The real action at a conference in Boise last week that focused on sage grouse and fire was taking place in side conversations in the halls, over coffee and at dinner.
People such as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, Assistant Interior Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Janice Schneider and Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze met with officials from the 11 states with sage grouse habitat whose economies would be hit by a listing that could limit grazing and residential and energy development.
The states are developing their own plans to protect sage grouse habitat.
Ashe told Keith Ridler of The Associated Press he was optimistic: "Every time we come together, we see more evidence that there is outstanding conservation going on."
I'd be skeptical if I weren't talking to the state BLM directors, the Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and the scientists whose work has documented the decline of the habitat due to the spread of cheatgrass and the explosion of road-building and energy development in the early 2000s. All the parties seem to genuinely be working together.
I heard similar rhetoric in the 1980s, when political appointees in the Reagan administration were doing everything they could to clamp down the spotted owl scientists at the same time they were cutting old-growth forests at a record pace. Soon after George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, and after losing in court, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director John Turner protected the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act.
The owl listing touched off a political explosion that didn't end until President Bill Clinton spent a day in Portland laying the groundwork for a plan that could pass legal muster in 1993.
I was there, and it was an incredible scene as Clinton deftly grilled timber executives and environmentalists about what was needed. Jim Lyons, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary of forests and conservation, was also there. His job was to put together what became known as the Northwest Forest Plan.
He was in Boise last week, as he has been often in the past year, serving as a counselor to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and helping her agencies avoid the mistakes of the past. The Boise conference shared some features of Clinton's summit.
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