Excerpts from a conversation on natural resources policy and management in a forum held at the University of California, Davis, on June 22, 1995. The forum was hosted by Chancellor Larry N. Vanderhoef of UC Davis and Secretary Douglas P. Wheeler of the California Resources Agency and is one element of the partnership established in a Memorandum of Understanding between the two institutions.
FORUM PARTICIPANTS
INTRODUCTION
CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT; EMERGING TRENDS
SCIENCE, INFORMATION, AND NEW MODELS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND MANAGEMENT
TRENDS AND POSSIBLE FUTURES FOR NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN CALIFORNIA
Nick Bollman
The James Irvine Foundation
Ken Domer
Special Assistant
Calif. Environmental Protection
Agency, State of California
Monica Florian
Sr. Vice President, Corporate Affairs
The Irvine Company
Robert Fri
President
Resources for the Future
Tom Graff
Environmental Defense Fund
John Helly
San Diego Supercomputer Center
Steve Johnson
The Nature Conservancy
C. Judson King
Vice Provost for Research
University of California
Andrea Lawrence
President, Sierra Nevada Alliance
Dennis Machida
Executive Officer, Tahoe Conservancy
Michael Mantell
Undersecretary for Resources
Resources Agency of California
Charles McGlashan
Director, Environmental Services
Coopers and Lybrand
Alfred Montna
Chairman
Farmers' Rice Cooperative
Richard Morrison
Senior Vice President
Environmental Policies and Programs
Bank of America
Dennis Pendleton
Director
Public Service Research Program
University of California, Davis
Gordon Rausser
Dean, College of Natural Resources
University of California, Berkeley
Michael Reid
Associate Dean
College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences
University of California, Davis
Jeffrey Romm
Professor
Environ. Science, Policy, and Mgmt.
Div. of Conservation and Management
University of California, Berkeley
Jeanne Sedgwick
The David and Lucille Packard Foundation
Kevin Starr
State Librarian
California State Library
B. Stephen Toben
Program Officer, Environmental Programs
The William and Flora Hewlett Fdn.
Larry Vanderhoef
Chancellor
University of California, Davis
John Walton
Professor
Department of Sociology
University of California, Davis
Douglas Wheeler
Secretary for Resources
California Resources Agency
Carol Whiteside
Director for Intergovernmental Affairs
Governor's Office of Planning
and Research
Patrick Wright
Policy Advisor for
Regional Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
John Amodio
Rebecca Bendick
Andy McLeod
California Resources Agency
University of California, Davis
June 22, 1995
This forum is part of a larger project to develop information on how to plan for the effective stewardship of the State's resources now and in the future. One premise of the project is that we must develop natural resources policies as they relate to and integrate with the cultural, political, and economic context of California. We intend to use the ideas developed in this forum to help initiate further discussion and actions on natural resources issues throughout the State.
Historical context
The whole question of juxtaposing nature and development, nature and technology, is one of the...three or four profound issues in the American psyche.
I don't think of California as a sub-variation of American civilization; it is American civilization at its most intense or theatrical. And so everything one says about California, one can say with modification, in one way or another, about the rest of the nation.
There's another side of California that is very important in the sense that there is a prophetic envisioning of this state through engineering. All the engineering projects we have, some of which take 40 or 50 years like the Central Water Plan, were envisioned in the 19th century. It's a powerful debate, the metropolitanization of some of California through water. I think to this day, the Owens Valley controversy, among southern Californians at least, is a bellwether kind of event, the same as the loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley to San Francisco. If you look at the documents, and the plans of what was sketched out, it is apparent that these people knew what they were doing. They understand what is being lost, much more in San Francisco than in southern California where it happened more haphazardly. Another snapshot is the Central Valley Project in 1933. How at the depth or the height of the Depression, Californians voted through the most expensive irrigation project in the history of the human race. And that would set in motion constructions that still are not finished. And the debate that surrounded that about what we were as a culture.
We're talking about a California that even through the '30's had only nine million people. Nine million people by '39, roughly. And then we went on Defense Department steroids for fifty years. We thought we were being astute business people. We thought we were being wonderful, creative entrepreneurs, but we were just mainlining defense dollars.
The inevitability of growth that is part of California is the suburban ideal. My personal hope is for re-urbanization. European cities tended to stay, at least until modern times, contained and were comfortable with the juxtaposition of wilderness and urbanism. We Californians were always anxiety ridden about where the two cultures come together. Can you have nature and civilization together? We are dealing on a psychological, symbolic, cultural level with the deepest possible American issues.
My own thinking has been guided in part by a controversial figure, Christopher Alexander and his group. Working with pattern language, for instance, he makes a marvelous point that agriculture and urbanism are not incompatible. We treat them in California as incompatible. Suppose those marvelous citrus orchards had still been allowed to run to the sea, but were interspersed with urban-suburban development. Of course with our land use patterns, we tore them all up, and I think we've lost a lot. At what point do we re-urbanize and juxtapose?
