Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico

President Obama plans to use his executive authority to permanently protect five new national monuments next week.  This marks a significant step for the administration: It is now willing to step in and protect special places when Congress refuses to act.

The new monuments will be:

-  Rio Grande del Norte, in New Mexico

-  San Juan Islands, in Washington

-  First State, in Delaware

-  Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad, in Maryland

-  Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers, in Ohio

Of particular note is Rio Grande del Norte, which at 240,000 acres is the largest monument that the administration has designated thus far.  Also, First State National Monument in Delaware will change the fact that the state is the only one in the U.S. without a national park unit.

The announcement of these designations under the 1906 Antiquities Act fits well with President Obama’s challenge to Congress during his State of the Union address:  “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”  The last Congress was the first since World War II that failed to protect a single new acre of parks, monuments, or wilderness, despite millions of acres proposed for protection by adjacent communities.  As John Podesta, Chair of the Center for American Progress put it, “The last Congress was the most anti-environmental in history, so President Obama is right to respond to the calls of local communities that want their public lands protected.”

The permanent protection of hundreds of thousands of acres is also critical because it is the administration’s next step towards putting the conservation of public lands on equal ground with energy development. In the president’s first term, he leased 6.3 million acres of public lands to oil and gas companies, while only 2.6 million acres were protected by Congress and the executive combined.   Last month former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt called on the administration to permanently protect one acre for each one drilled.

Today’s news is welcome for any American who see the economic, health, and other long-term benefits of protected public lands, and is an important advancement for the president in the establishment of his conservation legacy.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Rachel Nuwer via Take Part

In 1922 the conservationist Aldo Leopold canoed through a lush, verdant delta full of green lagoons, darting fish and squawking waterfowl. But Leopold’s “milk and honey wilderness,” where the Colorado River empties into Mexico’s Gulf of California, ceased to exist decades ago. In its stead, a cracked, barren mudflat stretches for miles.

“If we choose, we can have healthy rivers alongside healthy economies,” Postel said. “We don’t have to be running our rivers dry.”

“This amazing place does not exist anymore,” said Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and freshwater fellow of the National Geographic Society. “A lot was lost.”

Ten major dams — from the Hoover Dam, erected in 1936, to the Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1966 — block the flow of the Colorado River. Countless towns and industries siphon water from the river and its many tributaries as it meanders to the sea. Today the Colorado River joins the likes of the Indus, the Rio Grande, the Nile and other major world rivers that are so over-tapped they no longer reach the sea for long stretches of time. “This is one of America’s iconic rivers,” Postel said. “I don’t think this country would be the one we know today without the Colorado.”

It does not have to be this way, however. A restoration and outreach effort called Change the Course seeks to return the river to the sea. To pursue this goal, the National Geographic Society, the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and Participant Media teamed up and pooled their expertise — science, social media, storytelling and policy — to change the fate of the once-mighty Colorado River.

A key to the campaign’s potential success rests on reversing more than 100 years of water use along the river. Since the mid-1800s, the Colorado River’s water was legally divided amongst farmers, landowners and ranchers along its course. Then, in the 1920s, seven states in the Colorado basin were allowed to divert additional water for cities, agriculture and industry. The result: more people have rights to divert water than the river has water to supply.

The clincher, however, is this: water rights holders have to “use it or lose it.” If a stakeholder does not divert his allocated amount of water from the river each year, he may lose those rights.

Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a nonprofit based in Portland, seized upon this idea.

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Photo: Bridget Besaw, The Nature Conservancy

by Bronson Griscom, via the Nature Conservancy’s Planet Change Blog

Can tropical forests be logged sustainably and still maintain their incredibly rich biodiversity — and benefits to people? A new study published in the journal Conservation Letters provides evidence that, with smart forest management, the answer can be “yes.”

As a forest scientist and a co-author on this article, I believe our findings confirm a critical middle way forward in protecting tropical forests: maintaining the diversity of tropical forest plants and animals, reducing carbon pollution, securing economic opportunities for local communities, and recognizing that the world’s growing population will continue to have significant needs for timber.

Why a “middle way”? Why not just focus on halting logging of these forests wherever possible?

After all, our article does find that fully protected forests are often better at conserving more plants and animals than forests managed for timber. Also, cutting trees in the tropics generates as much carbon pollution as all the cars, planes, boats, and trains in the world. That’s why a lot of organizations like The Nature Conservancy, where I work, see protecting tropical forests as a powerful part of the solution to climate change.

But what happens when tropical forest logging is halted?

For one thing, what happens to the people in tropical forest regions who depend upon logging to put bread or rice on the table for their families? Getting rid of logging jobs may backfire as a conservation goal if the alternative livelihoods involve forest conversion. (We’ve seen this in Borneo, where villages face the option of engaging timber companies or oil palm companies … or attempting to refuse both and relying on subsistence agriculture.) Another problem: some builders might replace wood with another material like steel or cement, and the process of making those other materials generates more carbon pollution than wood. Furthermore, in some places loggers are a stronger force for forest protection than national parks. This dynamic has been demonstrated in community-managed forests of Mexico and Guatemala.

