Ecotrust Forest Management named to “Best for Environment” list

May 292013
 

Today, Ecotrust Forest Management was named “Best for the Environment” as one of the top performers among B Corporations worldwide. Sixty-three companies across 30 industries and 11 countries were recognized by the nonprofit B Lab, with the release of the B Corp “Best for the Environment List”, a second installment in its B Corp “Best for the World” series.

Ecotrust Forest Management manages 13,000 acres of Oregon and Washington forestland to deliver timber, wildlife habitat, clean water, carbon sequestration and local jobs.

Ecotrust Forest Management manages 13,000 acres of Oregon and Washington forestland to deliver timber, wildlife habitat, clean water, carbon sequestration and local jobs.

Ecotrust Forest Management is an Ecotrust subsidiary that  manages 13,000 acres of Northwest forestland on behalf of investors and forestland owners to enhance forest health and productivity, and to produce a diverse array of forest products and services including timber, biomass, carbon, and improved habitat and water quality.

EFM seeks to capture a wide array of funding sources — New Markets Tax Credits, carbon credits, conservation easements, and restoration funding — to supplement private capital resources in the acquisition and management of forestland. The company also strives to create reliable jobs for local residents and opportunities for local communities.

“With so many companies marketing themselves as ‘green’, it’s important to honor those walking the talk,” said Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab, the nonprofit organization that certifies B Corporations and governs the B Impact Assessment. “Ecotrust Forest Management has proven they’re the best of the best by meeting rigorous, comprehensive third party standards consumers can trust.”

Method Products, New Belgium Brewing Company, Patagonia and Seventh Generation were also recognized as leaders in environmental performance. Other honorees include Mas Ambiente, an Argentinian company producing handmade soap from used cooking and frying oil, Namaste Solar, an employee-owned, solar energy cooperative and New Leaf Paper, a developer and distributor of environmentally-responsible paper products. The ‘B Corp Best for the Environment’ companies come from over 30 different industries and 11 countries. 30% of honorees are based outside the US, with 8 companies operating in emerging markets.

The ‘B Corp Best for the Environment List’ honors businesses that earned an overall score in the top 10% of all Certified B Corporations for their positive environmental impact, as measured by the B Impact Assessment, a comprehensive assessment used by more than 8,000 businesses to measure their impact on their workers, community, and the environment. This analysis includes metrics regarding their environmentally preferable products, services, and practices, such as their materials, waste, water, and energy inputs/outputs and the environmental impact of their offices, plants, land, suppliers and transportation.

Each honored company is a Certified B Corporation, a new type of company that uses the power of business for good and meets rigorous standards of overall social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Today there are nearly 750 Certified B Corporations across 60 industries and 25 countries, unified by the common goal to redefine success in business.

In April, B Lab recognized Ecotrust Forest Management and 66 other companies as ‘Best for the World’ (overall impact). B Lab will release separate lists recognizing companies as ‘Best for the Community’ (community impact) in July and ‘Best for Workers’ (employee impact) in September.

B Lab is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.  B Lab drives systemic change through several interrelated initiatives: 1) building a community of Certified B Corporations to make it easier for all of us to tell the difference between “good companies” and just good marketing; 2) promoting benefit corporation legislation to create a new corporate form that meets higher standards of purpose, accountability and transparency; 3) driving capital to high impact investments through use of B Lab’s GIIRS Ratings & Analytics platform; and 4) helping all companies measure what matters through use of the B Impact Assessment, B Lab’s free educational tool for measuring and improving a company’s impact on it’s workers, community, and the environment.   Learn more at bcorporation.net,benefitcorp.net, andgiirs.org.

Beavers: Nature’s first river restoration engineers

May 242013
 

Beavers have been enlisted in restoration efforts in Methow Valley, Washington. Photo courtesy of NOAA.

By Lauren Senkyr

Once numbering up to 400 million in North America, beavers were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century.  While it has long been known that their fur makes excellent clothing and top hats, the role of beavers in maintaining healthy river ecosystems was less well understood until recently.

The Methow Beaver Project is an excellent example of how beavers are now being used to enhance stream habitat to benefit endangered salmon and threatened steelhead trout in the Pacific Northwest.  Funded in part by the Ecotrust-led Whole Watershed Restoration Initiative, the project is restoring wetland and riparian habitat by relocating nuisance beavers to creeks within the Methow watershed in the Upper Columbia River Basin in Eastern Washington.

Beavers have been enlisted in restoration efforts in Methow Valley, Washington. Photo courtesy of NOAA.

Beavers have been enlisted in restoration efforts in Methow Valley, Washington. Ecotrust photo by Cameron Harrison.

