Challenges

What one challenge that you faced was the hardest to overcome and what finally broke the logjam?

Boulder

I think we are very much still in the process of facing the challenge posed by ongoing and rapid population growth in the areas surrounding our public lands. The resulting increase in use and resulting challenges in balancing human use and access, with maintenance of functioning ecosystems, challenge our ability to protect our natural lands in a highly quality condition for the long term. Our department has been going through a transition over the last 15 years from heavy investment and focus on acquisition to a recognition of the need for more careful and focused use of our funding to maintain, restore and protect the land system that we have. The community has begun to understand the need for this, and our most recent sales tax renewal was designed to allow more money to be directed to operations and less to acquisitions.

However, we still struggle with the conversations surrounding human impacts on natural lands and wildlife. Community perspectives differ widely on the degree and importance of human recreational impacts on wildlife. When these impacts exist, and are negative, we struggle with how to best balance human access and the need to foster appreciation and love of our lands (which translates into support for the continued acquisition, funding and maintenance of the system) and the need to manage human uses in ways that mitigate unsustainable impacts to wildlife and the ecosystems on our properties. We do not have the answers to this dilemma (which is not unique to our lands), but are working with our community to find appropriate balance as we move forward, so we can be the best possible stewards of our lands.

Chicago

A number of people affiliated with Chicago Wilderness responded.

Funding. For the most part the public and board or commissioners supports the work we do. The challenge is always finding the funding to carry out the work we prioritize. Public largely supports what we do. Biggest challenging is balancing recreation and preservation. Our agency recently split our planning (think recreation and development ) and natural resource (wildlife, ecological restoration) departments. This has drastically improve our ability to balance competing interests as decisions ultimately fall to our executive director who can listen the cases made by the directors of each department. In the past we had a Director of Planning and Conservation, who was either a pro-development or pro-conservation, made the call alone.

- Gary Glowacki, Biologist, Lake County Forest Preserve District

One question we faced was what is a network, and how do you sustain it financially and programmatically? When Chicago Wilderness was created we wanted to make sure it wasn’t just another non-profit that was competing for funding with its members. Not all the member agencies are equal, some are huge organizations and some are tiny groups with no staff—you can’t expect them to contribute equally. Fundraising and staffing is always a concern. CW had federal funding for a while, but when that changed it put a lot of strain on the organization. It’s hard to convince funders of the “value added” by a consortium like Chicago Wilderness. Ultimately, they couldn’t come up with a sustainable business model. But the coalition still exists, and now we have an opportunity to define what we can accomplish and what our focus should be. At this stage, we might be able to learn from other consortiums like CW around the country to see what they’re doing well that might work for Chicago.

- Jerry Adelmann, CEO, Openlands

Funding was the biggest challenge and it eventually caused the organization to have to eliminate staff. The need to distinguish between what was a CW effort and what was an effort of a CW member was always challenging. Selling the overall “value” of CW was a major challenge, it is difficult to quantify the impact of a collaborative organization like CW. Eventually we were able to create delineations between funding sources that individual members would target and those CW could go after as a grouping. There was a cultural shift with organizations as far as learning what the appropriate amount of credit sharing was on different projects.

- Chris Mulvaney, former Director of Conservation, Chicago Wilderness

Los Angeles

The biggest challenge overall for the biodiversity effort in Los Angeles has been in engaging and educating those who are not already fierce advocates. For instance, we held two press conferences specifically about biodiversity and had no members of the press show up for either one [hence, lack of citations]. Generally, when a city councilmember has something to announce, we get at least a few interested press outlets. Once the biodiversity motion was approved by the full city council, the City News Service, which acts as an Associated Press-type city news distribution organization, at least covered it in this article, yet no other news outlets picked it up. Similarly, within city hall, within both the city council offices and the city departments there was a lack of understanding of what the approval of such a motion might mean.

We overcame this problem by assembling the coalition of advocates we had built to set up and meet with councilmember offices. Those meetings were quite successful and led to the eventual approval of the motion just a few weeks ago (May 10). We anticipate arranging such meetings with the Chief Sustainability Officers (CSO) of each city department as the motion moves into the report-back and implementation phases. (Councilmember Koretz partnered with Mayor Garcetti’s Sustainability Team a few years ago to request and fund in the city’s budget Chief Sustainability Officers in each department in order to facilitate the ease of implementing just this type of motion. The Mayor’s Chief Sustainability Officer convenes monthly meetings with these CSOs in order to coordinate their efforts.)

