Abstract:

At the ripe old age of 125, the oldest independent environmental organization in the Washington, DC region changed its name. Transforming from the Audubon Naturalist Society to Nature Forward, we will discuss the nuts and bolts: gathering feedback (including the haters) and gaining buy-in from members, donors, partners, staff, and the public; funding; working with a branding firm; copyright/intellectual property implications; and marketing the new name. As the first Audubon organization in the U.S. to change its name, we will also explore motivations for the change, the history of our evolving organization, and how we see ourselves positioned to move into the future.

Presenters:

Eliza Cava, Nature Forward
Amy Ritsko Warren, Nature Forward

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Nature Forward works to reach families in their communities—near where people live, work, and go to school—and connect them to nearby nature through engaging, hands-on activities and trainings. We work with community leaders, partner organizations, and of course, empowered community members.

Since 2019, we have been building these programs in partnership with community-based organizations and community leaders in several specific locations – neighborhoods along Little Hunting Creek in Fairfax County, VA; along Long Branch stream in Montgomery County, MD; and along Oxon Run in Ward 8, DC. In fall 2022 we developed a report telling the stories of these programs, analyzing lessons learned, and making recommendations for replication. Scroll down to view and download our report!

In November 2022, our team presented the report at the Chesapeake Watershed Forum in Shepherdstown, WV. Nature Forward staff Gregg Trilling, Renee Grebe, Jamoni Overby, and Denisse Guitarra were joined by our partner Tamara Cobbs of United Community.

Many of these partnership programs are ongoing – learn more about them and upcoming events and activities on our Community Outreach Programs page.

Executive Summary

Nature Forward has developed multiple partnerships throughout the Washington, DC region with both watershed groups and social-service and community organizations excited to bring environmental programming to their communities (mostly comprised of people of color, in low to moderate income neighborhoods). This case study shares what we have learned through partnerships in three communities – how to plan, approach, and fund a new partnership; how to develop programming that meets the community’s specific interests and needs; and how to build on relationships and trust to deepen skill-building that empowers community members to engage in environmental decision-making around redevelopment, transit planning, stream restoration, park renovations, and more. We share insights, stories, and lessons learned that will be useful for other organizations, grant funders, or environmental agencies interested in replicating or funding similar projects.

Read the Report

Backyard trees are critical elements of wildlife habitat. They provide excellent stormwater management, shade streets and houses, and provide health benefits. It is important to protect as many backyard trees as possible while recognizing that individual trees are not as valuable from a natural perspective as intact forests are. Healthy watersheds are further from our cities and have much less total development, but can be pushed quickly towards a tipping point to lower health and biodiversity with even relatively small amounts of development. 

When sprawl occurs in our less-developed areas, it is more likely to and often does cut down intact forests. This is less likely to be the case when development is contained in compact layouts close to already-existing impervious surface including infrastructure, transit, and other housing. Indeed, a nationwide study found that “housing development in terms of impervious surface cover shows that compact development does reduce the number of watersheds that become stressed over time.” In the Washington, DC region, while there have been some successes in reforestation and tree canopy planting, we have overall lost forest cover over time as the region has urbanized, suburbanized, and sprawled. 

The two NASA satellite maps above show the change in impervious surface in the DC region between 1984 and 2010. They display extensive increase of suburban and sprawl development in the region’s outer areas, including many places not serviced by transit. The massive increases in impervious surface from sprawl come from several sources- including roads (people spread further apart need more paved roads per person to get from place to place) and house size (larger houses enabled by sprawl development mean more land is taken up by each person). Not coincidentally, our region’s #1 and #2 sources of greenhouse gas emissions are also transportation and housing.

Nature Forward advocates that urban areas with low tree cover benefit from aggressive shade and street tree planting. We work to preserve habitat corridors, such as stream valley parks, through our suburban landscapes. And in the farther-out regions, we work to fight new highways, poorly-planned subdivisions in rural areas like Ten Mile Creek, and other forms of sprawl. Because, in addition to the climate impacts of sprawl, it is bad for our watersheds and bad for our forests.

Red areas on the map above show high carbon dioxide emissions associated with sprawl development in our region.

Nature Forward supported Montgomery County’s new Thrive 2050 (while pressing for needed improvements) because of the regionwide benefits of fighting sprawl with development that keeps housing and business growth centered near transit and away from the forests and farms of the Agricultural Reserve and further-out counties. The map above, produced in 2013 by researchers at UC Berkeley, shows the household carbon footprint by Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA). For our metropolitan region, the urban core, including close-in suburbs and small outlying cities, have low household carbon emissions shown in green on the map. But most of the suburbs and exurbs have much higher emissions. The study found that, “Dominated by emissions from cars, trucks and other forms of transportation, suburbs account for about 50 percent of all household emissions – largely carbon dioxide – in the United States.” While we must be careful to protect natural areas and manage stormwater in all communities to accelerate our fight against climate change, we must reimagine our transportation and development patterns. Nature Forward will fight for policies that keep development where it belongs – close to transit. 

Read more about Nature Forward’s position on Thrive 2050.

Image and Research Source: UC Berkeley CoolClimate Network, Average Annual Household Carbon Footprint (2013).

This post first appeared in the Winter 2022-2023 Naturalist Quarterly.

UPDATE: On December 12, 2022, the New York Times published an updated analysis of the CoolClimate dataset, produced by EcoDataLab. The new data (image on left) confirms what the older analysis shows. Read more about how our location and wealth contribute to carbon emissions, and why those patterns exist and persist, here: New York Times gift article link.

UPDATE: THRIVE 2050 passed! On October 25^th, the Montgomery County Council voted unanimously to approve Thrive Montgomery 2050 – the county’s new general master plan. Thank you for your collective advocacy to make this critical step happen! The Plan is the blueprint. Now the real work begins to create policies and take actions that strike the right balance between urbanism and environmental protection for Montgomery County. Council Thrive resources can be found here. Nature Forward’s Thrive work can be found here.

Montgomery County is a large, beautiful, diverse, progressive county famous for its Agricultural Reserve, stream valley parks, great restaurants, lovely neighborhoods, left-leaning politics, post-war suburban housing stock, and as a home for countless recent immigrants and new arrivals from all over the nation and the world. It was 1964 the last time the county’s general plan was rewritten. Known as the “Wedges and Corridors” Plan, the plan was only partly updated in 1993. Since 1993, and certainly since 1964, the county and world have changed dramatically. In 2019, Montgomery Planning began to rewrite the general plan under the name “Thrive Montgomery 2050.” County Council is now considering a final draft of the plan in the Planning, Housing, and Economic Development (PHED) Committee.

Read ANS’ October 3, 2022 Thrive 2050 Comments

It is time to modernize and improve the county’s land use plan to make it be relevant to the times and conditions we live in now. It’s time to make a plan that addresses all the challenges the future holds. ANS believes that while it can still be improved, it is time to pass Thrive 2050 so we can move onto the important work of implementing the plan.

Thrive passing now will allow other pending policies linked to land use, like legislation and important sector plans, to be updated to the new General Plan standards.

TAKE ACTION: CLICK HERE TO SEND YOUR LETTER TO COUNTY COUNCIL BEFORE OCTOBER 11^TH. URGE THEM TO PASS THRIVE 2050! 

ANS has engaged in the Thrive 2050 process since its inception. We hosted: sting virtual and in-person discussions with the public and with representatives of watershed groups. We provided feedback to the Planning Department on its Spanish-language outreach, including inviting Planning Staff to our Long Branch community outreach events, and co-hosting online bilingual webinars. ANS promoted discussion and debate on Thrive 2050’s environmental strengths and weaknesses. We engaged with Thrive through our participation and leadership in many coalitions, including specific outreach to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) groups: the MORE Network, Montgomery for All Coalition, Stormwater Partners Network, and the Montgomery County Forest Coalition.

Read more about why we think it’s time to pass Thrive 2050 in our February 2022 Bethesda Beat Op-Ed calling for improvements and passage of the plan.

Do we think the plan could be better? Of course! After analyzing the new additional THRIVE environmental chapter and Racial Equity and Social Justice (RESJ) Review Report, ANS recommends that the County Council incorporate the following into the final Council version to make it even stronger: 

Forests and Trees: Thrive should include stronger recommendations to protect existing forests and trees in the county. The plan should specify a goal of “no net loss” (no more cutting down trees) and “net gain” (planting more trees) to mitigate climate change, improve water and air quality, and enhance health and wellbeing benefits. We want more forest and tree protections in Thrive 2050, but we recognize that Thrive alone will not enact policies to protect our trees. That’s why we are also strongly encouraging Council to pass a new Bill 25-22 to improve the Forest Conservation Law, right now!

Outreach to Underrepresented Communities: As the Racial Equity and Socal Justice Review reported, the planning process should have included earlier and more meaningful outreach to diverse and working-class communities. The Planning, Housing, and Economic Development Committee should conduct a careful review to ensure that more working-class priorities are incorporated into the Plan and that investment opportunities increase in historically underserved communities over time. We acknowledge that when it comes to master planning, Thrive represents an unprecedented attempt at outreach to diverse audiences. We believe that early stumbles should not prevent passage of Thrive at this stage. Those early missteps should provide a critical source of lessons learned for all future policies and outreach efforts.

