Interview excerpted in Issue 56: Gratitude
& Wild Rivers
Vance: I realized, as I drove to the office this morning, that I’d failed
on a commitment I made a couple of years ago that I wouldn’t get into
work until seven and that I would take some time in the morning for myself.
I realize I’ve failed that.
Rod: And what do you think about that in terms of your
effectiveness? Because it’s something I struggle with. In fact just a
few days ago I made the resolution I wouldn’t start work until nine and
I would quit at five, in part to get a lot more reading done because I should
be reading many times more than I am. But anyway, what are your thoughts?
Vance: I think clearly at a certain time in one’s life
you have to consciously shift gears. At least those who are perhaps more driven
than others for better or for worse, I include myself in that, and clearly by
what you’ve tried to do with your outreach through Heron Dance, you’re
also driven. And I think when you really sense the need to accomplish something,
even if you can’t exactly say what it is, it’s just there when you
get up in the morning and put your feet on the floor. And I think one has to
consciously change gears. In order to say, “I’m at a different phase
in my life and I need to both absorb differently and give back differently.”
I’ve seen so many people as they age simply go with the driving force
that they’ve had all their lives and that they began to recognize as who
they are. They identify themselves with that force and I believe that’s
a trap. I think there is a need to consciously change gears and to invoke being
that which you are unsure of, or being a person that you do not know in some
ways. Sounds very philosophical, but I think it’s so easy to get on a
track in one’s life and just kind of keep going because it becomes who
you think you are.
Rod: I wonder if I’d be more effective if I worked
just nine to five.
Vance: I ask myself that. Some people just like to work more,
and that’s their thing. But, in general, I think there comes a time where
we are more effective if we cut back a little bit, because there’s effectiveness
of reflection that those of us who work more, I believe, have to develop. I
certainly see it in your work. Your work is all about reflection and providing
context. Boy, if we don’t understand the context in which we’re
operating, we’re so prone to go off the rails, make mistakes, and make
life a lot more complicated.
Rod: Maybe to some extent it boils down to, well, if you
do a hundred things, how many of them are actually worthwhile, and of the ones
that aren’t, how many are major setbacks. I guess the greater that negative
portion, the more important reflective time is, and doing less, but doing it
more thoughtfully and carefully. The fewer mistakes you make, the more positive
the better long hours are. But there’s something definitely going on in
my life where I screw up enough with the negative things that more thought would
definitely yield some benefit.
Vance: Again, I think everybody has to figure out their own
challenge. I know a lot of people who go through their lives and they never
catch fire. I err on the side of saying, “Thank you very much, I’m
burning myself alive.” Because it’s a passion, it’s an energy
output, and I guess we’re never perfect, but I’d rather err on that
side of things. I’m very thankful, actually, that I’m on that side
of the equation and that I’ve always had work that has very much fulfilled
me, that I find value and a certain amount of humor in, and that at the end
of the day, despite the problems, I can say, “Alright, I think I’m
doing something here.”
Rod: Last question on this subject for now—do you
plan into your year time at Findhorn, or to get away anywhere else for a week,
a month?
Vance: Yeah, I think it’s more like a long weekend. I’ve
been back to Findhorn a couple of times. And I go back there not so much to
recharge myself, but to understand a phase in my life, how it’s shaped
me, and to see friends who I still believe are very important people in my life.
And also there’s just a shape to the Scottish landscape that helped to
shape my life and, you know, my children were born there. You know, the lyric
in the song, “All of my changes were there”—at least in a
certain part of my life. I have a fabulous partner, Carol Batrus, who’s
smart, energetic and incredibly supportive of me. We’ve been together
eight or nine years now and my commitment is to give back to her a very little
amount of what she has given me. Hence, this summer, we have about three long
weekends. This is something that I do very specifically because there’s
a person who supports me incredibly and who I enjoy being with, and I want to
start giving back a little bit to that person.
Rod: Could you talk a little bit about the current projects
you’re working on?
