breeding colonies in the early 1900s. Those numbers stayed stable for the next several decades; surveys in the 1970s and 1980s estimated more than 23,000 birds bred at 35 known colonies. Then the bottom started to fall out. By 2009 biologists estimated that fewer than 3,000 puffins bred in Washington, and the number of known colonies had fallen to just 19. Counts since then have only gotten worse. In the Salish Sea, colonies at Protection Island and Smith Island have shrunk almost to nothing.
A suite of factors has driven the puffin’s decline. In June 1991, for instance, the Tenyo Maru, a Japanese fishing vessel, sank about 25 miles northwest of Cape Flattery, spilling over 400,000 gallons of fuel oil. Thousands of seabirds were killed, including an estimated 9% of the state’s puffins. But even as the risk of oil spills from rising vessel traffic remains a concern, changing oceanic conditions and large-scale declines in marine productivity are the greater existential threat. These changes have made it harder for puffins to find their preferred forage fish prey, harder for them to raise their chicks (called, naturally, pufflings). It was for this reason that in 2014 the Natural Resources Defense Council petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the puffins of the contiguous states as a distinct population segment—the same approach used to protect the southern resident killer whales and some individual salmon runs. A tufted puffin catches fish near Destruction Island on the Washington coast. Photo: Scott Pearson/WDFW
Getting a species listed can clearly take a long time and is frequently subject to litigation, so federal officials usually go to some length to explain how they arrived at their conclusions. Where other species in the December 3 notice had several paragraphs devoted to the rationale behind the decision, the tufted puffin received only three: the species is widely distributed across the North Pacific Ocean, with 82% of the population being in North America, and most of that in Alaska (first paragraph); although the species faces a range of threats, from climate change to oil spills to fisheries bycatch to human disturbance, “the best available information for tufted puffins indicates adequate redundancy and representation across the species’ range, including robust populations across the majority of its range” (second); on account of this robustness, listing was not warranted (last).
Conservation biology is considered an applied science, which implies a sort of practicality. But conservation as an act is at heart aspirational, even idealistic. Some organism is at risk of going extinct if things continue unchanged. Only by stopping or curtailing certain human behaviors, be it logging or fishing or hunting or draining an aquifer or building a subdivision or filling a waterbody with toxins or pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for two hundred years—the list is very, very long—do the odds of that organism’s survival increase even a little.
Ecological dynamics, on the other hand, can hardly be called idealistic. They tend instead to be binary: dead or alive, growing or shrinking, here or not here. But ecology can have its aspirational moments if you will. Not to imply intent, but a species is an ambitious entity. It seeks to occupy as much space as it can, given its physiological needs and the resources available. You see this with the tufted puffin. It needs a place to nest and fish to eat. California, Oregon, and Washington represent the southern tip of the species’ range. In this they are, in a way, aspirational. Yes, most of North America’s tufted puffins are in Alaska, but for some period of time a good number were able to venture south and make a home on the rugged sea stacks, sandstone cliffs, and windswept islands along the coastline abutting the California Current. Visitors hoping to see puffins at Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (CC BY-NC 2.0)
No longer. Here, the practical leanings of conservation, at least as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conceives it, become clearer. It is true that across much of its range the tufted puffin is abundant. Some colonies in the Aleutian Islands may host more than 100,000 birds. In ecological terms the species appears to be going through a range contraction, abandoning marginal habitat while staying robust in its core habitat. While range contractions can herald larger problems to come, they are not uncommon. That Washington, Oregon, and California will lose the tufted puffin is unfortunate but not unendurable so long as plenty remain in Alaska. That said, with the puffin, it is unclear how much longer their core habitat will be so suitable; the number of seabird mass mortality events in the North Pacific is on a worrisome rise. Soon we may have to have a conversation about puffin conservation in which the declines are widespread and undeniable no matter the prism through which one chooses to view them.
But that will be a matter for another day. For those of us on the West Coast, there is not much to do other than head out in spring, wait for the puffins to return, see how many are left, and learn a little about their lives so that, should the need arise, more assertive steps can be taken. How much longer they will cling to these territories with their little toe claws is uncertain. If they continue to decline at the current rate, they have perhaps forty years left in Washington. I for one will be sorry to see them go. But it was nice to have them while they were here.
Eric Wagner writes about science and the environment from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His writing has appeared in Smithsonian, Orion, The Atlantic and High Country News, among other places. He is the author of “Penguins in the Desert” and co-author of “Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish.” His most recent book is “After the Blast: The Ecological recovery of Mount St. Helens,” published in 2020 by University of Washington Press. He holds a PhD in Biology from the University of Washington.
Occasionally, this space includes reports and essays from guest writers on the subject of Puget Sound ecosystem recovery. Biologist and author Eric Wagner has this look at the federal government’s recent decision to decline special protection for the tufted puffin under the Endangered Species Act. While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that the puffin has “robust populations across the majority of its range,” the bird’s numbers in Washington, including Puget Sound, have dropped severely in recent years. Wagner recalls what it was like when things were different and the colorful bird known as the “sea clown” could be spotted more easily. By Eric Wagner
In the December 3, 2020 issue of the Federal Register, tucked between a correction from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and a NOAA decision on Pacific cod fishing permits, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a notice saying the agency was declining to list eleven species as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Many of the species I had never heard of: three types of pyrgs (snails), the relict dace (a fish), the Clear Lake hitch (another fish). But one I knew well: the tufted puffin.
