Browse
our Frontpage

The Future of Conservation
in America Runs Through It


Kathleen Clarke / AFP
08/19/05

If you want to find the future of conservation in America, don't look in marbled halls of Washington. Instead go to Trixi's Antler Saloon and Fine Dining in Ovando, Montana.

Trixi's is a social hub for locals in the Blackfoot Valley, the scenic area featured in the movie "A River Runs Through It." It is also the birthplace of The Blackfoot Challenge, a remarkable alliance of more than 500 local landowners, 27 state and federal agencies and numerous non-profit organizations formed in the mid-1990s to address environmental challenges such as degraded water quality, loss of wetlands, fragmentation of wildlife habitat, and second-home development that threatened the valley's traditional rural way of life.

Working together, the diverse partners in the Blackfoot Challenge have contributed more than $5 million to restore and enhance more than 2,600 acres of wetlands, 38 miles of streams and 2,300 acres of native grasslands. Private landowners have set aside nearly 90,000 acres of their land permanently with conservation easements.

Remarkably, all of this has been accomplished without heavy-handed laws and regulations or lawsuits and acrimony.
The spirit and energy of this community-based alliance and hundreds of others like it across the country is the future of conservation in America.

In recent decades, we have addressed many of the glaring environmental problems we faced in the 1960s and 1970s when smog enveloped our cities like a dirty blanket and rivers were so polluted that one even caught fire.
Landmark laws like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act have succeeded. We've cleaned up our waterways, eliminated much of the smog over our cities and brought back species like the peregrine falcon and the bald eagle.

We are reaching the limit of what these laws can do. Laws and regulations can prohibit harm to the environment but they cannot compel enthusiasm and creativity in restoring our wetlands, waterways and wildlife.

If we are going to continue to make progress in the 21st century, we need a new approach built on the idea that successful conservation is inspired by a partnership between the government and the people – a partnership that can achieve what the government alone cannot achieve. We need the Blackfoot Challenge.

To support local efforts like the Blackfoot Challenge, President Bush signed an executive order last year directing the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and the Environmental Protection Agency to promote cooperative conservation by actively working in partnership with states, local communities, businesses, non-profit organizations and private citizens. The goal of the order is to help empower the American people to take conservation into their own hands.

The order also called on the White House Council on Environmental Quality to convene a Conference on Cooperative Conservation this year. The three-day conference, to be held in St. Louis in late August, will provide a forum for diverse groups of community and business leaders and federal, state, tribal and community government officials to exchange information and identify innovative and effective approaches to promoting cooperative conservation.

The goal of the conference is to energize an army of citizen-conservationists and to give local communities, organizations and landowners the tools to cooperate on conservation projects.

Ultimately, the people who are best able to take care of the land are those who live on the land, work on the land, and love the land. They have the knowledge, skills and motivation to take care of the land better than anyone. We need to empower them.

Americans love the natural world as much as any people on earth. We strongly believe our children and grandchildren deserve to inherit a land as healthy and whole as the one we inherited.

Working in partnership, we can reach this goal. Successful conservation must be a partnership between the American people and their government.

Kathleen Clarke is the director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management