Ideas in Development

Environmentalists, such as The Nature Conservancy, remind me of advocates for health research.  To them, no commitment of dollars was ever enough.  Research was needed on a multitude of topics.  The researchers were hopeless when it came to prioritizing their choices.  Similarly, TNC wanted to save every species.  This is not a reasonable position and certainly not a useful one for a politician.  You needed something more to persuade those people that believed, in a specific case, this development project was more important than conserving this piece of property.¹

Secondly, the Conservancy had to find effective strategies for working with “local communities to protect entire ecosystems, not just isolated islands of biodiversity.”

TNC’s three Jedi set the precedent on both.  Greg, Bill, John and other TNC staff created an analytic tool that others could use to rank an area and to craft a conservation plan.  It became known as the “Five Ss”:

• Systems - a clear definition of an ecological unit that passes a biological test
• Stresses - the threats, such as pollution, shrinking of wildlife habitat into smaller unviable areas, etc.
• Sources - causes as agricultural runoff, homebuilding to close to nesting area
• Strategies - responses to “sources,” such as zoning, shutting down a polluting factory, etc.
• Success - goals and milestones

The next step was listing all the sources (e.g., residential development, detrimental logging practices, fire suppression) and all the stresses (e.g., habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, displacement of native species by exotics, degradation of water quality) into a matrix.  TNC staff then ranked these stresses by magnitude from very high to low.  Strategy development and benchmarking soon followed.

Greg took this methodology “on the road,” sold TNC staff on it and watched as numerous state chapters, preserves and land trusts used it to map strategy and set real priorities.

CFED then developed a complimentary economic and social health assessment, collected additional environmental data and presented them in an all-day planning session, involving 100-plus Eastern Shore residents.  We organized and facilitated the session with input from an advisory committee.  A new organization was created—the     Northampton Economic Forum—to act on the summit’s recommendations.  Four committees were formed to author action plans that would follow a template devised and counseled by CFED.  Also, during the strategy summit, the residents adopted a vision statement and a number of value premises.

The vision is well captured in the final wording.  The Forum’s slogan was “achieving a new kind of progress.”  Progress, in their definition, included

• Building a prosperous, diverse and self-reliant economy that provides good jobs for all citizens.
• Preserving the globally-significant natural resources, character, history and culture, and quality of life that are Northampton’s special strengths.
• Improving the lives of all citizens with good homes, schools and services.
• Creating a world model community.

The effort was successful.  The Forum identified about 25 options and implemented most of them, either by themselves or with other community partners. The options included running a leadership development program, piloting Eastern Shore “Experience” tourism packages, launching a county wide beautification effort, holding regular “job fairs,” hiring economic development staff at the county level, and, in the TNC program run by John Hall on the Virginia Coast Reserve, , conducting additional business venture and sector research on the region and others.

This approach, with CFED’s help, was also executed in the Clinch River region of Virginia, the ACE Basin of South Carolina, and the Les Cheneux Islands of Michigan.  None of these were as successful as the Eastern Shore project, but all passed the tests of making some good actions happen and increasing the citizenry’s understanding of the environmental, social, and economic problems of their communities and of methods of solving them in more environmentally compatible ways.

Over time, other projects were planned and then took form.  TNC paid for designing and helping to raise money for low-income housing.  It also funded a number of planning charrettes for some of the Eastern Shore’s villages and small settlements.

A local African-American doctor was so inspired that he gave up his practice and formed a community development corporation.

As a whole, community development projects such as leadership development training and affordable housing renovation and building, along with improved marketing of the area to eco- and heritage tourists, went well.  But the endeavor struggled with business development.

TNC and CFED raised federal money for authoring a resource book, Building Healthy Communities: Resources for Compatible Development.  Greg, after more work was done at other sites, put together an overview booklet on practicing sustainable development in rural areas of the U.S. He also compiled a comprehensive planning guide, based on CFED’s facilitation processes, data analytics and the on-site TNC work in the pioneering communities. 

Greg and Bill also established a TNC subsidiary, the Center for Compatible Development.  They ran training workshops and aided a number of communities in Virginia to use their development strategizing and implementing methods.

They accomplished a lot, especially on the Eastern Shore.  Other creative ideas were pursued, such as doing environmentally compatible residential development (they built an initial show-house), moving a Coast Guard Station from an island where it was deteriorating to the mainland to become a museum, and reaching out to the African-American community and getting them more connected to the natural assets of the region.

But the Jedi were not satisfied.  They were not resting on their laurels.  They believed that they had to demonstrate real environmentally compatible job creation on the Shore.

Look for Part 3 on Friday