These are reasons why we considered the implications of a “middle way” in tropical forest conservation: a path that integrates logging and conservation. Our study reviews over 100 scientific papers and concludes that, in places with improved forest management practices, selectively logged tropical forests[1] retain the lion’s share of their plants and animals (85-100%) and carbon (roughly 75%). Not only that: timber yields can be sustained, albeit at a lower timber volume than the first cut.

In other words, tropical forests are surprisingly resilient to damage, as long as they are not completely cleared for another land use.

Read more

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At a conference hosted by the White House this past Friday, President Obama spoke to a crowd of elected officials, sportsmen, environmentalists, ranchers, small business owners, and others about the many values and benefits of conserving our lands, waters, and clean air. In particular, he noted that protecting special places on both public and private lands can create jobs and boost the economy:

We have to keep investing in the technology and manufacturing that helps us lead the world, but we’ve also got to protect the places that define who we are, that help shape our character and soul as a nation. Places that help attract visitors and create jobs, but that also give something to our kids that is irreplaceable. And all of us have a role to play.

Watch it:

The president outlined recent successes and highlights of the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative, such as the establishment of Fort Monroe as a national monument under the Antiquities Act, local collaboration to restore and protect Montana’s Crown of the Continent, and a new commitment to work with farmers to protect 1 million acres of grasslands and wetlands under the Conservation Reserve Program. He also touted recent steps he has taken to promote tourism to the U.S., like easing visa requirements so that more people can enjoy our American parks, lands, and heritage.

In his speech, Obama waxed poetic about the beauty of Hawai’i and his first visit to Yellowstone National Park as an 11-year old child, saying he “still remembers” traveling there and the awe he felt coming over a crest and seeing the park below. He invoked America’s great conservationists such as Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold when making the case for the protection of our lands and waters. However, he failed to mention climate change, which fundamentally threatens all the “places that define who we are.”

The president’s statement that conservation can support jobs and the economy is supported by both academic experts and the American public. In November, a group of 104 economists sent a letter to the president stating that “protected public lands are significant contributors to economic growth” and asked him to create jobs by establishing more parks and monuments. Also, a new poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies project found that 91 percent of voters in six western states said that protected places are “an essential part” of their state’s economies.

As Obama put it last week:

The bottom line is this: there will always be people in this country who say we’ve gotta choose between clean air and clean water and a growing economy. Between doing right by our environment and putting people back to work. And I’m here to tell you that is a false choice.

Land conservation and environmental protection are under a broad assault in Congress.  Republicans have launched campaigns to mine uranium around the Grand Canyon, throw open some of our last best places to drilling, and roll back presidential authorities to protect areas that local communities want to see protected.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This afternoon presidential contender Mitt Romney’s campaign announced the endorsement of Rob Keck, the Director of Conservation at Bass Pro Shops and a “conservationist and renowned hunter.”  In his statement, circulated by the Romney campaign, Keck said that:

Mitt also understands the importance of wildlife conservation, as well as hunting and angling’s economic and political engine that powers America. He will ensure that this tradition continues and is strengthened.

“He will fix America and lead the way in helping protect and preserve our rich hunting and fishing heritage,” Keck concluded.

But just two weeks ago, Romney admitted in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal that he doesn’t know ‘the purpose’ of public lands, which are incredibly important to hunters, anglers, and western economies.

As Dietmar Grimm of Trout Unlimited wrote recently in response to Romney’s unfamiliarity with public lands:

Unfortunately, it seems there is a fundamental misunderstanding among the candidates of what public lands do for us beyond their extraction values. In contrast, we as sportsmen and women know that public lands are much more. Every time we go into a fly or tackle shop before we go out on the water, we see the value we’re creating as sportsmen conservationists. Every time we head out to our jobs in our local communities, whether it is in the gas field, a local restaurant, or at a local community college, we see the value we’re creating as sportsmen conservationists.

As a money man like Romney should know, hunting and fishing on public lands provide enormous economic benefits.  In 2006, hunter and anglers visiting Interior Department-managed lands spent $2.4 billion in equipment expenditures plus even more in hotels, gas, and food costs. However, the connection that hunters and anglers have with public lands goes far beyond their economic value.  As Sean of the hunting and fishing blog Up the Poudre wrote:

Political winds blow hard during election years, and seldom align perfectly with the values of the people for which speech writers and pundits entertain. Red, blue, green, or other, it doesn’t matter. Common sense needs a place at the table. It was disheartening to listen to Mitt Romney last week, discuss his idea of value as it pertained to public land in the west.

In his endorsement, Keck also says he is “very concerned about the future of America and the ability we have to pass along our rich hunting and angling heritage to the next generation.”  But Romney has not shown any indication that he is willing to make tough decisions to preserve hunting and fishing for the next generation.  In fact, he has gone so far as to deny the greatest generational threat to this uniquely American tradition -– man-made climate change.  As Todd Tanner of Climate Hawks, a group founded to “harness the power of sportsmen to address climate change,” told Field and Stream recently:

Let’s say you are walking down a trail in the wilderness with your wife and kids, and you come upon a grizzly sow, standing on a carcass. She charges, flat out. You’re in front of your family. What do you do? Just give up? Pretend it’s not happening? Let her maul you and everything your care about? Of course you don’t. You take action. That is how I see climate change. It’s real, it’s threatening everything we love. Not taking action is not an option.