I grew up near the northern Oregon coast watching tufted puffins nearby at Cannon Beach, where a few dozen pairs nested on Haystack Rock. They were closest thing the town had to a local celebrity. Come April, all sorts of people—not just birders—would go down to the rock to start the annual puffin vigil. Before long the birds would oblige. First one, then two, then more and more would appear, their stubby shapes flying circuits around the 235-foot-tall coastal monolith among the clouds of gulls. Eventually they would land on the rock’s grass-covered summit and disappear into their burrows to breed. Throughout most of the year, the plumage of nonbreeding tufted puffins is all black. Photo: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Tufted puffins are striking birds in the auk family. With their two congeners, the horned and Atlantic puffin, they are sometimes called sea parrots, or the clowns of the sea. Adults can grow up to sixteen inches long and weigh more than two pounds. They wear a sleek cloak of black feathers throughout the year, but when breeding their face turns so white it looks painted. Their large bills, too, become a brilliant orange, and they grow long thick creamy tufts above their eyes. Standing outside their burrows and gazing into the middle distance, the wind ruffling both the grass around them and the tufts on their heads, they could cut comically serious figures. Or maybe it was seriously comic. Whatever the case, everyone loved the puffins.
The sea clowns, alas, have become increasingly rare of late, not just in Oregon, but all up and down the West Coast. In Washington, tufted puffins were once common in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and along the outer coast, with 25,000 birds spread among 44 known breeding colonies in the early 1900s. Those numbers stayed stable for the next several decades; surveys in the 1970s and 1980s estimated more than 23,000 birds bred at 35 known colonies. Then the bottom started to fall out. By 2009 biologists estimated that fewer than 3,000 puffins bred in Washington, and the number of known colonies had fallen to just 19. Counts since then have only gotten worse. In the Salish Sea, colonies at Protection Island and Smith Island have shrunk almost to nothing.
A suite of factors has driven the puffin’s decline. In June 1991, for instance, the Tenyo Maru, a Japanese fishing vessel, sank about 25 miles northwest of Cape Flattery, spilling over 400,000 gallons of fuel oil. Thousands of seabirds were killed, including an estimated 9% of the state’s puffins. But even as the risk of oil spills from rising vessel traffic remains a concern, changing oceanic conditions and large-scale declines in marine productivity are the greater existential threat. These changes have made it harder for puffins to find their preferred forage fish prey, harder for them to raise their chicks (called, naturally, pufflings). It was for this reason that in 2014 the Natural Resources Defense Council petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the puffins of the contiguous states as a distinct population segment—the same approach used to protect the southern resident killer whales and some individual salmon runs. A tufted puffin catches fish near Destruction Island on the Washington coast. Photo: Scott Pearson/WDFW
Getting a species listed can clearly take a long time and is frequently subject to litigation, so federal officials usually go to some length to explain how they arrived at their conclusions. Where other species in the December 3 notice had several paragraphs devoted to the rationale behind the decision, the tufted puffin received only three: the species is widely distributed across the North Pacific Ocean, with 82% of the population being in North America, and most of that in Alaska (first paragraph); although the species faces a range of threats, from climate change to oil spills to fisheries bycatch to human disturbance, “the best available information for tufted puffins indicates adequate redundancy and representation across the species’ range, including robust populations across the majority of its range” (second); on account of this robustness, listing was not warranted (last).
Conservation biology is considered an applied science, which implies a sort of practicality. But conservation as an act is at heart aspirational, even idealistic. Some organism is at risk of going extinct if things continue unchanged. Only by stopping or curtailing certain human behaviors, be it logging or fishing or hunting or draining an aquifer or building a subdivision or filling a waterbody with toxins or pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for two hundred years—the list is very, very long—do the odds of that organism’s survival increase even a little.
Ecological dynamics, on the other hand, can hardly be called idealistic. They tend instead to be binary: dead or alive, growing or shrinking, here or not here. But ecology can have its aspirational moments if you will. Not to imply intent, but a species is an ambitious entity. It seeks to occupy as much space as it can, given its physiological needs and the resources available. You see this with the tufted puffin. It needs a place to nest and fish to eat. California, Oregon, and Washington represent the southern tip of the species’ range. In this they are, in a way, aspirational. Yes, most of North America’s tufted puffins are in Alaska, but for some period of time a good number were able to venture south and make a home on the rugged sea stacks, sandstone cliffs, and windswept islands along the coastline abutting the California Current. Visitors hoping to see puffins at Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (CC BY-NC 2.0)
No longer. Here, the practical leanings of conservation, at least as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conceives it, become clearer. It is true that across much of its range the tufted puffin is abundant. Some colonies in the Aleutian Islands may host more than 100,000 birds. In ecological terms the species appears to be going through a range contraction, abandoning marginal habitat while staying robust in its core habitat. While range contractions can herald larger problems to come, they are not uncommon. That Washington, Oregon, and California will lose the tufted puffin is unfortunate but not unendurable so long as plenty remain in Alaska. That said, with the puffin, it is unclear how much longer their core habitat will be so suitable; the number of seabird mass mortality events in the North Pacific is on a worrisome rise. Soon we may have to have a conversation about puffin conservation in which the declines are widespread and undeniable no matter the prism through which one chooses to view them.
But that will be a matter for another day. For those of us on the West Coast, there is not much to do other than head out in spring, wait for the puffins to return, see how many are left, and learn a little about their lives so that, should the need arise, more assertive steps can be taken. How much longer they will cling to these territories with their little toe claws is uncertain. If they continue to decline at the current rate, they have perhaps forty years left in Washington. I for one will be sorry to see them go. But it was nice to have them while they were here.
