What am I trying to illustrate in the above photo (a picture of cattle and elephant dung)? That conservation planning is a pile of poop?

No. But this mixture of excrement does show why such planning needs to incorporate extreme events like drought or flooding – especially for the impacts of those events on local people.

In the place where I took this photo — Mt Kenya – livestock herders have moved into protected areas. Why? Because of a protracted and devastating drought — one Kenya is (hopefully) at the end of. The drought has caused the displacement of huge numbers of people and the estimated deaths of half the livestock.

In times this tough, local herders have been forced to graze their animals in protected areas around the country – areas normally set aside for nature and tourism. I can’t blame them — but in a country that relies on tourism so heavily (it’s the second largest sector of the economy), this development is big and troubling news.

Obviously, conservationists should be planning for such extreme events. They will occur; we just don’t know when. We do often include in our plans responses to long-term environmental events (e.g., blow-downs, hurricanes, etc) and critical threats (such as habitat fragmentation and large-scale agriculture). We are even slowly coming to grips with consequences of climate change. But how often do we consider the effects of extreme events on local people, especially the poor, in the areas in which we work?

Probably not nearly enough.

Why should conservationists do this kind of planning? Because quite often the people living in and around the areas we are interested in protecting rely on their immediate surroundings for sustenance. And how extreme events effect these people will likely tell us how they will in turn use those local resources (in many cases, such as around Mt. Kenya, for their survival). By planning for these events and the ramifications on both nature and people, the effects can be at least reduced or muted.

To that end, many Conservancy projects have indirect benefits to people; but not many plan for direct ones. One example of direct benefits to people is grassbanking – the setting aside of land that can be used for grazing livestock in the event of an extreme drought. It’s simple and effective, and something the Conservancy has done in areas such as Montana, and in Kenya, with our partners at the Northern Rangelands Trust (http://northernrangelands.wildlifedirect.org/) where the grassbanks are being put to good use right now – helping both wildlife and people get through the current drought. And this grassbanking in Kenya has helped reduce pressure on protected areas and keep many more people off of Mt Kenya.

We will get droughts, or floods, or extremes of some sort or another — and people, especially those in poorer areas and countries, will turn to nature to help them through those tough times. We should make sure that nature is resilient enough not only to endure these extreme events, but also the pressures that will be brought to bear by local people — especially when those people’s very survival is at stake.

(Image courtesy Timothy Boucher/TNC.)

Bogdkhan Uul, just south of Ulanbator, Mongolia, is the oldest national park in the world. That’s right — it predates Yellowstone by over 100 years. Established by the Mongolian government in 1778, it was originally chartered by Ming Dynasty officials in the 1500s as an area to be kept off limits to extractive uses, protected for its beauty and sacred nature.

In 1778, it had 23 full time park rangers on staff. Today, there are only five. And therein lies a tale of a traditional conservation ethic degraded by modern politics and pressures.

We set out from Ulanbator at 7am by taxi to the monastery site of Manzushir, about an hour south, with the idea of walking across Bogdkhan back to UB. Established in 1733, Manzushir had over 20 temples and was home to 350 monks. The Soviets reduced it to rubble and killed or exiled all of the monks in the 1930s as Mongolian Buddhism was nearly stamped out because of its resistance and threat to Stalinism. The monastery is about 100 acres in size, located in a south facing valley below some jagged rock cliffs, and nestled within the boundaries of Bogdkhan.

In the cold early morning, the day before Halloween, walking around the ruins, half-walls, hundreds of terraces and foundations, and a lone restored building, we could almost hear the whirring of prayer wheels, see the young novitiates carrying water from the stream for the day. We could hear the echoes of the lives spent here in devotion and ended in a spasm of political and religious atrocity. Mongolian Buddhism, whose closest relative is Tibetan Buddhism, is slowly rebuilding monasteries and communities — but, as with many ancient traditions in Mongolia, the loss of 3 generations to Soviet interference has left these traditions ill-equipped to cope with the modern world.

