Defenders of Wildlife Blog

As many of you already know, after 20 years at the helm of Defenders of Wildlife, I have made the difficult decision to retire this fall. I am proud of the great victories we have achieved over the past two decades and appreciate all of your support for wildlife conservation.

On October 1, Jamie Rappaport Clark will take over as president and CEO of Defenders. As former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during some of its best years—which included the restoration of wolves to the American landscape in the 1990s, the recovery of the peregrine falcon, and the expansion of the National Wildlife Refuge System—Jamie has literally spent her whole career safeguarding our country’s precious wildlife.

She will continue to bring all that experience to Defenders, leading an extraordinary team of professionals in tackling the serious conservation challenges that lie ahead for wildlife.  That is why I am confident that with your continued help and Jamie at the helm, Defenders of Wildlife’s best days are still ahead.

Stay strong and keep up the good fight!

Rodger.

Famed conservationist Jeff Corwin looks back on 20 years of leadership from Defenders of Wildlife’s retiring president Rodger Schlickeisen.

I remember when I first met Rodger.

It was 2003 and we were standing on the steps of the US Capitol building. The sun was shining but there was a distinct chill in the air. Beside us was an impressive assortment of environmental leaders and members of Congress. In front of us sat about 30 school children, equal parts nervous and excited. Our purpose that day? To celebrate the 30^th Anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.

And I remember how eloquently Rodger spoke about the Act – the bipartisan support it enjoyed, the creatures it had saved, the threats it faces – and I realized this man wasn’t just reading words on a page. He could have been working without prepared text at all, because this man was clearly moved. He felt what he was saying and he felt it deep and it was apparent to all. I have made the conservation of wildlife my life’s work and I knew right away, listening to Rodger, I had found a kindred spirit. It was the beginning of my proud association with Defenders of Wildlife and the beginning of what I hope will be a lifelong friendship with its departing leader, Rodger Schlickeisen.

Rodger isn’t just the head of one of the nation’s top environmental groups, he is the consummate hands-on, make-things-happen leader. He is as much at home in the Oval Office chastising the president as he is clad in a winter parka, releasing wolves back into Yellowstone. And you are just as likely to find him in a powerful Senator’s office as you are the wilds of Africa, tracking collared lions with Masai warriors.

And his brand of leadership has served Defenders well. When he joined the organization in 1991, it had 60,000 members. Now? The list of members and supporters tops one million. When he joined Defenders, the US Geological Service had no arm devoted to addressing the impacts of climate change on wildlife. Now they do. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wildlife conservation programs, public and private, that were not in existence before Rodger made creating them a priority for Defenders.

When Rodger got started, environmental conservation had Democratic and Republican champions alike. And he deftly maneuvered back and forth across the aisle, exhorting champions from both sides to support key conservation programs. A decade later, when wildlife conservation became a political hot potato, Rodger read the writing on the wall, formed the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, and began taking on some of the environment’s worst enemies at the ballot box. Richard Pombo, Sarah Palin, Steve Pearce, Marilyn Musgrave, all soon found that you cannot run roughshod over the environment without hearing about it from Rodger.

Leadership, foresight, flexibility, proven accomplishment, all things we look for in a leader, all things Rodger delivered.

But as Rodger moves on from Defenders, I find myself thinking back to that fall day in 2003. And I think about another leadership quality: dedication. On that day, I saw the intense dedication he shows to the cause he so clearly believes in and the organization he cares so deeply about. And I am left to ponder how rare such devotion is in many of the leaders we see today. Truly, lots of people run organizations, but few people actually lead with such dedication. Rodger did. And we − along with the natural world − are the better for it.

The imperiled red knot has languished for five years on the candidate list. Without action, it could disappear forever. Photo (c) Diego Luna Quevedo

This week, the House of Representatives debates its Interior Department spending bill. National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog asks, “What’s at stake in the spending debate?” The answer? A lot. Read on to hear what Defenders’ president and CEO Rodger Schlickeisen has to say about this potentially disastrous bill.

The Interior Department appropriations bill currently before the U.S. House of Representatives contains provisions that would spell disaster for our country’s communities, imperiled wildlife and natural resources. Its nearly 40 policy riders that put the environment and our public health at risk have no place in an appropriations bill and would not save the country a penny, but they would cost lives and lead to the significant degradation of our environment.

One of these provisions, an “extinction rider,” would prevent the listing for protection of any more plants or animals under the Endangered Species Act. This would increase the risk of extinction for more than 260 species by blocking crucial life-saving protections for “candidate species” currently awaiting listing decisions, including wolverines, red knots and walruses. Should such a dangerous rider pass, we will feel its effects for decades. Because while we put vital listing activities on hold, the impacted plants and animals will have to fend for themselves. Denying much-needed protection for these imperiled species only means that their situation will be even more dismal down the road when—or if—the moratorium on listing is lifted.

This bill may represent the worst assault on public health and the environment ever to come before Congress.

This is exactly the case with the red knot, a shorebird whose numbers have continued to plummet during its five years on the candidate list. With the red knot at dangerously low population levels, the Fish and Wildlife Service finally plans to give the shorebird the Endangered Species Act protections it so badly needs and move forward with the listing process. If this plan is blocked by a moratorium, we can be sure their numbers will continue to fall, until they vanish completely. For other species whose numbers are already shockingly low, such as the wolverine (of which scientists estimate there are fewer than 300 left in the lower 48) they have even less time.

It isn’t just our wildlife under attack– this bill threatens our communities and natural resources as well. An amendment introduced just yesterday by Congressman Austin Scott (R-GA) would prevent the Interior Department, Forest Service and Environmental Protection Agency from preparing for any climate change impacts. That includes the implementation of programs that prepare for future floods, fires and drought. America has already experienced record floods, record droughts and record fires this year, and climate change promises more of these events occurring with greater intensity. But this anti-disaster preparation amendment would tie the hands of those agencies charged with protecting us from such events, from the Forest Service, the nation’s largest first responder to forest fires, to the EPA, which provides $23 billion in storm protection services to communities every year.

Scientists estimate there are fewer than 300 wolverines left in the lower 48 states.

This bill may represent the worst assault on public health and the environment ever to come before Congress. And it is likely to get much worse before it leaves the House floor. There is no argument that the American government needs to tighten its belt. But while these difficult economic times will require some fiscal austerity, it should not come at the cost of the safety of our communities, wildlife and natural resources.

Learn more:

Read the full question and other responses on the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.

Take action! You can help stop the extinction rider in its tracks.

For those of us who had hoped Barack Obama’s election would finally restore and strengthen protections for imperiled wildlife and natural ecosystems, the results to date have been a letdown. Many voters are extremely disappointed or even angry about his record on wildlife conservation, and I suspect President Obama underestimates the significance of this widespread and well-founded discontent among many who tended to be his strong supporters.

Candidate Obama consistently said that dealing with environmental problems—especially climate change, the number one threat to protecting the rich biological diversity that supports all life on Earth—would be one of his top priorities. Believing that, the House of Representatives acted quickly once President Obama was in office to approve comprehensive climate change legislation and send it to the Senate. The House bill curbed greenhouse gas emissions and set up a mechanism to help protect wildlife and biological diversity. But the President failed to put his political muscle into pushing the Senate to act. Then the long drawn-out battle over health care followed by his party’s loss of numerous House and Senate seats in 2010  doomed any chance of enacting climate change legislation for the foreseeable future – a missed opportunity that will result in considerable unnecessary environmental damage.

The opportunity for legislative action lost, one of the President’s strongest environmental appointments, energy policy “czar” Carol Browner, (former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Clinton) resigned after only two years in office. The White House’s decision not to push for climate change legislation likely further emboldened oil and gas industry champions in Congress determined to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. Their efforts were only narrowly averted in the 2011 budget bill. Given its weak performance to date, it is reasonable to wonder just how firmly the White House will continue to stand by Lisa Jackson, EPA’s strong administrator, and fight future efforts to limit EPA’s authority.

Unfortunately, climate change is not the only issue affected by Obama’s  timid legislative approach. The explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago dramatically underscored the need for stricter regulation of offshore oil drilling to protect our oceans and coasts and the people and wildlife that depend on them. But is the White House fighting for tougher new laws to assure that nothing like this event that triggered the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history will ever happen again? No. Obama did appoint a stellar commission that made thoughtful and important recommendations for stronger offshore drilling regulation, but he has yet to push for reform legislation – and each passing week whatever opportunity there is to win needed reforms grows smaller. Although a few stalwart environmental leaders have introduced reform bills, others in Congress have interpreted the administration’s congressional inaction as an opportunity to promote more unsafe drilling in more places. These places include Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, where  marine ecosystems are even more fragile and vulnerable to devastation from oil spills than in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not only has the President failed to push for desperately needed legislation, he [supported his Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who, with no consultation and no warning, adopted the Bush administration’s plan to remove federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies based on political boundaries rather than the science required by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). When conservationists sued and a federal court overturned his illegal action, Secretary Salazar actively encouraged Congress to enact legislation removing federal protection from Northern Rockies wolves, ignoring the court’s decision. And the White House did nothing to stop it.

For the first time in the nearly 40-year history of the ESA, Congress—with the complicity of the Obama administration—has intervened to remove all protection from a listed species. If, as many fear, this turns out to be a precedent for additional legislation blocking protection for endangered species, the damage to our ability to safeguard imperiled plants and animals essential to the web of life will be incalculable. In the past, conservationists have successfully defeated equally destructive attempts by anti-environmental administrations to weaken the ESA. Preventing an administration perceived to be in favor of environmental protection from undermining our nation’s most important law for conserving biological diversity is nearly impossible. It should be noted that the President has used his administrative authority to do some good things for conservation. For instance, the Obama administration designated more than 187,000 square miles as critical habitat for polar bears (listed as “threatened” under the ESA), the largest such designation in history.

For the first time in the nearly 40-year history of the ESA, Congress—with the complicity of the Obama administration—has intervened to remove all protection from a listed species. If, as many fear, this turns out to be a precedent for additional legislation blocking protection for endangered species, the damage to our ability to safeguard imperiled plants and animals essential to the web of life will be incalculable.

But this is an administration much too quick to turn and run when anti-conservationists bark. Their kowtowing to the Republican-controlled House and abandoning their own pro wilderness policy for federal lands, barely five months after establishing it, is just the latest example.  They still say they are sticking by their proposed America’s Great Outdoors initiative, which could put renewed emphasis on conserving more of our nation’s vanishing wildlands, but with the same  congressional opposition pushing against it, it is hard to see much hope that  this initiative will achieve anything significant.

Clearly the President’s overall conservation record to date is negative.  Whether he can yet earn a passing grade for this four-year term likely depends upon the final form of two significant Obama administration conservation regulatory proposals—a rewrite of the rules that govern the stewardship of our  193 million acres of national forests and grasslands, and new guidelines for energy development on public lands.

The current regulations for managing national forests, which were written by the Reagan administration, have protected wildlife reasonably well, but they need updating and strengthening.  President George W. Bush’s attempt at a rewrite produced rules that were distinctly pro-logging and overturned in federal court in a suit brought by Defenders. The new set of regulations recently proposed by the Obama administration offer strong statements of intent to conserve wildlife but leave implementation so much to the discretion of individual forest managers that political influence, particularly in an anti-environmental administration, could render stated conservation intentions meaningless. Defenders and other conservationists have made the serious shortcomings of these proposed new rules clear to the administration. Now we wait for their response.

We also wait to see how Obama will handle the development of the utility-scale solar energy projects the Interior Department is vigorously promoting on 22 million acres of western public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Conservationists, of course, applaud the development of solar projects to supplant dirty fossil fuel energy plants. But we are strongly encouraging the administration to issue standards that guide these massive solar s projects, each of which can sprawl across thousands of acres and consume enormous amounts of water, to locations where they will not cause significant harm to fragile desert wildlife and ecosystems. Locating the massive projects in this manner should also hasten their actual development by minimizing the threat of environmental lawsuits. Whether they follow such a course, or opt instead to take an overly permissive direction that sacrifices wildlife and habitat to energy development on public lands, remains to be seen.

Obama’s record to date gives us no reason for optimism on forest protections and energy development guidelines. His administration’s conservation record falls far short of what it promised, what was expected of it and – most importantly – what we need. Our major environmental problems, especially those caused by climate change and loss of species and habitat, are huge and growing and will cause future generations great anguish and difficulty if our political leaders fail to lead.  Unfortunately, President Obama’s instinct seems to be to avoid tough battles, relying on the argument that even as his record falls short, his administration is better on conservation than the previous one and better than any likely to succeed him should his re-election effort fall short.

Our major environmental problems, especially those caused by climate change and loss of species and habitat, are huge and growing and will cause future generations great anguish and difficulty if our political leaders fail to lead.

That argument simply isn’t acceptable. Avoiding serious action, or–to use one of the President’s own phrases–“continuing to kick the can down the road” to another administration, will only result in our most serious environmental problems continuing to grow faster than society’s capacity to solve them. The dangers are too great to give the President a pass on environmental leadership. Those of us who care about the fate of the planet and generations to come must demand real progress that promises to solve our very real problems. For conservation, the future has to be now.

Don Barry will join Defenders in June as executive VP.

NEWS: Don Barry will join Defenders of Wildlife this June as its new executive vice president. This is part of an ongoing leadership transition following President Rodger Schlickeisen’s announcement of plans to retire after 20 years on October 1, 2011 — handing over the reins to Defenders’ current executive vice president, Jamie Rappaport Clark.

“Jamie and Don will make a formidable team at the helm of Defenders,” said Schlickeisen. “They will be a powerful force in advocating for wildlife and biodiversity conservation in the years to come.”

Barry has spent the past 36 years working on wildlife and public land conservation issues as a senior governmental official, in the nonprofit community and as a senior staff member in Congress. He has played a major role in numerous environmental issues facing this country, including the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997, the implementation of the Endangered Species Act, and the management of our national parks, forests and wildlife refuges.

Barry has spent more than a decade working in the nonprofit conservation community, including senior leadership positions at The Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund and most recently at Environmental Defense Fund.

“Don knows how to make things happen.” — Jamie Rappaport Clark

He was assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks at the U.S. Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration.  In that capacity, he oversaw the policies and budgets of the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Barry was also a career attorney in the solicitor’s office at the Interior Department, serving as the chief counsel for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

During this period, Mr. Barry helped draft key implementation regulations for the Endangered Species Act and was the department’s lead counsel for the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Finally, Barry spent six years working in House of Representatives for the Chairman of House Committee with jurisdiction over all fish and wildlife conservation matters.

“I’ve known Don for many years as we worked together on conservation issues through numerous administrations,” said Clark.  “His vast experience in the conservation community, in combination with his executive branch experience and time on the Hill, makes him a great advocate for our issues.  Don knows how to make things happen.”

“I am thrilled to be teaming up with Jamie again to tackle the pressing conservation issues of our time,” said Barry. “Moreover, Defenders’ focus on Endangered Species Act and public land management issues brings me back full circle to the very issues that I began my career on more than 36 years ago.”

Barry graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Arts in American Institutions in 1971 and from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1974. He lives in Alexandria, Va. with his wife, Teiko Saito.

The U.S. House of Representatives today passed the third bill in a series of three fast-track drilling pieces that favors Big Oil profits over safety of coastal communities and environments. H.R. 1231, “The Reversing President Obama’s Offshore Moratorium Act,” is a massive handout to the oil and gas industry. This legislation forces the federal government to take on 50% of the cost of seismic testing for oil and would require the administration to open up coastal and Arctic offshore drilling areas regardless of economic or environmental consequences. These areas would include the coasts of California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and the fragile Arctic marine ecosystem off the coast of Alaska.

H.R. 1231 does not solve our gas price problem, but it does put at risk hundreds of thousands of jobs that rely on clean coastal waters. It also threatens thousands of miles of coastal habitat and exposes countless bird and marine species to the dangers of offshore drilling.

Rodger Schlickeisen, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife said,  “The House today rewarded Big Oil for carelessly causing the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. After deliberately weakening safety practices on offshore drilling rigs only yesterday, the House’s vote to open America’s most fragile and beloved coasts to polluting drill rigs adds insult to injury.

“The House of Representatives had three chances to prove to the American public that it had their interests at heart, but instead chose to vote for Big Oil each time.”

“Big Oil has hit a trifecta this week. The House of Representatives had three chances to prove to the American public that it had their interests at heart, but instead chose to vote for Big Oil each time. By now there can be no doubt that the House majority’s interests lie not with what is good for the country but what is good for the wealthy and polluting oil industry.”

Learn more:

Congress is suffering from oil disaster amnesia – read about the first reckless drilling bill to pass the House and the second that fast-tracks the permitting process and eliminates environmental and safety considerations.

See how Defenders is working to protect America’s coasts from the dangers of offshore drilling.