The “Perfect Storm” metaphor for modern day conservation professionals: Education, leadership, and a twenty-first century conservation legacy
- By Jacob Faibisch and Sally Guynn
- The Management Assistance Team
- 698 Conservation Way
- Shepherdstown, WV 25443
[Originally presented to the New England Chapter of The Wildlife Society, on April 7, 2005]
By Jacob Faibisch and Sally Guynn
We, the authors, and the entire
Management Assistance Team (MAT), are excited by the opportunity to present
our ideas on the changing landscape of the conservation profession. 
This
is a perspective piece. It contains the reflections , thoughts, and
suggestions of two people who have seen issues come up repeatedly yet remain
unresolved. The Management Assistance team is a grant funded body that serves
the state fish and wildlife agencies as business consultants. In any given
year we have some interaction with the majority of our client agencies. We
typically consult with administrators and senior management on a wide variety
of agency management issues. We also provide training workshops in about ten
subject areas and meet a lot of fish and wildlife professionals.
As employees of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife
Agencies, also known as IAFWA, we hear from agency directors their concerns
about the current issues in their
state as well as from a nation-wide perspective.
This article comes from a
presentation that was given at the
International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Summit on
Conservation Education, held in December, 2004, at the National Conservation
Training Center. Since making that presentation, our grant priorities have
evolved. The Management Assistance Team is now devoting the vast majority of
its effort on a single, underlying tempest: preparing tomorrow’s
conservation leaders. Hence, you will hear not only about the role of
conservation education in establishing this generation’s conservation
legacy, but also about some of the obstacles
to creating a cadre of well trained, motivated conservation leaders.
I want to stress that although
the topic sounds bleak, I hope you hear the clear message of optimism. Where
there is change, there is opportunity. The question is: Do we – the
conservation community – merely react to the inevitability of change, or do
we embrace this change to leave an even more impressive legacy for the
twenty-second century than our predecessors left last century? I would like to
think the founding fathers of conservation are pulling for us to build on
their legacy and create an ever-stronger conservation ethic.
The book and movie, The
Perfect Storm, tell the story of the Andrea Gale, a sword fishing boat
from Gloucester, Massachusetts, that sets into the North Atlantic on a serene
morning late in the season, hoping for one last opportunity to make the “Big
Catch.” The captain and crew
know there are perils, but they are careless in their determination to have
one last, great haul. As the days wear on, weather and other unfortunate
coincidences conspire to sabotage their mission. In the movie version of the
story, their fate is sealed when their fax machine breaks, and they stop
receiving weather updates. In spite of the warnings in hand (although
imperfect), they decide to soldier on to the fortunes they hope to find at
Flemish Cap, nearly halfway to Europe. We
know of Andrea Gale’s fate only from a few static-filled transmissions some
time before the fury of three improbable, convergent storms ripped the radio
antennas off the boat. They had always fished more or less the same way, and
they had experienced challenging weather, but on this trip they failed to
understand the incomparable power of these storms’ rare convergence. They
used old approaches to the new problems before them. The story ends when the
Andrea Gale sinks in the raging seas of the North Atlantic’s worst ever
recorded storm system.
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|
Photo of Gloucester harbor in 1913, courtesy of BodinHistoricPhoto.com |
What if our ship is conservation
and our cargo our legacy? How will we react to the eminent approach of the
storms in our path? In the conservation community, we are facing extraordinary
challenges including growing demands on personnel time and shrinking revenue.
Yet our cargo is precious: the conservation legacy we will leave to future
generations. Most of us are familiar with the metaphorical “weather” of
conservation. We know there are “storms.” Each of us has some perspective
on the challenges facing conservation and its disciplines: education, what we
call “human dimensions,” declining participation, wildlife disease, too
many deer – or not enough harvest. Look
with me now at a large-scale, “Doppler radar” of conservation. One can
hope that by increasing our awareness and understanding of the “Perfect
Storm” we will acknowledge its realities and prepare ourselves to take
advantage of the opportunities it creates. Change benefits those willing to
evolve to meet new circumstance, and often weakens those who resist. In the
near future, we propose that there are three overriding issues that will
change the practice of conservation as we know it. They are our storms, and we
are heading into their convergence. How do we heed the warning? How do we
prepare so that we can thrive in the changed landscape of the aftermath?
