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Remarks as Prepared for Deliver for
The Honorable Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of the Interior
North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference
Portland, Oregon
March 21, 2007

Thank you, Steve (Williams, former FWS Director and now President of the Wildlife Management Institute).

I thank you for inviting me to address the 72nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. I say this with an emphasis on the phrase “Seventy-Second.”

What an extraordinary thing that our nation’s leaders in wildlife conservation -- our best scientists, wildlife managers, educators and administrators – have been gathering every year since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Back when so much of our wildlife and its habitat were being swallowed up by the Dust Bowl.

Back when visionaries like Ding Darling and Aldo Leopold called our country to a new conservation ethic.

Back when extraordinary new ideas rose up out of the dust. Ideas such as the Civilian Conservation Corps to put young people to work on projects across the land and the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act to fund state conservation and wildlife management efforts.

Every year since then, you have come together to discuss new research and new methods to help us conserve our land and its wildlife more expertly, more efficiently and more effectively. I applaud you on this 72nd meeting of this great conference.

This is my first opportunity to address you as Secretary of the Interior. Those who know me know I believe in a walk-around management style. You can’t manage properly what you haven’t seen.

In the case of the Department of the Interior, that requires a lot of walking around. I discovered our mandate covers 12 time zones from the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean to Palau on the Pacific Rim. The sun literally never sets on the Department of the Interior.

 I’ve logged thousands of miles in trains, planes, and automobiles. Even airboats and motorcycles.

I’ve seen first-hand the enormous mandate of the Department of the Interior that rivals just about any governmental department in its breadth and diversity – and its importance to the everyday lives of our citizens.

In each place I’ve visited, I’ve been reminded that we have a responsibility – even a sacred responsibility – to the people of this country to manage our wildlife and other natural resources intelligently and effectively, remembering always that our land must be accessible not only to us but to generations yet unborn.

Many of you have been doing this for decades. I applaud your dedication and professionalism. In many ways, I still feel like a newcomer.

The topic of this year’s conference is “The Changing Face of Conservation.”

It is a topic I am eager to embrace -- indeed I believe we are in a time when the face of conservation is changing perhaps as much as it did in the 1930s. In many ways, the stakes are just as high. We have arrived at the threshold of great opportunities. Yet we also face great risks.

In the past two decades, we have seen an evolution in conservation that is allowing us to manage our wildlife and natural resources more effectively.

On one hand, we are becoming more focused – we have gained a greater understanding of wildlife and its habitat so that we are able to concentrate our limited resources on areas where we can achieve the greatest good.

On the other hand, we have become broader in our outlook, managing not just parts of the landscape but for the landscape as a whole.

We have learned the value of using adaptive management to help address complex resource management problems, to test and verify our management solutions.  We are using adaptive management more and more to guide our actions—whether in Adaptive Harvest management of waterfowl or in dealing with other issues.  I have just approved a new policy providing for better understanding and use of adaptive management by all of Interior’s bureaus.

Finally, we have learned to tap more fully into the power of partnership, bringing together federal and state agencies, tribes, conservation groups, businesses, and private landowners in the common cause of conservation.

These are more focused conservation efforts with landscape-level management and with cooperation and partnership. This is the new era of conservation.

The new era of conservation begins on a local level with individuals who make a difference.  In October, I visited the Crane Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota.  I met a young man at the refuge named Ron Beam.  Ron was a local boy who went off to college and came back home to become part of the team to establish the Crane Meadows Refuge.  He was the catalyst for change.  The farmers trusted him and he helped to quiet their suspicions about the refuge.

A local farmer named Elkin Faust—known as “Bumpy”, came to Ron and asked him how he could return a 30-acre pasture on his land to the wetland it used to be—a space only seven miles from the new refuge.  He was the original owner who got government funding to drain the wetland for pasture many years ago.  Now that he was retiring, he wanted to give something back.

Ron helped him through the Partners for Fish and Wildlife program.  He designed a dike and drainage ditch and spillway. 

Now the 70-year-old Bumpy walks to the wetland with his dog, sits in an old car seat under an oak tree and identifies the different species of migratory fowl that drop by to visit.  On occasion Bumpy hunts on his land, but is sparing of what he considers a wonderful resource.

Bumpy’s story speaks to partnership and a passion for respecting people and nature. Individual stories like Bumpy’s are repeated across the country. 

And his story is repeated on a larger scale in places like the Blackfoot Valley in Montana.  The valley is a scenic area depicted in the movie, “A River Runs Through It.”

In the 1990s, residents of the valley became concerned over growing environmental issues including degraded water quality, loss of wetlands, fragmentation of wildlife habitat, and the development of vacation homes that threatened the valley’s traditional rural way of life.

In many places, this could have led to a deluge of government regulation and litigation.  Instead, more than 500 local landowners, 27 state and federal agencies, and a number of nonprofit organizations created the Blackfoot Challenge.

The partners in this endeavor voluntarily 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 voluntarily have set aside nearly 90,000 acres of their land permanently through conservation easements. 

Together, these partners took an honest look at the entire landscape—the landscape where they live and work and play and raise families; the landscape they share with all kinds of wildlife.

Together they found ways to accommodate the change and development while protecting the natural environment and landscape they cherish.  It is a model of the new era in conservation.

But there are many more models.  Last month, I visited an area managed by the Bureau of Land Management south of Carlsbad, New Mexico. I had a good conversation with Joe Stell, who grazes cattle on the land. In that part of New Mexico, creosote and other invasive species have crowded out the native grasses. Historically, creosote comprised 10 to 15 percent of the landscape. Today, the figure is 75 percent.

I asked what caused this to happen. I was surprised when the answer came back: “The Chisholm Trail.”

The five million cattle driven from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail in the late 19th Century decimated the native grasses and allowed creosote to take over. We often think of habitat destruction and degradation as a recent phenomenon. But here was habitat destruction from more than a century ago that was still evident on the landscape.

Today we’re undertaking aerial spraying of the area to combat the creosote. Ranchers like Joe Stell are joining in the effort. We are not only treating BLM land. We are treating state and private lands. It is a voluntary program.

Lush native grasses are coming back. We will soon reintroduce native species such as pronghorn antelope, turkey, and bighorn sheep to restored areas throughout New Mexico.

Ranchers participating in this program agree not to increase the number of cattle on their allotments. At the same time, they understand that the cattle they do have will get fatter faster.

Our vision is to return the grasslands, woodlands and riparian areas to fully functioning ecosystems in New Mexico and other western states. We are doing this in partnership with the Joe Stells of the world. This is a new era in conservation.

President Bush made a major commitment in his budget to support the kind of landscape level conservation we are doing in New Mexico. We are calling it the Healthy Lands Initiative.

Under the initiative, we will invest $22 million to help restore nearly half a million acres of federal land in six targeted areas of the West. These areas have seen growing conflict among competing uses of the land including wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, and energy production.

I am well aware of the friction among conservationists, recreationists and energy developers on public lands.  Access has become a rallying cry among many groups.  That cry is only equaled by the clamor for more energy and less dependence on foreign oil.  Our goal must be to deliver that energy to the nation in an environmentally sensitive way.  And our goal must be to maintain centuries-old wildlife corridors for game to continue into the far distant future.  It will take a holistic approach to do this—one that brings together all competitors for the land and looks at the entire area, not at individual tracts.

The Green River Basin in Wyoming, for example, is one of these targeted areas in our Healthy Lands Initiative. As in other places in the West, the basin has world-class energy resources sitting under world-class wildlife resources. The area has enough natural gas to heat 4 million homes. It also has 100,000 deer, 100,000 pronghorn antelope, 40,000 elk, 8,000 moose and 1,400 bighorn sheep.

Under the Healthy Lands Initiative, we will use landscape-level conservation planning to develop the basin’s energy resources while conserving the wildlife habitat and the recreational opportunities that have made the area so popular for hunters, anglers and other visitors. We will undertake restoration of riparian areas, plant sage grass, aspen and other native vegetation, restore water sources for wildlife, and form partnerships to complete other conservation projects.

Last fall I visited Wyoming’s Pinedale Anticline gas fields.  I was impressed that energy producers there have been able to greatly reduce impact to wildlife by consolidating roads, pipelines, and production facilities; by using directional drilling and reducing truck traffic; and by developing temporary wooden pallets for well pads.  With these efforts the footprint for development has been reduced dramatically from 8 to 10 acres down to ½ an acre.  Every acre of development reduced, leaves an acre of habitat.

In addition to the Healthy Lands Initiative, we recently took another important step to conserve western landscapes and wildlife habitat. The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service issued an update of Onshore Oil and Gas Order Number 1. This was the first update in 20 years. It will improve the way we regulate energy leasing on federal lands like Pinedale. It also addresses many of the issues that are of concern to sportsmen and western landowners related to preserving the wildlife values of the West as we develop our domestic energy.

For example, the Order addresses the issue of split estates by requiring energy operators to make good faith efforts to reach agreements with private surface owners. Where a good faith effort fails and no surface agreement can be reached, the Order requires the operator to post a bond to protect against damages to the surface.

In addition, the Order encourages the use of Best Management Practices to reduce surface impacts from oil and gas development. These include:

When I was governor in 2001, for example, we recognized the importance of upland bird hunting both as a traditional recreational activity in Idaho and as an economic engine to local communities. We wanted to ensure that populations remained healthy so that we could safeguard this great tradition.

I authorized a “Pheasant and Quail Initiative,” directing Idaho Fish and Game to  examine our management practices and determine how we could be proactive in conserving upland birds and their habitat. We took a number of steps to conserve and restore upland bird habitat across key parts of the state.

One of our biologists came up with something he called a “Quail Condo.” He built a wire frame and planted fast-growing vines around its base. As the plants grew, the enclosure mimicked the thick brush and shrubs where quail like to roost. The idea worked. In part because of quail condos, landowners reported a bumper crop of California quail across Idaho's quail range last year.

It is this type of creativity that we need to promote and support. As Secretary of the Interior, I will help you tap into this creativity. I will help you build the partnerships and find the funding needed to seize the opportunities that are all around us in this new era of conservation.

I mentioned earlier that we face risks as well as opportunities as we enter this new era. The risks are that our children will become disconnected from the nature and the traditions of hunting, fishing, bird-watching and other outdoor recreation.

We’ve already seen troubling trends. Most states, for example, are experiencing a decline in the number of hunting licenses issued. Richard Louv’s fine book cleverly describes this as “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

A fundamental truth of human nature is that people take care of that which they love and cherish. Everyone in this room loves and cherishes wild places and wild creatures. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.

Most likely, you cherish these things because someone – a parent, a grandparent, a Scout Leader – took you hunting or fishing, hiking or camping when you were a youngster.

We now have a generation growing up in America that is more urbanized and more computerized. The closest many children get to nature is the screen saver fish swimming across their computer screens.

Ladies and gentlemen - we can do this.  It can be accomplished.  Look at the success we are already having.  We are going to do great things together.  God bless each and every one of you.