Time to CHAT? Mapping "Regulatory Resistance" in the West

"Mining companies like to say, 'The gold is where the gold is, that's where we need to go,'" said Chet Van Dellen, GIS coordinator for Nevada's Department of Wildlife. "We like to say the animals are where the animals are." New high-tech maps detail wildlife habitat in West, Scott Sonner, 12/13/13

Late last week a coalition of western governors released a new tool meant to help gold miners, transportation designers, energy companies - just about anybody with a natural resource impact - to plan development projects. CHAT, the Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool, going to be one big map for the West, and although it's not entirely filled out yet, the idea is to show those gold miners, hey, here's where our important habitats are. It pays to be clear: the maps are not, as the AP's headline suggests, simply mapping wildlife habitat in greater detail. The tool's resolution is somewhat impressive - down to the square mile - but what it's really doing is visualizing the spaces where project managers can expect to run into problems getting their permits. Some habitats will not be as crucial or as much of a priority as others. The difference may be subtle, but on it turns the role mapping plays in setting the public agenda in environmental governance today.

Here's how CHAT works. Each state has gathered a bunch of data and assigned weights to different kinds of habitats, on a scale from 1-6 (most to least important). The weights are based on information like the condition of habitat as well as economic significance. Each state has its own process, and very often, it's got its very own personal CHAT tool. You should expect no less from the West, and this brand of formal coordination, was likely what got every single western state on board. What CHAT isn't is a project to get all states on board to a similar standard for evaluating habitat significance. It's just meant to project (in the mapping sense) the standards each one already has. Take a look at some of the screenshots of the map if you haven't already, because you can see differences in regulatory regimes on the map.

A CHAT map. From: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/the-big-picture-western-governors-unveiling-high-tech-satellite-wildlife/article_7b95cf0e-496e-51df-b324-2a5f929a2232.html

Where you'd expect some important habitats to cross-cut state boundaries, like in Yellowstone, we see that they cut off at Montana, either because the state hasn't gotten around to doing it's categorization yet or because that habitat simply isn't as important to Montana as it is to Wyoming. CHAT is meant to show all western states so that if you're a pipeliner you can see what sort of regulatory resistance you're going to run into across your entire project. Or if you're a gold miner, you can easily see whether it'll be easier to do a project in Utah or Arizona.

It may have been five years in the making, but it's roots go back way further. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to start at the Articles of Confederation to get a sense of what kind of coordination this represents: federalism. Not only does each state gets to develop and share its own particular habitat standards, the map is a way for states to show federal authorities that, hey, we've got everything under control here, much as they are doing with candidate species rulings. More concretely, though, we only have to go back to the mid 90s to understand why we have CHAT now. Federal listing of endangered species like the northern spotted owl generated what boil down to two calls, two sides of the same coin really: state-led environmental policy, and economics-sensitive environmental policy. It'd be no understatement to say that most environmental politics in the West for the past 20 years has been an outgrowth, good or bad, to the issues raised at that time. Utah's and Oregon's governors, on separate sides of the aisle, have developed a set of principles they dubbed, "Enlibra" that they've promoted in the WGA. Enlibra is a new regulatory regime whose ambit is reconciling economic growth and environmental protection, and we've gotten ecosystem services markets and community forestry alike, to name a few examples, out of it. As a prioritization tool rather than a data display tool, CHAT is straight out of the Enlibra playbook.

But here's what it all comes back to: I can't help but feeling that CHAT is like showing your opponent your hand in a game of cards. Of course, it's not like the Nevada Department of Wildlife or some other agency couldn't say, "psych!" and go back on their promise of little regulatory resistance: the map isn't immutable. That also means there's no reason they couldn't go back on their promise of heavy regulatory resistance. The map is a curious legal entity. There's no mandate for all western states to make it: it doesn't have to exist or be used. But it sort of justifies its own existence. All I mean is that by putting the map - described as a "pro-development tool" by the Nevada Department of Wildlife - out there into the world, it's going to be hard to take it back. Developers, regulators, and even the Center for Biological Diversity like it, and that gives it a ton of legitimacy that goes beyond its ambiguous legal status. 

All the cards are on the table now in the West. It's not clear yet whether that's a good thing. It'll probably make regulators' lives easier, for one. There's also certainly a power in being the one to set the terms of engagement. Either way, maps like CHAT are going to play an important role in the making of the relationship between states, nature, and capital in the near term. Just take a look at the interactive maps the Coastal Resilience Network has set up that allows users to choose how important different economic and ecological variables are to determining great places to do restoration. It's not a regulatory map (yet), but you can imagine some of the opportunities that it would afford regulators. It'd make it easier for them to say, for instance, hey, we made the map based on how users (citizens?), not us, weighted restoration priorities. It's not our fault...Stay tuned for more.