Conventional wisdom tells us to
take the ship to harbor to “wait it out.” As things get worse, human
reaction is to entrench. Yet we cannot expect the solutions that worked in the
last century to carry us through the next century. We need to explore
alternatives and redefine conventional wisdom. It’s like Albert Einstein
said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level
of thinking we were at when we created them.” Our conservation legacy will
thrive by departing from the status quo.
The approaching storms are already confounding our traditional approaches to
conservation, which are themselves dangerous for our ship and cargo.
So what does fish and wildlife
management’s “Perfect Storm” look like? As in the movie, there are three
storms:
- The first storm - Changing human populations
- The second storm - Changing political landscapes
- The third storm - Changing fish and wildlife agencies
Any of these components alone could overwhelm our conservation community. But with careful planning, we can not only survive, but even capture some of the energy from the storms. Our goal is to survive the storms with the cargo intact. You are the captains. How do you want to outfit the ship and navigate the seas?
People
Let’s look at the first storm of changing human populations. The conditions are: detachment from the land and natural resources, and a population that, as a whole, knows less and less about natural resources and ecological processes everyday.
Kids don’t have to learn
anything about nature.That is, they are required to learn very little in a
formal setting. The less one knows, the less one will value, and increasingly,
kids have a “DISNEY-fied” view of nature. Here is an example: My wife
teaches high school biology, and she has taught in three states: Utah,
Vermont, and Maryland. In her current school, advanced placement biology
students are required to know the most intricate details of the Krebs cycle,
meiosis and mitosis. They are even taught and tested on the chemistry of
photosynthesis, but they don’t have to know how to identify a single tree
species, or even common wildlife species in their neighborhood. She says that
often the “environmental” goals in the curriculum are the last to be
taught, because there is a perception that the environmental parts of the
curriculum are not really “hard science.” Some of the teachers aren’t
conservation literate themselves. It is not uncommon that any part of the
curriculum that touches on conservation is dropped because the teachers claim
they just don’t have time. Maybe it is true that ignorance breeds contempt.
This is the start of vicious circle that does not bode well for conservation.
Conservation education also can get pigeon-holed, as though it is only for
lower-level students. Frequently, at the high school level, conservation
education is reserved for those kids that are not college bound. Some kids get
short field trips and week-long learning experiences in outdoor settings, but
how does the experience carryover to regular life after the students return
home or to the classroom?
The multitude of conservation
education programs probably reach kids by the tens or maybe hundreds of
thousands, but unfortunately our education message still lacks the necessary
impact. We need educational goals, priorities, and approaches to address the
needs of millions of kids and
adults. We’ll need to think big! Today everyone has access to information. A
necessary part of outfitting our ship includes creating new ways to make our
educational materials and our conservation message more accessible.
How can we more effectively use the web and interactive learning? How
do we market our educational products to teachers, schools, and departments of
education?
There are also diversity and
urbanization issues, and the fact that our traditional customer base is
increasingly a “species of special concern,” to borrow the language of
state wildlife grants. Let’s
think about this for a moment. We all know that hunters, and to a lesser
degree, anglers, are in decline. The state fish and wildlife agencies who 
really
only exist because of hunting and fishing dollars have been trying everything
to get more hunters in the field and anglers on the water. Here are my
observations from having lived, worked, and hunted in both the western and
eastern states of Utah and Maryland. In Utah, there is ample publicly
accessible land, and in Maryland there is a shortage.
In Utah, they sell out of every deer tag made available to the public,
and they no longer have hunting units with an unlimited number of permits for
any big game species. In Maryland, deer are over abundant, yet they cannot
harvest enough. In Utah, there are not enough deer to meet demand, and in
Maryland, there is not enough publicly accessible space to dent the burgeoning
deer populations.
I hunted deer on a state forest
in Maryland last fall, where we first scouted the area and found a great spot
a little more than a mile from a main road, as remote as we could find. On
opening morning, we parked an hour and a half before sunrise, so we could walk
in and let things settle before shooting hours. When the sun came up, we were
in the proverbial pumpkin patch of orange clad hunters hoping against all odds
for a buck. The area was oversaturated, and among the hundreds of hunters we
did not see a single deer hanging in a camp or in the bed of a pickup truck.
Because license sales are declining, we have assumed that we need more
hunters. We have assumed that that declining hunting rates reflect societal
changes. Society is changing, but I think we need to dig deeper and ask some
very hard questions. It would be great if we could weather this human storm by
recruiting more hunters – but what if we are already over-recruiting
hunters? This is a real possibility, since we are limited by permit numbers in
western states and public access in the east. We need new opportunities to
stop losing hunters and forget about recruiting new ones.
How will today’s and
tomorrow’s leaders establish a vision that creates a sustainable business
model? Will it be one that best takes advantage of the resources available,
and accounts for the realities of a changing human population and changed
business and geographical landscapes?
Political Storms
The second storm is politics and
money, inextricably tied together. We are all faced with financial challenges
in our agencies and organizations, and part of this storm is the politics of
new funding sources needed to meet the demands of a changing society. The
National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife Related Recreation has
demonstrated the economic benefit of the resources managed by fish and
wildlife agencies,and in the election last fall, both political parties spent
significant effort courting the camouflage set:a new conservation demographic.
In terms of education, we cannot
ignore the political storm of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Public schools and informal and formal education are all transforming
education in big ways. As a result of NCLB, formal education is increasingly
standards-based. If conservation education principles are not included in the
standards, kids will not get formal exposure to our messages. Currently, they
are not on a national level, and what I hear from teachers is that they are
under more pressure to focus on microbiology and biochemistry but not
conservation. Staying within our circle of influence, what can we do to
develop conservation-focused programs that promote the goals of NCLB? The
other consequence is that as education becomes increasingly “high stakes,”
which is to say that kids get
tested, and if the class averages on those tests are too low, the schools lose
funding and teachers lose their jobs. The demand for classroom presentations
by conservation professionals will go down if we ignore the issue of
educational standards. Furthermore, teachers will feel less compelled to take
advantage of continuing education opportunities offered by our agencies. In
this regard, NCLB throws another wrench in the works. Under NCLB, the
standards for teachers’ continuing education requirements have been boosted,
and the next generation of environmental continuing education opportunities
for teachers must reflect this new standard, if we are to even maintain our
presence in the classroom.
Interestingly, the election in
2004 brought a conservation demographic to light. The Bush – Cheney campaign
actually held a rally in a Cabela’s store. This means that hunting and
fishing are still seen as important politically, and with an identifiable
demographic, we can seize opportunities to create positive change. Here is one
thought, what about the possibilities of combining the politics of the
conservation demographic and No Child Left Behind? If we can figure out this
connection, there will be real opportunity for creative program development.
Why isn’t the conservation demographic stressing the importance of getting
educational standards to include real conservation elements. This question is
complicated because it involves politics from ranging from the federal to
school-district levels. However, answering it is vital to the conservation
mission.
Funding is the never-ending constraint. There is never enough to go around. The long-term forecast is more of the same. However, creative minds will find ways to find the funding or realize that it is too expensive to ignore conservation education. Great societal changes happen when need meets vision. Breaking with the status quo often requires more courage than money. We know there is a clear need, but what about a vision? The “fixed pie” assumption appears to be prevalent. In other words, you divide the pie and everyone gets a sliver. Perhaps our education programs can be a bakery of sorts, if we are willing to invest in the long term.
Agencies
The third storm is our own
conservation agencies and organizations.
This storm is a multi-cyclonic, raging force.
Cyclone 1: Many fish and wildlife agency educators feel that they are the “black sheep” of conservation.
Cyclone 2: Conservation education is colliding with conservation marketing.
Cyclone 3: Agency internal demographics are changing.
Cyclone 1, is on one hand easy to recognize, and it may be the one storm component most in our sphere of influence. On the other hand, cultures do not change easily.
Look at your organization, and ask if education programs and personnel are treated equally with other programs and professionals. If the answer is no, there is a real problem. I believe that most or all conservation professionals recognize that education is a vital tool to conservation success, but unless education programs are appropriately prioritized within agencies, and unless personnel are seen as equals, we should expect this cyclone be damaging.
Cyclone 2 is formed by the pressure between conservation education and marketing. Many agency conservation education efforts focus on recruiting new hunters and anglers. While every state conservation agency has an obligation to recruit and retain its hunter and angler base, this is endeavor is marketing, not education. Marketing in its simplest sense is a mix of Product, Price, and Promotion. From a national perspective, how well do we know that hunting participation, for example, is limited because people need more information, skills or knowledge about hunting (Promotion)? What if participation is limited because Product issues, like not enough opportunity to hunt? Are we offering the right mix of products and services to attract new customers to fish and wildlife related recreation? We need to be very careful about too eagerly combining education and marketing functions because both disciplines suffer. If we are using education programs to meet marketing goals, what happens when we meet our marketing goals but not the educational goals?.
Say you are in a state that
either is selling out of deer permits or hunters have over- saturated public
hunting areas. The state still has educational goals, so agencies keep pushing
the education programs even though hunting participation is limited by supply,
not promotion. The result is a system designed to over-recruit. I would expect
the result to be high churn rates and under-satisfied customers, and I bet
this is happening more often than we are ready to admit. If an agency gets in
this situation they are then faced with the dreadful choice of stopping the
education programs because continuing will result in over-recruitment, or they
continue the education program because they need to meet their educational
goals, but the overall hunter satisfaction goes down due to the over
recruitment issue. Simply put, education and recruitment are not going to
deliver a two-for-one benefit by combining the efforts. Both programs are
valuable and need to be coordinated just like education needs to be
coordinated with other conservation programs.
We do not have good tools to
measure marketing or education 
success.
Following the Conservation Education Summit, the IAFWA approved a strategic
document that includes evaluation as an important component of education
programs. This is a great step to improving our situation.The Andrea Gale’s
weather fax is a metaphor for this situation. We may not be wisely using the
information we do get. Obviously this is a complex issue and will require
further exploration.
Cyclone 3 was detailed by Steve McMullen from Virginia Tech this fall. Seventy-seven percent of state fish and wildlife agency leadership will leave their agencies in the next decade, and only 7% of surveyed fish and wildlife agencies have employees under the age of 30 compared to about 25% in other sectors. Also, about 48% of the surveyed state fish and wildlife agency workforce is expected to retire in the same amount of time. If the average career is 30 years, one would expect that percentage of retirement about every 15 years – assuming that the agency has a stable number of full-time employees.
Some people believe that this
changing workforce is really a bad thing. It does not have to be. How can we
alter this pattern of internal fish and wildlife agency change into
opportunity?
The leadership vacuum is a huge
and complex issue. We need to train tomorrow’s leaders, and convince people
to become leaders. Both are challenging. If your agency is in constant
“brushfire” mode, it may feel impossible to think ahead five or ten years,
yet this may be absolutely necessary if you want to leave something for future
generations. In February this year, MAT interviewed the directors of all of
the state fish and wildlife agencies and we found that on a 1-5 scale, five
being “extremely important,” the directors had a mean response of 4.5 when
asked how important leadership development was in their agency. Overall,
existing fish and wildlife agency leadership recognize that this issue can
have huge impacts in long-term success. Let’s make the impacts positive!
Many directors said they wished they had started to develop emerging leaders
years ago. Interestingly, when we asked the directors about the skills and
competencies they felt needed to be addressed in leadership development
programs, critical thinking was among the highest needs.
Our most important task is to give new leaders the tools to address
tomorrow’s issues, so.a new crop of well-trained leaders will have the
opportunity to create conservation agencies and programs that will leave a
conservation legacy in the twenty-second century.
We must not assume that training programs alone will fill the leadership vacuum left by retirements. There is some recognition that biologists, while well trained in biology, are often not likewise trained in leadership, management, and administration. When they get promoted, skills are often learned on the job. The fact is these skills are learnable to people with aptitude and the desire to lead, but tomorrow’s leaders will have a higher likelihood of success if they learn their business management skills as part of a deliberate process, in anticipation of the need instead of in reaction to it. A great many of the biologists we meet at MAT don’t want to get promoted. They love their jobs because they love the science. So, herein lies another issue with tomorrow’s leaders. How do we create the desire among conservation professionals to be promoted: to leave the field, deal with politics, create budgets, and take on all kinds of additional responsibility for not a lot more money? What happens if the new position requires relocation? The MAT team has been hearing about this problem. Real estate prices nationwide have been soaring, especially in urban centers such as state capitols. Agency directors are reporting to MAT that promotional opportunities are often declined because despite a raise, the person who might fill a promotional position would take a sometimes significant financial hit in terms of cost of living to move from a regional office or remote district to headquarters. The problem is compounded when the promoted individual is one half of a two-wage earner household. The fact is remains there is no simple solution and every agency is different, but if no solutions are found, the best candidates will not get promoted, and the conservation community will suffer.
Legacies
In a presentation last spring to
the IAFWA Education, Outreach and Diversity Committee, Rick Lemmon from the
National Conservation Training Center and Eric Schwaab from the IAFWA,
recognized that the leadership issues facing conservation organizations are
intertwined with a conservation legacy.
Let’s build on this idea. Looking at the last century of conservation in
North America, after every 30-40 years, conservation takes a shift. Things
continue steadily for a few decades, then wham! Things shift again. With each
shift, a new legacy emerges. And those legacies endure, good or bad. There are
three legacies of the 20th century that provide an interesting
backdrop to help us develop meaningful navigation strategies.
Starting at the turn of the century, Teddy Roosevelt launched a “Land Legacy,” when he created the US Forest Service and the Refuge System. This legacy lives on in the wealth of public lands and open space that really make North America unique among developed nations. Did Roosevelt shy away from the critical need of land conservation because of funding or political obstacles? No, he recognized a problem and took decisive action, and he forged a solution: one that was not necessarily popular in his day, but continues to be celebrated in ours. In the 1930’s and 40’s, conservation began its “Science Legacy,” which remains a cornerstone of wildlife management. Through the application of science to wildlife management, Aldo Leopold almost single-handedly revolutionized and legitimized the wildlife profession, transforming fish and wildlife agencies. This legacy continues to shape the culture of conservation professionals.
By the late 1960’s, a time
ripe for change, the “Policy Legacy” rose in part as a result of the
publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. By the late 1970’s, a
string of federal legislation took root such as the Endangered Species Act and
the National Environmental Policy Act. The legacy is a host of regulatory
tools (though some may argue they are obstacles) to providing a healthier
environment.
We’ve visited a number of issues that will be impacted by the “Perfect Storm.” Among them, education and leadership. If we fail to prepare adequately, we risk a legacy of atrophied agencies and a society without conservation values. I propose that you consider how you can shape, as part of your programs, a legacy of educated and active conservation enthusiasts: where the children of the 21st century know, understand, and value wildlife and their habitats; where the next generation of conservation leaders have the skills, desire, and courage to create a broad conservation vision. Be courageous. Think differently and think big! As the skies clear, what will we call this legacy?
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- Jake Faibisch and Sally Guynn can be found at:
- The Management Assistance Team
- 698 Conservation Way
- Shepherdstown, WV 25443