Watershed Protection: Thrive should include more language on watershed and waterways protection, especially for stormwater management and green infrastructure. We need this protection to mitigate the impacts of climate change is bringing more frequent, intense, and larger storms and flooding to the county. Beyond Thrive, we are advocating for strong clean water policies in the County by watchdogging the County’s development regulations, state Clean Water Act permits, green building codes, and other arenas where ANS has been and continues to be active in pursuing policy improvements.

Climate Change & Environmental Justice: The final draft of Thrive should expand and incorporate more environmental justice and climate change actions throughout the plan, not only in the re-added environmental chapter. We do support Thrive’s vision that would allow more housing types around transit corridors in already-developed parts of the county. Improving and adding housing near transit is one of the most impactful things we can do to fight climate change in the suburbs.

ANS recognizes that Thrive 2050 represents a long-term vision, not a set of implementable policies. Fighting for those policies will be our work for the future. Today, it is time to move forward toward a new general plan vision by passing Thrive 2050. We’ve been waiting since 1964 to strike the right balance between urbanism and environmental protection for Montgomery County. That balance is essential to creating a sustainable future.

We must not delay. Join us and encourage the Montgomery County Council to approve the County’s General Plan Thrive 2050 now.

Keep Fighting Highway Expansion – Submit Comments on the MD “Op Lanes” Wetlands & Waterways Permit – Due Thurs., Sep. 29

Update 9/29/22: NOTE: The public comment period has been extended to October 28, 2022.

Click here to read and download a copy of Stormwater Partners Network (SWPN), Maryland Advocates for Sustainable Transportation (MAST) and Other Environmental Groups JPA comments.

Along with many partners, ANS has continued to fight the wrong-headed decision to expand the Beltway and I-270 in Maryland. For years, Governor Hogan has pushed for a pre-determined solution to traffic: more pavement, built by a private operator to be funded with variable tolls. The entire process has barely considered transit alternatives or demand management strategies, and has pushed forward despite changes at the federal level requiring more consideration for climate change in planning highway projects. Now, the Federal Highways Administration and Maryland Department of Transportation have issued a Record of Decision choosing a final Phase I alternative – I-270 widening and replacement (and widening) of the American Legion Bridge. The next step is to acquire permits from the US Army Corps of Engineers and Maryland Department of the Environment for “unavoidable” impacts to wetlands and waterways.

Click to see the permit documents: Environmental » JPA update 7/15/22 » Op Lanes Maryland (oplanesmd.com)

TAKE ACTION by THURSDAY: Join us in saying NO to these permits!

Use the form below to send your letter to Mr. Steve Hurt at MDE and Mr. Nicholas Ozburn at the Army Corps of Engineers. In your own words, write a few sentences that address any of the following issues:

• The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis and alternatives selection was flawed by relying too heavily on financial analysis, failing to consider a transit-focused, non-highway alternative, and insufficiently considering the cumulative and indirect impacts of highway widening including future planned phases of Beltway expansion and induced suburban sprawl.
  • Learn more: New Expert Review Exposes Critical Errors and Omissions in Governor Hogan’s I-495 and I-270 Toll Lane Expansion Plan | Sierra Club
• It is not in the public interest (one of the criteria the Corps must consider) to permit more polluting highway lanes designed to carry more cars in a time of crisis. We can’t wait – we need to change our transportation infrastructure NOW to reduce car use dramatically, not lock in more polluting pavement for another generation.
• IF the project moves forward, compensatory mitigation plans are inappropriate and insufficient. While Cabin John Creek will suffer the majority of the permanent impacts from Phase I widening, compensatory mitigation is all planned in other sub-watersheds – including in Frederick County! If you must hurt one creek, you should heal that creek, in accordance with Montgomery County’s watershed management plans. And most of the mitigation should consist of upland stormwater management, not only in-stream or wetland restoration, to heal some of the root causes of stream degradation and not risk future blowouts of any restorations that do get put in place.

Read: ANS and 26 other organizations recommend DENIAL of the JPA permit

SWPN-MAST-Comments-on-JPA-9-29-22Download

Watch: Virtual Public Testimony on the JPA permit

At 2:44:33 and 2:58:08 in the recording below, you can hear the public testimony of Denisse Guitarra, ANS MD Conservation Advocate, and Eliza Cava, ANS Conservation Director.

Throughout my time at Nature Forward (formerly Audubon Naturalist Society), I created and moderated a presentation series called “Conservation Café”. Usually the speakers were outside guests discussing their work or personal histories. In September 2022, I was the primary speaker presenting on the The Story of Streams project.

This is the first in a series introducing ANS’ new Conservation Advocacy Priority Campaign Areas.

As world renowned conservationist and ANS Board Member Rachel Carson wrote, “Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.” Things have changed since 1897. The “low-hanging fruit” of conservation has been plucked. And the challenges facing humans in 2020, particularly climate change, endanger everything we have worked to protect for over 120 years. The threats and impacts of climate change are inextricably tied to the hazards facing vulnerable human and wildlife populations in our region. In severity, scope, and urgency, the climate crisis is a fight like no other the environmental movement has experienced.

Changing rainfall patterns in the region are already leading to extreme floods that scour out valleys, knock down trees, and devastate communities. Extreme summer heat waves and nights that no longer cool off dry out our wetlands, stress native trees and plants, and result in illness and death from heat exhaustion. These threats are particularly potent for vulnerable populations such as outdoor workers, those who live with minimal tree canopy coverage, and those experiencing homelessness. Warmer winters with fewer very cold nights mean more pest insects survive and thrive, spreading diseases like Lyme and Zika and overwhelming native plant populations. All these changes create openings for aggressive invasive species to expand into native ecosystems, making it more difficult for local biodiversity to thrive. As these changes intensify, our drinking water sources will be put under greater stress. Our built infrastructure will erode more quickly. Our coastal regions will flood more frequently and in many places disappear under rising seas.

These changes are already here and are affecting us all, right now; virtually every reputable scientific study indicates that they will continue to worsen. We must slow the rate of global warming, adapt to the impacts that are already upon us, and prepare our own human and wildlife communities to be ready, resilient, and responsive to these changes so we can continue to live prosperous lives supported by healthy ecosystems. 

Much of ANS’s work over past decades sets the foundation for what we must continue to do: protect habitat patches and ensure they are connected, expose people to the value of nature so that they will work to protect it, and protect our watersheds, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay. 

However, climate change is woven even further into the fabric of our lives than this. It threatens bird populations and other animal and plant species both here and elsewhere in their ranges. It causes real harm, now, especially to marginalized, vulnerable, and diverse natural and human populations and communities in the region. It looms over the futures of the thousands of children we educate in and out of school every year. 

Solutions to the climate crisis, especially at the local level, will protect nature and people alike. Increased access to and use of public transit, cycling, walking, and other transportation options can reduce net greenhouse gas emissions. Affordable housing developments near transit locations that provide access to jobs can help reduce sprawl into our remaining green spaces.  Joining with those most impacted by climate change, such as under resourced, lower income, and immigrant communities, in safeguarding nearby natural areas can help ensure a healthy future for all families. The very same strategies that can help safeguard public health in a time of climate crisis, such as planting more street trees, also provide oases of habitat for pollinators and wildlife that need a respite in a hotter time.

Recognizing this, and the complexities that fighting climate change brings to the already-challenging arena of trying to conserve nature in a growing region, ANS assembled a Task Force of current and former Board members, Advocacy staff, and outside experts (see the next post in this series for more about the Task Force). The Task Force considered our mission, history, membership, partnerships, commitment to IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility), and the facts and predictions of climate change. They helped us develop, and in April the Board of Directors adopted, a new set of four Priority Campaign Areas:

• Human Health & Access to Nature: All people live in nature. A healthy natural environment is one that includes healthy people who have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and safe places to be active and explore nature. ANS supports local environmental justice advocates, campaigns, and policies that intersect with our conservation priorities. Check out our support for critical equity and health funding in regional budgets.
• Biodiversity & Habitats: The stream valley corridors that knit our region together with ribbons of blue and green space are critically important in protecting clean drinking water, habitat for fish, birds, insects, and amphibians, and migratory corridors for our wildlife. Our science-based advocacy emphasizes resilience, connectivity, and networks of habitats in order to give our native wildlife the best possible chance in the face of a changing climate. Check out our advocacy for a cleaner Anacostia River.
• Climate Crisis: We combat greenhouse gas emissions by advocating for solutions in our region’s biggest contributing sectors: transportation, electricity, and buildings. We promote natural solutions that remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as forest conservation and tree planting. These and other types of “green infrastructure” help address some of our region’s most significant climate impacts—flooding from increased storms, and hotter heat waves. Check out our advocacy for clean energy and transit around the region.
• Sustainable Land Use: Our region is predicted to keep growing for decades to come, which seems likely even with the uncertainties of the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. Where will our new neighbors live? How will they get to work? Where will their clean drinking water come from and how will they access Nature for All? We will work to solve these questions to provide equity for people and smart nature conservation in a tight space, prioritizing density near transit and protecting intact ecosystems. Check out our work right now commenting on the D.C. Comprehensive Plan update and the Montgomery County Thrive 2050 General Plan update.

“This is big news.” 

— BRENT BOLIN, CLEAN WATER ACTION

ANS (now Nature Forward) has been working in these areas for many years, but this effort makes our work more consistent, forward-looking, and embedded in the organization’s strategic priorities. You can read about our current work on each of the four Campaign Areas right now on this blog. We are voicing strong support for critical equity and health funding in regional budgets, now dramatically impacted by Covid-19. We are advocating for a cleaner Anacostia River. We are pushing for energy efficiency and better public transit—not issues you might have associated with a historic “birds and trees” organization. And, we are weighing in on comprehensive plans that will guide growth, sustainability, and environmental protection in our region for decades to come.

We also created new internal guidelines for Conservation staff to use in campaign planning, to allow us to strategically focus our efforts. And, we updated the current Strategic Plan to better reflect the reality of the climate crisis. Task force member Anne Cottingham, a past ANS Board President, said, “This collaboration produced updated advocacy policies that, while no less ambitious, are thoughtful, strategic, and clear-eyed in the face of new challenges and limited resources. It is gratifying to see our beloved ANS look to the future without flinching!”

Task force member Danielle Reyes, Executive Director of The Crimsonbridge Foundation and founder of Yoga Hikes DC, said, “Growing up, I thought conservation organizations were for wealthy people, for science types, for other people. My parents taught me to identify birds and plants, to garden, to compost and not waste. We were never engaged in the work or messaging of the conservation organizations around us, despite being so aligned. There are many families like mine that should be invited in. I applaud ANS for its desire to incorporate human health and access into its conservation work and engage a broader community in its work on climate change, which is so urgently needed.”

“This is big news,” said Brent Bolin, former Chesapeake Regional Director of Clean Water Action. “As a historic, mainstream conservation organization, ANS is in a unique position to lead other traditional conservation organizations towards progressive climate change policies and the value of focusing development within existing footprints.”

My mother says I was never afraid of anything as a child.  I would run laughing into huge waves on the beach and climb trees so tall it made my brother dizzy to try and follow.  I am fortunate enough to have a family and personal safety net that means I do not fear the lack of food or a roof over my head.

And yet I live every day with fear, a deeply personal and also political kind of fear that is at the same time a bit laughable in the light of day and devastatingly realistic.  Climate change threatens my future and the people and places I love, and the physics of the atmosphere mean that there is no way to undo the damage we have already caused–all we can do is wait to see what the effects will be.  I find this terrifying, and even more so that our country has been so helpless (and in denial, and backwards, and corrupted) in response to the threat.

I usually deal with this diffuse sense of fear and helplessness in self-consciously quirky ways, like practicing survival skills and learning first aid, navigation, and other useful post-apocalyptic strategies.  I also try not to think about it too much if I don’t have to.  Last night, however, I did think about it, and I talked about my fear.

At Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, over one hundred people gathered for a four-hour peaceful action training to prepare for a demonstration the next day.  We had come from all over the nation: California, Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nebraska, West Virginia, even Alaska.  Some were from DC, of course, but it was astonishing how many had come from so far away.  They had come for one purpose: to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and the increased tar sands mining and burning it will facilitate.

As we role-played, filled out legal forms, and committed ourselves to nonviolence for the next day’s protest action and risk of arrest in front of the White House, I spoke with my “jail buddy,” Kathy.  Kathy had come from Texas with her husband after an illegally placed natural gas pipeline blew a leak under her property and destroyed the creek her children had grown up playing in.  She and Steve were disgusted with how unethically and illegally the gas company had behaved and were horrified to learn that the 36″ wide Keystone pipeline was slated to run through the middle of their county, carrying corrosive bitumen fuel from Alberta’s tar sands.  Neither of them had ever risked arrest before.  Neither had I.

As we spoke together about why we were there that night, I found myself crying.  So many of us had come from so far to risk arrest and get the President’s attention.  Obama and the State Department have sole approval power over this enormous pipeline project–it does not require a congressional vote.  We were there to learn how to peacefully tell the President how much this matters, to “use our bodies as collateral” in the words of Bill McKibben.  We came there to testify about the impact of tar sands and bitumen transport on frontline communities, and to share our vision for a future without tar sands.

I thought and spoke about what I am really scared of.  I am afraid that rising average temperatures, loss of clean water, and rising sea levels will exacerbate hunger and conflict around the world.  I am afraid desperate people will commit desperate acts and that the increasing resource pressure of an overpopulated planet will mean that my parents’ generation’s standard of living will be just a dream when my future children are grown.  I am afraid that storm surges and more powerful hurricanes, combined with saltwater penetration of the aquifer, will destroy the beautiful place I still call home–Miami, Florida.  I am afraid of losing the beauty of familiar species and the mystery of rare ones.  I am afraid for the health of the oceans, our planet’s lungs.

And when I let myself think about all this too hard, I get angry.  Last night I was sad and angry–and today, I was ready.  And hopeful.  I stood in front of the White House and protested peacefully, chanting and singing.  Maude Barlow spoke to us about the risk the pipeline poses to water supplies from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, including the vast Ogallala aquifer which it will traverse for much of its path.  Hundreds of supporters who could not risk arrest demonstrated nearby in Lafayette Square, buoying us with their voices and applause.

I disobeyed police orders to move and was arrested, along with 110 others on that day and over 700 over the course of eleven days so far.  The day was bright, clear, and hot.  The industrial strength zip ties cut into my wrists and my shoulders ached as I waited on the bus to be processed.  But the police were respectful and even friendly, doing their jobs and taking their part in the action, too.  I was processed and released after two uncomfortable hours.

One protestor said to a SWAT member, “I appreciate what you do.”  He looked at her and responded, “I appreciate what you do.”

It’s good to appreciate and it’s good to find even a small glimmer of hope.

A version of this essay without photographs was published in SAGE Magazine in April 2011, and can be viewed as originally published here.

It’s ten thirty at night, and in the bright light the wet caribou comes over the rise and rolls her eyes at me.  Thirty more caribou does and calves follow, knee joints popping and hooves clicking on the loose gravel of the hilltop.  Frozen in place, I watch the caribou walk steadily past, nose to tail, shaking off fur still damp from their river crossing in the valley below.  Brown with lighter spots on top and short, fuzzy horns, the animals are so near and yet seem oblivious to our presence.  Their breath hangs in the air, shot through with buzzing flies.  The enchantment lasts until one nearly steps on my knapsack and the camera inside.  I take an involuntary step forward, my shadow crosses the face of one of the mothers, and the herd takes off—thundering down the slope and across the mountain bowl faster than seems possible.  In their wake, a few long, thick hairs settle down onto the rocks at our feet and we gaze after the herd, watching mothers and babies scatter across the bowl like so many white ants on a dull green background.

I have never been to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, just like nearly every other American.  ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”), traditional home of the Gwich’in, “people of the caribou”, sits atop what may be billions of barrels of potentially recoverable crude oil.  A portion of the refuge lies above the northern Alaska oil field that includes the hugely productive Prudhoe Bay wellfields along the southern edge of the Arctic Ocean.  The Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages ANWR with very little developed infrastructure, has tracked between 1000 and 1300 known visitors each of the past ten years.  Estimating liberally, about 0.000004% of the population of the United States visits the refuge annually.  I didn’t go there, either.

I did, however, go to nearby Ivavvik National Park.  Ivvavik (pronounced “ih-VAH-vick”) is in Canada’s Yukon Territory, permanently protected from oil exploration, and not subject to Congressional debates and filibusters.  It is north of the Arctic Circle, and very, very, very far away.  The park abuts Alaska’s eastern border and is contiguous with ANWR itself.  An old land of low, rugged mountains and deeply scoured river valleys, the Northern Yukon is home to the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, historically over a hundred thousand strong but recently declining in numbers.  The herd travels a loop around the extreme northern edges of western Canada and eastern Alaska, retreating each winter to the uplands and returning to birth their young on the coastal plains of ANWR and Ivvavik every summer.

The caribou I saw on that little ridge beside a nameless mountain bowl were wet because they had just crossed the Firth River, which my family was rafting down on an unguided ten day journey to the Arctic Ocean.  Only 120 kilometers long, the Firth drains the center of Ivvavik and comprises four distinct stretches, or “reaches”: Aufeis, Mountain, Canyon, and Delta.  In the first stretch, my parents, brother, and I had to navigate our raft past sheets of ice (the aufeis) that spread across the river from each bank, sometimes leaving only a narrow channel in between for the bulky red craft to squeeze through.  In this forbidding Aufeis Reach we saw very little vegetation or wildlife.  Then, late in the afternoon (or was it midnight?) while we were having lunch on a gravel bar the huffs of a grey wolf pacing back and forth on the opposite bank sent shivers down our spines. Later that day two more wolves graced the slope above our campsite, smoothly traversing the steep hillside and disappearing over the ridge.

As we arrived in the Mountain Reach we began to see caribou.  Many, many caribou.  We began rounding bends and the vistas that unfolded before us contained more caribou than we could possibly count—ants swarming from a nest, a New Zealand sheep rancher’s proudest year, a pointillist painting of off-white caribou.  They crossed and recrossed the river seemingly without reason, churning the rapids with their long legs and knobby knees.  Calves were swept downstream and we cheered when they finally dragged themselves up the opposite bank and shook themselves off to go look for their mothers.  The animals leapt into the river from great heights, swam across it in singles and pairs, and occasionally by the hundreds.  The valleys were on the move with pulsating streams of Porcupine Caribou.