Who didn't start the fire? Some difficulties in (sage grouse) conservation

Apologies for another title with an 80s musical reference. 2012 has been one of the hottest and driest on record and that has meant "wild" fires. While national attention was drawn to Colorado's blazes, I've been more drawn to reports on Oregon's largest wildfire in 150 years. This Oregonian article in particular does a great job of spelling out the politics of the fire. Was it the ranchers, the BLM, or the weather that started it? I'm not sure, but I think the consequences of the fire are intriguing.

That's because the fire has put the sage grouse at risk by burning a large chunk of prime habitat - and that matters because the sage grouse is a keystone species for emerging forms of conservation. The sage grouse is a big and beautiful bird that lives in the western United States and depends on sagebrush for habitat. The decline of the grouse, it seems, has a lot to do with habitat fragmentation cause by new energy development in the West: wind turbines, transmission lines, oil drilling, and mines. The bird does neat things like group mating calls. The grouse and its ways have been at the center of scientific-legal scandal. In 2004 the Bush administration decided it didn't need any protection, but a more recent court ruling, in 2010, noted that the decision-making proccess in that case was faulty. FWS has replied that listing the species is still "warranted" but also thinks that there are bigger fish to fry, er save, at least until 2015 when it will reconsider listing.

So the sage grouse is instead now implicated in an assortment of "new" conservation efforts that aim to pre-empt regulatory burdens in the first place. In part, these efforts stem from the fact that the bird is still a candidate species and not actually listed. In 2010, the same year Interior/FWS called for protecting, but not listing, the bird, NRCS jumped in and created the Sage Grouse Initiative, seeking to do "wildlife conservation through sustainable agriculture." SGI's voluntary approach - via conservation easements and Conservation Innovation Grants - is key. According to SGI itself, it represents an "excellent example of how NRCS is orchestrating a paradigm shift in recovery for at-risk species. Instead of regulatory burdens, the Initiative takes a voluntary approach that benefits agriculture and sage grouse – along with a suite of other wildlife species too, from pronghorn to mule deer." SGI works with ranchers to help them do things like: change grazing patterns, move fences, and remove invasives (junipers) that benefit sage grouse habitat. The hope is that the bird ultimately won't have to be listed and that rancher income can be buffered at the same time.

I'll argue that the other reason why the grouse is a model for new conservation is because of the scale of its habitat and the species's extensive range. The Willamette Partnership has thought long and hard about scaling-up habitat conservation. Along these lines, it's developed a metric for sage grouse/sagebrush, with the idea, I think, that it could be portable to any context where one might want to save sage grouse habitat. It would be much harder for a more localized endangered species like the red-bearded Jackson County lark (fictional bird) or even the fairy shrimp (real!) to get this kind of energy behind it.

Here's what I'm bringing the bird back to: I wonder what the fire can tell us about "new" conservation. For right now, I'll answer with a question: how do conservationists, agencies, ranchers, etc. account for the dynamics of ecosystems within a regulatory, or better yet, a "pre" regulatory ESA? The question certainly goes beyond assessing future climate change, though the uneven effects of climate change, like drought and fire, are undoubtedly a huge source of project risk. I think there are two specific, but interrelated kinds of questions to be asking here: how do you effectively make sage grouse habitat into a credit or unit of sale/funding and what are the rules governing the life of this mitigation credit or best management practice or whatever. I'll start with the latter question. If a rancher signs up to protect the sage grouse, but then a fire comes along and destroys the protected habitat, what do you do as a regulator? What's the rule? Hold the rancher responsible? And what if the rancher had already sold credits to a developer making an impact elsewhere? Is the developer responsible (they would be in TMDL mitigation, but not 404)? In the end, part of the answer is: well whose fault was it anyway? But as the Long Draw fire shows, that's not an easy question to answer.

There's more than a question of liability here too. How do you create a non-linear or a non-equilibrium currency, one that accredits changes in ecosystem states over time? Or do you? As a regulator you probably want verifiable results of sage grouse protection, preferably with a 5-10 year timespan because you are operating within a legal climate that calls for the bird's protection. So you might prefer a set of performance standards that asks for no fire on the conservation site. That sort of conservation might not look like the kind The Society for Sage (fictional) might ask for. That group might say, well fire is a regular component of the sage ecosystem. A rancher might then reply, how can I be certain that fire is going to give me all the sagebrush I need to sell credits?

That's a completely fictional conversation, but a Willamette Partnership report on biodiversity markets raises several of the questions I've asked here. What's clear is that there's going to have to be some sort of balance between what works for sage grouse/sagebrush and what works for regulators and what works for conservationists and what works for ranchers and the politics of that tradeoff will be interesting to watch as climate change burns on all around us.