--Kevin Starr
The history of California, when told in other voices, becomes different histories than the one we hold and use.
Our California myth has been the possession of a rather small group of people, a group that is becoming ever smaller as a proportion of the population, yet the myth continues to be the legitimating basis upon which our structures of resource regulation and management, and a good deal more, are built.
Jim Crow segregation flowered in the South at the very time that the Conservation Movement grew strong. Sierra towns and reservation towns were segregated into the '50's and have not lost the undertones to this day.
We are in the midst of major transformations in our demography, economy, and settlement patterns, transformations we have yet to seriously acknowledge or even begin to accommodate in our myths and structures.
Our people are losing a sense of dignity in their lives because they have no value in the structures of the past and as yet no compelling new vision of what the future may bring. They have little reason to treat the environment with regard, even if valuing it greatly, when they are given little reason to hold regard for themselves. Until myth and civil process reform to engage the people of California, the future of the state's natural resources will be a warm topic for those such as us at this table, the contemporary campfire, but will otherwise merely expose the blinders of past privilege.
--Jeffrey Romm
If you look around this room, (we don't see...) great ethnic representation. Particularly Hispanics and Asians, political powers that are growing, don't think they have the same stake in resource preservation that maybe some of us around the table do. If you don't get those people engaged in understanding why this should be important to them, I think you are going to lose, because I don't think the white minority is going to be able to carry the day on this.
--Richard Morrison
We need to move to another stage in which the larger demographic and economic dynamics of the state can be related to the larger landscape dynamics of resource systems, and in which the distribution of power over resource systems becomes a variable rather than the conventional block type e.g., Industry, Ownership, Environment, Government, etc. Conventional categories have gotten in the way of understanding actual relations of people and resources and why these relations are changing.
We call a regulation `environmental' although it has as strong an impact on the distribution of economic assets among people and activities as it would if `economic' by intent. Its distributive impact affects current income as well as longer-term productivity. Similarly, `economic' policies have strong `environmental' effects through their redistribution of activities and intensities over space and among people. Our categories get in the way of seeing and explaining what actually happens when one or another action is taken.
The North Coast timber industry offers an example of how conventional categories prevent effective resolutions. Industrial employment dropped by 40% in a decade due to capital-intensive technological innovations in mills, but Industry blamed Environment and its bundle of forest regulations. Environment argued for more regulation on behalf of long-term employment opportunities, and blamed Industry for failing to make the needed investments. Workers and communities, although central to the argument, had by convention no Capital-Letter category, and continue to be a merely derivative consequence of the Models and structures through which debates about futures are pursued. A more human construction of the problem would diversify the projections of trends and the visions of potential opportunity for resolution, and would mobilize the popular constituency needed to achieve these resolutions. Instead, we have a history of two decades of meetings of the same small groups in the same small rooms, structurally locked into models and projections we all know. This may help to explain why the vague anger outside the room is so great, and why our models, trends and indicators don't explain it. We need to look elsewhere.
--Jeffrey Romm
It's quite right on the one hand to say that these fundamental societal philosophical conceptions of nature infused thinking about industrialization, urbanization, planning. It's another to say that those conceptions are inflexible or fixed in this Anglo American heritage. In fact it changes and new versions are being constructed all the time. Some of those indeed harken back to ones that existed prior to the population of the continent by Anglo Americans....What we have been experiencing in the last 20 years which I think will continue is a reemergence of the different conception of the relationship between nature and society, that being more of an environmental consciousness.
--John Walton
Upper middle class Progressives, gathered around tables like this and looking very much like this, traditionally made decisions (affecting environmental policy). They could implement them. I think that's just something radically different now, that upper middle class Progressives can't sit around and build Hoover Dam and sit around and get the vote through for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and get the vote through for the Hetch Hetchy and get the vote through for the California Water Plan.
--Kevin Starr
Dennis Machida (who had to leave early) asked me to convey his comment about broadening the diversity of support for natural resources issues. He said: "You know, we will never reach the growing ethnic communities in this state on these issues until we convince them that we care about their issues. Once they see us caring about their issues, they'll be more of a player in our issues."
--Michael Mantell
Something we didn't talk about, that is driving a lot of what we all perceive to be a major crisis that makes this period different from other periods, and that is population. I think if the state of California doesn't somehow develop an integrated policy that addresses population growth and human settlement in the state, patterns of human
settlement,... I don't know that we can do it, but not to engage some kind of discussion
about population growth in this context is just madness. I don't know how to do it, but it has to be done.
--Jeanne Sedgwick
What I see as the biggest challenge for resources protection in the '90's is establishing it as a priority among other competing issues. I have a proposal for a conservation program that is going to set aside maybe 200,000 acres of land in a reserve. It's an ecosystem approach. And I'm not worrying about people saying that it is a bad environmental plan. I'm worried about people saying "Why in the hell do you want to take 200,000 acres out of productivity, out of paying taxes, to save some birds, when we need jobs and we need this and we need that?"
