The Future of Conservation

A keynote address presented by Ken Elowe on September 8, 2008 at the annual meeting of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Introduction by Matt Hogan the Executive Director of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

Our first speaker to kick it off this morning is Ken Elowe. Many of you know Ken. Ken has been the Director of Resource Management for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife since 1997. He’s been involved in landscape-scale conservation for over 15 years, including helping to negotiate many cooperative landscape management agreements with large corporate timber companies.

He also helped conceive and initiate the Beginning with Habitat Program in Maine involving 5 state agencies, 2 federal agencies, the University of Maine and many land trusts. This program helps towns design and conserve a landscape that provides functional habitat for all species that occur in the state, even at full build out of remaining areas, based on known habitat associations and thresholds for all species.

The program is currently working with over 150 towns in Maine and uses cooperative incentives, acquisitions and other available tools to help towns achieve landscape conservation outcomes.

He has worked with the European Union on designing recommendations for governance structures and incentives for landscape conservation and has also worked with the United Nations and the Government of Jordan to design a cooperative rangeland restoration project for Jordan to restore wildlife and grazing lands on 15 million acres.

He’s really been a true leader in this and was the real driving force behind this plenary session. So, without further adieu, Ken Elowe.

Ken Elowe

Good morning. First, I just want to say what an honor it is for me to be standing up here in front of my colleagues, my mentors in many cases, and leaders of conservation such as yourselves. It really is an honor and I’m humbled. I’m also really excited to be up here and talking about this topic this morning because, as some of you know and maybe some of you will find out, I am very passionate about this subject.

I’d like to do a couple of things in the next few minutes in introducing this topic. First, I’d like to try to illustrate, and maybe even convince you, that there’s a movement afoot - that landscape habitat conservation is not an initiative, it is a movement. Second, I would like to suggest a structure, perhaps even a framework, for us to talk about landscape conservation so that we can have a common language perhaps to compare challenges and successes across our different efforts. With those two things in mind…

First, let’s talk about what this is all about - why are we talking about landscape conservation? What’s the problem? And with every problem comes a commensurate opportunity. So, why are we talking about this?

It really comes down to one question, so here’s the deal. What is the single largest impediment to conservation of fish and wildlife resources for the future? If you ask yourself - if you ask your staff - if you ask even the public what the answer to that question is, you’ll probably get a similar answer. We have become and evolved, and appropriately so, over the years to become very, very good at acute management of fish and wildlife. By acute management I mean the management of harvest and take. We are expert at setting bag limits, season lengths, even antler restrictions to create the products that a lot of our constituents want from us and demand from us. We’re very expert at that. We know what we need to do in terms of habitat conservation, but we’ve been less successful at ensuring that 100 years from now, the fish and wildlife that we are managing today will have a place to stay on the landscape. So, that’s the problem.

It’s actually interesting - this organization has a committee, the Wildlife Resources Policy Committee, and a few years ago that committee went through an exercise to try to figure out what the hot button issues were. What are the things that are really going to affect fish and wildlife in the future? And right at the top of that list - and some of you that were on that committee will remember this - right at the top of that list was sprawl and the impact sprawl has on fish and wildlife habitat for the future. A white paper was developed by that Committee, and it was brought up before the business meeting. And actually, this association adopted, as part of its strategic plan, the encouragement to states and other organizations to address wildlife habitat on a landscape scale. That translated later into the development of the State Wildlife Action Plans. Almost every State Wildlife Action Plan addresses somehow, or alludes to, the need to address landscape habitat conservation. It’s a daunting task. But, in the interest of keeping common species common into the future, it’s something that we had to recognize, even though we don’t know exactly how to deal with it yet.

So, there’s been this evolution of both conservation need and, also, our conservation ability and capability. The need has been addressed really by the pace and the complexity of the impacts that are happening to fish and wildlife habitat, but commensurate with that, our capabilities have been evolving also. We have tools now and sophisticated GIS techniques that we didn’t have a decade ago that allow us to address some of these landscape issues in a way that we couldn’t have looked at them before.

So, the next question is, who should do landscape habitat conservation? Whose job is it? Many of us in this room work for public agencies - state agencies, federal agencies - created by the legislative bodies that supposedly represent the people and the people’s interests. When those bodies speak and create an agency, it’s because they feel that there’s something that needs to be addressed that’s in the public interest. In creating an agency, there is this need that says - there’s something important out there and we want your agency to address it. What is that? In the Maine statute it says, and I’ll paraphrase, basically that our Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s mandate is to ensure the future of fish and wildlife for the enjoyment of the people of Maine. Basically, that means that for our grandchildren’s children - we feel it’s important enough for our grandchildren’s children to have fish and wildlife in their lives also - and so, our job is to ensure that.

So, what do people really want from us? That’s what they want. They want us to somehow assure that there’s a future for fish and wildlife - so the question then becomes; can we succeed in that mission if we don’t put our efforts towards the one factor that seems to dominate the future? What happens if we don’t? Probably the answer is simple - we’ll be counting what’s left.

That’s kind of the problem, but the opportunity that comes with that is that when you whittle this down to what our efforts need to address, it helps direct our current efforts. In other words, it gives us a clear focus for what we need to do now. I want to take just a second and help structure a framework for how to think about this.

First, what is a landscape? We’ve heard lots and lots of ecosystem management initiatives, and they have been more or less successful, depending on how they were initiated and put on the ground. But I want to take a second here and define landscape as I’m talking about it, because I think it’s larger than what we’ve been talking about in the past. I think of landscape as being an area that’s large enough to support all endemic species at the population numbers that people want. Let me repeat – large enough to support all endemic species at the population numbers that people want out there. And that area is too big to acquire. It’s too big to regulate. It’s going to require that we get into the hard stuff, and that’s dealing with people and people’s impact on conservation and how to cooperatively create a future for fish and wildlife. So, how do you do that?

I think there are 4 components to a fish and wildlife conservation program for landscape habitat. I like to think of things very simply. Each of these things is not easy to accomplish on their own, but I think there are 4 basic components.

The first is to develop population goals for the species that you’re dealing with. These have to be developed in collaboration with the public because, again, we’re supposed to be managing what the public wants us to assure for the future. So, they have to be part of the process in defining what that future is - what that product is. Also, this brings them into an understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish. If they’re part of creating the goal for the future, they’re part of understanding what it is, what it means, what we’re trying to achieve, and also perhaps more importantly, what its going to take to achieve that goal. Because, if we’re talking about a landscape large enough for all species, we’re talking about a landscape that’s going to impact people and so they have to be part of this solution.

The second component is translating those population goals into habitat goals. We have to actually go one step further because we have to take the habitat goals - in other words how much area, what kinds of area, what configuration is needed to support those population numbers - and we have to do that for all species. We have to come up with a landscape model actually that integrates all species.

This was brought home to me - you have these aha moments every once in awhile. About 15 years ago I had a timber company that came up to me - the executive in one of the timber companies - and he said, “You want us to manage for moose, you want us to manage for lynx, you want us to manage for partridge, you want us to manage for snowshoe hare - tell me what you want the landscape to look like and then we’ll talk.” And, he was right. We were giving him information from 7 different directions, maybe more, and asking him to integrate it into a forestry plan and that’s impossible. So, here’s the opportunity and the responsibility – it’s for us to take all of those different components and meld them into a landscape design that we can then articulate to the people that have an impact on it.

The third component is to design the landscape - take that biological model and, collaboratively with the communities, design a vision for the future. Here’s the hard part - because this requires us to sit down with those communities and discover what their needs are, not just ours and our visions. We have to combine visions together because they’re going to be the ones that ultimately have the impact on how this happens on the ground. Our vision ultimately should reflect theirs, so it has to be a collaborative approach.

The fourth component is to then work cooperatively to implement this design, this vision. This is going to take acquisitions, regulations, incentives - social, financial incentives - any tool we can think about and dream up. It’s important that we work as partners - between state agencies, federal agencies, conservation organizations - that we work as partners very closely together in this for a couple of reasons. One is that none of us have the capability or the funds to do this on our own. It’s too big. And none of us really can afford to develop either redundant efforts or capability. We have to complement each other. This is a big task, there are only a few of us relatively speaking, and we each have complementary strengths - so we need to use them. The second reason is that when we talk about going to communities - going to private landowners with a message about conservation and a landscape for the future - we need to be speaking with one voice. We need to be speaking with one design because if Fish and Wildlife Service and state agencies and Maine Audubon Society and the University of Maine all go to landowners and say we want your landscape to look like this, they throw up their hands and say, we don’t know what you want. We need to speak with one voice. So, we need to be very, very complementary in our efforts.

If you believe that there’s an issue that needs to be dealt with here, and if you believe that there’s a way of approaching it, then we can start to redefine how conservation is done in this country. We can redefine the scope of conservation. We know enough about what’s needed biologically. We’ll never know as much as we would like to know, but we can’t be paralyzed by that - we need to start now.

We need biologists that are fluent in society’s language; political, social, and financial language. And, as conservationists, we need to center on a vision that integrates all the inhabitants together into one model, including people - because if we separate people and conservation, we can’t achieve this landscape vision. As conservationists we need to be willing to engage, both creatively and cooperatively, to develop incentives that are actually large enough to allow private landowners to contribute in a better way to the common good. And that’s going to require us to engage every level of society and government, because we’re looking for solutions here that will be impossible to find if we stay in our own camps.

Leopold, several decades ago said that perhaps the greatest achievement in his century would be when the social and the biological sciences came together. That’s where we are right now. That’s our opportunity, and it’s an enormous opportunity. So, this is not just another initiative. Initiatives are a few people from the top down saying that this is what will happen. This is a ground swell - this is your staff - conservation organizations – people – all saying that this is what we need to do. The will is there. The components are there. What we need are facilitators and leaders to take this forward. So, this is a movement.

We have some very special speakers this morning. They’re our colleagues and they are leaders. They’re facilitators in these kinds of efforts, and I’d like to invite you, as they speak, to listen for their challenges as well as their successes so we can learn from them. And, listen for those 4 components of conservation at the landscape scale. Biological goals, habitat models, a landscape design and cooperative implementation - listen for those 4 goals and see what we can find for a common way forward. I hope that you’ll become convinced that our efforts, collectively, are needed, and they’re needed now. And, that what you hear from these folks will give you hope that there is a start that we can make on this daunting task for ensuring the future of fish and wildlife. Thank you.

DEPARTMENT INFORMATION

The Future of Conservation