Eric Wagner writes about science and the environment from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His writing has appeared in Smithsonian, Orion, The Atlantic and High Country News, among other places. He is the author of “Penguins in the Desert” and co-author of “Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish.” His most recent book is “After the Blast: The Ecological recovery of Mount St. Helens,” published in 2020 by University of Washington Press. He holds a PhD in Biology from the University of Washington.
UPDATE: July 23
The Great American Outdoors Act passed the House yesterday on a 310-107 vote. See Associated Press and news release from U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor.
—–
It appears that the political stars are lining up for what some people are calling the most significant environmental legislation in decades. Billions of dollars have been laid upon the table for parks, recreation facilities and environmentally sensitive lands across the country.
The U.S. Senate has already passed the Great American Outdoors Act, which pairs two previous spending proposals: the Land and Water Conservation Fund with $900 million to be spent annually for the foreseeable future, and a new National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Fund with $9.5 billion to be spent over the next five years. Chart: Congressional Research Service
The House is poised to approve the measure when it returns to full session July 20, despite a last-minute effort by one Republican lawmaker to amend the bill. If successful, that could delay action for another year or more.
President Trump, who has consistently pushed for major funding cuts for conservation — including the Land and Water Conservation Fund — suddenly reversed course in March. Now he says he will enthusiastically sign the funding bill.
Trump’s Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, expressed the administration’s support. “The enactment of the combination of these two proposals,” he said in an opinion piece, “would be the most significant conservation legislation in generations.”
On that point, he hasn’t gotten much argument from conservation groups.
“This is an historic deal reflecting the tremendous bipartisan support for our public lands and would mark the biggest conservation victory in over 100 years,” said Tom Cors of The Nature Conservancy, a spokesman for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition.
Kabir Green, director of federal affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council also agreed. “At a time when the outdoors is more important to public health than ever, a bipartisan majority is recognizing how badly the country needs to invest in its public lands and waters and ensure access to them.”
Their comments and many others were compiled by the Senate Republican Communications Center.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund has been on the books since 1964, providing nearly $19 billion for conservation projects across the country. The fund was first proposed by a federal commission, supported by President John F. Kennedy and ushered through Congress by Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington state, who chaired the Senate Interior Committee at the time. Chart: Congressional Research Service
Congress first authorized the fund for 25 years, then approved a 25-year extension. In recent years, however, political squabbling allowed the fund to expire twice: once in 2015, when it was revived for three years, and again in 2018, when its annual authorization of $900 million was made permanent.
Even so, perpetual authorization does not mean that Congress must spend the money.
That’s why the new Great American Outdoors Act is so significant, said Amy Lindholm, manager of the LWCF Coalition. In addition to the new funding piece to help eliminate a $12-billion maintenance backlog in national parks, the new legislation actually mandates that at least $900 million be spent each year for land purchases and recreation projects.
That mandate will make a real difference, Amy told me. Even though Congress has authorized spending at the $900-million level since 1978, it has spent less than half that amount. If the fund were a bank account — which it isn’t — it would contain a balance of about $22 billion, compared to withdrawals and spending of $18.9 billion through the years. Once the new law is enacted, it would take an act of Congress to stop the flow of money. Spending targets: LWCF
The Land and Water Conservation Fund derives its $900 million in annual credits mostly from federal royalties for offshore oil and gas drilling, which have generated a total of about $7 billion a year for the U.S. government in recent times.
Money in the LWCF goes for three major purposes:
Financial assistance to the states for recreational planning, acquisition of recreational lands and waters, and developing outdoor recreational facilities. States receiving funds must provide an equal amount of money.
Other federal resource-related purposes, including the Forest Legacy Program of the Forest Service, which helps states to acquire important lands, and the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which helps states to protect listed species.
In Washington state, two federal projects are riding high on the list for funding in the next budget: the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge and the Dewatto Headwaters Forest. Many grants to state agencies have been proposed but not yet been prioritized. Spending targets: National Parks
The National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Fund would direct up to $9.5 billion in revenues from on-shore, off-shore and renewable energy supplies to the following:
National Parks, 70 percent
U.S. Forest Service, 15 percent
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 5 percent
Bureau of Land Management, 5 percent
Bureau of Indian Education, 5 percent
Deferred maintenance in the national parks alone is estimated at $12 billion. The National Park Service would use its share of the fund to repair roads, buildings, campgrounds, trails, utility systems and other infrastructure.
National parks in Washington state are facing a backlog of more than $427 million in needed repairs, according to a report by Pew Charitable Trusts (PDF 223 kb). That includes $186 million at Mount Rainier and $126 million at Olympic. History of LWCF
The Land and Water Conservation Fund was created during the heyday of the environmental movement during the 1960s, when Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson played an instrumental role as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee. Legislation during his tenure included the Wilderness Act, creation of North Cascades National Park, National Trail System Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and, perhaps most significant, the National Environmental Policy Act.
As the Senate prepared to vote on the LWCF for the first time, Jackson spoke to his fellow senators:
“I would like to remind you that it is mostly to the open areas that 90 percent of all Americans go each year, seeking refreshment of body and spirit,” he said. “These are the places they go to hunt, fish, camp, picnic, swim, for boating or driving for pleasure, or perhaps simply for relaxation or solitude.”
The vote was 92-1.
The original funding came from the sale of federal property ($50 million a year), motor boat fuel tax ($30 million), new entrance and user fees ($65 million) and $60 million over eight years to be paid back to the treasury. The new user fees never raised more than $16 million, so the oil and gas revenues were added in 1968 and soon became the major source of funding.
[iframe align=”right” width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/kQTBqQ6nAxk”%5D
Authorized spending was increased to $200 million a year in 1968, then to $300 million in 1970, and then to $900 million in 1977 — although spending reached that annual level only twice (see chart).
Jackson’s successors who occupied that same Senate seat — Dan Evans, Slade Gorton and Maria Cantwell — have all been supporters of the LWCF, with Cantwell working especially hard in recent years to strengthen the law.
“Public lands are a great driver of our economy and an essential aspect of American life, and this vote says we’re going to continue to invest in them,” Cantwell said in a news release after the Senate approved the Great American Outdoors Act on a 73-25 vote. “It couldn’t be a more important investment, and it couldn’t give America a bigger return.” (Check out her speech on video, this page.) Today’s politics
Until this year, President Trump showed little interest in acquiring more federal lands or creating new recreation areas. Congress consistently overruled his proposed budgets to gut the funding for the LWCF.
On March 3, Trump appeared to change his tune with this tweet: “I am calling on Congress to send me a bill that fully and permanently funds the LWCF and restores our national parks. When I sign it into law, it will be HISTORIC for our beautiful public lands. All thanks to @SenCoryGardner and @SteveDaines, two GREAT conservative leaders!”
Some have speculated that Trump’s change of heart is designed to improve the election prospects of the named Republican senators, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insists it was not a political move.
“It’s in proximity to the election, but nobody said you ought to quit doing things just because there’s an election,” McConnell was quoted as saying in “The Hill.”
Given Trump’s sign-on and with supportive Democrats in control of the House, the chances of approving the long-term funding appear good. But that hasn’t stopped Utah Sen. Rob Bishop, a Republican, from raising alarms about a confusing provision in the bill that would remove restrictions about where the money can be spent for land purchases. Reporter Emma Dumain describes the situation in E&E News.
“Eastern states deserve equality in federal land ownership as Congress intended,” Bishop wrote in a letter to 154 House members. “A last-minute ‘conforming amendment’ … eliminated this requirement, siphoning critical LWCF funds away from Eastern states in perpetuity. It’s not right.”
Stepping into the fray, a spokeswoman for Republican Sen. Daines played down the controversy.
“The conforming amendment makes no change to the status quo,” Katie Schoettler was quoted as saying in the E&E News article. “Congress and the agency have consistently approved and funded Western LWCF projects to meet needs and fulfill congressional intent behind the program. Eliminating this arbitrary cap just ensures LWCF is carried out as it always has been.”
If Bishop can dredge up enough votes to pass his amendment, all sorts of trouble could follow, and the bill would need a new vote in the Senate — which might not happen soon. Most House Democrats are expected to stay away from that “Pandora’s box,” as writer Dumain describes it, but in recent years turmoil has never been far from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Further reading
UPDATE: July 23
The Great American Outdoors Act passed the House yesterday on a 310-107 vote. See Associated Press and news release from U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor.
—–
It appears that the political stars are lining up for what some people are calling the most significant environmental legislation in decades. Billions of dollars have been laid upon the table for parks, recreation facilities and environmentally sensitive lands across the country.
The U.S. Senate has already passed the Great American Outdoors Act, which pairs two previous spending proposals: the Land and Water Conservation Fund with $900 million to be spent annually for the foreseeable future, and a new National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Fund with $9.5 billion to be spent over the next five years. Chart: Congressional Research Service
The House is poised to approve the measure when it returns to full session July 20, despite a last-minute effort by one Republican lawmaker to amend the bill. If successful, that could delay action for another year or more.
President Trump, who has consistently pushed for major funding cuts for conservation — including the Land and Water Conservation Fund — suddenly reversed course in March. Now he says he will enthusiastically sign the funding bill.
Trump’s Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, expressed the administration’s support. “The enactment of the combination of these two proposals,” he said in an opinion piece, “would be the most significant conservation legislation in generations.”
On that point, he hasn’t gotten much argument from conservation groups.
“This is an historic deal reflecting the tremendous bipartisan support for our public lands and would mark the biggest conservation victory in over 100 years,” said Tom Cors of The Nature Conservancy, a spokesman for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition.
Kabir Green, director of federal affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council also agreed. “At a time when the outdoors is more important to public health than ever, a bipartisan majority is recognizing how badly the country needs to invest in its public lands and waters and ensure access to them.”
Their comments and many others were compiled by the Senate Republican Communications Center.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund has been on the books since 1964, providing nearly $19 billion for conservation projects across the country. The fund was first proposed by a federal commission, supported by President John F. Kennedy and ushered through Congress by Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington state, who chaired the Senate Interior Committee at the time. Chart: Congressional Research Service
Congress first authorized the fund for 25 years, then approved a 25-year extension. In recent years, however, political squabbling allowed the fund to expire twice: once in 2015, when it was revived for three years, and again in 2018, when its annual authorization of $900 million was made permanent.
Even so, perpetual authorization does not mean that Congress must spend the money.
That’s why the new Great American Outdoors Act is so significant, said Amy Lindholm, manager of the LWCF Coalition. In addition to the new funding piece to help eliminate a $12-billion maintenance backlog in national parks, the new legislation actually mandates that at least $900 million be spent each year for land purchases and recreation projects.
That mandate will make a real difference, Amy told me. Even though Congress has authorized spending at the $900-million level since 1978, it has spent less than half that amount. If the fund were a bank account — which it isn’t — it would contain a balance of about $22 billion, compared to withdrawals and spending of $18.9 billion through the years. Once the new law is enacted, it would take an act of Congress to stop the flow of money. Spending targets: LWCF
The Land and Water Conservation Fund derives its $900 million in annual credits mostly from federal royalties for offshore oil and gas drilling, which have generated a total of about $7 billion a year for the U.S. government in recent times.
Money in the LWCF goes for three major purposes:
Financial assistance to the states for recreational planning, acquisition of recreational lands and waters, and developing outdoor recreational facilities. States receiving funds must provide an equal amount of money.
Other federal resource-related purposes, including the Forest Legacy Program of the Forest Service, which helps states to acquire important lands, and the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which helps states to protect listed species.
In Washington state, two federal projects are riding high on the list for funding in the next budget: the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge and the Dewatto Headwaters Forest. Many grants to state agencies have been proposed but not yet been prioritized. Spending targets: National Parks
The National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Fund would direct up to $9.5 billion in revenues from on-shore, off-shore and renewable energy supplies to the following:
National Parks, 70 percent
U.S. Forest Service, 15 percent
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 5 percent
Bureau of Land Management, 5 percent
Bureau of Indian Education, 5 percent
Deferred maintenance in the national parks alone is estimated at $12 billion. The National Park Service would use its share of the fund to repair roads, buildings, campgrounds, trails, utility systems and other infrastructure.
National parks in Washington state are facing a backlog of more than $427 million in needed repairs, according to a report by Pew Charitable Trusts (PDF 223 kb). That includes $186 million at Mount Rainier and $126 million at Olympic. History of LWCF
The Land and Water Conservation Fund was created during the heyday of the environmental movement during the 1960s, when Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson played an instrumental role as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee. Legislation during his tenure included the Wilderness Act, creation of North Cascades National Park, National Trail System Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and, perhaps most significant, the National Environmental Policy Act.
As the Senate prepared to vote on the LWCF for the first time, Jackson spoke to his fellow senators:
“I would like to remind you that it is mostly to the open areas that 90 percent of all Americans go each year, seeking refreshment of body and spirit,” he said. “These are the places they go to hunt, fish, camp, picnic, swim, for boating or driving for pleasure, or perhaps simply for relaxation or solitude.”
The vote was 92-1.
The original funding came from the sale of federal property ($50 million a year), motor boat fuel tax ($30 million), new entrance and user fees ($65 million) and $60 million over eight years to be paid back to the treasury. The new user fees never raised more than $16 million, so the oil and gas revenues were added in 1968 and soon became the major source of funding.
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Authorized spending was increased to $200 million a year in 1968, then to $300 million in 1970, and then to $900 million in 1977 — although spending reached that annual level only twice (see chart).
Jackson’s successors who occupied that same Senate seat — Dan Evans, Slade Gorton and Maria Cantwell — have all been supporters of the LWCF, with Cantwell working especially hard in recent years to strengthen the law.
“Public lands are a great driver of our economy and an essential aspect of American life, and this vote says we’re going to continue to invest in them,” Cantwell said in a news release after the Senate approved the Great American Outdoors Act on a 73-25 vote. “It couldn’t be a more important investment, and it couldn’t give America a bigger return.” (Check out her speech on video, this page.) Today’s politics
Until this year, President Trump showed little interest in acquiring more federal lands or creating new recreation areas. Congress consistently overruled his proposed budgets to gut the funding for the LWCF.
On March 3, Trump appeared to change his tune with this tweet: “I am calling on Congress to send me a bill that fully and permanently funds the LWCF and restores our national parks. When I sign it into law, it will be HISTORIC for our beautiful public lands. All thanks to @SenCoryGardner and @SteveDaines, two GREAT conservative leaders!”
Some have speculated that Trump’s change of heart is designed to improve the election prospects of the named Republican senators, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insists it was not a political move.
“It’s in proximity to the election, but nobody said you ought to quit doing things just because there’s an election,” McConnell was quoted as saying in “The Hill.”
Given Trump’s sign-on and with supportive Democrats in control of the House, the chances of approving the long-term funding appear good. But that hasn’t stopped Utah Sen. Rob Bishop, a Republican, from raising alarms about a confusing provision in the bill that would remove restrictions about where the money can be spent for land purchases. Reporter Emma Dumain describes the situation in E&E News.
“Eastern states deserve equality in federal land ownership as Congress intended,” Bishop wrote in a letter to 154 House members. “A last-minute ‘conforming amendment’ … eliminated this requirement, siphoning critical LWCF funds away from Eastern states in perpetuity. It’s not right.”
Stepping into the fray, a spokeswoman for Republican Sen. Daines played down the controversy.
“The conforming amendment makes no change to the status quo,” Katie Schoettler was quoted as saying in the E&E News article. “Congress and the agency have consistently approved and funded Western LWCF projects to meet needs and fulfill congressional intent behind the program. Eliminating this arbitrary cap just ensures LWCF is carried out as it always has been.”