If I were able to name two challenges, the other would be mountain lions acting like mountain lions and ignorant human beings reacting badly to them, as related in this New Yorker article and this LA Times article. Fortunately, the general public of Los Angeles is strongly behind the lions.

Pima County

Adequate funding to maintain, manage, and monitor protected properties. This is something we haven’t overcome – it’s still a pressing issue. Additionally, working with municipalities that are regularly annexing lands that have been identified as critical to the success of conservation efforts; municipalities that have not adopted the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan or its vision. Neither of these logjams have been broken.

San Diego

One of the biggest hurdles to completing and implementing these plans is finding adequate funding. Developing and implementing a large-scale conservation plan is costly, with the costs typically born primarily by the local jurisdiction. Grant funding from the State and Federal governments has helped move the plans forward as well local funding from Transnet which is a local sales tax that includes funding for management and monitoring. This is a challenge that we are still working on.

Wake County

In a fast growing urban county with twelve municipalities, the loss of open space becomes a small drop in the large bucket of high costs associated with the needed services for citizens. Wake County gains 68 new citizens each day and alters 27-35 acres from open space to development each day. Parks and open spaces are categorized as non-mandated services, which translates to funding significantly less than other mandated services (i.e., fire, EMS, police). The biggest challenge is finding a balance within available funding to make land acquisition choices that include geographical diversity, ecological values, stewardship (or lack thereof), and connectivity across the broader landscape.

A specific challenge example would be lack of funding for stewardship of open space. Successful bond funding for acquisition has not funded staffing for ongoing management of 6300+ acres. We have not had much luck making the budget case for stewardship within the many other services needed in our fast growing area.

WakeNature Preserves Partnership has been key to overcoming some stewardship needs by creating a network of natural resource professionals across local, state, federal government, non-profit agencies and universities to partner on stewardship projects, but there is much more work to do.

Another significant small step forward to this stewardship problem was the funding of the Open Space Manager position, the first full-time position with specific responsibilities for stewardship (after taking care of 3 new nature preserves, of course).

We hope stewardship will be included with new funding sources, but are still looking for any success stories to help secure funding.

I think the biggest challenge is merging landscaping aesthetics or “cues to care” and ecological functionality in the design and management of urban landscapes. Ecologists get a lot of pushback from built environment professionals when wildlife-friendly landscapes are proposed. As homeowners and state, ““Does the landscape look like they’re taking care of it?” We have all run across this – natural landscapes that look too messy, but the seemingly chaotic nature of ecosystems is what makes them function.

I would argue that we need more working, local models of wildlife-friendly landscaping that incorporates cues to care and ecological functionality. The power in local examples is that people can see examples for themselves. Until this happens, the needle will not move. Collaborate and build that first wildlife-friendly subdivision.

A couple of challenges I must mention ... 1. Lack of access to data in private design and planning practice, and an associated lack of expectation for scientific rigor in design and planning work; and, 2. Political or other barriers to implementing networks of urban ecological spaces, leading to the construction of fragmented urban ecological sites.

The big issue ... Understanding how to speak many different languages – especially when advocating for the creation of multi-functional landscapes.

As a planner and ecologist, I constantly act a translator or mediator between groups speaking very different languages. For example - working with watershed scientists, I know they will have a hard time looking past the hydrological benefits to see other why other values should be considered and integrated into a green infrastructure project. The siloed nature of their field skews their view to think that, because they care so much about water quality, others would too if they just understood how these systems work – in their mind, it’s an education problem. This is not the reality on the ground.

When faced with project implementation at a neighborhood scale where there is a need for community buy-in to install green infrastructure on private property, it is my job to make sure I translate the language of watershed scientists to be able to communicate how that green infrastructure will make that neighborhood more beautiful, can benefit pollinators and other wildlife, is a site for exploration and education for neighborhood children and adults alike, offers local cooling, AND retains water onsite. I also have to make sure I’ve done my homework to understand how different communities might value landscapes differently, or even how certain perceptions that vary between neighborhoods could negatively impact a project – i.e. not all communities speak the same language.

So, this very clearly applies to how we talk with communities about landscapes that benefit urban wildlife. This also applies when we’re communicating with key policy-makers in our cities. When working on urban planning projects and attempting to advocate for resiliency and ecological functioning in urban places, I need to very clearly articulate how those goals fit into the value framework of the client, local, politicians, and other key decision makers. So, if a client is most concerned with the economic resiliency of a place – how they can promote additional housing density, office and retail investment, etc. – then I need to be able to make an economic argument for recommending green and blue networks in that place. I need to effectively argue that economic resiliency is impossible without ecological and social resiliency specifically in that project context.

Image Credits

• Cliff Edge - George Hess