Common Ground for 21st Century Conservation

Remarks prepared for delivery by Dana D. York, Associate Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, at the International Forum on Synergies: Soils, Society & Global Change, Celebrating the Centenary of Soil Conservation and Land Restoration in Iceland.

Selfoss, Iceland
September 4, 2007


Introduction
Thank you, your Excellency Dr. Grimsson, for your kind introduction. On behalf of the more than 11,000 men and women of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, including our agency chief, Arlen Lancaster, let me say how pleased we are to take part in this wonderful celebration. We consider our Icelandic colleagues to be close professional family and would not miss the opportunity to congratulate you on your many impressive accomplishments.

Iceland’s establishment of the first organized Soil Conservation Service a century ago is typical of many “firsts” which characterize your proud national history, including creation of the world’s oldest practicing legislative body, election of the first woman chief of state and your pioneering use of renewable fuels as a means to gain energy independence. Through these achievements and others, Iceland’s people and institutions have influenced the evolution of democracy and conservation worldwide and have earned both our esteem and our gratitude.

Iceland’s historic leadership is just one of the causes for celebration today, however. A second is that in coming together in Selfoss as an international community to discuss our planet’s most pressing environmental challenges, we have found common ground from which to begin to resolve them. As we commit ourselves to future cooperation on wide-ranging issues, it is perhaps worth taking some time to revisit a bit of the past.

Soils & Society
Our forum theme, “Soils, Society & Global Change,” could certainly do double duty as the title for a history of U.S. conservation on non-federal lands. Although we began a national program of soil surveying in the United States in 1899, we did not formalize our Soils Conservation Service—the forerunner of today’s Natural Resources Conservation Service—until the mid-1930s, following severe degradation of the American plains during the Dust Bowl era.
 
Failed national policies designed to encourage settlement in the near west and poor land management decisions taken by individual farmers imperiled our agriculture-based economy and citizens’ quality of life. Faced with these threats, soil scientist and agency founder Hugh Hammond Bennett advocated “retracing our steps across the land in an effort to correct past mistakes in the interest of the future. ”

Bennett, a visionary sort of fellow, had been laying ground work for the agency well in advance of its creation. He lobbied to stand up soil erosion experiment stations and used the results to develop demonstration projects, including conservation plans for participating farms.

But Bennett knew more had to be done, and on a grander scale. He set off on a nationwide speaking tour and went before Congress to ask for additional funding and personnel, but initially without much success. Following a very dark day in April 1935 known as “Black Sunday” because a dust storm in the plains blackened the sky so it looked like midnight at midday, Bennett decided to try again.

Having learned from the weather bureau that detritus from the storm was moving east, Bennett scheduled his congressional testimony to coincide with the duster’s predicted arrival in Washington. Here’s a description of the meeting from an extraordinary book on this period by Timothy Egan, called The Worst Hard Time:

“On Friday, April 19, five days after Black Sunday, Bennett walked into Room 333 of the Senate Office Building. He began with the charts, the maps, the stories of what soil conservation could do, and a report on Black Sunday. The senators listened, expressions of boredom on the faces of some. An aide whispered into Big Hugh’s ear. ‘It’s coming.’”

So he kept talking.

“Keep it up, the aide told Bennett again, it will be here within an hour, they say.” So Bennett continued, until finally “a senator who had been gazing out the window interrupted Bennett. ‘It’s getting dark outside.’

“The senators went to the window. Early afternoon in mid-April, and it was getting dark. The sun over the Senate Office Building vanished. The air took on a copper hue as light filtered through the flurry of dust. For the second time in two years, soil from the southern plains fell on the capital. This time it seemed to take its cue from Hugh Bennett . . . .

“’This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about,’ said Bennett. ‘There goes Oklahoma.’

“Within a day, Bennett had his money and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the health of the soil. ”

Two years later, the first local soil conservation district was formed in North Carolina; that district, which includes Bennett’s home, just marked its 70th anniversary. Its founding was a watershed moment, so to speak, in the history of soil conservation in the United States, as landowners and the government began to share responsibility for conservation on private lands. Government field offices staffed with expertise appropriate to the needs of the county being served were also set up.

Bennett was convinced of the soundness of this approach: “In this democracy,” he wrote, “national action to conserve soil must be led by these millions of land users. If they are active and willing participants in such a movement, it will endure; otherwise it will fail. ” He also thought participation in our programs should be entirely voluntary, which it has been to this day.