Vance: I know that right now those of us in the conservation
world have one of the greatest opportunities we’ve had certainly in my
generation. The absolute what appears to be cataclysmic challenge of climate
change. The new data even in the last week, in the last couple of months, is
just staggering. But without being absolutely cliché, clearly the scale
of this crisis presents a conservation opportunity that we’ve just never
had. I talk to people now, to policy makers, to business men, and they are talking
in a way that I never dreamed they would talk about. They’re beginning
to understand that we’re both a product of and subject to the natural
world. It simply staggers me—the rate at which this mindset conversion
is occurring at the moment. And why? It’s because people are scared, they’re
panicked. You know, this incredible spiral of oil prices, the gloom in the economy,
and this specter of environmental change is changing people.
Two weeks ago, the Yale School of Forestry—Gus Speth,
their Dean is a valued and old colleague of mine—put out a study that
I couldn’t believe I was reading. And what did it say? It said the scale
of the challenges, the rate of environmental degradation is so much that only
a change in consciousness will show us the way out. Now, that study went on
to say that that change in consciousness would be described by some people as
a spiritual experience, by other people as a rational change of course. Back
in the sixties, when our change in consciousness was self-induced and fueled
by rare and exotic herbs, we all spoke this language that people called rather
derisively New Age thinking. You read that Yale report and you come to your
own conclusion. It is virtually the exact wording that we used back in the sixties,
but it’s dressed up in modern academic language. That to me is incredibly
awesome.
I can work with the biggest building supply company in the world
and they’re declaring a wilderness area managed as a wilderness on some
of their corporate lands and they’re doing it for many different reasons.
One of the biggest reasons is that it’s good business. It’s carbon
offsets, it’s social responsibility, and, hey, it feels good, right? But
I think the biggest reason is that it’s good business. It makes sense.
You’ve got to work with the natural world if you’re going to make
it at all. So I do see this rippling change of consciousness and how it’s
put into action at a rate that I find amazing. So I see a lot of hope in the
face of some very dire threats and dangers.
That’s a very long preamble of where I think we are.
What I’m actually doing is trying to narrow my focus and say, “Ok,
how do we take advantage of this opportunity for wild nature?” So that’s
really where all of my attention is. The World Wilderness Congress that we do
every four years is one of our main vehicles and it’s multisectoral. It’s
all about bringing a very wide range of views together so that the spiritual
and the cultural are given equal play in the technical, the economic and the
political. You have the game rangers together with the politicians, the tribal
people together with the bankers. You get the mix right and you work hard on
the objectives so that you go into the process wanting to actually achieve something
that you can stand on afterwards—new protected areas, new funding mechanisms,
new community programs, new laws. You want to achieve not just a scintillating
experience, but numerous vehicles that people can utilize in their lives.
The next Congress down in Mexico in November 2009 is called
Wild 9. So we’re working real hard on that. We’re also working hard
to develop policy inroads so that wild nature is actually in the climate change
policy guidelines. When the Kyoto Treaty was first negotiated, one of the most
obvious things in the world was left out, and that was that standing forests
sequester carbon and therefore have value in fighting climate change. Very obvious,
but it was left out, ironically, largely through the lobbying of many of the
conservation organizations because they were fighting—this is mostly the
Europeans and some of the Americans—they were saying, “No that’s
a give-away, we don’t want carbon offsets, we want reduced carbon emissions.
We want industry to come to heel. We want governments to see their responsibility.”
Very noble, but it didn’t work.
One of the things that has come around now in the Bali negotiations
last December and these REDD (reduced emissions through deforestation and degradation)
principles is that wild nature has value in fighting climate change. And it’s
not just tropical forests. It’s grasslands, it’s savannahs, it’s
undisturbed marine ecosystems. Current information shows that disturbing wild
nature is responsible for releasing into the atmosphere twenty to twenty-five
percent of carbon. Hence the argument that if we don’t disturb wild nature,
we’re twenty-five percent of the way there. Very simple argument, right?
And it’s quite a different argument than what I call the smoke stack or
tailpipe argument, which is a type of technological fix which is very important.
What we’re trying to do is to get that more institutionalized and into
policy by clarifying what the wilderness concept is. It’s a strange concept
this thing called wilderness because it’s very relative and contains cultural
and spiritual values as well as biological values and climate change values.
We kind of go in there where it’s a little bit unclear, this thing called
wilderness, because it’s all about relationship. It’s not just about
a national park or a game reserve or a national forest. So our work is to say
how can this concept of wilderness be better understood as the relationship
of people to wild nature, not just about a pristine area that you leave alone,
because that won’t work. A lot of it’s policy, a lot of it’s
training, on the ground projects in Africa working with villagers to try to
get them to understand how saving a bit of wild nature in their area can bring
them better tourism revenue or better water downstream. I don’t think
anybody has ever accused me of being overly focused in my work. When we see
an opportunity, we’re a small organization, but we try to take it.
Rod: How much of your time these days or your organization’s
time would be taken up with what you’ve just been talking about—climate
change, the human relationship with wild nature as opposed to working on specific
area.
Vance: We worked a lot last year in the Carpathian region, which
is still the wild heart of Europe and one of the most amazing places I’ve
ever been because it is wild with hundreds of thousands of hectares of primeval
forest and bears and lynx and wolves, and yet it’s Europe and it’s
in a landscape that is incredibly related to human activity. In the midst of
these dense primeval forests, 400 year old beech trees, 500 year old beech trees
and oak forest, there are these meadows that have been tended by hand for 1,000
years and they’re still tended by hand, which is the amazing thing. The
biodiversity in these little pastures is off the scale. They haven’t done
many studies on them. One study that was done two years ago was by a butterfly
expert. He worked for two weeks, studied three meadows and identified 550 species
of butterflies. He said if he had worked another week, he probably would have
topped out at about 750.
Where did that biodiversity come from? It came from human interaction
with nature. Now, is that wild nature? No, that’s not wild nature, but
those meadows were surrounded by wild nature, some of the wildest stuff I’ve
ever seen certainly in the temperate world. So you have this juxtaposition of
these meadows tended for 1,000 years surrounded by these dense forests. So you
get this composite picture of wild nature and people working together.
Rod: Where are these mountains?
Vance: The Carpathian Mountains go through six nations. The
heart of the Carpathians is in Romania. But you’re talking about Poland,
Ukraine, Hungary, that whole area. The other side of the issue is that a lot
of these areas that were national parks are now for sale for a variety of reasons.
One is they don’t have the money to take care of them, part of it is because
they were seized either by former kings or during communist times and so a lot
of the EU regulations now call for land restitution. Sounds like a good idea,
but I don’t like it and conservation-wise it poses a lot of challenges
because a lot of these lands are being snapped up now and are being illegally
logged.
The opportunity is there to turn that around. Corporations are
seeing the need for large carbon offset areas, so we’re trying to encourage
them in that regard. There are a lot of private investors involved now. We’re
not doing a lot with the personal and private investors, but friends of ours
are. There’s some pretty inspiring work being done by individuals who
have made a lot of money who are going out there and buying up these lands.
The greatest example that I know of is what the Tompkins have done down in Latin
America, but there are others doing very similar work, perhaps not to the same
scale. But that’s a type of personal action that is just awesome.
Right now, about fifty to sixty percent of our time is very
focused on this next World Wilderness Congress down in Mexico. I’m spending
a lot of time between Mexico, America and Canada. There’s a big regional
focus on this Congress. We’re setting up the conservation objectives.
Our goal, and we’re approaching it now already, is to have at least ten
new protected areas and potentially a whole new system of protected areas for
Mexico. I think that’s within reach, so we’re spending a lot of
time on that. I then spend about twenty percent of my time just making the shop
run. We’re a small organization, and I grapple every day with the concept
of what happens if I fall over and drop off a cliff some place. So the question
of how do you institutionalize? Do you want to institutionalize? The whole question
of where is the Wild Foundation going after me is a responsibility I have to
address, and I have very distinct ideas on it, about three different plans I’m
working on. I’m not a believer in large institutions for myself or for
what we’re doing. So I’m actually spending probably twenty percent
of my time on transition, succession and future planning. With the way the economy’s
going and the world’s going—on a hard day you sort of wonder if
it’s even worth spending the time on it. So you have to go out there and
just do what you can do now to save as much of wild nature and help people’s
sanity, and your own work will take care of itself. But I think life does show
us that you have to help yourself, trust in God and tie your camel. It will
work out, but you have to do your homework about 110%. I was given a great joy
and responsibility in my life when Ian Player and I started working together,
and I took over the Wild Foundation when it was kind of in a shoe box and I
have to now think about where it’s going after me.
We moved to Boulder two years ago and I think we’ve now
found a place where we’re going to stay for the rest of the time I’m
involved. Board relations, fundraising, strategic planning are that twenty percent.
The other thirty percent is very much practical projects on the ground in Africa.
In training programs. Working with governments and trying to be proactive on
if they’re seeing the value of wilderness. We’re developing a toolkit.
We call it the Wild Planet Project and it’s a procedure and set of tools
that help to identify where wild areas are and how to create legal mechanisms
to protect them. There’re only ten or eleven countries in the world that
have a wilderness law. So we’re working with other countries who are beginning
to see the light and want to do that. And then you’ve got to train the
professionals and the public in what these areas are and how to manage them.
We’re helping mostly governments, but also NGOs and native communities.
We just published the first ever book on case studies of native
people managing their own wild lands for wild land purposes. It’s a very
underserved, under-recognized area in international conservation. We’re
having our second Native Lands and Wilderness council down in Mexico next year.
So we’re trying to understand how traditional mainstream conservation
and non-traditional, indigenous conservation can be part of the same equation
and work together. It’s a non-traditional look at where the wild lands
are and how to protect, maintain, respect, and sustain them.
Rod: Do you have any thoughts on types of projects, approaches,
tactics that are most effective or successful in the kind of work you do?
Vance: I think private money protecting wild lands is very
effective. Whether it’s the Tompkins, whether it’s the nest of investors
in the Carpathians or private companies like Siemens, Grupo Bimbo and all of
these others, it can be very effective if it’s done in the right way.
I think what hasn’t worked is just as important. And
I believe what we’re seeing now is that the infatuation with economic
value of nature is fading a little bit. People still talk about it and they
say it’s important, but when you’ve got climate change roaring down
on you and suddenly your life is threatened, you begin to act differently. It’s
that shift from money to worth. Without a values-based approach, you’ve
got a short-term approach. Because it’s only values, I believe and I think
history shows, that persist, maintain, grow, and foster life over time. Money
is not a value, money is a tool. The shift to understanding values as opposed
to money is extremely important and where that is exercised, we have effectiveness.
Rod: This small project we’re working on here to
buy another 8,000 acres in the Adirondacks for a wildlife corridor, we’re
wondering how readily money is available for these kinds of acquisitions that
don’t involve logging. So basically you accumulate the land with the hope
that someday the states going to come along and buy every one out at the appraised
value. And that may be twenty, thirty, forty years down the road. Do you have
a view on that, Vance, in terms of how easy or difficult that kind of money
is to come by?
Vance: I’m not a good fundraiser. One of my oldest friends,
who I’ve bought and sold rugs with for many, many years, reminds me constantly,
“Please remember, I sell rugs for a living, I don’t live to sell
rugs.” And so when I think of conservation and raising money, I look at
those people who really thrive on raising money…no, I raise money for
a living, I don’t live to raise money. I have to really work at it. Now
to answer your question specifically, I think there is a lot more opportunity
now because the economy’s in a bit of a rough patch at the moment and
all of that, but the consciousness of both people, or the awareness of investors,
in the value—the economic value and the social value—of standing
timber and wild nature and connectivity is higher than it’s ever been,
and I see it growing quickly. Out in Jackson Hole through this wonderful work
done by Gary Tabor and the Large Landscape Institute, the Western Governor’s
Association of all people have just endorsed a western connectivity initiative
that is all about connecting wild lands throughout a third of America. Gary’s
a remarkable man. I mean here’s a guy who knows how to raise money. Guys
like him are merging this wild lands concept and connectivity with the politicians
and the businesses. Originally, Gary worked very closely with the Y to Y initiative
years ago. One of the initiators of that was a visionary Canadian named Hardy
Locke.
To answer your question, yes I think there are more opportunities
and there actually is more money available. Whether the government buys it back
or whether a private company does, or whether it’s simply a private investor
that sees value in it, they have money and they want to put their money some
place that’s going to have enduring value. That is part of the American
tradition that is simply overwhelmingly not found in most places in the world
and it’s called conservation philanthropy. There’s a wonderful new
book called Conservation Philanthropy, An American Tradition. The Tompkins
have funded it and Tom Butler up in your part of the world has written it. It’s
going to be launched I think in October of this year after three years on the
drawing boards.
Rod: When you’re doing the work you were doing in
Europe and Romania, are those corporations that are buying that land that used
to be a national park and now is available for sale? What are their motivations?
