The woodpile we leave behind: The future of wildlife conservation

Years ago, a friend of mine, who had spent the bulk of his working life in interior Alaska before relocating to rural Nevada, walked past my house on a fall afternoon.In the side yard sat about ten cords of black oak, stacked properly, with crisscrossed end pillars and good airflow between the rows.A freshly taken cow elk hung in the shade.He paused, looked at the wood and the meat, and while admiring from the road, yelled to me something simple.You would be a rich man in Alaska with that woodpile and that elk.I have thought about that remark for years.It has come back to me at odd hours, in budget meetings, in legislative testimony, on cold mornings in a duck blind.What he meant, of course, was that wealth in a harsh environment is not measured in the way we measure it now.It is measured in the things that keep you alive and keep you warm.It is measured in foresight.A woodpile is a bet on the future.It says you saw winter coming, you did the work in summer, and you are ready for the cold.What I want to ask in the pages that follow is a question about a different kind of woodpile, and about a different kind of winter.Not the one outside the cabin door, but the one our successors will inherit from us.Conservation is a national woodpile.The very source that ensures our survival through goods and services it provides, like clean air and pure water.It is the grasslands and wetlands and forests, the public lands and wildlife and the science capacity and the legal frameworks, all of it, painstakingly stacked across generations, available to whoever inherits it next.The question that occupies me, more than any other, is what kind of pile our generation will leave behind.Will the next set of professionals walk into a yard with ten cords stacked tight and ready, or will they walk into a yard with three cords of cull scattered loose in the rain?The answer, I have come to believe, depends on something more fundamental than budgets or staffing or any single piece of legislation.It depends on whether we, as a profession, finally do the unglamorous work of articulating our foundational principles in writing, translating those principles into durable policy, and letting that policy drive consistent practice on the ground.Principles, policies, practices.That sequence is the framework for everything that follows in this piece, and I will return to it at the end.For now, let me say only this.A woodpile stacked without a plan falls over.A profession that does not know what it stands for, and cannot clearly articulate it in writing, will not stand for long against the headwinds of the next twenty-five years.I have spent a career inside this profession, and I want to be honest about what I think the answer is right now, and what I think it could still become.The editors asked for my opinion.I am going to give it to them straight.