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Collaboration in the Northwest
NATALIE HENRY BENNON, 04/10/06
Jim Walls of the Lakeview Stewardship Group in south central Oregon wasn't surprised when he got a call recently from a lumber mill in Oregon that wanted to start a new group to work collaboratively on natural resource issues. Nor was the executive director of the non-profit Lake County Resources Initiative surprised when someone at a biomass conference in Denver asked him how to get a group started.
"This is the way to get around the battles and stay out of court—coming to agreement and working on areas of common interest. I don't think there's any other way to do business anymore," Walls said.
Diane Snyder of Wallowa Resources, a non-profit in northeast Oregon involved in several collaborative groups, has also received phone calls from people inquiring how to get a collaborative group started, or asking if Snyder herself will come and help them start one. "They're asking about the model and wanting assistance in collaborative and community-based natural resource management," Snyder said. "Collaboration is growing. And the desire for collaboration and the benefits that have been experienced is also increasing," she said.
Many other leaders in Northwest-based collaborative conservation efforts echo these comments. Both urbanites and rural Northwesterners find the trend appealing. "People across the Northwest are more and more interested in collaboration because they like the idea of a solution to what's been a bitter, long debate. So it's not only people who've been affected or actively involved, like the conservation or rural communities. People in Portland love the idea that there could be a solution to this problem," said Emily Platt, executive director of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force and one of the coordinators of the Pinchot Partnership.
The trend toward collaboration
The reasons behind this growth are varied. For one, more people are realizing that the old model of conflict, litigation, and gridlock is not working. "I think there's recognition that despite all the conflict, we still haven't recovered owls or fish in the Northwest, or restored the habitats that are critical to those species. And we still haven't quite figured out the social end of restoration and sustainability. I think that's the challenge right now, and I think collaboration at the local level is probably what's needed to elicit consensus at the local level, on the ground," said Brett Brownscombe of Oregon Trout.
Many of the people active in collaboration in the Northwest agree with Brownscombe, but there may be other, less-traditional reasons for the mounting interest in collaboration. Claire Lavendel, supervisor of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, said she believes communities everywhere—not just natural resource-based communities—are generally seeking more consensus and less conflict, and beginning to articulate what they need as well as empathize with others. "I just think people are more willing, because of the pressures of society, people are becoming more like that," Lavendel said.
"Things are getting to some critical points. We're losing salmon, we're losing schools, so people can't afford to be vague anymore or play games anymore. People are getting much more real … and saying, 'Here's what I really need,'" Lavendel said. "And the egos kind of get stripped away."
While the Bush administration has made efforts to bolster "cooperative conservation," most northwesterners involved in collaborative groups say it has made little to no difference. But neither have the administration's attempts to limit public participation by having short comment periods or public hearings where people air their opinions individually and alone to a microphone in a closed-door session.
Johan Hogervorst of the Siuslaw National Forest said his sense is that collaboration becomes locally popular when local leaders push for it and support it. "We have leaders and people involved in collaboration that really open it up for us," he said. "It depends on where you go, who you're working with and, really, the personalities involved, because it's people that make the difference."
Hogervorst, however, also acknowledged that national leadership has made a difference. For example, when Congress passed a law in 1999 authorizing "stewardship contacts" that allowed each national forest to retain some of its earnings to fund restoration projects, collaboration received a huge boost. "We just thought that was too good to be true," Hogervorst said, adding that he is thankful Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) was able to secure authority for the Forest Service to be able to fund restoration projects on private land when they benefit public land.
Barriers against collaboration
But the movement does face challenges, the biggest one being funding. Platt of the Pinchot Partnership would like the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and any other agency involved in collaborative conservation to include a specific line item in their budgets for collaboration and monitoring. "If this is something they're going to be encouraged and required to do, they need to be funded," she said. "Collaboration could have a huge impact on the Northwest, and I think it's an absolutely critical, smart, strategic investment for the Forest Service and BLM."
Maia Enzer of Sustainable Northwest agreed. Enzer noted that not only is there no money for the agencies to collaborate, but if a collaborative group comes up with a solution to a problem, the agency that wants to implement the solution rarely has any money for it. "If Congress and the administration don't prioritize funding collaborative outcomes, it will be very difficult to get beyond process and get to implementation," she said.
"The Forest Service has downsized and defunded to the point where we're not even sure that they're in business anymore," said Jack Shipley of the Applegate Partnership. "That sounds kind of sarcastic, but they're almost irrelevant. They talk the collaborative talk, they've got all the words down, but we're just not seeing it. And that seems to be the message we've heard from people we've talked with in New Mexico, in Arizona, in Montana, and elsewhere here in Oregon." Shipley noted, however, that there are always exceptions, and that the Applegate Partnership has had a somewhat positive response from the BLM lately, but less so from the Forest Service.
Snyder of Wallowa Resources echoed the comments about needing to fund collaboration within federal agencies, but added that the agencies also need incentives. Without incentives, it becomes the prerogative of each individual bureaucrat to decide whether or not to work closely with communities.
For example, Snyder noted that lately the administration has been talking about applying performance measures to federal agencies. "I think that's great. Everyone wants our government to be accountable for the funds that it's spending," she said.
But performance measures cannot be linked simply, for example, to the number of acres treated for fuels, which will encourage repeated treatments of easily accessed acres. Similarly, performance measures that tie success to lowest cost will encourage agencies to restore the easier to manage areas, like those without endangered species listings, thus failing to help recover species. And performance measures that tie success to the highest volume of timber cut will encourage agencies to push timber sales through quickly, with little time for collaboration, Snyder said. The result would likely be more crisis, gridlock, and litigation—and a stake through the heart of collaboration. Instead, Snyder wants to see performance measures that reward collaboration and capacity building.
Another challenge is defining collaboration. "It's kind of like old growth. Everybody defines it differently. Now people define collaboration differently," Lavendel of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest said.
"Collaboration is not single-issue mediation," said Enzer of Sustainable Northwest. "It's much more integrative, and it requires that at some point everybody look at the whole issue, not just the single thing they care most about."
Others echoed her comments, noting that successful collaborative efforts are long-term efforts that are broad in scope and aim not simply to solve one immediate problem, but rather to establish a new tradition of involving entire communities in making resource management decisions. Brownscombe of Oregon Trout added that it is key for agencies to be on equal footing with everyone else in a collaborative group.
But despite the confusion about defining collaboration, Platt of the Gifford Pinchot Partnership said she is wary of a top-down edict that strictly defines collaboration. "There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly what collaboration is and exactly what that looks like," she said, noting she would like more money spent supporting new collaborative groups and training agency staff and community members on how to work collaboratively. "But I wouldn't want to see them get too specific about what collaboration is or isn't. … It's going to be different in different areas. That's the bottom line, and I wouldn't want to see all that taken away. Some sideboards might be good, but flexibility is nice, too."
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