Sometimes the fact that beavers dam up water, cut down trees, and flood riverbanks is seen as a problem.  Not everyone wants busy beavers in their backyard!  But these same activities that beavers do so well are exactly what river restoration professionals have been trying to emulate for decades to improve habitat for Pacific salmon species, which co-evolved with beavers over millenia.  Adding wood to streams, creating backwatered areas, and reconnecting a stream with its floodplain are frequently the very same objectives of river restoration projects.  For this reason, beaver reintroduction is identified as a priority action in the multi-agency Upper Columbia Spring Chinook Salmon and Steelhead Recovery Plan. The Methow Beaver Project is relocating beavers from places where they are seen as a problem, and moving them to places where they can be part of the solution to salmon recovery.

A video about the projects is below.

So far fourteen new beaver colonies have been established and an additional three are being monitored to determine their long-term viability. This ten-year project aims to establish 50 new beaver colonies within the Methow Watershed.  Since it began in 2008, the project’s success rate for establishing beaver colonies has increased by over 30% compared to other similar efforts in the Western United States.

The project has restored over 44 acres of wetland habitat at a fraction of the cost of typical construction-based restoration techniques.  Over time, the acres of restored habitat will continue to expand as the watershed processes created by beavers improve wetland, stream and riparian habitat both upstream and downstream of the relocation sites.  Over the long-term, it is expected that this project will result in over 1,000 acres of habitat improvement.

The project is led by the Methow Conservancy, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. The NOAA Restoration Center and the U.S. Forest Service provide financial support through the Whole Watershed Restoration Initiative.  Other project partners include Washington Department of Energy, Yakama Nation, Priest Rapids Coordinating Committee, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and many dedicated volunteers, private landowners, and local residents.

Lauren Senkyr is a habitat restoration specialist with NOAA’s Restoration Center in Portland, Oregon.

Building Cully Park: Social equity in America’s greenest city

Jan 082013
 

It is a sunny afternoon in northeast Portland, and I am walking through a 25-acre open field, scattering seeds. The Cascade Mountains and the Columbia Gorge rise up behind me; the sun streams through billowing clouds as chains of wild geese fly in a V formation across the sky. All around me, nearly a hundred other Portlanders walk, scattering the seeds of a mix of Willamette Valley wildflowers from the Bosky Dell native plant nursery.

Verde organizer Tony DeFalco at the future Cully Park.

Most are residents of the surrounding Cully neighborhood, gathered to commemorate the restoration of this field and its future use as a neighborhood park. Our seed-scattering is just one piece of an afternoon-long Cully Park Land Blessing Ceremony – including prayers, songs, dances, and speeches by members of the community.

As it stands, there’s not much to see here at the future Cully Park, soon to emerge on this former construction waste landfill and sand-and-gravel pit mine. But the Land Blessing Ceremony represents a watershed moment in a long, participatory process of ecological restoration and greenspace development. It’s a sign that a relatively invisible community in one of America’s model cities is finally coming into its own.

Restoration has become a household word here in Portland, which New York Times columnist and Oregon native son Nicholas Kristof has called America’s environmental laboratory. But it’s relatively new to the Cully neighborhood, one of the poorest and most diverse in Oregon. Until recently, living conditions in Cully have been closer to the seldom-mentioned underbelly coined the “Other Portland” – poor, underserved and disconnected to the strong central city and revitalized core neighborhoods, and the green economy that has grown up around both.

According to the Regional Equity Atlas of the Coalition for a Livable Future, Cully suffers from poverty, lack of open space, and lack of food access. Cully is also more racially and ethnically diverse than Portland as a whole: 44.7% of Cully residents are people of color, compared to the regional average of 20.2%. The neighborhood has undergone rapid demographic change in the last several years, with a large influx of Latino immigrants. Access to public and private-sector services has not kept pace with the rest of the city.

But thanks to a strong neighborhood association and a cluster of robust community development organizations, the Cully community is now reversing its fortune through its own initiative, bolstered by innovative partnerships with city agencies, private sector firms and nonprofits.

“The energy is powerful,” relates community organizer Tony DeFalco of local social venture organization Verde. “People are fired up. Finally, something’s happening here.”

First guests: Geese have already taken to the Cully Park site.

Through collaborative efforts to develop the park, improve the local housing stock, and rezone the commercial corridor for walkability and access to services, the neighborhood’s residents are creating opportunities for themselves, and expanding the definition of a green city by making sure social equity, fairness and community participation are part of the mix.

The Living Cully Ecodistrict brings together a group of community partners including Verde, NAYA, the Native American Youth and Family Center, whose Portland headquarters are located right here in the Cully neighborhood, and Hacienda, a local community development corporation (CDC) that provides affordable housing, small business services, and family support. Housing redevelopment, ecological restoration, green street improvements, and more open space acquisition are equally important items on the neighborhood agenda. With schoolchildren, homeless residents, and other community groups actively planning, restoring and building new spaces in the neighborhood, landscape architect Randolph Hester would call this process ecological democracy — participatory urban design that nourishes both people and place.

A veteran of the environmental movement who’s worked in marine conservation and land trust sectors, DeFalco has teamed with his colleagues at Verde, who run landscaping, energy retrofitting and nursery operations — all in the name of bringing economic opportunity and environmental justice to the neighborhood. Yet, to build upon this sense of community will require anticipating and responding to challenges. As Cully grows more attractive, gentrification will loom large on the horizon, as recent patterns of displacement in Portland attest.

Anticipating the threat, DeFalco and his colleagues have built local contracting, hiring and business development into the bedrock of their strategy; as the amenities multiply, so will jobs and incomes. “We need to own the park,” he asserts. “If there’s restoration, we want to put local people to work doing that. If there’s a new community center, we want to build it.”

Verde and partners are now setting their sights on a recent golf course purchase by the Trust for Public Land at the edge of the neighborhood. If some of the 100-plus acres become public space, Cully could suddenly become a park-rich community. And local residents could find opportunities for employment and small business development through restoration and other green building contracts as part of the site transformation. It’s all part of evolving shape of green in places like the Other Portland. “This is where the action is now,” says DeFalco.

Restoration=Jobs

Aug 312012
 

While the presidential contenders argue about where the jobs of the future will come from, there’s no debate about this: watershed restoration and similar activities throughout Oregon are creating serious employment and economic growth right now.  In a new study, Ecotrust has found that restoration projects in the state generated $977.5 million in economic activity and as many as 6,483 jobs between 2001 and 2010.

A Northwest road being decommissioned. Courtesy Bengt Coffin, USFS.

Much of the activity has come in rural communities that are in the midst of a long-term employment crisis, with measured unemployment rates up to twice the national average. This ongoing employment crisis has undermined local tax bases, leading to the collapse of vital public services and infrastructure. The lack of local opportunities, and the resulting brain and youth drain to urban centers, threatens to unravel the social and cultural fabric that has defined many rural communities for generations.

“Restoration can drive economic development and job creation, particularly in rural communities that have suffered from persistently high unemployment rates,” says Spencer B. Beebe, president and founder of Ecotrust. “And, unlike in many other sectors of our economy, restoration jobs can’t be outsourced to far-off places.”

The investments in restoration have created jobs for construction workers, landscapers, heavy equipment operators, and technical experts such as engineers and wildlife biologists. And the projects also create demand for local businesses, such as plant nurseries, quarries, and others.

Restoring habitat also benefits the economy in the long term. Habitat improvements intended to bolster fish runs promise to increase sport and commercial fishing opportunities in the coming years — already big business in Oregon. So investments in ecosystem restoration can be seen as the first steps in the evolution of a new natural resource economy.

“Habitat restoration jobs pay dividends twice, first in creating good, local jobs immediately, and then, for many decades to come, through increased benefits from fisheries, tourism and resiliency for coastal communities,” said Eric Schwaab, assistant administrator for fisheries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA provides technical expertise and funding to restore coastal, marine, and migratory fish habitat in Oregon and around the nation.

Bob Carlin Sr. and son, Bob Jr., take a break from restoration work on Sucker Creek in Southern Oregon. Photo:Sam Beebe, Ecotrust.

A recent national study published in Marine Policy analyzing job creation and other economic impacts from NOAA restoration projects found that an average of 17 jobs were created for $1 million invested. That rate of job creation is significantly higher than other industries, including coal, natural gas, or road and bridge construction.

Congressman Earl Blumenhauer, who represents Oregon’s 3rd district and recently introduced HR 6249, the “Water Protection and Reinvestment Act,” a bill that calls for investment in clean water infrastructure across the nation, commented: “For too long, we have treated our rivers and waterways like machines to the detriment of water quality and quantity. Investing in restoration not only improves habitat for fish and wildlife, it creates jobs and bring much needed revenue to local communities. Oregon has tremendous opportunities for restoration that can serve as a model for the rest of the nation.”

A recent University of Oregon report found that an average of 90 cents of every dollar spent on restoration stays in the state, and 80 cents of every dollar spent stays in the county where a project is located. For example, of the nearly $400,000 invested to restore Little Butte Creek in Southern Oregon from 2009–2011, 72 percent was spent in Jackson County, and 97 percent was expended in Oregon. Over half of those dollars went to salaries that directly benefit Oregonians.