An interesting parallel is what happened to the herding culture of Mongolia under the same pressures. In the 1930s and 40s, the traditional pastoralists of this country — herding groups and clans that had sustainably grazed the grasslands for at least 1,000 years using complex social, cultural, geographic and meteorological systems and cues — were forced into shared ownership communes and collectives. Some groups managed to integrate their historical knowledge into the collective, some ignored the collective and kept their traditions, and many others lost their practices to the Soviet socialist experiment. In 1990, the date of Mongolia’s independence, the claim of one of the world’s last nomadic people to the land that had sustained them for generations was in serious doubt. And the last 20 years has done nothing to secure their rights, as the government of Mongolia has issued mining leases on their lands without consultation, partially privatized some lands, and failed to put in place trespass protections.

Bogdkhan is about 100,000 acres, mostly forested mountainous country, surrounded by grasslands to all sides except to the north where the city bounds it. Tsetseegun Mountain is at the center of it, one of the 4 sacred mountains around Ulanbator. There is really only one trail into the center of the park, access is limited, yet the past 20 years have seen a number of illegal encroachments and uses inside the boundaries of the strictly protected area. These have happened when some official of the city of UB or a Mongolian ministry official issues an official-looking piece of paper to a businessman to build a Ger Camp (tourist tent) or to a Middle Eastern sheik to build a huge luxury home.

It also happens when local residents get hungry and look to the park to hunt food or graze animals. Twenty years ago, big herds of Red Deer, close relatives of elk, would walk through the middle of UB on their way between seasonal grazing areas; wolves were occasionally heard on the outskirts of town. The pressures of population, corrupting influence of money and the severance of a multi-generational institution of conservation have slowly frayed the quality of this, the world’s first national park.

East Asian Buddhism has the concept of Pure Land, a realm existing in the primordial universe outside of space-time, produced by a buddha’s merit. It is tempting to think of several hundred years of monks and nuns contemplating the celestial in the bosom of earthly Bogdkhan. And equally tempting to hope that some day, this place will achieve again the ideal of conservation that was started there hundreds of years ago. Until then, perhaps the ghosts of nuns and monks will mingle with the ghosts of the red deer in the Pure Land realm.

(Image 1: Bogdkhan Uul Strictly Protected Area, Mongolia. Credit: yeowatzup/Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Image 2: Ruins of Manzushir Monastery. Credit: Yaan/Wikimedia Commons through a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.)

Ecotourism is often presented as the savior for wildlife and wild places — providing local communities with financial incentives to preserve nature while also reducing poaching and development pressure.

But, lately, others question whether rich Westerners jetting around the world really help much at all: They disturb animals, create demands for new development and only employ local people in low paying jobs.

Some conservationists even consider tourism to be a significant threat to natural areas.

Which view is correct? Is ecotourism a problem, or a solution?

My biases up front: I’d rather travel for the purpose of seeing wildlife and enjoying various outdoor activities than just about anything. My wife has remarked it’s my drug of choice.

That aside, I still think the issue of ecotourism defies easy answers. Problem or solution?

It depends.

Certainly, the ecological havoc wreaked by tourists in places like the Galapagos is well documented. A fragile ecosystem, animals unafraid of humans and an increasing number of cruise ships has been a recipe for disaster.

One doesn’t have to look hard to see tourists behaving badly in nature.

People harass and feed wild bison, leave trash strewn across the Himalayas, demand resorts in places they shouldn’t be — the list is long.

And then there’s the whole carbon footprint issue. We all know that flying has tremendous impacts, so can we really justify flying off to some far-off corner of the world to see animals or scenery?

These are important concerns. Without a doubt, ecotourism can be a threat. But is it always?

After all, would there even be a Galapagos left as we know it if it wasn’t for tourism? Really?

Consider other island ecosystems and how difficult it is to conserve native island wildlife. If it wasn’t for those tour boats, the Galapagos would likely be a highly developed, rat-infested island devoid of wildlife.

