Red Lodge Clearinghouse: Collaborative Conservation

Valle Vidal — the "collaboration that could" and did
BY APRIL REESE
The Coalition for the Valle Vidal just may be the biggest, broadest, most effective collaborative effort in the West. After more than three years of statewide coalition-building, congressional lobbying and consistent press coverage, the coalition achieved its ambitious goal in November 2006, when Congress passed the Valle Vidal Protection Act. Boasting 400 members from all walks of life and thousands of supporters throughout New Mexico and beyond, the coalition was able to attract national media attention and congressional support in its quest to permanently protect the Valle Vidal, a vast, verdant bowl of alpine meadows and conifer forest nestled in the Sangre de Cristo mountains (the southernmost finger of the Rockies) in northern New Mexico.

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Collaboration on the move — Lakeview Stewardship Group's Mike Anderson reports expanding collaboration
Our efforts to organize a similar collaboration on the Olympic Peninsula have been extremely successful. The Skokomish Watershed Action Team has brought together all the key players — the tribe, timber producers, county and state governments, Forest Service, Congressman Dicks, and environmentalists — in a concerted effort to restore the health of the Skokomish River watershed.

Every restoration program requires strong leadership

Skokomish Watershed Action Team
BY NATALIE HENRY BENNON
According to many members of the Skokomish Watershed Action Team, the Skokomish River is the most frequently flooded river in the state of Washington. The Skokomish once hosted throngs of Puget Sound chinook, Hood Canal summer run chum, bull trout, and steelhead — all either endangered or close to it — but migrations are impeded in the north fork by a dam and in the south fork by a de facto dam of sediment and gravel that plugs the river and blocks it to salmon migration. The river bottom rises a little every day, increasing the damage caused by frequent flooding. Three years ago, flooding caused part of the river to change course permanently so that now the river passes through a cattle farm. According to one member of the action team, it is common for some residents of the lower valley to have watermarks up to five feet high in their homes.

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Cameron Wheeler, immortalized at the Red Lodge Workshop at the end of October in 2001, then a state legislator from the state of Idaho, now Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner is basically an optimistic man. We named the summary document of the event "Next Year Country." The words were used by Cameron's wife. He had the sweet habit of saying, "Mark my words, next year we'll see a lot more early rain. Next year we're going to get a much better harvest. Next year the elk will be back and the hunting will be great."
   "You know, Cameron, you live in "next year country," she would say.
   And when, on the last day of the workshop, he addressed the last plenary session, he said, "She's right, I do live in Next Year Country, and I'm there now, with a bunch of folk who want to work things out."
   As Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner Cameron is having a little more of a problem "working things out." He faces a powerful hunting constituency who claim the elk are being "decimated" by the growing number of wolf packs, and then there are the conservationists who claim there's been no clear scientific data that prove lower elk numbers, "in certain places," indicate a direct correlation between more wolves, fewer elk.. Yes, elk will move and change the habitat they use, but they're there, and the evidence that they've been "decimated," as in slaughtered, does not exist.
   Cameron remains optimistic that the work of the Elk Collaborative is still valid. A base of trust was built among many stakeholders and Cameron hopes that base will encourage the players to get together again. He also hopes that Wyoming relaxes its stranglehold on wolf status so that Idaho, Montana and Wyoming can put together a coherent, scientifically supportable wolf management plan.

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