If Bishop can dredge up enough votes to pass his amendment, all sorts of trouble could follow, and the bill would need a new vote in the Senate — which might not happen soon. Most House Democrats are expected to stay away from that “Pandora’s box,” as writer Dumain describes it, but in recent years turmoil has never been far from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Further reading
Washington and British Columbia residents are largely unfamiliar with the Salish Sea. A recent study conducted by the SeaDoc Society and Oregon State University reveals a need to improve geographic literacy and familiarity with the Salish Sea among those communities who share and live alongside this integrated transboundary ecosystem. This is a guest blog from two of the collaborators on the survey, David Trimbach of Oregon State University and Joe Gaydos, Science Director at the SeaDoc Society. By David Trimbach and Joe Gaydos
Do place names matter? For about a decade the Salish Sea has been recognized as the official toponym (place name) of the transboundary sea and integrated ecosystem that includes the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound. While the name may be formalized and known to regional scientists, planners, governments, and some coastal communities, the name is still relatively unfamiliar to many residents of Washington (WA) and British Columbia (BC). This lack of familiarity is highlighted by a new study released by the SeaDoc Society and Oregon State University. The study builds upon interdisciplinary research focused on geographic literacy and toponymy (study of place names) with the intention of illustrating what residents call and know about the shared transboundary Salish Sea.
Geographic literacy refers to, “the ability to understand, process, and utilize spatial data,” and includes geographic knowledge (e.g.: What do people know about a place? Do people know place names?) and geospatial recognition (e.g.: Can people identify or locate a place on a map?) (Turner and Leydon 2012, p. 54). Geographic literacy and awareness are often assessed by the National Geographic Society (Council on Foreign Relations and National Geographic Society 2016; Roper Public Affairs 2006) and American Geographical Society (Kozak et al. 2013, 2015). According to the National Geographic Society, geographic literacy, including of place names, is integral to making place-dependent decisions (Edelson 2014). Place names inform and contribute to sense of place, including an individual’s place attachment, identity, dependence, meaning, and behaviors (Cresswell 2015; Helleland 2015; Masterson et al. 2017). Building upon this research, Dr. David J. Trimbach of Oregon State University, a trained geographer, developed a geographic literacy survey with an emphasis on place names (e.g.: Salish Sea) in collaboration with the SeaDoc Society.
Using Qualtrics survey software and stratified sampling to ensure generalizability, Trimbach solicited responses from approximately 2,405 (n) Washington and British Columbia residents. Residents were asked targeted close-ended questions focused on geographic knowledge and geospatial recognition. Responses were analyzed to highlight demographic attribute relationships and predictors with an emphasis on place of residence (e.g.: Does living in WA or BC relate to and/or predict specific geographic literacy question responses or response patterns?).
Overall, the survey’s findings illustrate a low and/or lack of geographic literacy among Washington and British Columbia residents when it comes to the Salish Sea. Survey participants’ responses reflect a general lack of geographic knowledge and geospatial recognition when it comes to the Salish Sea place name. Residents do recognize that the waterbody is comprised of saltwater, but do not necessarily share descriptive language. Image 1: Map shown in survey.
This level of geographic literacy is illustrated by response patterns to a map-based question that sought to solicit geospatial recognition among survey participants. When asked to identify the body of water illustrated on a map (Image 1) by name, BC and WA residents’ responses differed significantly. Over 50% of WA residents identified the body of water as “Puget Sound” and 36% of BC residents selected the “Strait of Georgia” (Figure 1). “Salish Sea” was marginally selected by WA (9%) and BC (15%) residents (Figure 1). Based on the responses, there was a significant and strong association between place of residence (BC/WA) and place name identification when prompted with a map. This significant and strong association demonstrates variation in how residents visualized or mentally mapped the region’s bodies of water. This association also illustrates that place of residence mattered when it came to how participants identified water bodies on a map. This association was also illustrated elsewhere and reflected that place of residence was a major predictor of responses among survey participants. Figure 1. Place Name Responses to Map (Image 1)
Overall, the survey’s findings indicate inconsistent place names, that may equate to inconsistent, divergent, or conflicting understandings of place (geographic literacy and sense of place) more broadly. Since the Salish Sea remains unfamiliar for many WA and BC residents, there does not seem to be a unifying and shared place name for the transboundary sea, that likely may inform regional planning, management, outreach, research, and education efforts aimed at improving the Salish Sea’s ecosystem. Trimbach recommends a multi-strategy approach, including: Salish Sea-focused targeted communications, education, outreach, and research; collaboration with partners to emphasize common geographic/place name language; and survey replication in the future to track change in the region. Some strategies stem from formal geographic education and literacy efforts; however, geographic education extends far beyond the classroom. As Trimbach notes, “Geographic literacy and place names matter, particularly when it comes to mobilizing communities and decision-makers around complex place-dependent problems. If communities are not sharing place names or understandings of place itself, such problems may be more difficult to collectively communicate and solve.” Improving and/or expanding geographic literacy and shared place names is one of many steps that can help improve the Salish Sea’s ecosystem. References
Council on Foreign Relations and National Geographic Society. 2016. What College-Aged Students Know About the World: A Survey of Global Literacy. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.
Cresswell, T. 2015. Place: an introduction. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Edelson, D. C. 2014. Geo-Literacy [National Geographic Society online article.]. Available at:
Helleland, B. 2012. Place Names and Identities. Oslo Studies in Language. 4 (2): 95-116.
Kozak, S. L., Dobson, J. E., Wood, J. S., Wells, W. R., and Haynes, D. 2013. The American Geographical Society’s Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey: Report of Results for the United States. Brooklyn, NY: The American Geographical Society.
Kozak, S. L., Dobson, J. E., Wood, J. S. 2015. Geography’s American constituency: results from the AGS geographic knowledge and values survey. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education. 24 (3): 201-222.
Masterson, V. A., Stedman, R. C., Enqvist, J., Tengö, M., Giusti, M., Wahl, D., and Svedin, U. 2017. The contribution of sense of place to socio-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda. Ecology and Society. 22 (1): 49.
Roper Public Affairs. 2006. National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs: 2006 Geographic Literacy Study. New York: GfK NOP.
Turner, S. and Leydon, J. 2012. Improving Geographic Literacy among First-Year Undergraduate Students: Testing the Effectiveness of Online Quizzes. Journal of Geography. 111: 54-66. Dr. David Trimbach is a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. Dr. Joe Gaydos is Science Director at The SeaDoc Society, part of the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
A Puget Sound scientist’s work is never done. PSI’s Lead Ecosystem Ecologist Tessa Francis sent us this e-mail about a recent call to identify some wayward fish on Vashon Island. It didn’t hurt that she happens to study the same species of fish — Pacific herring — as part of her research at PSI. By Tessa Francis Two days into the New Year I got a text at lunch from Vashon Island Nature Center staff with a picture of dozens of fish in a pool: ‘Wondering if you could tell what kind of fish these are? They seem to be trapped.’ They were in a tidal creek that had become isolated from the main Puget Sound at low tide. The staff was worried the tributary wouldn’t be reconnected at the next high tide, and were planning to manually move the small fish back to the open water. After seeing a close-up picture (and after confirming my ID with a WA Department of Fish and Wildlife colleague – better safe than sorry!), I told them they had Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) on their hands, probably 2-year olds, given the size. Historically, herring have spawned annually on Vashon Island, all along the shores of the Quartermaster Harbor bay, but their numbers have been very low in recent years. Work from a group I am co-chairing as part of the Ocean Modeling Forum suggests that when populations of herring are on average young (like these 2-year olds), they have a more difficult time finding their way back to their spawning grounds. In any case, it is just about the window of time when the Quartermaster herring start their spawning, and while it is not exactly clear whether these fish would be spawning this year (only about 1/2 of 2-year olds are mature), it was interesting to see them hanging around the island. The volunteers then moved 130 fish by hand, aiding them on their journey. If indeed these fish were making their way to the Quartermaster spawning site, they still had the circumnavigation of Maury Island ahead of them!
Read more about Puget Sound herring and other forage fish on the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound or follow some of Tessa Francis’s herring research.
Additional links: Vashon Island Nature Center
South Lake Union Streetcar, August 2017. Photo: SDOT (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdot_photos/36924152151/ By Jeff Rice, Puget Sound Institute
A strong economy driven by a world-leading technology industry is expected to draw millions of new residents to the Salish Sea region within decades. This changing population brings with it new strains on the environment but also new perspectives. Incoming residents may not see Puget Sound the same way as previous generations. Many will have different relationships to the natural world or come from other cultural backgrounds and traditions.
Technology will also play a role, not just as an economic driver, but as an influence on the way that people receive and share information. Our smartphones and digital lifestyles will have their own geography, and some say we will have to navigate and understand that virtual world as surely as we understand the real bays and inlets of Puget Sound. Given this changing landscape, can Puget Sound recovery efforts adapt and keep pace? Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel member Robert Ewing says it’s absolutely critical.
Ewing is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is actively involved with strategic training for members of Seattle’s technology industry through the organization Pathwise, where he is Director of the group’s Fellows Program. He will be co-chairing a special panel with PSI at next year’s Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference titled “Can ‘Silicon Valley North’ change the way we think about Salish Sea recovery?” PSI spoke with Ewing earlier this year and asked him how he thinks the Puget Sound science community can reach the region’s changing population — particularly its technology sector — and why it matters. PSI: In the broadest sense, who do we need to bring to the table?
Robert Ewing (RE): I think everybody who lives in the region is a potential constituent as well as visitors and others. I think we ought to be able to articulate the region’s importance in terms of the quality of life here, the reason that businesses locate here — the [conditions] that allow us to live in a healthy, natural environment. All those things are part of what we’re trying to accomplish and should have resonance for everybody in a sort of a civic, nonpolitical frame of mind. PSI: How important do you think the technology sector and its economic engine are to the equation?
RE: If you really were doing some business model development and you looked at the distribution of brainpower and wealth in Puget Sound, you would quickly come to a conclusion that those are the people you should be talking to. And the management council for the [Puget Sound] Partnership is part of that community — Bill Ruckelshaus certainly was — so it’s not like there hasn’t been contact or thinking there. But if you were an objective observer looking at who lives in the Puget Sound region, you’d want to know how to deal with all those people and bring them to the table. PSI: Do you think those folks — the Bill Gates’s and the Jeff Bezos’s — really care about the environment? Or do they care more about making money and building software?
RE: I’m doing some work with a leadership training group called Pathwise. I’m managing their fellowship program. Most of their students are Microsoft, Expedia, Gates Foundation professionals and engineers. And in dealing with them I find that most of them don’t think about the environment very much. But you don’t have to talk very long until they get quite interested.
I’ve been in a class with engineers [whose] whole world is about getting a search a nanosecond faster than Google. Just giving them a few minutes to think about where they are in the world with their family and so on can open a path to environmental discussions.
We are all so much more capable through intuition and emotion to understand the world we live in — and [to understand] that we are part of the natural world — but we don’t communicate in that way. That’s something Pathwise is trying to do and is doing pretty successfully. I’m not saying I’m an expert in these things, but I see it working. PSI: So what should we do to bring these people in?
