Making a quilt

Just who do you think you are, coming into my community, taking land off the tax rolls, and telling me I can’t hunt on land that has been feeding my family for six generations? I swear, you environmentalists think this whole region should be your playground so you can come here with your $5,000 bikes and your Patagonia clothes and go home to your fancy home, while everyone here is left with no jobs, no money and no way to make a living!

The county economic developer was irate, to say the least, and went on to say, “And what is it with you all that you think all the land in our Tier One counties needs to be protected from the people who’ve lived here forever? Have you and your fancy scientists ever thought that maybe all these beautiful places are here because our ancestors took care of them?”

This was the first time I’d ever met with an economic developer, but I understood some of what he was talking about. I had worked for many years as a whitewater raft guide in a county that was only 17 percent privately owned, with the rest federal conservation lands and tribal reservation lands, so the county had a very small tax base. I knew from trying to find a job that would allow me to stay year-round that there were no jobs available because globalization had shut down the factories years before. The jobs with the federal conservation agencies employed relatively few local residents, and they were prized because they provided benefits.

One thing that struck me about the conversation, though, was his reference to Tier One counties. I was not familiar with the term and didn’t have a clue as to why he would think we wanted to protect all the land in Tier One counties. When I did a quick search, it turned out that our state commerce department classified counties on a number of economic factors, with Tier Three counties having strong economies, lower unemployment rates, higher median household incomes, etc. Tier One counties were the poorest of the poor, with fewer jobs, high unemployment rates, and all kinds of indicators of socio-economic distress; and Tier Two counties were somewhere in the middle. I also learned in my search that many states use some form of economic classification, although different terms are used.

Research into other socio-economic data provided a much more in-depth picture of the places we wanted to protect. There were higher rates of poor health, low educational attainment, substandard housing, infant mortality, and so much more. While the statistics tugged at my heart, I knew that those were issues that were far outside my organization’s mission. At the same time, I thought about how it had felt like the economic developer was thinking that his county could have economic development OR it could have clean air and clean water, but not both. Yet, he clearly had connections to the land, through his hunting and fishing, so maybe we could work together and make it a both-and conversation, instead of either-or.

The next time I sat down with the economic developer, I had listened to and talked with residents, business owners and agency professionals in different parts of the county and looked at some ideas for collaboration. I learned about asset-based community development and community-led planning processes that focused on identifying local strengths and assets as the basis for small business development and job creation rather than focusing on needs. I also learned, as I spent more time listening to local residents, that rural families had been building on their assets and strengths—or, as they put it, “makin’ do with what we’ve got”—for generations.

And, importantly, I learned about working in diverse partnerships, where each partner brought their skills and expertise and resources to the table, much like a patchwork quilt. It meant that my land trust could bring our natural resource expertise and connections to the table, while the economic developer brought his connections to economic development funding and other resources that my land trust could never access, and the faith group and social justice group and community development corporation brought access to their funding and resources as well.

Getting to know the community, listening to local residents and decision-makers, and learning to work in partnerships that provided benefits to folks who had seldom sat at the same table helped me see that community-centered conservation can be structured to meet my land trust’s mission while also meeting the needs of the community.