The Landscape Conservation Bulletin |
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A bi-monthly service of the Network for
Landscape Conservation
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Dear Network Friends,
Welcome to the November Landscape Conservation Bulletin! This past month has been seemingly entirely consumed by the U.S. election—and the disruptions that followed. But, as we flip our calendars to December, it feels as if we are finally able to look forward.
And there is good news: as the incoming Biden/Harris administration lays out their conservation priorities, we see emerging opportunities to build and advance an inclusive, equitable and resilient framework for landscape conservation. This is the opportunity to realize the future we have been talking about for landscape conservation.
It seems clear that conservation at the landscape level and inclusive landscape collaboratives will play an essential role in the approach and policies of this new administration. Early indications show that the Biden administration is committed to advancing an agenda that prioritizes landscape level conservation, not only as an essential way to address pressing ecological issues, but also as a key path forward for: climate mitigation; building resiliency in natural and human communities; global bio-diversity protection; and as part of a commitment to inclusive conservation, shared management and equitable access to clean air and water and open spaces. They know that landscape level conservation and collaboratives are vital to addressing both our long-term ecological and economic recovery.
Explore this Bulletin—and we hope you too find inspiration here in the critical value and importance of the work that we all do!
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Laurel D. Angell
Senior Policy Advisor, Center for Large Landscape Conservation
Member of NLC’s Policy Working Group
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TNC Climate Resilience Data |
Virtual Policy Forum: Private Landowners |
Additional Landscape Conservation News |
Landscape Conservation Job Board |
Webinars & Additional Resources |
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Watch this space in the coming months as we will continue to feature the various voices of the Network for Landscape Conservation, with members of the Network’s Coordinating Committee and/or Working Groups sharing brief welcomes in future Bulletin. |
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Cover photo: View of the Yosemite Tunnel, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, California. Photo by James Donovan on Unsplash.
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The Landscape Conservation Bulletin is a news-aggregating service that we provide freely to support and advance the landscape conservation movement across the country and beyond. We ask you to consider making a contribution in support of the Bulletin and the Network's broader efforts to build that connections within the landscape conservation movement that accelerate our collective abilities to achieve lasting and meaningful successes in the landscapes we call home. |
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Featured News
Indigenous voices speaking to connection to land, community, and culture
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As November closes we reflect on Native American Heritage month, and the opportunity to celebrate the rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories of the Indigenous peoples of North America—and recall the historical trauma and injustice, the silencing and marginalizing of these voices. Landscape conservation, with an emphasis on building collaborative approaches to working at scale across landscapes, has a critical role to play in elevating Indigenous voices, perspectives, and priorities.
This month, Jason Baldes of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe writes powerfully in High Country News about efforts to restore buffalo across the American West, and the central role that Indigenous perspectives are playing in driving such efforts. Elsewhere, Nonprofit Quarterly has published a series of articles lifting up Indigenous voices to explore environmental justice and their connection to culture, land, people, and the economy. Read a piece from Hawaii that explores the cyclical nature of displacement and alienation of Indigenous peoples in ways that continue to be overlooked in environmental justice efforts; a piece from Alaska that explores the power of the Indigenous worldview; and a piece that shares the story of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe and their efforts to preserve their lands in the face of climate change impacts. A recording of an associated webinar also explores these themes more deeply. Finally, Emergence Magazine features a new short film, Border Nation, that shares the story of the Tohono O’odham people, whose ancestral homelands in the Sonoran Desert are currently divided by the U.S.-Mexico border—and explores how the increasingly militarized border is threatening their communities, culture, and connection to place.
As you read and reflect on these stories, we invite you to reflect on the original inhabitants and the whole historical legacies of the places that you are working to conserve—and to consider how we as a landscape conservation practitioners can work to recognize and address these legacies.
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Featured News
The Nature Conservancy releases climate resilience data covering the entire continental United States
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In early October The Nature Conservancy released climate resilience data that covers the entire continental United States, offering a fine-resolution assessment of our landscapes’ climate resilience—its capacity to maintain species diversity and ecological function as the climate changes. A decade in the making, this data is grounded in the understanding that biodiversity conservation must be forward-looking due to climate change: conservation planning based on current biodiversity patterns will increasingly become less effective at sustaining species and natural processes over the long term. The Nature Conservancy has utilized this data to identify a “roadmap” of Resilient and Connected Landscape across the United States, identifying sites that cover a third of the continental United States and that will withstand climate impacts and keep nature safe in the face of climate change. Lead scientist Mark Anderson offers additional thoughts on this roadmap, and a storymap showcases the unique landscapes that comprise the Resilient and Connected Network.
Elsewhere, a Global Safety Net tool builds off a coarser approach to achieve a similar goal: identifying the first comprehensive global-scale ‘blueprint’ to save critical ecosystems and stabilize the earth’s climate.
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Featured News
Cutting Green Tape in California: Helping environmentally beneficial work happen more quickly, simply, and cost-effectively
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This month California has put forward a new initiative aimed at accelerating stewardship and restoration at scale: the California Natural Resources Agency has announced Cutting Green Tape as a signature initiative. “Green tape” represents the extra time, money, and effort required to get environmentally beneficial work done because of inefficiencies in current systems. Cutting Green Tape means improving regulatory processes and policies so that this work can occur more quickly, simply, and cost-effectively. This initiative emerges out of a statewide collaborative process that was initiated by the Resources Agency and supported and facilitated by the California Landscape Stewardship Network—which has released an associated report, Cutting Green Tape: Regulatory Efficiencies for a Resilient Environments, to offer concrete recommendations to catalyze the pace and scale of restoration across California’s lands and waterways.
Though this initiative and the associated report are specific to California, its broader themes are relevant across geographies: this innovative example underscores the importance of advancing the systems change (in this case around regulatory processes and policies) necessary to enable us to scale up conservation and stewardship efforts to meet 21st Century challenges such as climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and uncontrollable wildfire.
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Featured News
A second virtual policy forum on the future of landscape conservation to focus on cultivating landowner engagement
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The Network for Landscape Conservation is hosting a second virtual policy forum on the future of landscape conservation: the December 17 forum (1-2:30 pm ET) will focus on private landowner perspectives and innovations for landscape conservation. This virtual policy forum continues conversations that started in our opening forum this past July (see inset for recording).
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Successful landscape conservation depends upon the ability to work across multiple organizations and land ownerships to manage for shared conservation values. Private landowners are a key class of ownerships. Working farms, ranches, and forests are often the last best places for intact, fertile, habitable open land. They can provide interconnected permeable landscapes where nature and local communities thrive. They are the cornerstones of both human communities and the ecosystems we all depend on – and in some regions, they are disappearing. Too often, landowner contributions to conservation at landscape scales are overlooked, while some collaborative's struggle with how to better engage private landowners. Lastly, with the ever-changing economic, sociopolitical, and environmental pressures, innovations in public policy are needed to bridge gaps and embrace private landowner participation.
An opening keynote from Lesli Allison, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Lynn Scarlett (Chief External Affairs Officer of The Nature Conservancy) and featuring:
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Sara Parker Pauley - Director of the Missouri Department of Conservation, and President of the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies;
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Jimmy Bullock – Senior Vice President of Forest Sustainability, Resource Management Service LLC
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Adam Kiel – Iowa Soybean Association and Senior Vice President, AgOutcomes, Inc.
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Jim Lyons – Yale School of the Environment, past Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment
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Additional Landscape Conservation News |
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Full Moon Rising: A long-form essay captures the personal learning journey of a white conservationist working in the ancestral lands of the Wabanaki to explore a regeneration of conservation that centers Indigenous voices and knowledge.
Article in The Narwhal highlights how five Indigenous communities have joined together to spearhead an effort to create an Indigenous Protected Area in the Seal River watershed of Manitoba.
“30 by 30”: Governor Newsom issues Executive Order to conserve the lands and waters of California and to accelerate efforts to combat climate change.
