New Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis: Friendly.Photo: National Park ServiceOne weekend this summer, my wife and I ferried across Puget Sound to Olympic National Park, chose a hiking route with the help of an awesomely smart and patient ranger, and set forth from the highest trailhead in the park. We crossed alpine ridges, dropped into a lush valley, frolicsome marmots etc., etc.

It wasn’t until we set up camp hours later that we discovered … I had forgotten our tent. Whoops. We slept under a ramshackle lean-to, and, fortunately, it didn’t rain.

Jonathan Jarvis, the newly confirmed director of the National Park Service, can’t do much to prevent boneheaded moves like mine. Truth be told, when we spoke this week I was too embarrassed to tell him about forgetting a tent. Instead, I asked about his 33 years in the park service, starting with a volunteer stint when he was fresh out of college and culminating later this month with an office view of the National Mall when the 56-year-old moves to Washington to assume his new post. Jarvis has been a park ranger and superintendent in parks across the West—in Alaska, Idaho, Washington state, and California. He raised his family in parks and worked most recently as director of the service’s Pacific West Region, based in Oakland.

In taking charge of one of America’s most beloved public institutions, Jarvis confronts a formidable list of challenges. Chief among them, he says, will be readying the parks for the ongoing effects of climate change.

Detailed in a recent report, those threats include more and fiercer wildfires, receding glaciers, a shift from spring rains to fall rains, and more rainfall on snow. The rainfall changes will increase flooding, says Jarvis.

“All of those are disturbing, of course, and they’re changing the parks in significant ways,” he said. “But they’re also teachable moments that allow us to communicate with the American public about how this climate-change thing is not some theoretical thing that’s only affecting the polar bears, but it’s actually affecting us here close to home.”

When he was superintendent of Mount Rainier National Park, visitors would ask what happened to the ice caves they remembered climbing in as kids.

“Rather than just saying ‘they’re gone’--because they are--there’s an opportunity to tell them that over the last 25 years, the Tahoma Glacier has receded hundreds of yards and the ice caves have disappeared,” he said. “Based on our long-terming monitoring, all the glaciers are receding. There’s strong scientific evidence that this is the result of climate change.”

I asked if climate change would be the foremost message that rangers would teach. That would be silly, Jarvis pointed out.

“There are ways to incorporate climate change into a lot of messages,” he said. “But, you know, it might be hard to have it part of your Civil War battlefield story. You could probably build it in, but it certainly shouldn’t be your predominate story.”

Fair enough. There’s also the issue of shifting habitats—animals and plant species moving in and out of parks in search of cooler or wetter climes, for example. Historically, Jarvis said, the park service has not done well managing at an ecosystem level by working with nearby landowners—private citizens, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service. One exception has been at Yellowstone National Park, where migratory bison have forced the park service to accommodate them. It can learn from this model, he said.

Another top goal, he said, is “to connect all Americans [emphasis his] to their national parks.”

“[Wallace] Stegner’s idea is that parks are democracy at its best,” he said.

I asked him about a fascinating profile of Shelton Johnson, one of a very few black park rangers, who notes that few African Americans visit parks. Jarvis spoke about the EcoHelpers program at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which brought nearby urban youth into the park to help with restoration projects. The students then brought their parents to show off their work, in a model Jarvis would like to replicate elsewhere.

By the way, the parks system includes 58 national parks and 333 other units--national monuments, historical parks, battlefields, national lakeshores, seashores and parkways, wilderness areas and other cultural sites.

Does Jarvis’s job still sound fun? Here are a few more challenges:

“You hear stories about kids seeing the Milky Way for the first time, and they didn’t realize that the sky was full of stars, until they got out into these environments,” he said. “It changes them in profound ways. If we can give every American that opportunity … to see the Milky Way, to see wolves in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone, to see natural fire burning, or to see the salmon running freely up a river--all of those things, I think, create a sense of social responsibility that will carry through the rest of their lives and make them better citizens.”

It’s a romantic notion. I guess the parks have that effect. Let’s end on a proper note:

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So earnest it hurts.The new climate anthem is out—you know, the remake of “Beds Are Burning” that features such hip, 21st-century acts as Duran Duran, Bob Geldof, and Youssou N’Dour—and I can’t get it out of my head.

Actually, it left my head pretty much as soon as the 4:02 video ended. But I was struck by, and can’t stop thinking about, the fact that the modified language in the song goes like this: “The time has come/to take a stand/it’s for the Earth/it’s for our land.”

I expect this to resonate with exactly no one.

Right? Of all the ways to get people fired up about the urgency of the climate issue, is “land” going to get the job done?

This notion keeps surfacing in discussions at Grist—first when Obama gave his speech, and laid out the various reasons the U.S. needed to take action. (Not any plan for taking action, but some darn good reasons why we should think seriously about it.) Then with the debut of the latest Ken Burns documentary, the one on the national parks. Associated with that program has been a fair amount of press (and press releases) warning of the damage that climate change could inflict on our treasured parks—Glacier losing its glaciers, Joshua Tree losing its Joshua trees, and so forth.

Which is a bummer, to be sure—even tragic in some sense. But is it tragic to someone who can’t find a job? For that matter, is it tragic to someone who has a great job and all the comforts that go along with it?

There was a time when protecting land was enough to get environmentalists and their allies all fired up. That’s what got the movement going. And to be sure, there is still important work going on in that arena. But as a way in to the climate issue, I think we can do better.

How about drawing the connections to jobs, or health, or the despicable folk who run our slimiest corporations? How about saving money or protecting your children?

Or how about thinking of some shiny new ways to get people to “care” about the climate. How about making it a competition to see which country can lower its emissions most—winner gets free ice cream for every citizen! How about making a new reality show in which industries face off against each other, American Gladiator-style, for the right to emit? How about tying it to sex? Surely there’s a way to tie it to sex.

I think they should redo that video.

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Theodore Roosevelt had his delicate spots—he was an asthmatic child and later a naturalist who reveled in birdwatching. But 100 years after his presidency, the image of him that endures is decidedly more swaggering—an outdoorsman who loved to hunt, a mountaineer, a populist who thundered against corporate "despoilers" of the public welfare.

He also left a legacy of 234 million acres of national parks and other protected American wilderness. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written acclaimed books on Ford Motor Company and Hurricane Katrina, focuses on the conservationist work of the larger-than-life president in his new book, the 960-page Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.

We spoke recently about Roosevelt and how he might have taken on today’s despoilers.

Q. Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands, on his African safari, and in the mountains with John Muir—he seemed link it all to his work in public. What was it that he found in the wilderness that made him such a powerful leader?

A. He had chronic asthma as a boy and got very skeptical about hyper-industrialization, seeing the smokestack factories along the East River in New Jersey. Yet when he’d go to the Catskills and later the Adirondacks, his illness would go away. He found that being out in the wild was the cure to his respiratory illness. 

He also created a philosophy that what made American democracy unique was wilderness. He believed that it would have medium-sized cities surrounded by what we today would call greenbelts. And that if you let sprawl happen it would desecrate the beautiful American landscape.

He was also very influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin and this notion of the need for species survival and the classification of species. Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishment may have been his leadership in inventorying the biotic America. He wanted to know what kind of wildflowers we had, what insects, what types of prairie grass. And he wanted to educate people that the planet was one whole thing, one biological organism.

Q. What would he think of the so-called unscientific America today, where so many people reject evolution?

A. He would be aghast at people ignoring science. He pushed for science and biology to be taught in public schools.  He wanted all children to grow up understanding Darwin and Huxley. On the other hand he was a bit of a romantic about nature. The combination of the two made him almost an ideal president for the current environmental moment.

Q. Today we’ve got big business interests—the National Association of Manufacturers for one—saying the world is going to end if we pass a climate change bill. It sounds like Roosevelt faced the same kind of opposition when he took on the mining industry and others who didn’t want places like Grand Canyon to be protected. What was his strategy?

A. He would have taken his fist and smashed the National Manufacturing Association. I’m not kidding, he was that vigorous a figure. Anybody who put a company profit over the public welfare, Roosevelt called them despoilers. It was his favorite word. He also called them swine. It was a trend of capitalism he worried about, that we would create a culture where the corporations could do what they wanted for their profits and do damage to the public welfare.

Q. Do we have anyone of any influence speaking like that today?

No, we don’t. Roosevelt cloaked himself in American mythology--he’d wear a cowboy hat and bandana, carry a gun, and present himself as kind of an archetype of American manhood -- so he could talk to common people. Sometimes 200,000 people would come to hear him give conservation speeches.

He didn’t see it as negotiable. He was a pragmatist, but there were some things that you couldn’t negotiate. You couldn’t partially mine the Grand Canyon. It needed to be preserved forever. And that was the end of the conversation. Even though Congress voted to mine it for zinc and asbestos, Roosevelt used an executive order and overruled them.

Roosevelt also called for a global conservation congress that would have global environmental laws. One hundred years ago, in 1909, he called for that. He knew that it doesn’t go any good to save birds in America if they go down to Central America and the whole flock is massacred. It doesn’t do any good for us to keep the Rio Grande clean if Mexico’s going to dump sewage in it. So Roosevelt’s notion that we could work in a global fashion on conservation issues is very timely today.

Q. Did he have any success with that?

A. No. The first one he passed was with Canada and Mexico, and it was successful. But they were planning the global one when he left office and went to Africa to collect for the Smithsonian Institute. William Howard Taft came in with the Republican big business crowd, and they threw out the idea.

Q. A politician going to the wilderness for self-reflection--that’s such an exotic idea today, Appalachian Trail jokes notwithstanding. What’s lost with that?

A. Well, it’s tough to do. I think it’s good that President Obama visited Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon last weekend. But I’d also like the president to get into some of the wilderness areas of America and to start thinking of immediate things that can be done on climate.

For example, ANWR in Alaska should become a national monument or park. Obama should create a national caribou reserve. Roosevelt created national buffalo reserves—the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma and at the Flathead Reservation in Montana--wildly successful efforts to keep the buffalo alive and thriving. We need to do that now for the caribou that climate change has put under great stress in Alaska.

Historian Douglas BrinkleyPhoto: Danny Turner for HarperCollinsQ. And Obama could do that through executive order?

A. He can. He could do it tomorrow with an executive order declaring ANWR a national monument. The only problem is a weird stipulation put on ANWR in 1980 that says it would be sacrosanct for only one year, and then Congress would have to agree to it. He would have to use the political muscle to get votes on Capitol Hill. But he could get them. It’s just a matter of wanting to have these fights. [Update: See below for more on conservation law in Alaska.]

And on the Mexican border, wildlife is dying like crazy because they’re building a wall that’s killing off an entire wildlife corridor. The wall is idiotic. There’s a lot that can be done besides the big difficulty of weaning the world off of its addiction to petroleum. Those are proactive things the Obama administration should be doing now.

Q. Do you see any way that the Republican Party might embrace his conservation legacy and reclaim the environmental heroes in its past?

A. We’re on the verge of a new green revolution, and I think I think there’s an opportunity for the Republican Party to reinvent itself as promoting it. The problem is the oil lobby and the coal lobby are so powerful in Republican politics that nobody wants to stand up to them. Until you get a Republican of great vision who can be Rooseveltian in putting long-term public welfare over short-term corporate good, I don’t see it coming any time soon.

Q. How do we make environmentalism badass again, the way it was for Roosevelt?

A. Everybody likes TR, because we can see that his legacy is not a Democratic legacy or a Republican one, it’s a great American legacy. I don’t think we have to be at partisan odds over clean air, clean water, and keeping our forest reserves intact. Those should just be American goals. And I think Roosevelt helps that process along.

There’s always a need for an alliance between sportsmen--hunters and anglers--and the preservationists in the environmental movement. They have different interests, but when they work together they can get a lot of things done. It can often mean those extra Congressional votes. I know for a fact that these hunt clubs, many of them for their own reasons, want to have caribou and polar bears saved in Alaska right now. Green activists might be able to form alliances with them, working against the extraction industries. Roosevelt provides an example of bringing those communities together in a common, concerted effort.

Watch Brinkley talk Roosevelt and Wilderness Warriors on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week.

Update: More from on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge conservation law from Cindy Shogan, executive directory of the Alaska Wilderness League (AWL):

The short answer is that ANILCA (Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act - passed in 1980) says that large withdrawals of public lands terminates unless Congress extends the withdrawal through legislation within one year of the withdrawal.
 
Yes, an Arctic Monument would be large - but we would argue that this is not a new withdrawal, these lands are already withdrawn.

Shogan also directed me to attorney Peter Van Tuyn, who has done work for AWL. He provided this anwer:

With passage of ANILCA in 1980, Congress purported to “provide[] sufficient protection for the national interest in the scenic, natural, cultural and environmental values on the public lands in Alaska.” ANILCA § 101(d), 16 U.S.C. § 3101(d). Among other provisions, the Act set aside more than 104 million acres in new and expanded “conservation system units” and created 56.4 million acres of wilderness. In doing so, Congress stated that ANILCA struck the proper balance between lands set aside for conservation and lands left available for other uses, and as such, future legislation creating new conservation system units in Alaska would be unnecessary.  Id.  Based on this balance, ANILCA’s so-called “no more” clause limits future actions by the executive branch to establish or expand conservation system units in Alaska. ANILCA 1326, 16 U.S.C. § 3213.  The provision renders ineffective any executive withdrawal of land that exceeds 5,000 acres in the aggregate absent public and congressional notice and a joint resolution that approves the executive action. If Congress, within one year, does not ratify the executive land withdrawal it automatically terminates.

Layering an Arctic Refuge Monument over the existing Arctic Refuge does not, by itself, violate the “no more” clause.  As noted above, ANILCA’s “no more” clause limits the authority of the executive branch to withdraw public lands in excess of 5,000 acres without the express permission of Congress. 16 U.S.C. § 3213(a). The language of the “no more” clause, however, clearly indicates that the provision is only triggered when a withdrawal of land actually occurs.  The general understanding of the term “withdrawal” in the public lands context means a removal of land from the operation of some or all of the public land laws under which the land would ordinarily be made available for settlement, mineral location, or other forms of disposition or private use.  Currently all land within the Arctic Refuge, in particular the coastal plain area and wilderness areas, are fully withdrawn from operation of the public land laws. As a result, in its existing state, the land in the Arctic Refuge cannot be further withdrawn, and establishing an Arctic Refuge Monument would thus not run afoul of the “no more” clause.

As with anything legal, there are other nuances to the answer, but this is the gist of it. 

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Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado's War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism.

Back in the 1980s and '90s, during Rodney Coronado's radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to mean violence against people. Feeling strongly that the loss of any life was wrong and that casualties would harm the movement, Coronado took care to not hurt anyone as he liberated animals and burned down research facilities across the American West. Charged with arson in 1995, Coronado served four years in a medium-security prison and, in August of 2006, was sentenced to eight more months for dismantling a government-owned mountain lion trap.

But over the years, the official definition of terrorism expanded. Through the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, and the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the federal government proclaimed that the tactics the radical animal-rights crowd had been using for years were now a form of "terrorism" and could be prosecuted much more harshly.

In 2007, Coronado found himself standing before a judge once more--though not for property destruction, as his days of burning down buildings were long behind him, but for making a speech. While giving a lecture about his past radical actions, Coronado answered an audience question about how to build an incendiary device out of a plastic jug, and for that, Coronado was charged with a felony and ultimately sent to federal prison for a year and a day. Compared to other collared eco-activists who have been threatened with sentences of up to 20 years under the stricter federal laws, perhaps he got off easy.

Kuipers has been following Coronado's flame-broiled tale of radical action for 17 years and tells the whole story in Operation Bite Back. Kuipers makes it clear that he does not advocate arson or property destruction, but challenges us to consider whether it's reasonable to apply the label of terrorist to someone who releases animals from a lab.

------

Q. How has the shifting definition of "terrorism" changed the environmental movement since the 1980s?

A. I think a lot of the old-timers, the "rednecks for wilderness"--it's sort of where Earth First! began, and Sea Shepherd too in a way--might pin a little bit of that expansion of the term "terrorism" on the late '80s-'90s anarchists who came into the scene. Guys like Rod Coronado. They changed things a lot because the original eco-radical[s], like Greenpeace, were sort of mainstream conservation guys -- they called themselves conservationists. Mostly they were white men who had parties out in the woods and ate steaks and drank whiskey. They were kind of red-blooded Americans, like the heroes of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

And then this whole new contingent, right around 1990, started coming in that was much more about anarchism and identity politics. "What do I believe, and how does that separate me from the rest of the world?" People got into listing their issues. "I not only don't eat animals, but also I am transgendered and I have these piercings that are very important to me." Those kind of issues just drove the old-timers insane, because all of those things started being in the radical journals: "What are we going to do about the homophobia in our movement?" Those are all important discussions, but they didn't have anything to do with saving whales or species problems. That was very disconcerting to the old school of the movement. A lot of them kind of left the movement, because they didn't think that was as important as saving a chunk of wilderness or preserving a specific species.

The use of the word terrorism was always around, even in the '60s, early '70s -- but it was always rhetorical. I think it was Ron Arnold who actually coined the term in 1982: "eco-terrorist." But it was rhetorical at that time because eco-terrorism didn't exist. Unless you killed somebody, you weren't a terrorist. And they hadn't killed anybody, so there wasn't any eco-terrorism.

Changing [terrorism] laws [to encompass environmental activism] really came about because guys like Rod Coronado went further, started using arson. The threat of more violence was sort of there in that movement and I don't think that went over very well with a lot of the conservation movement, and they kind of split off in a lot of ways. So I think that the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front and people who modeled themselves after them have found themselves very isolated from the rest of the movement.

Q. Where do you see the eco-movement going from here?

A. I think that the mainstream approach is totally taking over right now, and they're being successful. Kind of all they had to do is wait out George Bush. I think they have a very sympathetic ear right now. All of the big groups -- NRDC, the Sierra Club -- are very effective right now. They have sympathetic ears in Congress; people like Henry Waxman [chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and cosponsor of the House climate bill] kind of took the key positions that they needed them to take. The deck is loaded now for a lot of stuff to happen.

However, I think that the radical parts of the movement arise because of threat. The global warming question will continue to get bigger, and species extinction and various types of animal abuse, for lack of a better word, are not going to get better. So I think that that kind of action will rise. I don't see that the terrorism laws have ever really stopped it because people -- young people in particular -- just assume they won't get caught. And they're right. They've hardly caught any of those people through the years, [even though there have] been over 1,200 actions and like a billion dollars worth of damage.

I think that the radicalism will rise if the mainstream movement fails to get anything done. I think that's why there's always a radical element to any movement. They're there to step it up and push everybody to a more aggressive position. If they pass some real bullshit legislation about global warming that's basically full of loopholes and everybody can drive a Hummer, the radicalism will step up.

Q. How do people respond when you talk about your work?

A. It depends on who it is. There's such a huge community of people who believe in more radical action -- called direct action -- in solving environmental and animal rights problems that there's a lot of sympathy. But there [are] a lot of people for whom Rodney Coronado is not radical at all and would like to see it go far beyond that.

But that's not the mainstream, and for the most part, mainstream America doesn't really want to get involved in this. They still eat meat and they don't really want to think about factory farms or where their mink coat comes from. Consciousness has definitely gone way, way up, but still it's a huge jump from being conscious about where your food comes from or where your coat comes from to being somebody who knows people who actually go out and do stuff about it, [whether] it's just legislation [or] actually trying to close a place down physically. That's kind of shocking.

I'm sure my family in Michigan would be a little bit appalled: "Another book from Dean that we can't read!"

Q. Have you faced conflicts within the mainstream media because there are stereotypes about environmental activists?

A. I haven't encountered that many serious challenges. You have to dial things back. You have to position them in such a way that the publication feels comfortable that you haven't just completely denied one half of the story from getting its say. Even when we know things are just absolutely for sure -- something like a cancer cluster of people from asbestos -- you've still got to call for a comment from the asbestos department where they say, "No, it's not us." But I do that, so there haven't been too many stories I've brought to people where they've just said, "No, that's too radical for us."

Even in my book, I don't write about Rod Coronado saying that arson is awesome. Arson is not awesome. Arson sucks. It's a thing that people should not do, but it's a tool that he used and I present it pretty matter of fact. I'm sure I will be accused of being an apologist for arson, but that's not my purpose. But if I did write a book about that, I don't think it would be as good, because suddenly there's no reason for any of the farmers to talk to me, the FBI, the police. All those guys have amazing and cool facts that I don't know, and I want all that stuff. As long as we do that, I think the story gets better and people are more open to reading it. I lose less of the audience. You can make more of a difference.

Q. What originally drew you to writing about eco-radicalism?

A. [The actions] happen in great locations. I grew up in the woods in Michigan with a big hunting and fishing family. I was living in New York City when I first started doing this stuff and really sweating it, and having a hard time getting myself out to the Catskills on the weekends to see some trees.

But there are whole protests that last for months happening in redwood groves in Northern California, and people trying to stop roads from being built into central Idaho, which is like God's Country. It's just amazing there -- huge contiguous pieces of roadless wilderness with wolves and moose. Those are the kind of places I like to be in. And on a boat with the Sea Shepherds out in the eastern tropical Pacific to Cocos Island or something -- it's fantastic. I'm not only working on a story, but I'm in the places I would like to see preserved.

Q. Does it water down our legitimate concerns about terrorism to have environmental and animal-rights activists looped into it?

A. Sure. I think it's an insult to the intelligence of the average American, that we can't tell the difference. But of course we can tell the difference! Osama bin Laden goes on the TV on one of his Al Jazeera tapes and says, "We will make the infidels pay," and that's about killing people. The Militant Vegan League -- which is something I'm just making up -- sends out their communiqué saying you have to stop hurting bunnies and you have to stop factory farming where you keep chickens in little cages. It's just a completely unrelated issue in every way -- strategically, philosophically, tactically, in every way. Terrorism is such a strong word that it just allows the same kind of law enforcement tactics to be used to suppress it.

Q. What is the No. 1 message you want to stick with people after reading your book?

A. What we were just talking about. I picked out a particular person--Rod Coronado--to help me tell the story because I want it to be obvious by the time you get to the end that Rod Coronado is not a terrorist. He's done lamentable things, he's burned things and attacked businesses and been very aggressive. But he's never attacked any people. He's an intelligent and respectful person who did things on principle and believed that he was executing the height of nonviolent direct action.

There's a difference between bursting into the Holocaust museum with a gun with the intention of "I'm going to kill a bunch of people to make a statement," and going into someplace late at night and burning their fence and making sure that no people are hurt because you want to make a statement.

We need to take some action to preserve the difference, for all kinds of reasons. So that people don't rot in jail who don't need to for long periods of time. So that we, as a country, are not spiritually affected by this -- I think that there's a price to pay when your country endorses things like torture, and calling people terrorists who are not terrorists plays into that. You're falsely accusing certain sectors of the public of doing something they're not doing.

I also think that it's not that good for us environmentally, that we shouldn't be able to demonize people who are trying to get a message across that many people would recognize as positive.

Catch Dean Kuipers on his book tour or follow him on his blog. You can also see him on BookTV Sunday, July 25.

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Tweet for the bees

A federal judge on Tuesday limited the scope of President Clinton's popular "roadless rule" to federal lands in 10 Western states instead of the whole country, leaving some 13.6 million acres of roadless forests largely unprotected from road-building and other development. Tuesday's ruling is a compromise between throwing the rule out and keeping protections in place for most roadless forests in the U.S. Two federal appeals courts are expected to rule on the matter next year.

source:

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The stereotypes of biz-begrudging enviros and planet-pillaging business leaders were upended years ago. These days, green groups and corporations team up on everything from preserving land to pushing for climate regulations. Now, in the latest example of cross-pollination, they're even swapping executives.

Mark Tercek

Photo: Mark Godfrey/The Nature Conservancy

Mark Tercek, who took the helm of The Nature Conservancy this week, spent more than two decades as an investment banker and managing director at Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. In recent years, he oversaw the company's Environmental Strategy Group and Center for Environmental Markets, and pioneered Goldman's sustainability initiative, which includes commitments to use recycled office products, report publicly on the firm's carbon footprint, and invest in emerging green sectors. During his tenure, Goldman invested $1.5 billion in renewables and clean technology and helped preserve 680,000 of pristine wilderness in Chile's Tierra del Fuego region.

Still, what makes a go-getting moneyman the right leader for a conservation organization? How compatible are conservation goals with the bottom line? I spoke to Tercek recently to find out.

(Full disclosure: Amanda Griscom Little's brother is an employee at The Nature Conservancy.)

Why did you leave Wall Street for the world of green advocacy?

I'm a long-time admirer of The Nature Conservancy. I think its mission -- to conserve biodiversity on a global basis -- is an absolutely vital one. For me to have the opportunity to put to work everything I've learned over 24 years at Goldman Sachs to help the team at The Nature Conservancy achieve its mission -- how could I say no? How could I resist that kind of incredible opportunity?

What skills from your business background prepare you for the job?

Goldman Sachs is a hard-charging, ambitious organization that seeks to get difficult things done by collaborating effectively with other people -- by consensus-building and rallying people together to pursue important tasks. The firm has produced very capable leaders who have gone off to do very interesting things -- leaders like Hank Paulsen, secretary of Treasury; Gov. [Jon] Corzine [of New Jersey]; and Bob Rubin, former secretary of Treasury.

I've had the good fortune at Goldman Sachs to have a couple of important leadership positions, most recently spearheading our efforts in the environmental area. I think I've learned about how to unite people around ambitious, clear goals and achieve those goals in the most direct, efficient, and fulfilling way.

What inspired you to make the environment a focus in your work?

Tierra del Fuego.

Photo: kafeole

As a citizen of the world, I have a tremendous sense of appreciation for the natural world -- for the services the ecosystem presents and provides to us. As a parent, my wife and I have tried to expose our kids to the great wonders of the natural world, and that has reinforced my interest in the environment. And over the last five years, I've become increasingly engaged with and concerned about the environmental problems the world confronts today. So right now I feel very fortunate, genuinely and 100 percent fortunate, to have been selected to lead The Nature Conservancy.

I like your phrasing -- "the services the ecosystem presents and provides to us." It has the ring of a banker's pragmatism. Can you elaborate on the values yielded by ecosystems?

The benefits that the natural world provides mankind are obviously enormous, valueless. You can't quantify them in a crass, accountant-like way. The wonders of biodiversity are sufficiently important that they, in and of themselves, should motivate tremendous effort toward conservation. Further, there are spiritual benefits -- people might use other words -- that flow to mankind from biodiversity that justify conservation efforts.

But if you want to go even further in the analysis and look at the more concrete ecosystem services that nature provides, these economic values are staggeringly large. Academics, scientists, economists are only beginning to think hard and comprehensively about how to value them. If you think about forests acting as lungs for the planet, or forests as stores of carbon, or forests as sources of providing clean water, protecting rivers from silt, providing flood control -- you can just keep ticking through the natural world and the economic value of its services is huge.

I think you could say these economic values have never been properly calculated or factored into an enormous range of economic decision-making. Organizations like The Nature Conservancy have a great opportunity to help governments and businesspeople better understand the dollar-and-cents values of those services.

A Bush administration official once told me she believed that the invisible hand of Adam Smith has "a green thumb." Do you believe that markets can be trusted to move in the direction of the greener good?

Markets can do a tremendous amount of good here, but I think there's often the need for regulatory intervention to make things happen in the right way. Consider greenhouse-gas emissions, for instance: They impose a cost -- an "externality" in economic terms -- on society. If you don't put a price on emitting those pollutants, you'll have, as a result, bad decisions and bad outcomes. So I believe that regulatory measures such as a cap-and-trade program are needed, and that, properly structured, the market can allow very good things to happen.

We often hear these days that "green is green" -- that protecting the environment fattens the bottom line. But this is not always true. When are profit motives incompatible with environmental goals?

There are lots of win-win opportunities for the private sector to do things that are good for their business and also good for the environment. On the other hand, there are also instances when private interests and the public good don't overlap. And it's in those instances that we need good regulatory oversight.

The Nature Conservancy has historically been fairly apolitical and steered clear of lobbying and advocating for particular policies. Going forward, do you see the Conservancy lobbying for specific climate policy?

The Nature Conservancy's mission is protecting nature to conserve biodiversity. Climate change poses an enormous risk not only to everything that the Conservancy will seek to do going forward, but everything it has already done. We are members of the United States Climate Action Partnership, and as part of that coalition we've endorsed a policy approach for legislation that puts a price on emitting carbon, but in a market-friendly way. We also see a role for the Conservancy in helping shape policies that provide incentives for reducing deforestation.

Last year Goldman Sachs brokered a deal to prevent a number of planet-warming coal plants from being built in Texas. Do you plan to be fighting against coal plants in your new role at the Conservancy?

The Conservancy is in the process of developing a comprehensive energy platform that will inform our work moving forward. For now, I can tell you that you should expect to see the Conservancy partnering with businesses and governments alike to work toward achieving our mission.

The Nature Conservancy gets large corporate donations. Is there a conflict of interest that arises when an NGO is presented with corporate money?

We're very careful in all of our fundraising to not put ourselves in the position of conflict so that our fundraising ever gets in the way of our objectives. We are focused like a laser on our core mission, and we would never let our fundraising get in the way of that.

Do you have to vet the backgrounds of the companies that donate to be sure they haven't been involved in any major environmental transgressions?

We try to be very careful about all of the ways we operate and all of our partnerships with companies, multilateral organizations, government, other environmental organizations, so that the work we do is never tainted or upset.

One of the challenges The Nature Conservancy has encountered when protecting valuable ecosystems around the world is collaborating with indigenous people who work and live around these areas. How should conservation groups deal with local communities in the regions you're trying to protect?

Conservation will only work, by and large, if it works for the people who live in the area where positive outcomes are being sought. There really aren't left in the world any more large areas without people. We try very hard to pursue conservation opportunities that have a whole host of benefits but always, importantly, start with and include the local folks who live there.

In 2003, The Nature Conservancy was criticized for controversial land deals and other practices. What will you do as president to ensure that the organization maintains high ethical standards?

We are tremendously committed to and focused on acting at the highest level of transparency and good governance. My board fully supports me; my senior management team is focused on that. It's an enormously high priority to get those matters right. In my read, the organization has all the right resources in the right places to make that the likely outcome.

Who is your environmental hero?

It's hard to pick a single one. The names that immediately arise are E.O. Wilson, who has taught me a lot about appreciating the beauty and wonder and preciousness of biodiversity. The work of Gretchen Daily has helped me understand the value of ecosystem services. The work of Jared Diamond has made me more cognizant of how mankind can make big mistakes.

What do you and your family do at home to lighten your environmental footprint?

On a day-to-day basis, my family is trying hard to improve its behavior so that we reduce our footprint, but we are very humble about this and we have a long way to go. Living in New York has been great, because we can commute by public transportation and get around town on foot in a way that is fantastic.

Can you share an anecdote about a favorite outdoor or wilderness adventure?

An experience my family and I recently enjoyed was hiking for 10 days in the glaciers of the Torres del Paine region in Patagonia. As a family in modern-day America, it's hard ever for us all to be together, undistracted by the modern world -- much less in a place so beautiful.

Of all the striking ecosystems you've visited, which has been your favorite?

Tierra del Fuego. Its beauty is just extraordinary -- you'd need to be a poet to put it into words. And it's interesting and encouraging to me that private-sector actors -- Goldman Sachs in collaboration with environmental organizations -- could come together along with the Chilean government to protect in perpetuity this enormous area the size of Rhode Island for the benefit of Chilean people. It excites me to think that we're at a turning point where there's even more opportunity to [replicate this kind of collaborative conservation model] over and over, throughout the world. The private sector is waking up and understanding the stakes and the opportunity. So new players are working in concert with the traditional players to make even more great things happen.

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Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!

So maybe you'll finally have a chance to catch up on some reading this summer. But so many of those books about the environment seem kind of ... well, homework-y. What's a vacationing enviro to do? Turn to Grist for advice, of course! Here are 15 recent page-turners just perfect for stuffing in your hemp beach tote.

Got sunny-day suggestions of your own? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Richard Preston, Random House, 2007

Think nature writing is boring? The Wild Trees is about as boring as a car chase. Master storyteller Richard Preston follows a motley group of professional and amateur botanists into the canopies of the tallest trees in the world, where they explore a sky-high ecosystem almost entirely unknown to humans. A great tale of science and adventure -- and a love story to boot.

Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living
Doug Fine, Villard, 2008

A breezy journal of Doug Fine's attempts to live a low-carbon life in rural New Mexico, despite his lack of gardening and electrical skills. After a year of wrestling with weather, goats, and tax assessors on the Funky Butte Ranch, Fine concludes that "... the greatest impact we can have on crafting a sustainable future is not just by buying 'green products,' but rather by actively understanding that every part of life can and should be infused with carbon reduction."

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
Diane Ackerman, W. W. Norton, 2007

During World War II, Antonina Zabinski, the wife of a Polish zookeeper, rescued Resistance fighters and Jews by hiding them in her Warsaw villa -- and in the empty zoo cages surrounding it. In this real-life historical drama, Diane Ackerman shows how Antonina's love for the animal world inspired heroism, even as Nazi romanticism about nature led to grossly different acts.

Winter Study
Nevada Barr, Putnam Adult, 2008

The 14th installment in Nevada Barr's reliably entertaining National Park Service mystery series is one of her darkest and scariest yet. Winter Study takes our heroine, park ranger Anna Pigeon, to a wolf study at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, where she contends with all sorts of mayhem, from interagency rivalry to bitter cold to a canine -- or human -- with murderous intent.

World Made By Hand
James Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly, 2008

An absorbing and disturbing novel about the near future. After a constellation of plagues -- war, disease, declining oil supplies, climate change -- fracture U.S. society into isolated outposts, former insurance salesmen and software executives are forced to grow their own food, build their own houses, and defend their communities against violence and fanaticism. As dark as Kunstler's world gets, hints of rural romanticism keep the reader guessing.

Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery
Jim Motavalli, Da Capo, 2007

In the summer of 1913, a middle-aged man named Joseph Knowles stood before reporters, stripped down to his jock strap, and marched into the Maine wilderness, promising to live for two months with only his outdoor skills to support him. One of a long line of American "nature fakers," Knowles was later exposed as at least a partial fraud. Motavalli traces his complicated, entertaining story, and delves into its larger cultural lessons.

Trespass: Living on the Edge of the Promised Land
Amy Irvine, North Point Press, 2008

Amy Irvine, a sixth-generation Utahn, is both a descendant of one of the original Mormon saints and a passionate advocate of wilderness -- a combination that often sets her at odds with her heritage, and with many of her neighbors in rural Utah. Her fine memoir weaves marriage, motherhood, and love of landscape into a story of rebellion and restoration.

Sixty Days and Counting
Kim Stanley Robinson, Bantam, 2007

Travel to the uncomfortably near future with sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson. In Sixty Days and Counting, the third in Robinson's trilogy of climate-change novels, deep freezes kill drivers paused at traffic lights, the D.C. metro area is recovering from a major flood, and grocery-store shelves are frighteningly bare. Wrapped in political intrigue, the substantive science goes down easily.

Wolf Totem
Jiang Rong, Penguin, 2008

A runaway best-seller when it was first published in China in 2004, Wolf Totem follows a young Chinese intellectual to the Mongolian steppes, where he raises a wolf cub and watches as the influx of Chinese bureaucracy changes Mongolian culture. Thick with political implications, Wolf Totem also offers some amazing descriptions of wolves on the hunt.

Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (Revised and Expanded Edition)
David Quammen, W. W. Norton, 2008

First published in 1985, when David Quammen was, as he writes, "unencumbered by experience, professional qualifications, broad knowledge, or a sense of decorum," the new edition of Natural Acts includes a selection of his columns from Outside magazine and more recent features from National Geographic and elsewhere. Whether he's writing about mosquitoes, weeds, octopi, or sex, Quammen always manages to turn science into a literary treat.

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
Craig Childs, Little, Brown, 2007

Craig Childs can often be found in an obscure Southwestern desert canyon, scribbling madly in his notebook, miles from water and even farther from people. His spectacular encounters with animals -- from porcupines to squid to mountain goats -- are recounted in this graceful collection. Save the mountain lion chapter to read aloud around a summer campfire.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Mary Roach, W. W. Norton, 2008

What's summer reading without a few good dirty parts? Considering the planetary consequences of unchecked reproduction, human sexuality is a pretty fundamental environmental issue -- some would say the fundamental issue. Science writer Mary Roach puts the steam in green with her hilarious tour of sex research, which includes all manner of odd characters and contraptions.

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird
Bruce Barcott, Random House, 2008

Environmental journalist Bruce Barcott follows the "Zoo Lady" of Belize as she battles a hydropower dam -- and attempts to save her adopted country's last nesting site for scarlet macaws. A larger-than-life character who once worked as a circus-tiger trainer, Sharon Matola faces her many foes with determination, a big mouth, and a passion for wildlife. Barcott's insights into Belizean society, and environmental set-tos in general, round out an engaging story.

Gaia Girls Way of Water
Lee Welles, Chelsea Green, 2007

Gaia Girls Way of Water, the second in the Gaia Girls series (the first is Enter the Earth, and Air Apparent is forthcoming) is an eco-adventure for the Harry Potter set. Appropriate for ages 9 and up -- but plenty entertaining for adults -- Way of Water sends its young heroine Miho to Japan, where she and a talking otter embark on a quest to save the sea.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Mark Lynas, National Geographic, 2007

Yeah, we know, you've already read too many climate-change books. But the problem isn't going away, and Six Degrees is a readable forecast of the future. Lynas details the effects of a 1-degree rise in average temperature, a 2-degree rise, and so on, all the way up to 6 degrees Celsius -- the upper limit of the IPCC predictions for the end of the century. So when your crotchety uncle tells you, at a summer barbecue, that he still doesn't think 3 degrees is a big deal, you'll be able to scare the sauce off his ribs.

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It's hard to believe, now that it's been overrun by 7 million residents and 7 jillion strip malls, but southern Florida was once America's last frontier. As late as 1880, the census recorded just 257 residents in a county covering most of the region -- because most of the region was a watery wilderness called the Everglades. Mapmakers weren't sure whether to draw it as land or water. Politicians dismissed it as uninhabitable swampland. Explorers described it as a "godforsaken" and "hideous" and "abominable" morass, "suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles."

When good wetlands go bad.

Photo: usgs.gov

Those explorers never would have imagined that the Everglades would get so dry that it would burn out of control, or that desolate southern Florida would become a sprawling megalopolis. But those two weird developments are intimately related. The wildfires raging through nearly 40,000 acres of the Everglades this week are the direct legacy of the elaborate water-management system that made southern Florida safe for human civilization. The system has functioned according to design for decades, but it's killing the Everglades, and it's ultimately unsustainable for human South Florida as well.

Environmentalists like to say that the Everglades is a test; if we pass, we may get to keep the planet. I wrote a book about the death and possible rebirth of the Everglades that was basically dedicated to the proposition that southern Florida is where we're going to find out whether humans can live in harmony with nature, and perhaps avoid the water wars that could otherwise dominate the geopolitics of the 21st century. The fires are a vivid, symbolic reminder that we've got a long way to go. History's bill is coming due for a century of bad decisions, and we haven't yet figured out how to pay it.

For all its famous sunshine, southern Florida has always been one of the rainiest swaths of North America; with 60 annual inches, it's significantly wetter than Seattle. And for thousands of years, most of that water ended up in Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, a panoramic sheet of shallow water flowing through 100 miles of serrated sawgrass from the lake all the way down to Florida Bay. In fact, the fires that are now raging in the northeast corner of Everglades National Park are incinerating one of the wettest sloughs of the original "river of grass." Another fire ravaging 25,000 acres around Lake Okeechobee is actually burning drought-exposed lakebed.

The scientific term for this phenomenon is FUBAR. Sloughs and lakes are not supposed to be flammable. Sure, there were fires in the natural Everglades, but they were caused by lightning strikes during summer rains, and were quickly extinguished by the waterlogged landscape. The Everglades is incredibly flat, declining just a few inches per mile, so its original wetlands were incredibly wet, storing rainfall and recharging underground aquifers in the summer so that there was still water on the ground when the rains stopped in the winter. If you were a glutton for punishment, you could have walked across the entire marsh without getting your hair wet, and without stepping on dry ground.

But starting in the 1880s, Americans determined to subdue Mother Nature started trying to drain the Everglades with canals, hoping to create a new paradise for agriculture and development. A few lonely voices warned that ditches could turn the swamp into a desert, but most Floridians agreed with Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who declared in the early 1900s that if drained swamps could really burn, "the great bogs of Ireland would have been ash heaps long before St. Patrick drove out the snakes."

But sure enough, the early ditches started sucking the marsh dry, ruining wells, damaging soils, and, yes, igniting fires so smoky that children in Miami had to cover their faces at school. And in the summer, southern Florida's torrential downpours overwhelmed the ditches, converting farmland back to swampland, inspiring the first jokes about buying Florida land by the gallon. The jokes seemed a lot less funny in 1928, when a hurricane blasted Lake Okeechobee through a flimsy muck dike, killing 2,500 pioneers in the Everglades.

Enter my friends in the Army Corps of Engineers, the ground troops in America's war against nature. They built the massive Hoover Dike around the lake, forever cutting off the Everglades from its wellspring. Then they built America's most ambitious flood-control system, with more than 2,000 miles of levees and canals, plus pumps so powerful the engines were cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The project gave water managers power to move almost every drop of rain that fell south of Orlando, allowing them to whisk floodwaters into the lake, the Everglades, or its estuaries for the convenience of thirsty farms and communities that only wanted water when they wanted it.

These waterworks made southern Florida safe for 400,000 acres of sugar fields, as well as one of the spectacular development booms in human history. On the southeast coast, suburbs like Coral Springs, Miami Springs, Sunrise, Miramar, Weston, and Wellington began sprouting west of I-95, paving over the eastern Everglades. And on the southwest coast, Naples and Fort Myers started marching east into the western Everglades.

Unfortunately, most of that boom took place back when wetlands -- which absorb stormwater, cleanse drinking water, and nourish wildlife -- were still considered wastelands. The result is a dying ecological treasure, but also a megalopolis that still seesaws between dangerous floods in the wet season and harsh droughts in the dry season.

Today, half the original Everglades has been lost, along with its ability to smooth out high-water and low-water events. The other half is a mess -- usually too dry, occasionally too wet, always polluted and discombobulated. The ecosystem hosts 69 endangered species, including the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, which exists only in Everglades National Park, and could use some flame-retardant pajamas this week. Water is supposed to be the lifeblood of the Everglades, but these days it barely reaches the park.

Meanwhile, since the leaky Hoover Dike is at risk of a catastrophic failure, and water managers don't want a repeat of the 1928 disaster, they often blast billions of gallons out of the lake when it gets high, ravaging the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries to its east and west, wasting fresh water they need in times of drought. For example, they dumped tons of water into the sea to prepare for the 2006 hurricane season -- just in time for a two-year drought that has left Lake Okeechobee three feet below its normal level.

That's how southern Florida got into its current predicament. Raindrops that used to fall on wetlands, recharge aquifers, and dribble across the landscape all year long now land on yards, roads, and parking lots, migrate into canals, and get whisked out to sea. And now the exurbs have moved to the doorstep of the Everglades, where they constantly stick new straws into the aquifers. So now the Everglades is parched enough to burn out of control when some yahoo gets careless with matches. And millions of people in the surrounding suburbs suddenly have to worry about smoke and particulates as well as unbearable traffic, overcrowded schools, skyrocketing insurance rates tied to the omnipresent threat of a hurricane, and a disappearing sense of place.

The good news is that in 2000, Congress decided to fix all these problems, enacting the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan to restore some semblance of southern Florida's natural hydrology. It's a complex project, but the basic idea is to spend $12 billion on reservoirs and high-tech wells that will store rain that used to be stored by wetlands, then redistribute it to people, farms, and the Everglades when it's needed.

The project passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both Washington, D.C. and Tallahassee, because everyone agreed that the Everglades was a national treasure. It's supposed to be a model for ecosystem restoration work in the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Louisiana's coastal wetlands, and even southern Iraq's Garden of Eden marshes.

The bad news is that the project is deeply flawed, particularly when it comes to getting water to the Everglades. And now it's stalled by money problems, engineering problems, and political problems. The Everglades is as sick in 2008 as it was in 2000.

Eventually, it will stop burning. But it will still be dying.

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A long-running disagreement over what should be done with the largest swath of privately owned wilderness in southern California has been settled by a deal between green groups and a developer. Ninety percent of the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch will be conserved, while 26,000 homes will be permitted on the remaining 10 percent. The Center for Biological Diversity, which was not involved in the truce, expressed iffiness, saying that the development would disrupt crucial habitat for the endangered condor. But the green groups involved in the deal -- including NRDC, the Sierra Club, Audubon California, the Planning and Conservation League, and the Endangered Habitats League -- were satisfied that a good balance was struck. So was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stated that the agreement shows how "we can protect California's environment at the same time we pump up our economy." Yes, he said "pump up."

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Motorized outdoor enthusiasts are converging in increasing numbers on Western public lands -- not only in areas marked for such outdoor enthusiasm, but in wilderness areas where rules against off-roading are nearly impossible to enforce. Registration of all-terrain vehicles and motorbikes in four Western states tripled from 1998 to 2006. The surge is traceable to the booming outdoor-recreation industry, as well as the culture of sprawl: In some places, houses have been pushed out so far that federally owned land is just a big backyard -- albeit a public backyard where no individual has to take the specific blame for vehicle-aggravated erosion and water pollution. Off-roaders deny criticism that they're out to defile untouched nature, arguing that public land is there for public use. "[Groups lobbying for wilderness designations] think it has to be kept in this pristine state," says one motorcycle-shop owner. "These people don't even use it." Which is, of course, the point.

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Part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be designated as wilderness under legislation introduced today by Sen. Joe Lieberman and 25 colleagues. Wilderness designation for the 1.5-million-acre coastal plains region would rebuff seemingly nonstop attempts to drill for oil and gas there. Says Lieberman in a stroke of analogy genius, "America's strength is not in our oil reserves, but in our reserves of innovation."

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