Ground Shift or Power Shift: Is a Ground Shift in the environmental movement a good idea, or not? (Part I of III)

A three-part series examining the network of power behind the Ground Shift initiative—and the records of the officials now positioned to shape conservation’s future.

Photo by Jenn Buxton on Unsplash

Every day the news grows more dystopian – civilians being killed and neighbors getting disappeared, child sexual abuse normalized and dismissed, expanding corporate capture of our institutions, and international diplomacy devolving into imperialist bullying. Every day, my colleagues and I try to reconcile these horrors with the recognition that the ongoing dismantling of environmental conservation still matters, and that our work to protect and restore ecological communities is still important. Our collective work to make things right with the land, with the plants and animals, and with Indigenous people are essential parts of the big picture of the changes we want to see in the world.

And then, you read another story that feels at first like a bad joke and then like a gut punch, which is that several industry lobbyists and former administration officials are teaming up to encourage “fresh thinking” about conservation. The effort, called “Ground Shift,” was announced Tuesday and includes a parade of participants that range from Mark Rey to Lynn Scarlett – architects of forest destruction and gray wolf delisting, respectively – to Brian Yablonski, prominent promoter of a deregulation consortium. These problematic thinkers are joined by former BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning, one of the architects of a mostly disappointing Biden conservation legacy. It’s a cast of characters that doesn’t necessarily inspire optimism for the future of our planet.

While many of us agree that we’re really in need of new solutions to the worsening climate and biodiversity crises, it feels like the players at Ground Shift are just recycling their bad ideas from the last couple of decades. It only feels “fresh” insofar as it still stinks. Both Scarlett and Rey, in particular, deserve a closer look, which we will dive into in Part II and III.

Prominent among the Ground Shift initiative’s advisory group members is Brian Yablonski, the CEO of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). His essay is one of the featured articles on the Ground Shift website, advocating that conservation move on from what he calls the “Regulatory Era —where laws and geographic designations provide enforceable protection for lands and wildlife—to “grander collaborative-based approaches,” a shift from federal authority to local control, and “more market-based incentives instead of regulation.”

Even as Ammon Bundy was leading the armed insurrection at Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, PERC sympathized with the insurrectionists, and proposed, “Western ranchers, loggers, farmers and, yes, even government bureaucrats with their feet on the ground could provide the stewardship sought by the rebels in Oregon.” The organization is still promoting this position on their website. PERC also advocates for what it calls “Free Market Environmentalism,” in which protections or conservation initiatives are undertaken only when the economic benefits outweigh the economic costs. The problem is that reducing nature to a ledger balance, and then prescribing conservation only where it makes economic sense, commodifies the natural world and rivets human uses and preferences to the center of the issue, instead of creating guardrails that limit our greed and monetary ambitions — which, after all, are the reason environmental movements and regulations are so necessary in the first place. PERC also pushed outcomes-based grazing, a scheme to remove environmental regulations in exchange for voluntary conservation efforts and rancher self-management, a concept with no scientific support.

But as misguided as PERC might be on federal public lands, Yablonski and PERC stuck up for American Prairie Reserve when they proposed to use public and private lands for bison rewilding on the High Plains of Montana. Private-property ownership, it turns out, is PERC’s defining criterion to determine who should get special privileges; the public’s interest would take a back seat as private interests take over management of the public lands, in their vision.

The Wilderness Society is at the center of the initiative, providing the funding and having multiple representatives at the heart of the project: Chase Huntley, as staff, and Tracy Stone-Manning, its Executive Director (and former BLM Director under the Biden administration) and Governing Council Members Jim Enote and Theodore Roosevelt IV on the initiative’s Advisory Council. The initiative’s other staff member is Matt Lee-Ashley, a longtime Senior Fellow with Center for American Progress, a conservation and politics-oriented think tank also represented by John Podesta, CAP’s chairman of the board (and former advisor to Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden). Other green groups name-checked in the bios of initiative members include the Pew Charitable Trusts, The Nature Conservancy, and Conservation Lands Foundation. To the initiative’s credit, leaders from one Black and one Indigenous conservation group are counted among the number. The conservationists—and the groups—lean heavily toward those that engage in political compromise, triangulation, and working within the imaginary netherspace of “political realities.”

In DC inside politics, there is the well-known phenomenon of the “revolving door” between advocacy groups—green groups more commonly with Democratic administrations, industry lobby groups more commonly in Republican ones—and politically appointed positions to helm the agencies that manage the nation’s public lands and oversee our wildlife.

Here’s an example. Robert Bonnie, now serving on the Board of PERC (one of the Ground Shift participant groups), was a senior advisor to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (who oversaw the Forest Service) before becoming the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment under the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. Before that, he was Vice President for Land Conservation at Environmental Defense Fund. In 2021, Bonnie was nominated to become the USDA Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation by Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, now in another term under the Biden administration. And around and around it goes.

This tight-knit interrelationship between the lobbyists and the agency leaders being lobbied leads to the almost-absurd result that government officials infiltrate environmental advocacy groups and get to determine what they do—and don’t—ask for as conservation policy positions. If there’s a single common thread to the “ideas hub” that is about to get underway, it’s the heavy representation of conservation (and industry) advocates who have been through the revolving door and blur the lines between public interest, corporate interest, and political administrations. This leads the new idea hub to revolve around that central question so beloved by both the political class and the agency bureaucrats: Can’t we all just get along?

The problem is, going along to get along leads us all along the garden path to arrive at the maximum exploitation of the environment by the most politically powerful vested interests. Say nothing, do nothing, and the American public and its interests are easily marginalized and swept under the carpet. It’s the very problem that environmentalism, conservation, and the laws that protect public lands and wildlife—from the Wilderness Act to the Endangered Species Act to the National Environmental Policy Act—were established to solve.

According to the initiative’s own website, “We need big ideas and a bold vision that get us more —not less—of what people need from our public lands and waters: more parks, more clean water and clean air, more abundant wildlife, more energy and basic materials, more collaboration with Tribal Nations in stewarding their ancestral homelands, more of our forests and rivers restored to health; and a more equitable distribution of nature’s benefits. Solutions that are good for our land, water, and people.” Sounds an awful lot like the “abundance” rhetoric of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. It’s a shift to the right, a sort of trickle-down economics wrapped in the language of conservation.

Some ideas presented in the Ground Shift rollout are new, some are old; some will advance conservation, others undermine it. Separating the wheat from the chaff will be critical. How that happens, and who renders those judgments, will be important.

Tracy Stone-Manning presents some viable concepts that are new, or at least novel, and might be helpful. Reorganizing federal departments so the lands and wildlife agencies are all under one roof makes some sense. Prioritizing human-powered public recreation over industrial extraction is long overdue. Giving the land a rest from livestock grazing when ranches change hands definitely should be on the table.

But perhaps framing the debate from a goal of finding common ground misses the mark. Entrenched, profit-driven interests take more than their share, and their footprint should be scaled back whether they agree to it or not. Native species have science-based habitat requirements, and negotiating a political agreement among stakeholders that doesn’t satisfy their biological needs will never be anything but failure. The real goal should be healthy native ecosystems and high-quality public recreation, foremost, with other uses—and users—taking a back seat with their private-profit agendas.

John Podesta’s observation is accurate that the twin anvils of economic growth and expanding human population place increasing pressures on rare plants and wildlife, resulting in more species on the Endangered Species list, not fewer. But the problem isn’t excessive restrictions, so loosening wildlife and habitat protections in exchange for voluntary conservation measures is a losing proposition. What we need is a both/and approach, in which regulatory protections remain—strengthened through diligent enforcement—with more funding and voluntary measures targeting faster population recovery and improved habitat quality. And raising the need to ease climate problems through renewable energy development without pressing for that development to happen on rooftops and shading parking lots is a breathtaking missed opportunity. Still, Stone-Manning’s proposed addition of an “at risk” category for rare species to spur conservation well in advance, rather than waiting for a crisis, is worthy of implementation.

The initiative asserts on its website that to “drive the ground-breaking ideas that will shape the next century for our public lands and waters, we need to encourage risk-taking, invest in cutting-edge thinking, and leverage expertise and creativity across the political spectrum, across geographies, and across stakeholder groups.” Remember that Robert Bonnie, the PERC board member with the USDA political appointments in multiple presidential administrations? He gave a lecture at the University of Wyoming in April of 2019, titled “Beyond Confrontation and Regulation: Towards a New Conservation Paradigm.” Sounds a lot like this Ground Shift messaging.

In 2003, Vanity Fair reported on the “new idea” policies of the George W. Bush administration. “Rigid rules— which is to say the body of environmental regulations adopted in the U.S. over the last 33 years, starting with the Clean Air Act of 1970—are out of fashion,” the magazine reported. “Partnership is in.” As it turns out, the “new ideas” in the rollout of this new idea hub sound a whole lot like a rebranding of ideas that stoked the environmental disaster of the George W. Bush administration.

Is it time to draw up a roadmap for the next 100 years of conservation? Always. But who gets to write it matters. The track record of this particular constellation of power brokers suggests that what is being marketed as a ground shift may be something closer to a rebranding of the same ideas that weakened environmental law, fast-tracked extraction, and called it collaboration.

Before we decide whether this is the future of conservation, it’s worth looking closely at the people being asked to design it. In the next two installments, we’ll examine the records of two of Ground Shift’s central figures—Mark Rey and Lynn Scarlett—and the policies that made their reputations.

Erik Molvar is the executive director of Western Watersheds Project.