Yellowstone may at times be crowded with tourists behaving badly, but would there still be herds of bison and packs of wolves and grizzly bears without those tourists?

The Serengeti faces issues, to be sure, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wildebeest population there continues to migrate, during a period of time when so many other large mammal migrations have disappeared.

Private ranches in places like Brazil’s Pantanal and Namibia still have large populations of wildlife, in part because many ranchers here now attract tourists. It seems naïve to expect that they will keep conserving wildlife if visitors quit showing up.

Ecotourism, ultimately, is a complicated issue. And in that way, it’s not so different from most other conservation issues.

Some conservationists have the tendency to declare activities as simply “good” or “bad” — whether it’s ecotourism, ranching, timber harvest, invasive species, hunting, fire, or agriculture. All have their proponents and detractors.

However, we should make decisions based on the reality of our world, not on utopian fantasies where humans no longer have any impacts on nature.

We can work to make sure that ecotourism is done in appropriate ways that benefit wildlife and local communities.

And as the saying goes, conservationists can’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Ecotourism isn’t perfect.

In many cases, though, it’s the best solution we have.

(Photo: Caimans draw tourists to Brazil’s Pantanal. Credit: Matt Miller/TNC.)

Yes, global warming is a big deal and a big challenge. But sometimes I get so frustrated by conservation and environmental NGO’s for not being able to chew gum and walk at the same time — in other words, for failing to appreciate the real lesson of greenhouse gas emissions.

The real lesson is there is no such thing as succeeding at local conservation (and no such thing as protecting your backyard or local community’s natural heritage) without paying attention to global pollution as a whole – of which greenhouse gases are but a few of many.

The National Academy of Sciences has just released a study of global sources of local pollution that is revealing and compelling in its analysis of the long-range transport of pollutants into and out of the United States.

Do you know what’s landing in your backyard? Try ozone, particulate matter, mercury and persistent organic pollutants that have all traveled halfway around the globe from Asia and North Africa, according to the study.

We also give what we receive — the pollution we produce travels to Europe and Canada. There is haze in the Arctic because of particulate matter “imported” from thousands of miles away, and the western United States has experienced several episodes of dust being dumped on it from Asia.

These pollutants are not a vanity or aesthetic issue — they take a huge toll in human health, affecting especially children and other vulnerable portions of our population:

• Ozone is linked to the rate of child admissions to hospitals for asthma.
• The health impacts of particulate matter may account for millions of deaths worldwide per year.
• Organic pollutants impair hormonal, nervous, immune and reproductive systems.
• And perhaps most insidious of all is mercury — which interferes with the developing nervous systems of human fetuses and young infants.

Meanwhile, mercury and organic pollutants can also wreak havoc on wildlife, with well-documented impacts on fish and birds.

What does conservation have to do with this? Simply put, air pollution is the quintessential issue that links ecosystem health and human health and global land use and conservation. For instance:

• Dust storms can result from poorly managed arid lands.
• Organic pollutants are products of unsustainable agriculture.
• The Nature Conservancy’s own analysis of mercury found it to be a major threat to our conservation goals in northeastern United States.

Conservation has historically and consistently neglected pollution. Look at most conservation science textbooks and you will find long sections on invasive species, on deforestation, on greenhouse gas emissions…but almost nothing on pollution. Of course greenhouse gases are now categorized by the EPA as a pollutant — but that was only recently, and most of the public would not think of greenhouse gas as pollution in the same way mercury is.

The Nature Conservancy did publish last year a report on air pollution and wildlife in the eastern United States. But I do not understand the lack of uproar about pollution on the part of the Conservancy and other conservation NGOs. Pollution is the threat to biodiversity and people that can tie us all together in a common cause. If we purchased 90 percent of all the private land in the United States and set it aside for conservation but did not address these global sources of pollution, it would all be for naught.