Mike Herrick, Owner of Aquatic Contracting said, “Over the last 10 years, restoration projects have allowed us to provide a sustainable living for our employees. They can use their skills in construction and feel good about what they are doing. We have grown from just a couple of employees to as many as 20. Without restoration funding, we would not be able to provide these opportunities and support the local economies where we work.”

Partnering with nature: How one city’s growth could be greened

May 012012
 

Human life depends on the services provided by healthy ecosystems. As described in the UN-backed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, these services include the provisioning of resources such as food, fiber, and raw materials; regulating services such as water filtration, storm buffering, and climate stabilization; supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and pollination; and cultural services that are spiritual, aesthetic, and recreational.

Human activities can impede ecosystem functions, thereby reducing flows of services. For instance, impervious pavement impairs watershed function, thereby diminishing services such as fish abundance. Prioritizing for production or harvest of a single commodity, such as food or fiber, can diminish other services in that same ecosystem, such as erosion prevention or soil formation, as well as undermine overall ecosystem resilience.

NCC bioswale

In working with nature in cities, stormwater filtration from bioswales is only the beginning.

Approaches to working with nature, however, can enable, rehabilitate, and restore ecosystem functions. Designs for on-site stormwater interception and infiltration can effectively reduce the imperviousness of built environments. Food production techniques can maintain or improve yields while bolstering species richness and abundance, enhancing soil fertility, and increasing carbon sequestration. In the Pacific Northwest, restorative forestry can effectively provide timber harvests while supporting other ecosystem services.

Practices and frameworks for working with nature to improve ecosystem functions, increase flows of services, and bolster the resilience of coupled human-natural systems include permaculture, agroecology, ecological forest management, ecological design, and green infrastructure.

Recently, Ecotrust looked at how the Portland Metro area could better utilize ecosystem services. In an urbanizing world, there are huge potential economic, social and environmental benefits to investing in ecosystem services in or near metropolises. While much research has been devoted to economic valuations of un-priced ecosystem services, cities and regions are in the early stages of incorporating these values into planning.

Ecotrust’s own experiences with ecosystem service projects and valuations, including the development of spatial and economic analyses for marine planning deliberations, lead us to seek to better understand these types of research questions and public engagement processes.

For Portland, we developed a set of scenarios to explore the potential for meeting social goals through management for ecosystem services across the greater region. We focused on three services of significance to the rural-urban context: carbon sequestration, stormwater interception, and food production. Our questions were:

  •  What percentage of the region’s climate change commitments could be met through biological sequestration — trees and other plant matter?
  • What percentage of the city’s stormwater management commitments could be met via green infrastructure?
  • What percentage of the region’s food needs could be satisfied with regional production?

For carbon sequestration, we examined current carbon storage and new sequestration potential in stream-side riparian buffers in The Intertwine Alliance’s regional parks and open spaces, as well as new sequestration potential in the urban forest canopy within the city of Portland.

For stormwater interception and infiltration, we examined the additional potential for tree planting in the urban tree canopy at the scale of City of Portland combined sewer system (which covers about one-third of the city), leaving aside for the moment additional potential of other public and private management options such as bioswales, ecoroofs, downspout disconnections, and rain gardens.

For food production, we looked at the landscape potential to satisfy regional needs from agricultural production lands in the tri-county Clackamas, Multnomah, Washington area, without considering the potential of community gardens or other production within urban areas. Nor did we consider the availability of farming inputs.

Based on plausible scenarios for working with nature, we developed the following estimates:

New carbon sequestration in the region’s riparian areas and urban forests could sequester 485,472 metric tons of CO2 per year by 2050, meeting 2.1 percent of Oregon’s greenhouse gas reduction targets on a current per capita basis. Stormwater interception by new urban forest canopy could meet 6.3 percent to 14.8 percent of city’s projected infrastructural needs by 2040. We found no specific targets for regional food production to satisfy regional demand, but based on a preliminary analysis of landscape suitability, we estimated that the region could supply current regional consumption for most crop categories, with the exception of meat products.

The full report, Partners with Nature, lays out our assumptions and conclusions in more detail.

By definition, our findings are partial and exploratory, and this exercise is as much about framing questions as it is about arriving at quantitative estimates. Each of these scenarios could be re-considered within a participatory or planning context, under differing assumptions or more detailed projections for climate, population, and other anticipated changes. We consider this report an invitation to more in-depth, place-based scenario development that supports shared goals, practices for working with nature and resilience building, in Portland and across the globe.

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