--Monica Florian
I would offer that there is a much more profound disconnection between the average American and the natural world and the natural resource base than was ever the case....I read an article recently in the Wall Street Journal that talked about the recycling phenomenon. And really, I think people when they say they are environmentalists, they are talking about what they are doing with solid waste....I would offer the politically incorrect view that recycling is an example of a tremendous diversion of human energy toward an end that, while worthwhile, is way down there on the list of environmental concerns we should be dealing with.
A coalition of foundations just funded a very large national polling effort with voters.... to find out what the average man thinks about biological diversity. A deterministic view of how nature functions is a very big part of the thinking of members of the American public. They believe nature will take care of itself and its own. One of the few positive things that came out of this very expensive undertaking was to show that to the extent you can point out to people what the man-made effects are, it's at that point that people say we should intervene. Most people think that nature is so much bigger than we are that they have a deterministic attitude. I think that's a point of entry for public education.
--Jeanne Sedgwick
One issue...is really dominating the debate in Washington right now. Assuming there is public value, whether it is a little bird or a spotted owl or whatever it might be, is the appropriate way to assure the public values are adequately protected to regulate and pass the cost of protecting that public value on to the private entities involved? Or is there an obligation for the public to buy the protection? You would get protection if you paid Pacific Lumber enough to value spotted owls more than you value board feet, and start counting them.
--Tom Graff
(It may be useful to look at...) who has a long-term stake in California. Because it is a different list than I think we have always assumed. The utilities, for instance, have become very active because their infrastructure is here and they are not going anywhere and they live and die with California. The property owners, both public and private, have need to have a long-term stake in California. Manufacturing doesn't, populations are fickle. Institutions of all kinds, even agriculture I think, increasingly becomes a commodity or an industry or an economic sector that can pick up and go to Costa Rica or farm in Mexico. And I think when we talk about how people feel affected or connected, that we have to start thinking about who actually cares about what happens to this state and for what period of time.
--Carol Whiteside
Any private forest in California is carrying debt that is controlled by forces beyond the state. We can look at the structure of the forest as the imprint of that debt, not as the consequence of rational decisions about ecosystems. Even localized management must deal with that reality.
--Jeffrey Romm
Longer term, what I think is really important about the last six months (since the November, 1994 elections), is the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. These issues of regulatory reform or delegation of increasing powers to states and localities are now on the table. Nobody can sweep them off the table. It is probably therefore one of the most important discussions that will take place over the next decade in our political system.
--Robert Fri
Let me ask you about these delegations of responsibility you talked about. Where do you see in the national environmental movements and the pro-environment members of Congress coming out on that issue? That has enormous implications for the work that we do.
--Michael Mantell
This is an issue which main line environmental groups are clearly having to address. There is a lot of tension in the ones with state chapters -- the tension between the grass roots and the national approach. Some organizations seem very clearly to have taken the grass roots approach. There was a full-page ad in the Washington Post a few months ago signed by Carl Pope of the Sierra Club. If you took Carl's name off of it, it would have looked like a Republican tirade against Washington. They are feeling the same
force to come to grip with issues at the local level. Of the ten major environmental groups, at least six are having major problems dealing with this.
--Robert Fri
Over time what you have built up is a system of more and more restrictive, less and less flexible sets of requirements for the federal agencies....What we are finally seeing now is the big backlash against that. I think what we're seeing, at least in the last two months, is a real reaction from the public that they don't want to relax those goals. They want the goals to remain the same, but they are very receptive to the argument that the implementation of those goals is far too prescriptive. So you're seeing a whole new wave ...in the last couple of years of new, more flexible, innovative approaches. And we've got a real window now, finally, (to do this).
--Patrick Wright
We can't expect people to comment on EIRs that are 1500 pages long and full of jargon. We can't blame people who get impatient with government process that goes on for years and is controlled by attorneys. In many ways, the goals of government action are desirable, but in the implementation, we have allowed institutions to create barriers to meaningful participation, and in the process, we have disenfranchised the very people who ought to have a stake in the outcome.
--Carol Whiteside
When the EPA was created in the '70's, there was a very loud response in business that we cannot meet standards. There is no technology, no capability. So please regulate us by telling us technologies we can use.... Now business is essentially living with the legacy of that reaction. Now we are regulated on manufacturing process lines, technology choice, a lot of inefficient decisions....If I could write the EPA's mandate today, I would say set standards for nationwide pollution levels and every year you lower the allowance. That's it. Let industry get there by whatever means is possible....We're going to use our creativity and our technological and our financing mechanisms to get us there.
--Charles McGlashan
Charles, I agree with you a hundred percent on the industrial side as far as setting standards and letting them meet them. Is there a counterpart way of doing that in habitat preservation or land use?
--Richard Morrison
I think the process of decision making could be very similar. You decide as a national strategy for resource management how many acres of virgin forest we want nationally. Where are they? And you choose from a national standpoint, politically, what you value. If that gets pushed down to the state level, then the states would decide to choose or don't choose to have virgin forest tracts, this level of extraction from our soils, and so on. And regulate the standard. There will be 5% virgin forest in the United States and that's a national policy, and then let industry-government partnerships figure out how to maintain that. Because industry is pretty flexible. The Nature Conservancy is a master at this. It's a great example of brokering deals to get certain kinds of natural resources
in one area in exchange for others. So you actually can create a marketplace for natural resources by setting firm standards.
--Charles McGlashan
I think the complicating factor is that natural land preservation, endangered species protection, is more like art collecting than it is pollution control. It's not good enough to have a picture of a woman; you have to have the Mona Lisa. There's not a lot of interchangeability here. And the same thing works out in terms of natural lands. There are some places that are intrinsically highly valuable for biological diversity protection,
and those places simply cannot be traded against "like habitat" in Nevada or Utah. It doesn't exist. It really adds a complicating wrinkle.
--Steve Johnson
The industrial groups, the private sector, mounted a huge campaign against the "Big Green" Initiative. What was their basic argument? Economic growth in the state of California is going to decline dramatically, and we're going to be far worse off, because our environmental regulations are going to be much higher than the rest of the U.S. or the rest of the world. Hence, we're going to lose whatever comparative advantage we have. That I would argue is the wrong public debate. The counter should be that if we invest in our sustainability and resilience of our ecosystems, we are going to be in a position in the future to take advantage of some opportunities that other countries or other states won't be able to take advantage of. If we build our information and the collection of data and our baselines and indicators in such a way that we talk about resiliency and ecosystem sustainability in the "stock." It's terribly simple, but quite frequently the debate turns to talking about flows. If I can exploit this resource and I can get a short run gain, that's sort of a flow argument. They don't stop to think about the long run implications of those kinds of exploitations, of degradation of the environment, and what effect that's going to have on your position and opportunities and options that you have in the future. We should be focusing the debate on the latter dimension, not the former dimension. And I would hope that the collection of data and information corresponds to how you want this to be used and how you hope to align incentives to get more support.
--Gordon Rausser
The private sector tends to be more comfortable with...the acknowledgment that the parameters used in our decision are woefully imperfect. We have to use them anyway,
so let's get on with it. One of the things that's difficult in the public sector is we wait for good science to get it all figured out. Meanwhile the fishery dies.
--Charles McGlashan
Charles McGlashan commented that there is enormous energy focused in industry now on collecting data and on assessment processes. I think there is an analogue in the resources agencies. It strikes me that one action that could come out of a meeting like this would be a more systematic and explicit partnership in those assessment processes. In CERES, the state's evaluation system, for example. It is being done to some extent, but I think it is piecemeal. I think industry that has an interest in doing these same sorts
of things, joining together with agencies and universities in developing assessment and data management systems would be very helpful.
--Dennis Pendleton
When we talked about environmental health and the realm of pollution,...we have to start with protection of public health. When it comes to...habitat, land systems, I think we are moving toward, in the NCCP (natural communities conservation planning) and others, using the health of the natural system. We don't (fully) understand these systems and their complexity, but we are getting better informed, more knowledgeable of the main functions that need to be sustained....Then perhaps it's really a bottom up, supported by and assisted by a top down. Relying on science for the health of the system, the output should be in terms of a healthy system, but then you are leaving it to the landowners and local community to devise the best way to achieve that health. Perhaps our focus needs to be on what kinds of incentives, what types of flexibility can we structure into the process to encourage them to be creative and figure out the most cost effective way to get there. In a way that gives them some certainty in outcome and a lower cost.
--John Amodio
I'm a little bit cynical about phrases like ecosystem health. They don't have any meaning really. Nobody knows how to measure it. Ecosystems change over time. They don't remain static. Some of them die, some of them are born, some of them remain in place for as long as we can measure time. The arbitrary question is how to pick a baseline that you are going to refer to and maintain. That's as arbitrary as you get, but I don't know how you pick a better criterion other than something that is observable. Otherwise you are going to make it up. If you observe it, you are better off at least in an ecosystem sense because it is at least viable in nature. The question is, if you maintain it is that natural? That's a whole other question.
In Europe there are entire countries that have been managed for centuries. And managed successfully. They are viable, they are intact, largely because they were a small amount of property compared to what we are faced with, and under the control of a small group of people who had a scarce economic resource and they wanted to maintain it successfully. That's kind of the key criterion someone said earlier, "Who are the stakeholders, the people who have a long-term interest?" Those are the people, at least in this case of the sustained forest, the people who are in it hundreds of years, families maintaining the same forest. It is a different situation when you have corporations managing a forest.
--John Helly
Do you mean literally that we cannot measure the health of ecosystems?
--Douglas Wheeler
Yes. We don't know what that means. We don't know what the health of an ecosystem means.
--John Helly
What do you say to someone like Steve Johnson who thinks he is working to protect the ecosystem now?