He was right, of course, about the importance of bringing society and soil science together. Today, there are more than 3,000 conservation districts nationwide which coordinate federal, state, local and private assistance to enable landowners to put conservation on the ground. As a result of this insightful construct, delivery of conservation programs is connected from policymakers and funding sources in Washington, D.C. all the way to individual farmers and ranchers well outside the Nation’s Capital—tailored, moreover, to their specific resource needs and those of the community at large, ultimately providing benefits to all citizens.

More than two-thirds of land in the continental U.S. is in private hands. That equates to more than 1.4 billion acres. Thus, the marriage of local leadership and national objectives has been, and remains, critically important in effecting lasting change for the environment, whether on a single acre or across a landscape. It has also afforded flexibility in program implementation over the years as science has progressed, funding has ebbed and flowed, and particular regions or resource concerns have become greater or lesser priorities.

What began as a fairly narrowly focused mission set emphasizing soil health has grown into a broader family of authorities, programs and strategies supporting high quality, productive soils, clean and abundant water, and healthy plant and animal communities.

What Have We Learned, Then?
In my effort to compress 70 years of activity and policymaking into several minutes, I have perhaps made delivery of our conservation programs to private landowners appear seamless or without controversy. There have certainly been challenges along the way and periods during which some believed the demand for agricultural production would overwhelm our stated national commitment to conservation; there were times we wondered whether we could have hugely productive lands and a healthy environment. And we have certainly learned many lessons; I’d like to share a few of them with you.

First and foremost, we now generally accept agricultural production and environmental quality as compatible national goals and for more than 20 years have expressed that symbiosis through legislation and appropriations informally referred to as “farm bills.” This legislation expires every five-to-seven years. An array of 2007 Farm Bill proposals are currently under consideration by members of the U.S. Congress.

For the most part, the funding and authorities resulting from recent farm bills have supported abundant production while also increasing our capacity to get conservation on the ground.

However, it is important to understand that conservation technical assistance, which is our agency’s oldest program and which we consider “the engine of conservation ,” is authorized and funded outside farm bill legislation. Most often, when we talk about our mission of “helping people help the land,” we mean providing technical assistance.

More recently, though, we have begun offering financial as well as technical assistance to farmers and ranchers and this has become an increasingly large part of our workload, especially during the last five years. While there can be no doubt that financial incentives facilitate adoption of conservation practices, it is technical assistance that makes them feasible and effective.

So, a second lesson is that financial assistance programs, whether delivered in the form of cost-share programs, easements, grants or stewardship payments, can distract us from core planning and other mission-essential activities. And the more specialized these programs become, the more difficult they are to absorb into our existing administrative and operational structures. We continue to struggle with finding the right balance in delivering technical assistance and financial assistance.

Further, as the number of financial assistance programs has grown so has landowners’ and partners’ confusion, given that there are sometimes only slight variations in program purposes or payouts, but often widely differing eligibility rules.

These are some of the reasons why agricultural producers told us the 2007 Farm Bill should: simplify and consolidate conservation programs, for us and our customers; significantly increase conservation funding; support emerging priorities, such as renewable energy research; and provide direct benefits to beginning farmers and ranchers and socially disadvantaged producers. These proposals are reform minded, for programs that are merit based and market oriented to enable us to meet future challenges, to make conservation easier and to be more transparent in our business practices. How and if these proposals will be captured in final legislation is anyone’s guess as we still have a long way to go.

I do want to make one final point about the process, though; most years, as the draft legislation makes its way through congressional committees, it typically does so without much notice. This year is proving an exception to that rule, as urban taxpayers, organic growers and environmental organizations have tuned into the debate and aren’t hesitating to voice their opinions. When President Abraham Lincoln founded the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1862, he did so saying it was to be “the People’s department.” This year, “the People” are making sure their concerns and preferences are heard.

Global Change and the Future

So why is this year different? I’d suggest it’s because citizens are riding the crest of the burgeoning environmental wave that has been building worldwide for decades. Voters’ active engagement in the farm bill process reflects increasing interest everywhere in issues like global warming, food safety and sustainable resources management, among others. They have educated themselves about the linkages between soil degradation and other large-scale environmental problems and they expect their neighbors and leaders to understand them, as well. It makes sense to them that if environmental problems are linked, the solutions probably are, too.