RE: There are a lot of people struggling with exactly how to do this. I think there’s a way of not putting all the action items within a bureaucratic framework. There are ways to think more experientially, and organically, about how to move forward. [We should] try more things. Be more open to ideas and changes. Be more adaptable. One of the reasons that I’ve wanted to be active on the science panel is I think we have to be able to answer the question you just posed. That’s going to take a collaborative effort, an open source effort if you will. This is where the brainpower of the region comes in. I mean, we have Amazon, the University and a variety of start-ups and a lot of smart people walking the streets. Collectively, I think the answer is there. We just need to figure out how to bring it all into action. My goal is to be around the people who can figure this out. And hopefully it’s younger, higher powered people with a lot of energy with some guidance from people with experience. My main goal is to try to have this dialogue go forward and find the resources we need to collectively involve the people who will give us the answer. About Robert Ewing:
Robert Ewing was trained as an economist and holds a PhD in Wildland Resource Science. He has worked in both the private and public sectors and was Director of Timberlands Strategic Planning for Weyerhaeuser for 20 years. Before that, he was head of resource assessment and strategic planning at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is Director of the Pathwise Fellows Program, which offers leadership training for business professionals. He is also a member of the Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel.
Related article: Urban lifestyles help to protect the Puget Sound ecosystem See also: Land Development and Land Cover Implementation Strategy.
South Lake Union Streetcar, August 2017. Photo: SDOT (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdot_photos/36924152151/ By Jeff Rice, Puget Sound Institute
A strong economy driven by a world-leading technology industry is expected to draw millions of new residents to the Salish Sea region within decades. This changing population brings with it new strains on the environment but also new perspectives. Incoming residents may not see Puget Sound the same way as previous generations. Many will have different relationships to the natural world or come from other cultural backgrounds and traditions.
Technology will also play a role, not just as an economic driver, but as an influence on the way that people receive and share information. Our smartphones and digital lifestyles will have their own geography, and some say we will have to navigate and understand that virtual world as surely as we understand the real bays and inlets of Puget Sound. Given this changing landscape, can Puget Sound recovery efforts adapt and keep pace? Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel member Robert Ewing says it’s absolutely critical.
Ewing is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is actively involved with strategic training for members of Seattle’s technology industry through the organization Pathwise, where he is Director of the group’s Fellows Program. He will be co-chairing a special panel with PSI at next year’s Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference titled “Can ‘Silicon Valley North’ change the way we think about Salish Sea recovery?” PSI spoke with Ewing earlier this year and asked him how he thinks the Puget Sound science community can reach the region’s changing population — particularly its technology sector — and why it matters. PSI: In the broadest sense, who do we need to bring to the table?
Robert Ewing (RE): I think everybody who lives in the region is a potential constituent as well as visitors and others. I think we ought to be able to articulate the region’s importance in terms of the quality of life here, the reason that businesses locate here — the [conditions] that allow us to live in a healthy, natural environment. All those things are part of what we’re trying to accomplish and should have resonance for everybody in a sort of a civic, nonpolitical frame of mind. PSI: How important do you think the technology sector and its economic engine are to the equation?
RE: If you really were doing some business model development and you looked at the distribution of brainpower and wealth in Puget Sound, you would quickly come to a conclusion that those are the people you should be talking to. And the management council for the [Puget Sound] Partnership is part of that community — Bill Ruckelshaus certainly was — so it’s not like there hasn’t been contact or thinking there. But if you were an objective observer looking at who lives in the Puget Sound region, you’d want to know how to deal with all those people and bring them to the table. PSI: Do you think those folks — the Bill Gates’s and the Jeff Bezos’s — really care about the environment? Or do they care more about making money and building software?
RE: I’m doing some work with a leadership training group called Pathwise. I’m managing their fellowship program. Most of their students are Microsoft, Expedia, Gates Foundation professionals and engineers. And in dealing with them I find that most of them don’t think about the environment very much. But you don’t have to talk very long until they get quite interested.
I’ve been in a class with engineers [whose] whole world is about getting a search a nanosecond faster than Google. Just giving them a few minutes to think about where they are in the world with their family and so on can open a path to environmental discussions.
We are all so much more capable through intuition and emotion to understand the world we live in — and [to understand] that we are part of the natural world — but we don’t communicate in that way. That’s something Pathwise is trying to do and is doing pretty successfully. I’m not saying I’m an expert in these things, but I see it working. PSI: So what should we do to bring these people in?
RE: There are a lot of people struggling with exactly how to do this. I think there’s a way of not putting all the action items within a bureaucratic framework. There are ways to think more experientially, and organically, about how to move forward. [We should] try more things. Be more open to ideas and changes. Be more adaptable. One of the reasons that I’ve wanted to be active on the science panel is I think we have to be able to answer the question you just posed. That’s going to take a collaborative effort, an open source effort if you will. This is where the brainpower of the region comes in. I mean, we have Amazon, the University and a variety of start-ups and a lot of smart people walking the streets. Collectively, I think the answer is there. We just need to figure out how to bring it all into action. My goal is to be around the people who can figure this out. And hopefully it’s younger, higher powered people with a lot of energy with some guidance from people with experience. My main goal is to try to have this dialogue go forward and find the resources we need to collectively involve the people who will give us the answer. About Robert Ewing:
Robert Ewing was trained as an economist and holds a PhD in Wildland Resource Science. He has worked in both the private and public sectors and was Director of Timberlands Strategic Planning for Weyerhaeuser for 20 years. Before that, he was head of resource assessment and strategic planning at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is Director of the Pathwise Fellows Program, which offers leadership training for business professionals. He is also a member of the Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel.
Related article: Urban lifestyles help to protect the Puget Sound ecosystem See also: Land Development and Land Cover Implementation Strategy.
