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Compatible Development and Resource Extraction Activities
Texas City Prairie Preserve
Virginia Coast Reserve
We are committed to seeking innovative conservation strategies that are aligned with our values. No one organization, or even a combination of all conservation organizations, has the financial resources to simply buy up all the world's most important wildlife habitat and fragile landscapes. Instead, we must find ways to work with private and public landowners and local communities to balance biodiversity conservation and sustainable, ecologically compatible economic development. Over the years, we have launched ventures ranging from sustainable logging to ecotourism. Of these many innovative experiments–often the first of their kind–some have succeeded; others have not. Such is the nature of innovation.
The Post series alleged that the Conservancy engages in resource extraction activities on ecologically sensitive lands at the risk of the species we seek to protect. The Conservancy is committed at every level of our organization to putting biodiversity protection first, while exploring innovative ways to achieve conservation goals.
The Post mis-states that "the Conservancy is best known for acquiring tracts of wilderness." But protecting wilderness is not our mission. Wilderness, as defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964, is "recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Some places we do protect for their core, pristine and often wilderness values. But we also look to the larger landscape and the ability of this landscape to buffer core natural areas and to sustain communities of people.
Most of the landscapes in which we work are "working landscapes;" they have hosted logging, grazing and farming for generations. We and our partners have found compatible development to be a valuable conservation tool in these landscapes when used effectively. Some of our innovative efforts, however, have failed. We acknowledge our mistakes and have tried to learn from them, adapting and changing course when necessary. Of all the thousands of projects that have proven successful for the Conservancy, the Post not surprisingly chose to focus on three projects that appear problematic and questionable at face value.
Texas City Prairie Preserve, Texas
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Download the report (.pdf, 63 kb) Also see the letter of support from Stanley Temple (.pdf, 741 kb) |
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Attwater’s prairie chickens are on the brink of extinction due to the loss of their habitat, a small remnant of which is the Conservancy’s Texas City Prairie Preserve, near Galveston. The natural life span of this bird is only about four years. Attwater’s prairie chicken populations have fluctuated greatly in the past few years, always gradually diminishing; their existence is precarious.
Oil and gas were produced at the Texas City site for some 50 years before the Conservancy created a preserve there. Since this site was donated to us, we have substantially improved the habitat, including control of invasive species that had degraded the bird's habitat. Our production of natural gas on the preserve began only after a review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that included their recommendations on preventing adverse impacts to the Attwater's prairie chicken. Those recommendations were made contractual requirements in our drilling agreements with private contractors.
Our staff and independent scientists have confirmed that the protection of the Attwater's prairie chicken has not been compromised by our decisions regarding oil and gas activity. Small remnant populations such as this one eventually disappear because they are simply not large enough to cope with the vagaries of their genes (which are inbred), their demography (it is typical for numbers to fluctuate widely) and their environment (which is subject to devastating hurricane damage). We regard the Texas City Prairie Preserve as a temporary home for the prairie chickens, until they can be reintroduced to a larger, more suitable habitat.
The only remaining large areas of prairie chicken habitat are on privately owned lands, and convincing landowners to cooperate with a reintroduction will depend on demonstrating that the needs of the Attwater's prairie chicken can be compatible with cattle ranching and oil and gas extraction, as is being done at Texas City. The scientist cited by the Post, Dr. Stanley Temple, supports continuation of oil and gas activity at the preserve, provided the funds are allocated exclusively to the management of the site and to the protection of prairie chickens at other sites. This is the course we are pursuing. The funds raised by natural gas recovery at the preserve represent the only significant private funds supporting Attwater’s prairie chicken recovery efforts.
In fact, Dr. Temple believes the Post distorted his conclusions and the tenor of the report he issued about the Texas City prairie chickens. In a letter to the Post following publication of the series, Dr. Temple wrote: "Over my career as a professional conservation biologist, I have developed a keen sense of when I am being used by a reporter who is writing a hatchet job with selected quotes that bolster a preconceived story-line while ignoring my main conclusions.... The management of the prairie chicken population at the Texas City Preserve is at best a holding action, maintaining the birds under challenging conditions until the Conservancy can eventually reintroduce the birds to a larger area of suitable habitat elsewhere within their former range. That's the Conservancy's long-range plan, and it's a good one that I endorsed wholeheartedly."
Texas City offers only a tiny pocket of habitat for the prairie chickens surrounded by heavy industry, with little opportunity for expansion of the preserve. The Conservancy has, therefore, looked for additional habitat for the birds – working with private landowners in an area known as the Refugio/Goliad Prairie in South Texas. The potential habitat there is on private land and will require intensive restoration before it is suitable for the release of captive-bred birds. Discussions are under way with interested private landowners to initiate habitat restoration efforts.
There is no way to know with certainty whether activity to retrofit a gas pipeline at Texas City Prairie Preserve in 1999 contributed to the deaths of 17 captive-bred Attwater's prairie chickens that were released on the preserve. However, only seven of these birds actually were released in November.
According to records from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 10 juvenile Attwater’s prairie chickens were released on the preserve on Sept. 13, 1999. All but one of those birds died within 30 days, and the final bird had died by 180 days after release. July and August are considered optimal times to release this species into the wild, yet factors such as weather (a severe drought that year made natural food scarce), the presence of predators and the number of birds released all effect the survival rates of the birds. An additional release of seven captive-bred birds took place on Nov. 3, 1999, also without any of those birds surviving.
It is interesting to note that in that same year, 47 birds were released in August at the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, with only three of those birds surviving to May 1. In 1998, before the Conservancy commenced its drilling operations at the preserve, none of the Attwater prairie chickens released on the preserve survived.
It should be recognized that oil and gas extraction have been going on at this site for at least 50 years, with far fewer restrictions in place than the Conservancy’s drilling operation. As Dr. Temple said in his report, "... the birds have persisted there even when the property was managed by previous profit-seeking owners not nearly as sensitive to the needs of the birds as TNC has been."
At Texas City, we believed we were extracting natural gas from a reservoir in which the Conservancy was the only leaseholder. We later learned that this reservoir was situated differently than we first believed, and that revenues should have been assigned in part to the Conservancy and in part to other leaseholders. When this issue was brought to the attention of our president, he took immediate steps to rectify the situation and settled with the other leaseholders for $10 million. No donor funds were used in the settlement; the settlement is funded by the oil and gas revenue and by insurance.
We readily admit we made mistakes at Texas City. We relied heavily on the advice of an advisor, as our expertise is in conservation, not oil and gas exploration. It was uncharted territory for us. We also miscalculated the public perception of our well-intentioned actions at the preserve: Things looked worse than they were, given the complexities of the birds' chances of survival and the drilling operations.
Virginia Coast Reserve, Virginia
The Virginia Eastern Shore is one of the largest intact, undeveloped coastal landscapes remaining on the Atlantic seaboard, due largely to more than 30 years of innovative and steadfast conservation efforts by the Conservancy and our many partners and supporters. We have engaged dozens of partners in our efforts: towns and local communities, farmers, fishermen, nonprofit organizations, universities, foundations and companies. To protect such a vast system, encompassing 14 barrier islands and mainland-side marshes, creeks, fields and forests, we have experimented with many economic development projects designed to address a daunting challenge: How to help communities create much-needed economic opportunity while protecting the ecosystem and critical habitat for migratory birds and other creatures.
Since February 2002, the Conservancy has been updating its conservation plan for the entire Virginia Eastern Shore based on Conservation by Design, the Conservancy's strategy for guiding conservation results everywhere we work. The resulting action plan includes more than 30 strategies designed to increase the Conservancy’s effectiveness. These strategies are intended to enhance both operations and conservation – from positioning the program on more sustainable economic footing, to protecting more bayside habitats, to addressing the complex needs of migratory birds and marine animals.
As we have forthrightly admitted long before the Post series was published, we have made some mistakes at the Virginia Coast Reserve. Because it was a model project for us, one from which all of the Conservancy would learn and emulate, we were perhaps too eager to demonstrate success there and so were not as objective as we should have been. It was the only Conservancy program allowed to operate outside the state chapter structure, and as result we allowed this situation to persist too long without taking corrective measures. We also let foundering projects such as the Virginia Eastern Shore Corporation (VESC) continue without addressing their problems and failures. It's not that we should have avoided experimentation; we launched these efforts in good faith to accomplish conservation objectives. But we should have been more circumspect in assessing our work and halting work that was not yielding good results.
When Steve McCormick became president in 2001, he initiated a thorough overhaul of the Virginia Coast Reserve, part of a wider organizational change effort aimed at correcting deficiencies and improving the way the Conservancy worked. The management of the Virginia Coast Reserve was brought under the Virginia chapter oversight. And after a programmatic analysis and internal audit, we began to develop new management plans and to reduce the reserve's debt.
The Post cited the Conservancy's "liabilities of $24 million" as a result of VESC. In reality, $18 million of the Conservancy's investment was in land on the Eastern Shore; that debt has been reduced to $4 million over the past two years through the sale of seaside farms whose development potential has been restricted through conservation easements. Between $3.5 million and $5 million was the investment lost on operations and the Cobb Island Station venture. An independent report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development, requested by the Conservancy, explains the failure of the VESC and lessons learned. The report is available online at: http://www.cfed.org/imageManager/_documents/sustainable_economies/econDev/vesc_final_report.pdf.