Then what does this global change mean to us as scientists, planners, business people and policymakers? In short, I believe it empowers us to boldly break new ground for conservation, to go beyond “simply retracing our steps across the land” as Hugh Hammond Bennett said 70 years ago.

But to break new ground, we will first have to break a few paradigms. For instance, in its 2007 assessment of 50 years of soil conservation policy in Europe, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission noted that “soil protection policies are established when there is a perceived threat to the population. ” This was clearly the case last century in the U.S. and Iceland, as formation of both countries’ soil conservation services happened only after threats to lands and peoples became imminent.

But being reactionary in this way will not get us where we want and need to go. We must discipline ourselves to use the powerful tools and expertise at our disposal to think and act more strategically. This is easier said than done in the United States at least, where our funding is allocated annually and we experience the disruptions of elections every few years; but, whenever we can take the longer view, we should.

Wouldn’t it be better to improve our current capacity to analyze and weigh the possible outcomes of proposed industrial, agricultural and conservation practices in order to plan more extensively, make better decisions up front and manage risk more responsibly at the outset?

We are already moving in this direction in the United States, under an umbrella program called the Conservation Effects Assessment Project, or CEAP. With greater government-wide emphasis on measuring performance and as a result of increased scrutiny following substantial funding increases for conservation programs in the 2002 Farm Bill, we knew we had to strengthen the science base for conservation spending.

CEAP promotes cooperative conservation, including with international partners, since impacts across a watershed cannot be judged in isolation and various parcels of land don’t recognize the “public-private” and nation/state labels we assign to them. Establishing a framework for measuring and reporting the full suite of ecosystem services provided by conservation practices is another program objective; soon, we will be inviting farmers and ranchers to participate in an on-line greenhouse gas reporting registry. Our ability to calculate the amount and value of such services will be paramount as we explore market-based opportunities to encourage investment in conservation.

We know we must also break new ground in how we deliver technical assistance, because our customer base is changing along with technology.

When I joined the Soil Conservation Service 30 years ago, we were taught there is only one way to deliver technical assistance: in person. Yet we have new customers who are only part-time farmers and ranchers, having bought rural properties mainly for recreation. They still desire information, but they want to access it via the Internet, late at night or on weekends.

As rural communities acquire broadband and other high-speed communications capabilities, more of our traditional customers are computerizing their operations. So, we must find ways to make virtual services work for both of these groups and our other conservation partners.

We currently conduct soil surveys and other assessments on the Web, provide on-line “energy estimator” management tools, and offer both our plants database and field office technical guides electronically, to name a few of our e-initiatives.

Maps and tables for more than 2300 soil surveys can also be accessed for free on the Internet, as can the results of National Resources Inventories, which report on land use and natural resource conditions and trends on U.S. non-federal lands. We have made a good start, but have a long way to go; and, we will need to continuously update and adapt our electronic outreach as technologies change.

But we recognize that we also have other new customers, including some beginning farmers and ranchers, disadvantaged producers and underserved community members who very definitely require the hands-on, in-person technical assistance I spoke of earlier.

How all of us choose to balance the needs of people with the lure and genuine benefits of new technologies will characterize our governments, agencies and partnerships in the 21st century.

As we work to find common solutions for common problems, we must take care to leverage the learning of others. We should, for example, adopt international standards for soil science and surveys and conservation engineering to facilitate information exchange and technology transfer; from the U.S. perspective, we have a lot to bring to the table in those discussions.

But in other areas, such as renewable fuels, we are still building national consensus regarding the way ahead. But we are not discouraged, because we are confident that we can learn much from others’ research and practices, including Iceland’s far-reaching energy-related initiatives. We look forward to hearing more about that from you, Your Excellency, when you deliver the “Frontiers of Soil Lecture” at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the American Society of Agronomy in New Orleans, Louisiana, later this year.

In Closing
Clearly, it will take a balanced approach, continued aggressive information exchange and technology transfer, and much innovation to ensure we realize the promise of our common ground for 21st century conservation. But there can be no question that we must make the effort, for as the poet and farmer Wendell Berry assured us, “The care of the earth is our most precious and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope. ”
Thank you again for including me in this very special gathering. Please plan to join us in 2010 when we celebrate our 75th anniversary in Washington, D.C. I hope to see you there!

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