--Douglas Wheeler
I don't think the question needs to be that esoteric. This is a very anthropomorphic term "Are you healthy?" I don't think a very esoteric analysis needs to be done to determine whether or not an ecosystem is healthy. An ecosystem is always, in some sense or another, functioning. And we have some idea for many ecosystems what kind of natural processes occur and if it has its parts, it's like you. If you have your parts and you are functioning, I guess you are healthy.
--Steve Johnson
Isn't this experimental, though? If you can't have absolute and permanent standards, isn't it worth having experimental standards that are reached through fairly simple processes of negotiation around what we do know?...If it is experimental, then it goes to the question of indicators, which may be specific rather than general to the particular ecosystem you are talking about.
--Nick Bollman
It's especially useful because it helps you get more quantitative information and when it gets to the point that you have measurement, you can do something about it. At one end of the spectrum it's clear the government has a responsibility for human health risk. There's got to be some insurance at a social community level that public health is not allowed to be compromised, provided consciously by the government, if not by other mechanisms. At the other end of the spectrum there is no bound. It's aesthetic value that determines where you stop. And what you value in there has no metric. There's no measurement short of monetization. Monetization, as we have heard, is not sufficient to capture all aspects. So the question for the government, and it's probably painfully apparent to you, is how do you pick that boundary. There is no way to pick it. We can't set it scientifically, except in a few cases which are notable by exception. The question is in between there, where is the limit? How do you determine that limit and how do you get the information to determine that limit and justify it? It's the justification that is the hard part right now.
--John Helly
One problem has to do with the time period you are concerned with. You observe an ecosystem at this point in time and we don't know whether what we are observing is degradation or cyclic. We'll know that if we wait 20-30 years. I'm thinking specifically of fisheries....Throughout the '30's and early '40's the yield of sardines being taken out of Monterey Bay, with larger boats and better technology, was tremendous. This was the third largest fishing or canning port in the world by tonnage. And they noticed a downturn in the cycle and the state Department of Fish and Game was very attentive to this, studied it carefully, and was continually issuing warnings about depletion. All the other interests, the canners, the fishermen themselves, were saying this was temporary. It will turn again like it always has in the past. In the end of course, the combination of the cycles and the overfishing killed that fishery and killed that industry. We now know that for sure. The scientific evidence is solid now and there was a point where it could have been saved when it wasn't quite so solid. So this is the choice. When do you have to make a decision and you have to rely on imperfect science and make political choices?....To get a precise sense is to wait until it is all over.
--John Walton
I think the success of local consensus processes depends, to some extent, on how people can mutually agree on the data and on the scientific basis for what is being undertaken. One promising model for this is some variation on the work of Paul Sabatier on this campus. His advocacy coalition model brings scientists together on an issue, but scientists who have different perspectives and represent organizations with different political and environmental perspectives. (The group is then charged with developing "scientific consensus" recommendations on an issue.)
--Dennis Pendleton
Forestry...is, in lots of ways, the closest analogy we have of a regulatory environment in the resources area. We are without definition of an objective, we are mired in regulations....This has to do in large part with our failure to establish the standard. Everybody will say that sustained yield forestry is the objective. But the industry is not prepared to accept that as the objective, or at least not to implement it on its own terms. So the effort of establishing an output standard or performance standard has failed. And what they have said to us, if not directly than certainly by implication, is regulate. And then they will complain about the effects of regulation. The consequences have been disastrous for the industry and for the communities that are dependent upon the industry....Do we have an agreement on sustained yield forestry?
--Douglas Wheeler
No. We have an agreement that sustained yield is a good thing. But what it is is whatever the owner wishes it to be. That is how the law is now interpreted. The essential point is that `sustained yield' is a relative, not an absolute, concept. It is relative to stocking level. It is relative to the character of the forest that is sought. It is relative to the area and to the time horizon within which balances between growth and harvest are assessed. If there is no fix on these variables, then there is no capacity to
measure sustained yield on some standard basis. If these variables are entirely discretionary, there can be no public standard.
--Jeffrey Romm
If we cannot agree to that as an output and balance the environmental and the economic components, how are we to deal with any of these resource issues?
--Douglas Wheeler
That's why there is a fairly big fight over this.
--Jeffrey Romm
It makes water quality and air quality sound simple. Because as Patrick (Wright) said, there are precise measurements of individual pollutants and we can modify those depending on the cause and effect relationships. This one is at its base is quite simple, the notion that we should be able to find that level at which a forest will sustain itself and provide us both with economic and environmental attributes.
...It seems it would be possible in forestry as in land development to find an appropriate balance. To find a carrying capacity at a sustainable level of development that enables them to operate profitably. But at the same time that protect those values that distinguish a forest from a fiber farm.
--Douglas Wheeler
It's a little tricky, that analogy. The development company is selling an integrated lifestyle. As an example, development within a natural tract, open space. In most cases where you have a debt-levered fiber processing company, that is the problem. That the expanded definition of a forest does not apply. It is board feet, and it is cut and dry.
--Charles McGlashan
We fail to monetize these other values?
--Douglas Wheeler
Right. And so that's the case where I would argue that the private sector cannot provide the creative solution to that issue unless it decides to monetize the value of its employees having long-term access to that forest in a sustained livelihood. But if that goes away because of debt considerations, you lose it....That's a case where I would argue the state as a whole has to step in through access to a broader group of stakeholders and say there is an inherent value to keeping this untapped.
--Charles McGlashan
We have...(tried) to develop the argument for common solutions applicable to pollution management, and natural resources management. In the end I have concluded that the argument doesn't sell for me....I think this comes down to two very different phenomena....We have the possibility to take Nick's (Bollman) very astute analysis, aggregating individualized solutions on the land as the way to build toward the resolution (of natural resources management issues), as opposed to simple clear-headed standard setting on the other side when it comes to the pollution output piece.
--B. Stephen Toben
How do you deal with big environmental problems, that span a large scale, and then how do you solve problems locally? A lot of companies deal with this all the time. Trans-national companies especially have an inherent tension between corporate identity and corporate policy and decision making and goal setting at the center, and autonomy for separate facilities, in different countries sometimes, that need to incorporate both conditions to be successful....I suspect the answer would be a very careful analysis of what problems are huge in scale, like global warming, or acid rain, or a national resource strategy, or even a statewide resource strategy, and then separating from those local problems that really need the fire and energy and spirit of local solutions.
--Charles McGlashan
One of the reasons that the private sector is more responsive today than they were 30 years ago is because of the environmental regulations. It's a default option. And it creates incentives for various parties in the private sector to come together and try to design self-compliance sort of mechanisms....
--Gordon Rausser
When people refer to the private sector there are two aspects to it. There's the for-profit private sector...and the non-profit private sector. I think the participation of the non-profit private sector is going to be tough to predict in future years. Part of it depends upon what the federal government and the state government does with what it currently has on its plate with homeless, education, medicine, research. If they essentially withdraw from those fields, the burden of managing those will fall to a large extent on the non-profit sector. This will make what I consider basically a saturated non-profit economy even more saturated.
--Steve Johnson
To the extent that environmental and resource issues and public goods are translated into economic forces, business is increasingly responsive....As long as policy is monetized into a language or a feedback loop that business understands, there are a lot of good examples of active engagement by the private sector in a quest for sustainable development....
Over the last 15 years, quality has been seen as something we all need to manage every single day. And more and more people are saying the same thing about environment. The companies who can effectively manage quality and environmental issues strategically and carefully and cleverly will yield a lot more profits.
There are a variety of international standards emerging....Probably the most influential nowadays is the ISO, the International Standard Organization, development of ISO 14000, which is a quality management standard, essentially applied to environmental issues....These types of initiative translate not so much from the regulatory sphere into corporate policy, but from customer-driven behavior. It is really a marketing strategy issue, and that is the way people talk about it. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago that indicated companies that could get the Blue Angel label in Germany, for example, could experience a 30% increase in market share.
One of the key roadblocks traditionally talked about in the environmental solutions industry, if you will, has been the bottleneck of regulation....That too is dramatically changing. There is an effort to consolidate permitting for new technology at the Office of Environmental Technology in the state of California. There are efforts to bring natural resource decisions into corporate strategies through public-private partnerships. ....There is the joint effort between state environmental programs and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, called in the vernacular, Beyond Compliance, also called XL at the federal level. And this is an effort to allow greater flexibility in companies to achieve global permits for their facilities, rather than having to certify or permit each individual technology piece. And to guarantee to the public, to the agency regulating them, that the company will go beyond all aspects of regulatory standards in exchange for that covenant for this global permit. The company would then be free to choose whatever technology or whatever management standards it wants to achieve this
type of compliance record. And it would be audited by outside parties to verify that the numbers are right and the systems are tracking the numbers correctly.
--Charles McGlashan
The thing about monetizing environmental costs within corporations brings to mind the New York Times article a couple of weeks ago....Basically the theme of the article was the cost of compliance with acid rain provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act have been very substantially less than was predicted at the time of the passage of the act....The upshot of the article was basically that environmentalists shot too low, set the pollution requirements too low, because look at how cheap it has been to comply with the environmental standards that were set. Monetizing those results turned out to be a whole lot cheaper than industry or we ourselves predicted at the time. We're sort of in the awkward position of saying we didn't know, but we probably should have shot for more. It creates a kind of difficult tradeoff between what the environmental goals are going to be and how much can industry really afford to meet those goals.
--Tom Graff
We talked a lot today about monetizing, and I know that is absolutely essential and we have to create better natural resource accounting systems. I support that totally....I also, just at an intuitive level, feel that if we just focus on monetizing these resources then there is a trap there for us. Somehow we need to make the link to public policy about the other pieces of why these resources need to be managed intelligently, and sometimes managed for qualities and values that we can't really articulate.
--Jeanne Sedgwick
All politics, as someone said, are local. And what that means is not simply a metaphor. It's to say that politics ultimately happen to people in places. They happen in Mono County or Owens Valley or Monterey Bay....What is constituted essentially by these environmental policies is a whole string of local issues....The important way to deal with environmental policy as part of that whole struggle of delegitimation or legitimation of government is to go back to these local issues that have been addressed in different ways and sometimes quite successfully. Mono Lake is certainly a case in point. The Owens Valley agreement is another. These are all instances in which people and governments together have engaged environmental issues and struggled with other authorities at other levels. Small struggles that in ways set big precedents.
--John Walton
The national conference of state legislators just recently published some interesting research which suggests that state legislatures can be more effective in reforming water policies by acting primarily as conveners of outside stakeholders than they can by passing legislation or enacting new regulations.
In my own experience as a funder, we have found that providing that outside agent to come into local communities with sensitivity, with diplomacy, and to provide that function, to offer that kind of service, gives very important validity to state government in an entirely different role. An example of that (is) the Coalition for Utah's Future. It's focus has been the enormously difficult and divisive wilderness designation debate in Utah....For six months, in Emory County, Utah, deeply conservative, highly suspicious of federal governmental motivations,...they worked a process that yielded two products. First it yielded a shared statement of values within the community that sounds very much like an environmental document but is really a product of people who largely resonate with the idea of county home supremacy, home rule in custom and usage. The second document that it yielded was a recommendation for specific land designations in Emory County, which includes some of the most magnificent natural landscape features. That gets to your idea of what is the place and what is its meaning to us, its sacred value. But the designation was not wilderness and non-wilderness. The designation was six different kinds of wildlands protection. A much more nuanced statement of how we can live compatibly with the various features of our environment than was the defining terms of the debate in congress.
Unfortunately, the events of the last nine months have overtaken this process to a large extent....A wilderness designation bill introduced June 1 by agreement of all the Utah delegation. It essentially runs roughshod over this more nuanced approach to wildlands designation, and describes a number, 1.8 million acres of Utah land that would become wilderness designated. But what is significant in that bill is that three times the proportionate amount of acreage ascribed for wilderness is being voluntarily enrolled by Emory County. Emory County through this process involving this outside agency is prepared to live with vastly more wilderness than any of its surrounding counties, which did not participate in this kind of state-stimulated process. So I offer that as an illustration that there is a role for government to play, and it can work.
--B. Stephen Toben
I am in favor of community-based negotiations. But isn't it the case that one of the disconnects that we are struggling with here is that the community itself in the forest doesn't have the power to monetize the environmental values that they are seeking? How do you get the other stakeholders to the table? Not just government, but other stakeholders into the community dialogue who have the power to monetize. People who invest, for instance in the long term. Venture capitalists. People who have alternative industry interests that are compatible with sustainability. They are not at the table yet,
they are in the future, people thinking about it. But there isn't a way to get them at the community table.
--Nick Bollman
Some of you who know me know that I used to be the mayor of Modesto. I remember one of my earliest experiences was going to a seminar in San Francisco and talking about what we were going to do to preserve the valley's farmland. As the new mayor of this growing urban center in the valley, I was very resentful of the dilettantes in the Bay Area who were talking about me like I was a specimen on a slide in a microscope, and never giving anyone from the valley the opportunity to speak and participate. That has traditionally been the way that we have managed....We tend to ask what does the majority want and then we apply it to the small population that can't possibly represent itself. Now you're talking about changing that....The question is, how do we deal with the power of that population, those populations, because they are not unified, and their ability to make decisions that are relevant and meaningful to their own life without destroying the larger picture. Everybody understands that this is often not seen when you're looking at only a small piece of the pie. I think that scale and how we deal with constituencies and scale is really a fundamental issue of this discussion.
I have a thematic speech that I have been giving lately called "Smaller Government, Stronger Communities." As we talk about taking down the regulatory environment, there has to be a simultaneous buildup at the community level.
--Carol Whiteside
The United States deals with (environmental policy) issues through legal endeavors, in ways that can be complex, consumptive of time, consumptive of money, and not get to where you are trying to go very fast. By contrast, I had the experience about three years ago of doing a tour of about 10 days in Japan as part of a team looking at technology, including accommodation of technology to the environment. We looked at their biggest paper mill. It was located right on the coast. It was a very clean paper mill when you looked at various measures of what the emissions are. And so we asked who regulates them. And we got strange answers. The answers really bespoke in all respects a dialogue between the government and the locality and the industry so that it was worked out by negotiation. There was not a standard on how many ppm of sulfites could be emitted into the ocean. There was not a standard on what level of particulates could go into the atmosphere. Probably we are looking at the difference between the Japanese culture and the U.S. culture. But, the contrast to me was very striking....Elements of this (would help us) proceed in a way that will be less consumptive of time and expense and draw people together better rather than pushing them apart.
--C. Judson King
The California rice industry has been for many years under attack for adversely affecting Valley air and water quality. So we decided we would go by way of working with others. Getting with our detractors and trying to figure out where our problems were and how we would correct them. We cleaned up our water quality,...and we got the Chevron award for water quality. We were the only commodity group in the United States to do so. We initiated the Smoke Reduction Act with Assemblyman Connelly which will phase out burning over 10 years to zero burning....Instead of people saying, "Why do we need a rice industry in the state?" they are saying, "You should keep the rice industry."
We are a mainstay for waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway. We're an industry of 600,000 acres, providing the majority of the food for migrating waterfowl that come through this valley. We entered into the Riceland Habitat Committee partnership with people that were highly critical of us. Mark Reisner, whom many of you know wrote Cadillac Desert, highly criticized our water uses. We turned Mark around on that....He worked with us to design a program where we are now flooding in the wintertime to stop from burning our straw; we flood it, and it will decompose, and the water fowl will become our partners in doing that.
When the original redneck farmer thinks about an environmentalist, he sees a person with horns and a beard, pitchfork and all these things. But that's not true. We found these people are very reasonable. We've found we have a lot of common ground, and we have the...responsibility to really manage our resources.
The California program has been a major model. We have now formed a national waterfowl program working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and others. We have three million acres of rice in this country, sitting in the midst of a flyway, mainly in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri.
--Alfred Montna
(Are these initiatives) justifiable on economic terms?
--Douglas Wheeler
Absolutely, because you have to look at the cost of regulation....It is affecting our economic bottom line by not having to need to be continually responding to regulations and doing whatever we have to do in our industry to fund those....And we're finding much more good coming back from these efforts than we are finding what we're spending. For instance, we supply all the rice to Kellogg's for Rice Krispies. (We're part of their) total quality concept....They look at not only our production efforts, but our responsibility to society. It's very important to a company of that size, and they prefer to do business with people like that.
--Alfred Montna
Those of us who have been through the Bay-Delta process, which was in fact stakeholder-driven but was state-sponsored and federally-sponsored, can attest that the role of government, state and federal, was considerably different than anything in our experience. We convened the stakeholders and asked for their definition of a solution, which surprisingly, despite years of dispute, they managed to resolve. And we are now in the process of implementing (it), in the public interest.
--Douglas Wheeler
If you have to list, say, the five greatest natural resource accomplishments in California in the last two years, I think at the top of the list you would have Bay-Delta, Mono Lake, the gnatcatcher, CVPIA, and the California Desert Bill. Perhaps even the rice venture. Which of those are unraveling right now? The two that were enacted by Congress, the Desert Bill and the CVPIA. Those that were stakeholder driven, Bay-Delta, Mono Lake and the gnatcatcher, were all locally driven.
--Patrick Wright
There's no doubt about it that they reached a cooperative solution. But in each case there was still the default option out there (regulations) that provided motivation for them to cooperate.
--Gordon Rausser
(We need to) ask the academics here to provide feedback, more formally, (on) what works and what doesn't work. There are plenty of consensus-oriented processes that have come to nothing, more than have been successful. So what defines the good ones from the bad?
--Tom Graff
Steve's (Toben) reference to the Coalition for Utah's Future was a good example. Mono Lake is another one. It is that energy that gets engaged in a concern for a local issue. And they all have a certain custom quality to them. You can't take the formula of any of these and just lay it over all of these issues. It just isn't going to happen that way. That's why (local emphasis) is so important.
--Andrea Lawrence
...Maybe that's where...indicators would lead you. Rather than to establish a pre-ordained methodology or a complex of rules and policies. You can't measure success by number of rules and policies. We look at what it is we are trying to achieve and then rely upon these partnerships to get us there in ways that are efficient and effective and respectful of one another's economies. How do you define those (objectives/indicators)? I guess that is the question.
--Douglas Wheeler
I encourage further discussion of the respective roles of the state, federal, and local governments. Clearly it is something that we (in the federal government) are asking ourselves every day now. Congress is focusing on, as we move further away from strictly relying on command and control and work more toward these other approaches, what is our role? Is it just to provide money? Is it to provide hammers in terms of regulations? Is it to provide technical support? It's still an open question.
--Patrick Wright
...It is worth exploring, in a lot of different resource-based fields of interest, that what we need to build the political will for setting and monitoring standards is community-based negotiation involving all the stakeholders from the community, plus the regional, state and perhaps national stakeholders who bring to the table the power to monetize, and therefore support, the results of that stakeholder process.
--Nick Bollman
Though not the literal final word in the forum, many participants agreed that these comments by Nick Bollman summarize and integrate, concisely, a number of the conversational threads of the day's discussion.
These forum proceedings will be used to develop a framework for further discussion and actions on natural resources policy and management in California. An important objective for future workshops in this project is to engage more extensive representation of diverse communities of interest in the State. We welcome your comments, questions, or suggestions about the specific issues raised in this forum or about our larger project on the future of California's natural resources. Please send comments or inquiries to: