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Hope is the Thing with Feathers
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"We’ve found the bird.” The simple but breathless comment, uttered to me in confidence at the end of a busy board meeting, gave me goose bumps. Long-time board member John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, could barely contain his astonishment: The ivory-billed woodpecker, long presumed extinct, long the haunting epitaph of a uniquely American landscape, had been captured on video, slipping through the forests of Arkansas’ Mississippi Delta.
As you will read in this issue of Nature Conservancy, the miraculous reappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the bottomland hardwood forests of Arkansas’ Big Woods marks the thrilling climax of an uplifting saga, rich in lessons and insights—and profoundly hopeful implications—for conservation in
the 21st century.
The Nature Conservancy undertook the first step in conserving these forests in 1986, when we purchased
a 380-acre parcel along the Cache River. At one time in our history that might have been the extent of our efforts: the purchase and ownership of a small preserve to “save” an example of original habitat.
But by 1986 we were beginning to understand some important precepts—imperatives really—that have since become fundamental to pursuing our mission. First, conservation must be undertaken at a scale sufficient to embrace and sustain natural processes. Second, success of such magnitude can be achieved only through long-term partnerships with the public and private sectors.
To wit, The Nature Conservancy immediately partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and, with the help of Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers, established the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. Over the next three decades, The Nature Conservancy and a suite of partners, including the Fish and Wildlife Service and the State of Arkansas, have tirelessly cooperated to conserve more than 120,000 acres of the Big Woods. A shared vision for restoring this vibrant natural system has engendered a collaborative approach to management that ignores individual agendas in favor of emphasizing the good of the ecological whole.
“Such lasting accomplishments can be achieved only by engaging local communities and private landowners, who can derive enormous benefits from the preservation of functioning natural systems.”
Steve McCormick
President/CEO, The Nature Conservancy
This effort is noteworthy in its own right, but what makes it especially meaningful is what it says about conservation in our time: Such lasting accomplishments can be achieved only by engaging local communities and private landowners, who can derive enormous benefits from the preservation of functioning natural systems.
In the Delta, hundreds of landowners have voluntarily placed permanent conservation easements on their land and have helped plant trees to reestablish 50,000 acres of forest. Meanwhile, Nature Conservancy scientists have worked with local communities to demonstrate management practices that reduce sediment loads and stabilize river banks, thereby preventing catastrophic flooding and ensuring that agricultural soils are enriched rather than eroded.
The Delta town of Clarendon, long dependent almost exclusively on agriculture, realized that its future would be more secure and stable with a diversified economy. In collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, Clarendon created a progressive economic plan that calls for developing tourism, recreation and other activities associated with healthy rivers and forests. The plan has caught the attention of other Delta towns as a new and better approach to economic viability: developing businesses, products and land uses that capitalize on healthy natural systems.
All of these great things have been going on for thirty years, notable but not widely noted. And there is so much more to do.
Then came the bird—a ghost of the past but a harbinger of the future. It reappears at just the right time, as if to announce: “You’ve done good. Keep it up.”
Steven J. McCormick
President and CEO
Summer 2005
Read the previous message from Steve McCormick
