The last SAMAB conference I attended was four years ago, in 1995. That was an interesting time. Many of you were out of work, for one thing, because Newt Gingrich or somebody had shut the federal government down.
Back then, if you were trying to predict the future, some patterns were easy to make out. It was the "do more with less" era then, just as it is now.
For example, they strip-mined most of the science people out of the Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies, and called them the National Biological Survey. Then they detonated the NBS, cut its budget, and put some of the pieces into the U.S. Geological Survey. Then folks in Congress started talking about abolishing the USGS, and the Census Bureau, too, and while they were thinking about that they did away with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.
As a journalist, it fell to me to consider: who's going to be left standing, when all these resource agencies have been swept away? So I kind of figured it would be probably be the Forest Service.
But I didn't realize that the process didn't stop there, until recently, when I spent a day with a biologist on the Dry Creek District of the Washington and Jefferson National Forest up in Virginia. He told me their whole contingent had been downsized by a third, in just the preceding year or so.
So I reckoned that at this rate, in a few years there will be probably be only one Forest Service person left to do all the work, and I wondered who that would turn out to be.
And then at the happy hour last night down at Calhoun's, I met him. The Man of the Future. I shook hands with this pleasant fellow across the table. His name is Larry Hayden -- maybe some of you know him -- and I asked him what he does for the Forest Service, and he said: "I'm the director for Air, Soil, Water, Wildlife, Fisheries, Threatened and Endangered Species, and Strategic Planning, and Environmental Coordinator for the National Forests of North Carolina."
This brings me somewhere near my real subject today. There's a kind of information ecosystem out there, that we are all part of, and that we all depend on.
When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, he included a story about this kind of interdependence that has been embellished by ecologists ever since. I think of it as the "humblebee story" - that's what the British call bumblebees - and it related them to country widows, and to the fate of the British Empire.
It was well known that the widows were very fond of keeping cats. The cats kept down the population of field mice that otherwise would have consumed the honeycombs of the humblebees. The bees were needed to pollinate the clover, that yielded the hay, that fed the horses...of the British Infantry. No bees, no Empire.
In the information ecosystem out there, you are as important as humblebees were to the Empire. No public information, no action. Information can lead to greater community awareness and engagement with sustainability, biodiversity, ecosystem management.
Well, something else was happening back in 1995: a 900-pound gorilla of a deadline was looming. I speak, of course, of the Southern Appalachian Assessment. When it was complete, the SAA was a superb document, and one that I have cited many times in my writing.
Thanks to efforts like the SAA, valuable chunks of information do reach the eyes and eyes of the citizenry. But not often enough.
I think we have some underused tools that can be effective in thinning out the infosmog -- that is, the confusion, the ignorance, the information pollution - that often surrounds ecosystem issues.
You know, this public education stuff is serious business. Think of the surface paradoxes that average citizen has to work through. We sing the praises of biodiversity, and then we turn around and complain when some new exotic species want to camp out in the neighborhood. If it's diversity we want, what's the problem?
We worry about the ozone layer thinning out up in the stratosphere, and then we complain about too much ozone down here, and call it ozone pollution.
We dread the possibility of global warming, and its effect on the health of our forests. And then we're teaching those innocent young students at Warren Wilson College - as I learned in a session yesterday - to march off into the woods and torch everything, and call it a "prescribed burn!"
Anyway, here's what I think you can continue to do, and do more of.
First, keep communicating openly and generously with writers and reporters--even when you feel sure that you have run out of time, patience and even trust.
When I was researching my book on the future of the Blue Ridge ecosystem, I kept dozens of Forest Service, Park Service, TVA, EPA and university-based research people on the phone, sometimes for more than an hour at a stretch. Other times I'd pepper them with questions out in the woods. Then I would e-mail them, and then I would call them back for more information.
The response I got was patience, and willingness to explain and to document, a miraculous 99 percent of the time.
You may have heard of the so-called butterfly effect in physics. The idea is that even a small effort can, in chaotic conditions, yield enormous change. So the movement of a butterfly's wing in China can theoretically cause a hurricane in the Caribbean.
In a democracy, our faith is that even small amounts of accurate information can, sometimes, displace enormous quantities of ignorance.
So please, if they're calling YOU for a sound bite or a photo op, keep up the good work of trying to slow the pace of the interview, trying to ferret out the journalist's ignorance and false assumptions, trying to be candid about the constraints and the contradictions that community organizing and research and pubic service labor under.
Of course, that advice assumes you're waiting for the media to call you. But you don't have to wait. You can initiate conversations in the media in several different ways, which some of you are adept at already.
Newspapers and, to a lesser extent, television news operations, will often be eager to hear stories you have to tell.