To get to Ivvavik National Park: two buses from western Massachusetts to Boston.  Overnight in a hotel.  Meet up with brother.  Fly to Dallas/Ft. Worth.  Meet parents.  Two margaritas in a Tex-Mex bar.  Fly to Calgary, Alberta (home of the Calgary Stampede later that week, “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth”).  Overnight in a cheap motel too far from the airport.  Five hours of sleep.  Next day fly to Edmonton.  Then on a jumbo jet with stops in Yellowknife and Norman Wells.  Finally arrive in Inuvik.  Exhaustion.  Rustic lodge with large pack of snow-white sled dogs in kennels.  Howling and barking accompanies perpetual daylight.  Several days (nights?) getting outfitted with raft gear, buying food, emergency supplies, swatting mosquitoes.  No darkness, hard to sleep.  All the shops open 24/7.  Lots of liquor for sale.  People up late (early?) being rowdy in town, enjoying summer and the contrast to the long dark winter.  Everything very expensive.  Caribou burger rather dry.  Finally on to a twelve-seat propeller plane with raft, oars, barrels, coolers, dry bags all loaded in behind the pilots for a two hour flight over the Mackenzie River delta.   Eerie, even grey light.  Bumpy landing on a desolate airstrip among low mountains.   Aufeis Reach and ice across the Firth River.

After a cup of tea our last motorized link to civilization left, buzzing off over the ridges, our eyes straining to keep it in sight.

The preternatural light all day and all night made it hard to sleep, so I lay in my tent on the banks of the river reading library books on Alaska and the wildcat days of oil exploration.  Pioneers and speculators made millions of dollars on hunches and lost it gambling, found themselves in inconceivably harsh conditions, and performed heroic acts to save themselves and others.  No thought was given to the health of the ecosystem, the stability of the permafrost, the livelihoods of the First Nations people, the majesty of polar bears, or to the massive caribou herds that migrate back and forth from the coast every year.

The Porcupine Caribou herd is very sensitive to human activity, and their summer feeding grounds span both Ivvavik and the coastal area of Alaska’s ANWR that has been most sought after for oil exploration, the so-called 1002 area.  I learned from my library books that on-land oil exploration in the region is a self-destructive cycle, with impacts to the permafrost opening up thawed gaps that never fully refreeze or grow over, given the slow pace of vegetative growth in a land with eight months of darkness.  During the summer these open areas melt quickly, increasing the size of the gashes and spreading unstable thawed mush underground beneath the foundations of the roads, rigs, platforms, buildings, and other infrastructure required to drill below the earth for oil. Then the oil companies need to move their buildings, reinforce them, open up ever-larger wounds in the permafrost which is now dripping into the sea.  The infrastructure and melted permafrost disrupt the delicate landscape that the caribou herds rely upon during a crucial part of their migration cycle.

The refuge is so remote and gets so few visitors that it is really an abstraction: an idea of wilderness upon which we all project the views that have in large part defined the American enterprise from the beginning.  Should we preserve the wilderness untouched, or extract its resources to power our economy?  How should we value it?  In the case of ANWR, these questions are complicated by the presence of the one thing that all Americans agree we need to maintain our quality of life: oil.

In 2005, not for the first time, drilling in ANWR came up for debate in Congress.  Republicans sought to pass the measure while Democrats threatened a filibuster, preventing debate and precluding a vote on the issue.  I was in college and remember 2005 as the year of the filibuster, with Princeton students protesting in support of the legislative tool and Republicans threatening to roll back opportunities for its use.  The high-profile nature of the ongoing ANWR debate has established oil drilling as a partisan issue and descended in a direct line to the chants emanating from Saint Paul during the Republican convention in 2008 to “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Environmental economist Matt Kotchen has performed a thought experiment on the value of ANWR to society.  There may be more than 7 billion barrels of oil in the ground within the refuge, enough to power our national addiction for all of the heady pre-recession year of 2007.  It can’t be extracted all at once; so opening the area to drilling would offset at most only about 3% of America’s oil demand each year.  What may be more important, however, is the dollar value of that oil, which will increase over time—the refuge holds hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil, which at current taxation rates would provide enormous pots of money to the federal and Alaskan treasuries.  The Sierra Club and most other environmental organizations are militant in their opposition to drilling, but countless other parks and wilderness areas around the country are aching for preservation and restoration funds and are much more accessible to our largely urban population.  Our climate change programs are drastically underfunded.  We could use some high speed bullet trains.  We could create refuges to protect the last of America’s large animal populations.  You get the idea.

