Building Bridges, to a Sustainable Future

A new style of environmental problem solving and management is under development in the United States. Government agencies, communities, and private groups are building bridges between one another that enable them to deal with common problems, work through conflicts, and develop forward-thinking strategies for regional protection and development. From management partnerships and interagency cooperation to educational outreach and collaborative problem solving, this new style of management is developing organically in many places in response to shared problems and the simple need to move forward. In other places, agency initiatives have helped to create opportunities for meaningful involvement that were not possible in the past.

Consider the case of the Kiowa National Grasslands of New Mexico, where a collaboration between the USDA Forest Service, the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), and local ranchers has greatly improved the quality of the area's rangeland. In 1991, Forest Service District Ranger Alton Bryant and Mike Delano of NRCS broke with convention and decided to cooperate in assisting ranchers who worked both private land and public land under permit. Under the jointly administered program, rather than having different management schemes for public and private lands and a mix of advice from Forest Service and NRCS staff, a rancher sits down with representatives of both agencies to develop a long-range plan for the affected area. According to Delano, by managing all of a rancher's land as a "single operating unit," the needs of wildlife, cattle, and environmental restoration can be addressed.

One of the first ranchers to try out this idea on her parcel was local rancher and civic leader Ellen Grove. In her words, she is "sold on it." On her approximately fifteen hundred acres of private and permitted land from the Kiowa Grasslands, Grove fenced in sixteen individual paddocks and installed a new water storage and transport system to service each of those paddocks, all at a substantial cost to herself. She rotates her cattle through the series of paddocks as the vegetation begins to show stress and does not return them to a paddock until the vegetation in it has completely recovered. Other improvements include live snow-fence plantings, wildlife habitat, and wetlands creation. Although initially hesitant to break with ranching techniques that her family had always used, Grove was pleasantly surprised by improvements in the land and cattle.

Improvements in environmental quality were staggering. After three years, Grove had more diverse vegetation. Some native grasses thought to have been locally extinct have reappeared on previously degraded parcels, and cottonwoods and willow seedlings are sprouting in the riparian area. Wildlife habitat has improved so that over fifty species of birds were recently recorded where previously there were only a handful. According to District Ranger Bryant, the "crowning jewel" of Grove's efforts has been the dramatic improvement in the riparian area. An old creek bed that had been dry since the 1950s has once again been running with water and providing wildlife habitat, a powerful symbol of environmental restoration.

Not surprisingly, with the environmental improvements came health improvements for the cattle. Both conception and birth rates have improved in most cases, with weaning weights higher as well. In addition to improved quality of health, ranchers have actually increased the carrying capacity of their parcels. For example, when Ellen Grove began the program, she was running 47 cattle. At the end of the third year, she was running 115 cattle and hopes to consistently support 80 head with continued environmental improvement.

There are literally hundreds of such success stories throughout the United States. Some efforts, such as the Applegate Partnership in Oregon, the Chicago Wilderness project in Illinois, and the Malpai Borderlands in New Mexico, have received considerable public attention, while others are striving quietly to make a difference. Such efforts in some places are called public-private partnerships or alternative dispute resolution approaches. Elsewhere they are described under the labels of ecosystem management, collaborative stewardship, community-based environmental protection, civic environmentalism, and sustainable development. Whatever terms are used to describe them, they are generally place-based, cooperative, multiparty, and grounded in high-quality information. Of necessity, they involve building relationships between individuals and groups who have been isolated or alienated from each other. And by all accounts, they are the pioneers in a new style of natural resource management in this country.

Collaborative resource management has its roots in age-old notions of neighborhood and community, but it is not a purely interest-driven approach that can allow natural resources or certain interests to be exploited. It recognizes the need to ground decision making and management in good science but understands that technical factors are only one of many important considerations in making wise public choices. The new style of management helps to build a sense of shared ownership and responsibility for natural resources by moderating a top-down style of government agencies that has tended to disempower landowners and local interest groups. But it also recognizes that government as a partner can provide unique resources, incentives, and opportunities important to collective efforts.

On the one hand, such an approach to the management of communities and resources is revolutionary and responds directly to the problems inherent in industrial era management that has emphasized narrow objectives, top-down control, tight boundaries, and extensive rules and formal structures to institutionalize public policies. On the other hand, a style of management that emphasizes people getting together to cooperatively solve shared problems seems almost like common sense. Yet most observers of the protracted conflicts over natural resource management in recent years agree that common sense is not so common.

The virtues of collaboration, cooperation,...