I am all for focus — with Copenhagen coming up, it is natural that we talk and talk about emissions reductions. But climate change is simply one symptom of a general failure to think clearly about the costs and benefits of our actions in terms of general human well-being and ecosystem health. And climate change is but one of many threats to conservation that can only be dealt with by international agreements.

Let’s hope that negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases pave the way for future international cooperation regarding a wide variety of global pollutants.

(Image: Air pollution and power lines in China. Credit: AdamCohn/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Of course this year’s Nobel Peace Prize got all the press — as that prize nearly always does. The Nobel Prize in economics, by contrast, went almost unnoticed.

That’s a double shame. First, because it was given to Dr. Elinor Ostrom of the Indiana University and Arizona State University — the first woman ever to win the economics prize.

And second, because Ostrom has devoted her career to demonstrating how a fundamental premise upon which most modern conservation strategies are built — the “tragedy of the commons” — is at times false.

More than 40 years ago, an ecologist from Texas named Garrett Hardin who had a gift for a well-turned phrase published an article called “The Tragedy of the Commons.”  His central thesis was that any common resource — say an open pasture or woodlot — will be subject to ever increasing exploitation by individuals unwilling to organize or impose a cost to manage the system, eventually leading to accelerated erosion of the resource.

This premise has so influenced the conservation movement that conservationists have focused their strategies on either advocating government interventions (say, creating a national park or wilderness area) or using private enterprise (privately buying land, easements, etc.) to avert death by a thousand cuts.

But Ostrom’s work has shown that this “tragedy of the commons” does not always have to happen.

Her research finds that communities can and will impose substantial costs to themselves to sustainably manage a common resource if (a) the expected benefits of managing a resource are greater than the cost of investing in the rules to govern those benefits, (b) loss of short-term economic gains are offset, and (c) the potential of cheating is eliminated.

Reading her recent paper in Science magazine — “A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems” — was like a flashlight being turned on during a night dive: My whole world was immediately illuminated.

In the piece, Ostrom outlines 10 key conditions or factors under which a local community will self-organize and impose rules or costs on itself in order to sustainably manage a resource for the long term — factors such as moderate territorial size, shared moral or ethical standards in the community, and an influential leader. (The full list of 10 is at the end of this post.) While achieving all 10 might seem daunting, I would bet that a broad survey of The Nature Conservancy’s field efforts would support her findings.

And here’s why those findings are revolutionary: Because conservationists have always worried about the long-term sustainability of our work — especially in poor places with little government presence and where money to fund our efforts will eventually tail off (and it always tails off — that’s the nature of fundraising).

But when we accept the applicability of Ostrom’s work to ours, then our theory of change — our job, if you will — has to change. Instead of defaulting to government intervention or private enterprise, we must now find ways to ensure that the key conditions of resource self-management are present…and where they are absent, to step in temporarily to fill the gap.

Ostrom’s Nobel Prize validates an approach that depends on empowering local communities, under some very specific conditions, to manage and care for nature — the true test of sustainability.  Without it, we will always be dependent on an ever-needier pipeline of funds to support far-flung efforts.

It is high time for the conservation movement to pay attention to a prize the rest of the world largely ignored.

(Image: Sheep in New Zealand. Credit: vtveen/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Ostrom’s 10 conditions:

1.    Moderate territorial size — so there is an optimum size for the resource.  Too big and its tough to self-organize; too small and it won’t provide enough income.
2.    Scarcity or need must be present.
3.    System dynamics need to be sufficiently predictable (e.g., pastoralists may organize at a big scale but not a small one because of rain unpredictability).
4.    Stationary units of resources — e.g. trees or oysters are easier to deal with than highly mobile resources like an unregulated river.
5.    Size of the group or community has to be considered (optimum group size)
6.    An influential leader, previous organizational skills, and education are all necessary.
7.    Shared moral and ethical standards and thus norms of reciprocity.
8.    Knowledge of the socio-economic system — a common knowledge about the resources helps understand how a resource may generate slowly while a population grows rapidly.
9.    Users dependent on or who attach a high value to the sustainability of the resource.
10.   Collective-choice rules.

Late October brings a slight chill to the air and shadows fall early as we dare to tip-toe through the bat trailer. Secreted within a dark corner of The Nature Conservancy’s 12,000-acre Disney Wilderness Preserve in Florida, this trailer is not for the timid.

A rare maternity colony of southeastern big-eared bats has claimed the trailer as home. They want to be alone, and — except for a monthly visit by Conservancy scientists — that’s exactly what they get. Plus a zillion wasps and some predatory rat snakes, of course.

It’s thought that the colony used to live within ancient cypress and swamp tupelo trees. These hollow structures in misty wetlands once provided privacy, but decades of swamp-logging forced the bats to look elsewhere. To lose these magnificent mammals altogether would be devastating.

A hunting haunt for previous owners, the bats’ chosen trailer has spiders bigger than I am. Holes yawn through the walls; its floor threatens to disintegrate at every step. Female bats in particular cling within, rejecting a new structure the Conservancy built for them just a few hundred yards away.

Certain parts of the country have caves with millions of bats, like Tennessee and Texas. Florida can point with awe and pride to this independent little colony, whose numbers are creeping back up.

But, trust me — it’s probably best to point from a distance. You can safely view a slideshow and check out the full story here.

Judy Althaus is a conservation writer with The Nature Conservancy in Florida.

(Image: the bat trailer at the Conservancy’s Disney Wilderness Preserve in Florida. Source: Erica LaSpada/TNC.)

Thirteen years ago, The Nature Conservancy teamed up with Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, American Electric Power Company, BP America and Pacificorp to buy out four logging concessions adjacent to Bolivia’s Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.

In addition to protecting almost 832,000 hectares of forest habitat and doubling the size of the national park, this purchase (which became known as the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project) aimed to test an idea that was appealing in principal but not yet tested in practice — that saving trees could reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Today, there is broad agreement among businesses, environmentalists, local communities, and government leaders that forest protection must be part of the solution in the global fight against climate change.

That consensus was most recently highlighted at the Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles and in the findings of the bipartisan Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests.

Why such broad consensus? Because deforestation accounts for about 17 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — more than from all the planes, trains and automobiles on Earth.

Slowing — and eventually stopping — that deforestation is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. And it is something we can do right now.

But in 1996, discussions about how to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) were in their infancy.

Trees obviously store carbon as they grow, but there were outstanding questions about how to measure the emissions reductions and to assure that saving trees in one place would not just displace logging elsewhere.

A report from Greenpeace being issued today revisits some of those old questions in an attempt to criticize the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project and to discredit emissions offsets that businesses might claim by supporting such efforts in the future.

The Nature Conservancy respectfully disagrees with Greenpeace’s assertions – a disagreement based on our experience working on the ground for more than a decade to develop high quality forest carbon projects, and on the documented accomplishments and lessons learned from the Noel Kempff project.

As the world’s first project of its kind, the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project was a pioneer project that tested and refined the science of forest carbon accounting and monitoring. It is the first — and still only — REDD project to have its carbon benefits verified by an independent third party.

The Noel Kempff project also serves as an example of how well-designed forest carbon projects can result in real, scientifically measurable and verifiable emissions reductions with important benefits for biodiversity and local communities. These benefits and reductions include:

• Avoiding 1,034,107 metric tons of verified CO2 emissions — emissions that would have been caused by logging and deforestation between 1997 and 2005;
• Preserving a rich and biologically diverse forest ecosystem that was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its outstanding biodiversity value;
• Helping local indigenous communities achieve legal status as “Communities of Native Peoples” and obtain official land title;
• Providing alternative, environmentally sustainable economic opportunities for the local communities, especially via community forestry, and jobs in park monitoring;
• Establishing an endowment which is used to fund project activities and preserve the park for future generations.

The Nature Conservancy and other organizations are now building on the experience and lessons learned in Noel Kempff to inform scientifically rigorous methods and standards for other forest carbon projects, and we are undertaking REDD projects that span entire political jurisdictions in Berau, Indonesia and Para, Brazil.

Projects like these are critical stepping stones that can help inform development of national-level programs and build up the capacity and expertise that countries will need to protect their forests on a national scale.

Getting REDD right and doing it at national scales is essential for making forests a part of the climate solution.

The Nature Conservancy is proud to have had the courage to take the first steps with the Noel Kempff Climate Action project.

We remain steadfastly committed to working with partners from all sectors to learn from, improve on and share the lessons of our experience in Noel Kempff and other forest carbon projects around the world.

(Image: Arcoiris waterfall at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in Bolivia, South America. Credit: Hermes Justiniano.)

Boys fishing the Zambezi River behind a crocodile barrier

How do you convince people that a river they’ve known their whole lives is not the river it once was…or could be?

That turned out to be my challenge last week, when I traveled to Zambia in support of The Nature Conservancy’s new project to restore the Zambezi River.  After several days of meetings with our partners — including WWF and universities and government agencies from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique — I finally got to spend some time on the river itself, in Lower Zambezi National Park.

This was my first experience in an African wilderness, and I was awestruck by the sheer abundance of hippos and crocs and the throngs of elephants, buffalo, antelope and baboons brought to the river’s edge by the blazing heat and parched hills that marked the end of Zambia’s long dry season (see below for a slideshow of the river, dam and wildlife).

While the wildlife had left me with a childlike sense of wonder, it was our dinner companion that night that brought home for me the importance and challenge of this project.

We sat down to dinner amidst a throbbing insect soundtrack, a slow-burning fire glowing in the foreground with the Zambezi a sinuous darker void in the darkness beyond. Joining us was Kevin, a Zambian who manages the lodge where we were staying.  Conversation turned to the health of the river and he told us the majority of his guests were anglers lured by the aptly named tiger fish, a fearsome predator with teeth right off the costume rack of a B-horror movie.

Kevin mentioned that fish numbers were down and had been going down for a while. This seemed a natural opening to talk about one of the specific objectives of our Zambezi project: working with dam managers to improve how they release water from the massive upstream Kariba Dam (called “environmental flow releases”), in part to promote the productivity of fish in this part of the river.

My Conservancy colleague suggested this: “You know,” he said, “some people think the fish decline is because the river no longer has high water during the rainy season because how the dam is operated.”

Kevin, nothing if not blunt, shook his head and said: “Nah, that’s crap. The real reason is that people in the villages take too many fish — they use nets with a small mesh that catch everything in the river, even the smallest fish. That’s why the fish numbers are going down.  But what can you do? You can’t simply tell people not to fish, they have nothing else. What will they do then, come and rob you at night?” He went on to relate his skepticism that the operation of Kariba Dam should, or even could, be altered; it just seemed risky to him.

In this one riposte, Kevin succinctly framed both the need and challenges for the Zambezi project.

First, although the river appears healthy — its water is clean and its banks are wild and rich in wildlife — appearances can be deceiving.  The river is not healthy, or at least not the same healthy it once was. Kariba Dam — big enough to store every drop of water flowing in the river for two years — has tamed it, made it a different river. Before the dam, the river ran high during the rainy season and very low in the dry. Today, the big reservoir behind Kariba captures the floods and evens out the flows throughout the year

Though we don’t have fisheries data from before Kariba, if the Zambezi is like most other big rivers, much of its fish abundance would have been produced in the floodplain grasslands and wetlands when they were inundated by high flows. Now the Zambezi mostly stays in its banks.

Second, the challenges for conservation and of people are intertwined. Overfishing is hurting the Zambezi and, ultimately, the people that depend upon it. The people who live here need some combination of better fisheries management, alternative sources of income and protein, and more fish in the river (one of the goals of the environmental-flows project). These livelihood challenges are inextricably linked with nature conservation and restoration.

Finally, even potential beneficiaries of changes can be skeptical of deviations from the status quo, because the risk of disruption looms larger than the as-yet-unproven possibility of benefits. Thus, the benefits must be clearly analyzed, demonstrated, and communicated.

Kevin’s conviction that overfishing, not flow regime, is the cause of fish decline is partly right — it is a problem for the river as it is today, this river. But this river is different from the river it once was. It’s not surprising that Kevin doesn’t suspect the flow regime; the current river is the only river he’s ever known.  Kariba was built in 1955, and so the only people who can really remember how the river previously worked — let’s say those at least 12 years old then — are nearly 70 years old today.  For everyone else, this river is the river.  And this Zambezi is being overfished.  But perhaps some aspects of the old Zambezi can be restored.

It’s clear we need good communications tools.  If Kevin — who has much to gain from a new flow regime — was skeptical of changes to the river’s management, what would other people say?

Fortunately, we got some practice at that communication later in the conversation. Kevin mentioned that the anglers know they need to fish near the river’s edges, where it flows next to or through downed logs, grasses and other vegetation. “Not out in the middle of the river,” he said. “The water’s too fast and the fish don’t like it. The fish are along the edges.”

I explained that what we talked about before — environmental flows to restore the connection between river and floodplain — was really the same thing as creating lots and lots of such “edge” habitat. Rather than just being restricted to the sides of the river, the shallow, calm, and vegetated “edge” habitat would cover an extensive plain — the difference between grazing cows in a strip of grass along a highway versus a vast meadow.

Kevin nodded his head thoughtfully.  I don’t know if he was convinced, but we’d found some common understanding and vocabulary of how the river worked.  We have much work ahead of us.

(Photo credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

Tom Cassidy is director of of The Nature Conservancy’s federal land programs.

America’s national parks are a constant in my life, both with my family and my work as the Conservancy’s director of federal land programs.

And sometimes the parks, the Conservancy and my work and family come together…as in June 2008, when I traveled to Badlands National Park – first, to celebrate the acquisition and protection of two ranches in South Dakota’s Conata Basin with our staff, trustees, neighbors and officials from the National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Forest Service, and then to explore other NPS sites in the western Dakotas with my wife and 15-year-old son.

The work of the Conservancy, the Park Service and other partners in the Badlands exemplifies the stories told by Ken Burns in his recently concluded PBS film series on the National Parks: citizens working to protect our nation’s wonderlands.

A portion of one ranch lies within Badlands National Park. Most of the Conservancy’s land will continue to be a working ranch and managed in collaboration with partners to advance the recovery of the black-footed ferret, North America’s most endangered mammal, and the prairie dog whose ecological needs extend well beyond the boundaries of the national park. We were privileged to spend time in this area with Badlands Park Superintendent Paige Baker, who generously shared insights informed by his Native American heritage. My family will always treasure our time with him on Sheep Mountain overlooking Badlands National Park and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The Conservancy’s supporters and partners are a part of the living history of our national parks. Great Sand Dunes National Park, the nation’s most recently established park, was made possible in 2004 by the Conservancy’s acquisition of the 100,000 acre Baca Ranch for $32 million. With support from Secretaries of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Gale Norton (and our current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, when he was Colorado’s attorney general), Congressman Scott McInnis and Senators Wayne Allard and Ben Nighthorse Campbell and the citizens of the San Luis Valley, we worked for more than five years to ensure Congress appropriated the funds necessary to protect this area of great human and ecological significance. Approximately 12,000 acres of the Conservancy’s Medano-Zapata Ranch are within the Park boundary.

The Nature Conservancy is also a significant owner of lands within other national parks:

• For example, the Conservancy owns all but 30 acres of the nearly 11,000-acre Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas’ Flint Hills, and collaborates with NPS on natural resource planning and management.

• Santa Cruz Island is the largest of Califonia’s 8 channel islands and the largest within Channel Islands National Park.  The Conservancy purchased 90 percent of this 62,000 acre island in 1978.  In 2000, the Conservancy gave the NPS 8,500 acres (14 percent of the island) — valued at more than $68 million, one of the largest gifts to the Park Service in its history.