Well, let me start by telling you a little bit more about those large animals, called “charismatic megafauna” by those who work to preserve them.  There were caribou and wolves engaged in that great dance of predator and prey, juicy little drowned baby caribou morsels no doubt like candy to the carnivores, but there was so much more.  We saw a moose, standing in solitude in the river as we pulled into our campsite one evening (or was it morning?).  It had a full rack of antlers and wheeled away with a snort of indignation when our red rubber monstrosity floated into view.  Way up on the side of what appeared to be a sheer vertical cliff overhanging that very same campsite we saw a trundling lump that, with closer inspection and some high-powered binoculars, turned out to be a musk ox with uncannily perfect balance.  In the Canyon Reach mischievous Dall sheep skipped over the rocks with vertical bounds, pure white fleece on the dark canyon walls.  My dad caught fish for lunch.  My brother and I found polar bear tracks bigger than our heads stamped terrifyingly into the mud of the braided Delta Reach.  Golden eagles perched far overhead in giant nests that have been under construction by generations of related birds for decades, if not centuries.  Other raptors wheeled above us as we made our way out to sea, and a grizzly bear crossed the far side of that same mountain bowl where my parents and I were mesmerized by thirty damp caribou.

All four of us rowed, my brother guiding us masterfully down the canyon rapids, the son taking his arthritic father’s place.  My mom navigated.  I took naps atop the gear in back of the raft.  We huddled together to shelter from the fierce daytime (nighttime?) winds that whistled up the river, hiked over alpine tundra and dwarf shrubs, found unimaginably ancient Native sites of sacred circles and bone middens.  We found rusted metal sieves and shovels, the desperate discards of solitary gold miners, and carried our containers and towed our raft across a sand choked lagoon for an endless day where the water was less than three inches deep and the grey coastal sky blended with the sandy delta so that we could not tell where air ended and water began.  The sun neither rose nor set.  We traded novels, the constant light inducing insomnia and giving us plenty of time to read before bed.  Our parents built a bonfire on the beach to warm my brother and me after we ran, shrieking, in and out of the ice-dotted Arctic Ocean clad only in our swimsuits.  We cooked three-course meals on campstoves.  We ran out of cooking gas and had to cook over damp driftwood fires, the smoke stinging our eyes and blackening our pots.  We watched unsuccessfully for whales on the frigid coast while waiting a day and a half for the clouds to part so our plane could return and ferry us back to Inuvit, and we walked miles along the rocky beach to a forlorn roofless shack once belonging to the coldest, loneliest whaler in the world.  I found the sole of his shoe.

My trip to the Arctic reminded me of why I have chosen to dedicate myself to environmentalism.  My mom and dad raised me and my brother canoeing and camping in the Everglades of Florida, and we left town and went paddling as many weekends as we could and often one full week in a year.  I loved the coast, the beach, sailing, and exploring the mangroves and canals that line the edges of Miami’s city streets.  This trip down the Firth, our first trip just the four of us as adults, in as remote a setting as seems at all plausible, was a moment of reckoning for me.  My parents brought me to this point, my family gave me the gift of wilderness that drives my choice of career, that charts my life.  The thrill of seeing those megafauna and the rush of whitewater down the canyon will always be with me.

Kotchen’s thesis presents us with a Solomonic choice—invite mechanical intrusion into an isolated wilderness in order to save many other natural areas.  I’m not sure that humans have the right to make those kinds of choices.  It’s like the fable of the altruist who is willing to throw himself in front of a train in order to save the children playing further down the track, except in this case ANWR is the dumb and mute altruist and we stand behind it, poised to shove it forward onto the rails of progress.  The very forces that cause this dilemma are the same ones that sent me to the Arctic—we humans use energy for everything, for work and pleasure, comfort and productivity, food and travel, survival and leisure.  I flew 10,549 miles round trip for this journey, adding up to over two tons of carbon emissions.  Each of those carbon-intensive activities is part of what makes us human and defines our very lives, yet for all of them the energy we rely upon most is petroleum.

How do we resolve this conflict?  I, for one, will not give up having adventures, or traveling to the parts of the world that I am fortunate enough to visit.  But I will ask myself more questions, think carefully about the need for and circumstances of any future trips, and more than anything, I will enjoy them.  We have to keep working on solutions to change our fossil-fuel economy, all of us, environmentalists and engineers, wind turbine technicians and home energy auditors—and we have to have inspiration to do so.

My trip was worth it.  Especially for the wet, wild-eyed caribou, walking sedately past me on a ridge in that fuzzy twilight (midday?) of the Arctic in summer.

“It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.” 
–Edward Abbey, 1976