Are they planning to make any economic use of it or are they going to buy it
and hold it?
Vance: Right now we are trying to line up some corporations
to do this. There is a lot of interest. The land that is being bought that I
know of is being bought by private investors. This is forest land they’re
buying for conservation purposes. One of the challenges is that a lot more of
the land, not the forest land but the more open lands, is being bought by agricultural
contortions for agricultural purposes. There’s a very quiet revolution
going on right now where people are seeing the food situation, and prime agricultural
land and natural areas that can be agricultural land are being bought up as
future investment in food production. So the corporations that we’re talking
to are largely driven by the whole carbon sequestration value of these lands
and the need to have offsets.
Rod: When you’re working on projects like this, Vance,
are you spending your time in Europe meeting with corporations, talking about
land that’s available, talking about the amount of money that’s
necessary, getting them information they need to make a decision? Is that how
your time is spent?
Vance: Yeah a little bit with the corporate world, a lot with
governments and agencies, some with other NGOs planning. Our technical expertise
has to do with wilderness law, policy and sustainability as opposed to economic
valuation and all of that kind of stuff. We’re not really a science driven
organization. We hire science when we need it. We’re much more concept
and policy driven. We spend time with the corporations and all that, but just
as much with the governments or other NGOs. And I’m sad to say, but the
reality is that we spend a considerable amount of our time within the conservation
community, especially the IUCN, the World Conservation Union as it used to be
called, protecting the category of wilderness in the framework of protected
areas. Wilderness is simply not a totally understood concept because it’s
equal parts culture, personal experience and science. Every time we turn around,
people are trying to get rid of it. “Oh we have national parks, we have
gamers, we don’t this thing called wilderness because it’s too hard
to understand.”
Rod: What are your thoughts on goodwill versus confrontation
in protecting wilderness and otherwise effecting positive change?
Vance: I think goodwill is the essential aspect of life that
involves a certain degree of giving people the liberty to make mistakes and
believing that they’ll correct themselves. That said, I believe that confrontation,
the ability to recognize and elucidate that which is incorrect and do it in
a way that builds respect as opposed to tearing down somebody else, is probably
even more important than goodwill because that’s goodwill in action. You
see something that isn’t correct and you do your best to correct without
degrading anybody or anything. So you build a spirit. It’s a spirit of
collaboration, even if it is not returned. It’s the spirit of collaboration
that builds a world because, in my mind, that’s how nature works—that’s
how wild nature works. There is a collaborative process at work that’s
not conscious between a plant and an animal, but yet it is a collaborative relationship.
And so I think if you look into the template of wild nature and understand a
little bit and then apply it in your work, that comes out to mean that, number
one, goodwill is essential, but also that goodwill in action sometimes involves
confrontation, sometimes involves saying no. But how do you say no and persist
while showing the respect that life requires in order to grow and be wholesome.
Rod: Could you name some people doing particularly effective
work, particularly interesting and creative work out there on behalf of wilderness
or environmental protection?
Vance: Well I’ve mentioned the Tompkins, they’re
certainly a great example. Bittu Sahgal in India is one of these people. He
founded an organization and a publication called Sanctuary Asia. He’s
one of these people working in one of the most difficult countries in the world
to save nature in—India—and is deeply entrenched in the traditional
values of his country. He’s a believer in nature, a vegetarian, but he’s
also a man of action. He provides context, he says no all the time, but he says
no with respect. He says no through giving intellectual and spiritual context
and practical solutions. He’s a great source of inspiration for me working
in the conditions that he does living in Bombay.
I get a lot of inspiration from the arts. You read people like
Terry Tempest Williams. I get intellectual stimulation from people like Robert
Kaplan. His book, To the End of the Earth, was one of the first really
comprehensive intellectual exercises that tried to bring politics, history and
environment all together. And just normal everyday things—listening to
Maura O’Connell sing “The river is wide” or reading Bob Dylan
lyrics—that to me is effective inspiration from the arts. Terry of course
is very much environmentally concerned and I think is one of the best environmental
writers the world’s ever seen.
I just want to end by saying that what I think is important
for the world and what I see in your work, Rod, is a generosity of spirit and
action. And that’s what I see largely lacking in the world.