Is there new research on air quality issues with a distinct public interest message? On stream acidification? On an endangered species recovery project?
Or maybe a story on prescribed burn results? Something new on wildlife management issues, such as how last summer's drought is affecting bears this fall?
Call local editors or reporters and let 'em know. Start a relationship. It's a five-minute investment. You don't have to bother with an institutional press release, and you don't have to do a sales job. Just lay the story before them, and move on.
There's no guarantee that coverage will follow, but I can almost guarantee you'll get an interested hearing.
Take the stories I have heard at this conference about exotic pests and diseases. I don't have to tell you that our native ecosystems are something like a war zone now. The stakes are high. And this war on our own soil is largely unreported.
It's a compelling story that needs to be told over and over again. But YOU have to let THEM know about it.
If you're an NGO, or you work at a college or university, you can consider independent action. That's what the 500 scientists did who petitioned the federal government last year for a crash program to fight exotics. That petition won ample news coverage, and very certainly made it easier for the current Administration to launch its anti-exotics initiative last February.
You public servants, on the other hand, can't become publicly embroiled in lobbying efforts about specific solutions. That contradicts your mission. But for you as well as NGO's the opinion pages of local newspapers are not out of bounds. They are a ready opportunity that does not necessarily require a political stance.
You can tell the story of purple loosestrife, of that awful oriental bittersweet vine as thick as your leg, of disappearing hemlocks, dogwoods, butternut and Fraser fir, without arguing the politics of the problem. Current research results, and a reasonable interpretation of what they mean, are enough. Maybe you have concluded long since that editors really are not open to such ideas. But I am talking here about a column that YOU write, of a phone call to a reporter that YOU make, not a more easily ignored standard-issue press release about a new regulation, or a meeting.
And, this might surprise some of you: Southern Appalachian Weekly and small daily community papers have already given plenty of evidence of awakening interest in ecosystem stewardship issues. Several dozen of them, from the Blowing Rock Rocket in North Carolina to the Blue Ridge Leader in Virginia, from the Mountain Messenger in Tennessee to the Travelers Rest Tribune in South Carolina to the Pickens County Progress in Georgia, ran a lengthy opinion column on exotics just last summer.
It advocated strong community leadership from town councils, and county commissions. The author urged that these local officials be made to … Press hard for more effective state and federal action against exotics … He wrote that local elected officials should insist on both immediate and long-term funding for research to keep out new exotics, and deal with the ones already here. … And this opinion piece said local officials should demand tough inspections and penalties to clean up international shipping, and close down all the pathways that exotics now use so freely Other such opinion articles appeared in larger papers, in places such as Asheville, Raleigh, and Charlotte--on air quality research on public lands in the Southern Appalachians, and on the effects of exploding real estate development on natural resources. Again, they argued for strong action, not in Washington, but at the community level. So in my experience many, though not all, community news media are ready for discussion of these kinds of issues.
Here's another kind of public education project at the community level but its a bit more labor intensive. Involve the public in research initiatives like Bill McLarney's work on the Little Tennessee, or Ronald Moser's on the Pigeon River.
Here's another example, the Yellowstone Ecosystem Studies group in Montana is an enormously successful cooperative. It promotes research, publication and funding for ecosystem scientists there, and raises some of its funding from public and private grants. But it also has for several years recruited private individuals and families to do a week or two of research data-collection on wolves, coyotes, bears, forest health or water quality. And for this chance to help out, these people pay about $1,500 a week. It's the Earthwatch model, and it seems to work well on this smaller scale.
Volunteer programs at public agencies can also help defuse public suspicions. I'm thinking of U.S. Forest Service plant pathologists in West Virginia, whose agency has seen years of painful controversy over then possible connection between air quality and tree health.
The argument, of course, is that you feds are trying to cover up, rather than investigate, forest decline.
But one successful program there recruited volunteer national forest walkers who, with modest amounts of training, collected data on tree health for ongoing studies.
Even a few of the agency's fiercest critics helped out. It certainly didn't silence all criticism, but this volunteer program promoted cooperation rather than estrangement. And to the astonishment of the scientists involved in the project, one of these amateur data-gatherers even discovered a hitherto-unknown disease of poplars.
A final example comes from Long Island, New York. They are fighting a pest there you might have heard of--anoplophora glabripennis, aka the Starry Sky Beetle or the Asian Long-Horned Beetle. It was brought to New York some time in the '80s on Chinese freighters, and it has also shown up recently on the Great Lakes, in the Chicago area, and in ports in North Carolina and Georgia.
It has an appetite for 30 species of trees, at last count, including maple and poplar. I was told it could get from Brooklyn to the Blue Ridge in less than 25 years. The distance from Georgia is much less than that!
Anyway, APHIS, the plant health inspection service, set up an 800-number reporting system on Long Island, and encouraged citizens to head into their back yards, take a look around for suspicious insects, and call in if they found something.
Well you can imagine what happened then. So can I. I'm the kind of citizen forester who thinks he sees a champion chestnut that turns out to be a beech tree. I spot adelgids on hemlocks in Tennessee that turn out to be bird poop. At least I hope that's what it was. And APHIS's initiative in New York was an open invitation to a lot of false alarms. There were plenty of them. But out of all the noise in that data, there was also a strong signal - a handful of crucial, accurate reports. Some local infestations of the long-horned beetle were found and eradicated as a result. And citizens were very enthusiastic about helping, about having a role to play.
There are other chances for public education on ecosystem issues. These are perhaps the easiest of all for some of you to take advantage of. We can talk at a somewhat higher volume, and with appropriate urgency, in our communications with the visiting public: communication like those tens of thousands of maps and brochures, and even the bulletin boards at trailheads.
Sometimes those messages are clear and direct, and very useful. I am thinking here of former Shenandoah National Park superintendent Bill Wade. For a couple of summers, he posted signs at the entrance to his park. They were the type of signs that traditionally show a daily fire hazard rating. But the Bill Wade signs instead showed the ozone pollution rating for the day, and made the point strongly that some visits to that national park could be a hazard to your health.
Clear and direct messages. We are overlooking some opportunities there. Here's an example. This is the guide for the Laurel Falls Trail, an extremely popular stroll in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I'll bet tens of thousands of visitors read it each year.
This pamphlet is really well written. As a writer, I envy whoever wrote this for his or her ability to convey some complex ideas--such as forest succession--quickly and simply.
But there is almost no mention of human disturbance here, at all. Only a brief line about the effects of off-trail trampling.
Is widespread human-caused ecosystem damage a legitimate part of the story along this trail? You decide. Just a few minutes' hike beyond the Falls, the trail passes through an astonishing old-growth hardwood forest, mostly Eastern Hemlock and yellow poplar.
In a very few years, of course, unless some miracle takes place, those old hemlocks, and most of thousands of younger hemlocks in the park, are going to be wiped out by an introduced insect, already on its way south--just as surely as chestnut trees were, six and seven decades ago.
Do visitors need to know that? I think they do. How come we aren't telling them at every opportunity?
The trail continues for another couple of miles to the top of Cove Mountain, a site that air quality people know well. There's a monitoring tower on top, bristling with antennas and collectors. Under it, a big engraved metal sign explains that this is a joint Park Service/TVA project to monitor ozone.
Dozens of lines of typography and some graphics tell the nature and the process of this research in detail.
But the story most citizens would be most keenly interested in is buried down in one tiny corner of that sign. It is told, obliquely, in only two short lines of type.
Here's that story, the real story, at greater length:
Ozone pollution is important because of its effects on human health, and a strong suspicion that it adversely affects plant life, including trees.
A substantial fraction of humans, including asthmatics, suffer immediate short-term effects from ozone pollution, and EPA scientists suspect long term lung damage. The most recent meta-analysis I've read shows a slowdown in growth in Southern pines because of ambient ozone levels. So these are rather intriguing details.
And when you're standing there on top of Cove Mountain, you're probably standing in the spot with more intense ozone pollution than any other rural site in the United States. That's according to Jim Renfro, the park's air quality specialist.
As a citizen, I wonder: why is that message missing from this sign, which has details about so much else that is clearly not as significant? Why is the ozone story missing from the trail guide? What's making us so ... shy? Is it because this is the government talking? Well, agriculture extension agents don't shy away from telling farmers about threats to their crops. I think state and federal natural resource managers should consider speaking more plainly and frequently to citizens about air pollution, development, and exotics that affect their resource base, their tourism, their economies, their health, and their public lands. Will visitors to parks and national forests in the next generation be grateful for our seeming reluctance to speak plainly on these matters, on every possible occasion?
In short, I think we information ecosystem humblebees don't always need to be so humble.
I owe federal agencies an enormous thanks. the information they make available to the public is indispensable. It's part of the feedback about both our governing systems and our natural systems that we citizens need, in order to make sensible decisions in a democracy.
Well, it's time for me to thank you for letting me bend your ear--about the chance the bend the public's ear--about the important, the extremely valuable, work that you do. If you aren't already, I hope you'll take me up on them:
Think about establishing relationships with reporters at community newspapers and TV outlets by feeding them story ideas:
*Nash is the author of Blue Ridge 2020: An Owner's Manual and an associate professor of journalism at the University of Richmond. His environmental reporting has appeared in Bioscience, The Scientist, National Parks, The Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor.