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Collaboration in the Southwest
APRIL REESE, 05/15/06
In the Southwest, like the rest of the West, stories of "unlikely bedfellows" hashing out local solutions to natural resource issues are becoming increasingly common. And as the movement has grown, it has also changed. Collaborative groups have become bigger, better organized, less fractious and more politically savvy. They are settling into a new level of trust and efficacy, forging closer relationships with federal land managers, and in some cases, they have even managed to enlist the help of Congress.
"I think the collaborative movement is entering a robust era," said Courtney White, executive director of the Quivira Coalition, which formed in 1997 to help heal the rift over grazing in the Southwest and promote ecologically and economically sustainable ranching.
The reasons for the movement's progress are multi-fold. Several groups in the Southwest, such as the Malpai Borderlands Group and the Upper San Pedro Partnership in Arizona and Las Humanas in New Mexico have been around long enough to know what works and what doesn't, and have reached a comfort level that makes it easier to get things done. Word of collaboration successes is spreading through media coverage and web sites such as those of the Red Lodge Clearinghouse and the Sonoran Institute, and new groups can learn from the experiences of established groups.
Many groups have proven that with good faith, flexibility and a strong commitment to the greater good, collaborative groups can find solutions that have long-term staying power and keep people out of court.
"When diverse interests are brought to the table, under a fair hand, and everyone's voices are heard, I think people are amazed at how much they agree on," said Whitney Tilt, who supports collaborative efforts through the Arizona-based Sonoran Institute.
"I think it's growing in power and awareness. And it could change how forest management occurs in the West," said Henry Carey, who has been working on collaborative forestry efforts with the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Forest Guild for almost twenty years. When the Forest Guild first conducted a survey in 1988 to find out how many such groups existed, it came up with 15. "Now, it's in the hundreds," Carey said.
CHANGING TIMES
Part of the reason for the spate of collaborative groups is that new issues have arisen that are unifying communities in new ways. For instance, coalbed methane development on so-called "split estate" lands, where by law a landowner must allow an energy company to develop minerals beneath the surface that are leased from the federal government or the state, has exploded just in the past few years. In the San Juan basin, which stretches across the New Mexico-Colorado border, ranchers like Tweeti Blancett are joining with environmental groups to hold companies accountable for damaging private lands.
And for half a decade now, the Southwest has been in the grip of one of the worst droughts on record, leading some ranchers to question old assumptions and try new methods advocated by groups like the Quivira Coalition, such as grass banking or rotational grazing. The dry spell—which some meteorologists say could last another 15 years or more—has also prompted more ranchers to join watershed groups that are working to protect water supplies through restoration of streamside vegetation and other means.
At the same time, the drought is testing collaborative groups in new ways, pulling some ranchers back the ranch to take care of their own immediate challenges. "You can be collaborative all you want, but if it doesn't rain, you've got problems," White said.
The federal role in collaboration has changed as well: Where there was once skepticism among federal land managers, who are accustomed to a "top-down" approach, there is now greater involvement. And with much of the Southwest's land under federal ownership, having the ear of Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service personnel is key, those involved in the movement say.
In recent years, some groups have actually come together at the urging of natural resource agencies. The Southeast New Mexico Working Group, for instance, was convened by the BLM, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and other agencies that hoped to find locally-based solutions to the decline of the lesser prairie chicken and the sand dune lizard. Agency officials put together a group of stakeholders from a wide range of affected or interested constituencies, including the oil and gas industry, ranchers, state land managers, and environmental groups.
Even Congress is getting involved in collaborative conservation. In 2004, Congress directed the Upper San Pedro Partnership to address the area's groundwater deficit by 2011, and has made sure the group receives federal funding. And Congress recently established the Rio Puerco Management Committee in central New Mexico, charged with restoring water flows and water quality in the Rio Puerco basin.
Science has taken on a bigger role in collaborative efforts as well. Many groups, including the Malpai Borderlands Group and the Upper San Pedro Partnership, have found that having a solid scientific basis behind group decisions ensures better results on the ground and helps ward off lawsuits. For instance, scientific studies of the Ruidoso River have helped the Ruidoso River Association win greater support among skeptics in the community, said Dick Wisner, president of the association.
GROWING PAINS
As the collaboration movement grows in the Southwest, it also faces new challenges.
Established groups are finding that as they complete their first round of projects—typically those that are the least controversial and easiest to implement—they now face more challenging ones they have put off. "We started with the low-hanging fruit—stuff that was kind of obvious and politically acceptable," said Holly Richter of the Nature Conservancy, who serves on the Upper San Pedro Partnership. "Now the projects left are the tougher, larger and more difficult ones."
And while collaborative groups began by getting together around kitchen tables and in conference rooms, in recent years a few groups have found that when it comes to face-to-face contact, less is more. The Southeast New Mexico Working Group, which began meeting once a month, now only meets sporadically, communicating largely via email. And the Gila Watershed Partnership, located in the highly contentious southwestern part of the state, has found that its survival actually depends on participants not being in the same room together. Instead, they email ideas and comments on an evolving watershed management plan to a state environmental representative, who coordinates the collaborative effort.
Securing consistent funding sources is perhaps the biggest challenge collaborative groups face. Private foundations often will only fund a group for a few years at the most, and federal funding is a small pool tapped by many straws, especially as the movement continues to grow, Tilt said.
While watershed groups are bolstered by the Environmental Protection Agency's grants for community watershed efforts, there are consistently more applicants than the agency has funding for. And while the Forest Service offers some community forestry grants, for the past few years, there generally has been less funding allocated to natural resource agencies. "Finding just basic feed money for these efforts can be extremely difficult," Tilt said.
Overall, the federal government appears to be sending mixed signals, even as it touts collaborative conservation as a welcome alternative to top-down natural resource management.
Last August, the administration hosted a "White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation" in St. Louis, Missouri, which produced a slew of recommendations on how federal agencies can do a better job of supporting such efforts, including addressing regulatory barriers to cooperative conservation, getting federal employees more involved in collaborative efforts, and increasing local involvement in federal decision-making.
In November, the administration followed up with a memo directing the Department of Interior and other federal agencies to hire more applicants with experience in collaboration and to train existing employees in building partnerships.
But while those signs are encouraging, the administration has also implemented policies that undermine collaborative conservation. Carey said that just as community forestry is gaining momentum, Congress' Healthy Forests Restoration Act, passed in 2003, is hurting collaborative forest management by limiting the ability of citizens to appeal management decisions.
"My feeling personally is that just as we were beginning to make some real progress in community forestry, the Healthy Forests bill came in, and we are back where we were 10 years ago," he said.
On the plus side, Congress has set up a new program in New Mexico that many credit with successfully addressing the need for a collaborative approach to restoring the state's forests, overgrown from a century of fire suppression. The Collaborative Forest Restoration Program, established six years ago under an act of Congress after a series of catastrophic wildfires burned large swaths of the state in the late 1990s, provides $5 million a year to fund cost-sharing grants to communities that want to carry out fuel treatments and forest restoration projects on public lands.
The projects, which are designed through a collaborative process involving various stakeholders and must be completed within four years, are selected by an approval committee made up of scientists, industry representatives, environmentalists, tribal members and others.
"That's really putting us ahead of the rest of the country," Carey said, adding that there is talk of expanding the program to other states. But even with the program's success, there is not enough funding to support all of the projects that are approved—a familiar story with federal and state grants.
While overall, budgets for land management agencies are decreasing, the culture within BLM, the Forest Service and other agencies appears to be shifting in favor of collaboration. Indeed, that may be partly because of dwindling budgets, theorizes Courtney White, executive director of the Quivira Coalition.
"Since they don't have many resources, they're going to have to be more collaborative," he said. "Ten years ago, you had much more resistance from the federal government. Now, they see that it's okay to get involved, and they need to get involved."
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