Today, the Conservancy continues to own 47,000 acres and co-manages the island with NPS.  In addition, we are working with NPS and other partners to implement one of the most successful park restoration projects in the world.  By removing cattle, sheep and most recently, feral pigs, and ensuring the return of bald eagles to this island paradise, we will secure the long term vitality of island’s unique vegetation and rapid recovery of the rare island fox, the island’s largest native mammal.

• The Conservancy is a significant landowner in Florida’s Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, where we partner with NPS and the State of Florida to protect the wild wetlands of the St. John’s River. This highly productive estuary, where the Conservancy own 9,500 acres of coastal islands and saltmarsh, is full of oyster reefs and provides habitat for sea turtles and manatees.

• Just a few miles from the Capitol, we partner with the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park to protect the globally rare habitats of the Great Falls of the Potomac River flood plain, including Bear Island — site of the popular Billy Goat Trail, which we co-own with the NPS.

This is just a sample of the numerous land protection projects the Conservancy and NPS have collaborated on over the years.

Ken Burns’ film has popularized the description of the National Parks as America’s best idea. It is a privilege to work with so many Conservancy colleagues and the National Park Service to be a part of the great story of protecting the lands and waters essential to the long-term viability of our legacy of protected lands.

(Image: The author overlooks Badlands National Park. Courtesy of Tom Cassidy.)

Editor’s note: Charles Bedford, the state director for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, is living and working in China for the next year and will be writing about conservation issues there. Read all his posts.

How are U.S. perceptions of China sadly out of date? One example lies in how China’s first national park was created.

China has over 2,500 nature reserves, but had no national parks until a few years ago. So The Nature Conservancy worked with the Yunnan provincial government and the Diqing county governor to create China’s first national park — Potatso (Pudacuo) National Park, a Rocky-Mountain-National-Park-sized swath of land in the north part of the state where the government has invested heavily in a classic U.S. national park infrastructure — roads, tour buses, boardwalks, interpretive programs.

It was a bit of a head scratcher — the landscape looked like Yellowstone and so did the roads, lodges, tour buses, stops and signs. But those in charge spent (borrowed) something north of $100m U.S. on the infrastructure and are generating a very large income stream to pay off the loan. The Conservancy worked with them on the signage, design of infrastructure, land plan, etc. Oh yeah, they designated, designed, constructed, and implemented this new national park from what was basically lightly used high-country grazing land in a little over three years.

Here’s the really interesting thing, though: The Diqing county governor — not the central government — was the driving force behind all of this. He set aside the land, he borrowed the money and oversaw the design of the project, he pushed the idea with the Yunnan provincial authorities, and he made the park happen.

He did it so fast that two government ministries in Beijing are still arguing about to whom the park belongs (even though it is administered and managed by the Diqing county government, others want “credit”) and whether it can really be called a national park. Legend has it that the Diqing governor (akin to a county commissioner in the United States) visited Yellowstone and said something like “this is the place” — then came back to Yunnan and made it happen.

Recently, I and officials for The Nature Conservancy in China were in a room with a lot of Chinese government officials — Yunnan parks and wildlife deputies and secretaries, government think-tank directors, and governors’ advisors. They had convened with the Conservancy to talk about how to advance the idea of national parks throughout China.

The group in the room was trying to figure out how to get the national government to embrace their concept of national parks to promote tourism, nature education, conservation and local economic development. It’s a bit like in the late 1990s in Colorado, when Alamosa County commissioners petitioned then-U.S. Senators Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard to champion a new national park at the Great Sand Dunes.

All this is an interesting illustration about how wrong most of our perceptions of China are. We tend to think this is a place with one authoritarian government where all rules flow from the center, Beijing. Nothing could be further from the truth. And in that mistake lies a lesson for conservation in China.

(Image: Potatso National Park, China. Credit: nOr/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)