Finding common ground

By CHRIS YOUNG
OUTDOORS EDITOR

Many who enjoy the outdoors treasure the quiet solitude found in nature. But when it comes to influencing public policy and elected officials, those who work to protect wildlife habitat, open space and recreational opportunity know strength lies in numbers.
Increasingly, those who hunt, fish, hike, watch birds or stroll in the park are finding they must work together to protect the resources and activities they hold dear.

Recent examples range from the local (lobbying for the reinstatement of state funds for open space and natural areas acquisition programs) to the big picture (pushing for continuation of nationwide conservation programs).

These and other issues have brought together an unlikely assortment of sportsmen's and environmental groups, some crossing ideological lines to work together for common goals.

Jonathan Goldman of the Illinois Environmental Council says environmental issues always rate high with voters.

"Our experience has always been that environmental issues are always of a very strong concern to citizens and voters," he says. "There is a lot of attention paid to issues like public education and public safety, but in the polls we see that the environment is always at the top as far as concerns about clean water and open space."

"On our Web site, we just put up something concerning the upcoming campaign and election, noting that nobody on either side has said much about the environment," says Marilyn Campbell, executive director of the Illinois Audubon Society. The item asks people to consider casting a vote for the environment and wildlife.

"So we are asking people to think about that and think about what's been done in the past four years," she says.

Efforts to influence policy don't stop after the election.

Eric Schenck, regional biologist with Ducks Unlimited in Canton, spent the first five years of his career as a lobbyist for DU in Washington, D.C., working on issues related to the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the wetlands reserve program and others.

"In the political world there is power in numbers," he says. Schenck says a coalition of organizations including DU, state fish and wildlife agencies, Pheasants Forever, Quail Unlimited, the National Rifle Association and others banded together at a time when many 10-year CRP contracts were set to expire.

The Conservation Reserve Program pays landowners to take erosion-prone and marginal farmland out of production for a period of years and plant grass or other cover. Part of CRP's mission is to prevent erosion and enhance air and water quality. While officially part of the nation's agricultural policy, CRP also is one of the nation's largest habitat restoration programs.

When wet conditions returned to the prairie pothole region of the north-central United States and Canada in the 1990s, millions of acres of grass were in place to provide upland nesting sites for breeding waterfowl.

"It was this combination of the return of wet conditions and the abundance of CRP grass that turned waterfowl populations around," he says.

"Then as we were coming into the mid-'90s, when the farm bill was being reauthorized, it was also a time that we had come to the end of these 10-year CRP contracts." Around two thirds of the nation's 36.5 million CRP acreage was set to expire in 1996 and 1997.

Schenck says it was critical to get those areas of prairie that were expiring back into the program "so it didn't all get plowed back up."

To accomplish this, groups had to have the trust of lawmakers.

“The other thing that helped our cause was credibility,” he adds. “For Ducks Unlimited and the groups we tended to align ourselves with, they were organizations that were proven to be willing to roll up their sleeves and be partners.

“We brought farmers in from all over the country that we had been working with,” he says, “and had them come in and testify on behalf of each of these conservation programs.”

Joe Duggan, vice president of corporate relations and marketing for Pheasants Forever say it is important that conservation and environmental groups work together to stay involved in policy decisions.

“We can affect more acres many times by working with policies than we can by raising money locally,” Duggan says.

Habitat projects help more than just pheasants and sportsmen, he adds.

“When we do wildlife habitat projects that we say are benefiting pheasants, they are benefiting all the species,” he says. “We work on restoring nesting cover, that’s for pheasant nesting but obviously there are all kinds of other birds that use it.”

In Illinois, the Henslow’s sparrow has been upgraded from endangered to threatened partly thanks to nesting habitats created by CRP. Henslow’s sparrows originally nested in prairies.

“Many of our members have a lot in common with sportsmen’s groups; in fact, a number of our members are sportsmen,” Campbell says of Illinois Audubon members. “We have people sitting on our board who hunt.”

She says those people understand the need to control populations of game animals like white-tailed deer and Canada geese.

“I think reasonable people understand this,” she says. “Many of us buy duck stamps, for example, because habitat for waterfowl is habitat for rails, bitterns and marsh birds.

“Habitat is what is bringing everyone together,” she adds. “Because they can see habitat disappearing and they know this is detrimental.”

Duggan says Pheasants Forever tries to reach out to local groups, including Audubon Society chapters. Signs at habitat restoration sites list contributors and often are a “Who’s Who” of local organizations, he says.

Goldman says gathering more than 130 organizations under the umbrella of Partners for Park and Wildlife was one key to restoring funds to a pair of Illinois land acquisition programs totaling more than $30 million this summer.

Last February, Gov. Rod Blagojevich proposed a one-year “holiday” for the Open Space Land Acquisition Development Fund and Natural Areas Acquisition Fund. Calls and letters from the public, along with lobbying from conservation groups, sportsmen and communities wanting to protect open space, helped convince lawmakers to restore the funds to the previous level.

“We like to believe that’s the way democracy in this country works,” Goldman says. “But people don’t always take the time to make that phone call or write that letter to a legislator to convey their feelings about an issue.”

“In many instances, they get very little feedback on an issue,” Campbell says of legislators. “If they get 10 or 15 letters on something, they say ‘Golly, people are sitting up and paying attention to this issue.’”

“(Letters, phone calls and faxes) can really get the attention of legislators and government officials,” she says.

Jack Ward of the Illinois Federation for Outdoor Resources, says groups that band together have greater clout.

“We’ve found what’s happened here in Illinois, since IFOR has grown and taken some of these organizations under our wing is that we are being listened to in Springfield,” he says of IFOR’s work with the legislature and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

“They’d rather get us in on the ground level than fight us later,” he adds. “But that doesn’t mean they will agree with us. That’s another issue altogether.

“But now we have input into the plans prior to them becoming proposals.”

Chris Young can be reached at 788-1528 or chris.young@sj-r.com.

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Jonathan Goldman
Executive Director
Illinois Environmental Council
Illinois Environmental Council Education Fund
1608 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Suite 511
Chicago, IL 60647
Tel: (773) 252-5954
Fax: (773) 252-5953
Cell: (312) 388-7358

In Springfield:
107 West Cook Street, Suite E
Springfield, Illinois 62704
Tel: (217) 544-5954
Fax: (217) 544-5958