Article in On Land underscores the importance of working lands to the future of conservation.
Forbes article highlights a pilot program from the Land Trust Alliance to accelerate land conservation by enabling land trusts to access carbon offset markets.
The Trust for Public Land tracked 26 conservation ballot measures across the country in the 2020 election—and voters approved all 26, bringing nearly $3.7 billion in new funding to conservation, parks, climate resiliency, and habitat.
A Conservation Finance Network article highlights case studies across New England that underscores how conservation and open space can open additional pathways to economic success for communities.
State and federal wildlife biologists have collaborated to produce more than 40 new maps that capture—for the first time—big-game migration routes in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
Taking charge of change in the High Divide: a new video from Future West explores sociodemographic trends and highlights hallmarks for successfully navigating the balance of conserving landscapes and communities while improving economies and opportunities—and Future West Director Dennis Glick explores similar themes in an interview in The Mountain Journal.
The largest wildlife crossing of its kind in the world—and a first in a densely populated urban center: article in Fast Company highlights how a wildlife crossing over a 10-lane stretch of the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles is in the final planning stages, with groundbreaking anticipated in 2021.
Article in The Revelator honors the career of biologist and Galapagos conservationist Linda Cayot, and highlights lessons she absorbed from a lifetime of conservation—lessons that underscore the human element of conservation.
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Upcoming Conferences & Events
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The National Tribal Leadership Climate Change Summit is being held as a series of virtual workshops between October 2020 to May 2021--view a recording of Session I (Tribal Climate Change Policy) and watch for details on upcoming sessions--including Promoting Tribal Climate Resiliency (mid-January), Empowering Youth (March or April), and Traditional Knowledges (May).
A Gulf of Mexico Alliance virtual workshop
A Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition Annual Meeting virtual panel
A Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition Annual Meeting virtual panel
A virtual training course--applications due December 2.
A virtual festival
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Landscape Conservation Job Board
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Communications Specialist, Highstead Foundation
This section of the Landscape Conservation Bulletin is intended to be a space to share job postings that will be specifically relevant to landscape conservation practitioners. We welcome submissions: if your organization would like to widely distribute a posting please be in touch.
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Webinars & Additional Resources
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Call for submissions: Special Issue of Sustainability focused on the theme of "Collaborative Management, Environmental Caretaking, and Sustainable Livelihoods." More details.
A Wildlands Network webinar, featuring Senator Tom Udall
December 3, 2020
An International Land Conservation Network webinar
December 3, 2020
A Shared Stewardship Peer Learning Series session, hosted by the National Forest Foundation in partnership with the USDA Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters
December 3, 2020
A Nonprofit Quarterly webinar
December 3, 2020
A Shared Stewardship Peer Learning Series session, hosted by the National Forest Foundation in partnership with the USDA Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters
December 7, 2020
An NPS Connected Conservation webinar
December 9, 2020
A webinar hosted by New England Forestry Foundation, Northeast Wilderness Trust, Highstead Foundation, and Harvard Forest
December 15, 2020
A webinar hosted by The Nature Conservancy—Massachusetts
December 17, 2020
A Network for Landscape Conservation Policy Forum
December 17, 2020
Following cancellation of the 2020 Conservation Finance Boot Camp, the Conservation Finance Network compiled a 4-part video short course, which is available via the above link.
A weekly podcast that explores the challenges presented by adapting to climate change and the approaches the field's best minds believe are already working.
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The Network for Landscape Conservation is the community of practice for practitioners advancing collaborative, cross-boundary conservation as an essential approach to protect nature, culture, and community in the 21st Century.
Contact Ernest Cook, Interim Network Director, for more information.
Contributions of news, upcoming events, and resources for future Bulletins are welcomed. We also welcome inquires for future "Perspectives: Landscapes Conservation in Action" stories; please be in touch if you are interested in sharing stories and insights from your work.
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The Network for Landscape Conservation is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, P.O. Box 1587, Bozeman, MT 59771
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