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.”

At the Natural Capital Center: The new faces of food

May 222012
 

Douglas Gayeton’s zeitgeisty, alluring photographic compositions of unconventional farmers from all over the country are hanging in the Natural Capital Center.

But he has no idea.

Or at least, he didn’t, until we contacted him last week to find out more about the show, “The Lexicon of Sustainability,” which he co-created with his wife, Laura Howard-Gayeton.  Turns out that anybody across the country can apply to curate this pop-up show; once they receive the two dozen high-resolution photos, they hang them wherever they choose. “People are more plugged into communities than we are and have a much bigger reach than we would,” Gayeton, 52, says. Shows started over a year ago. Our local exhibit came by way of Nana Cardoon, a local garden-based learning center, which has been moving the show all over the region.

That’s the nature of this project, which is designed to be accessible to wide audiences, while tackling terms of art in the sustainability and progressive farming movements – from freighted words like “food miles” and “green collar” to lighter ones like “farm fairies.” Each photo has backstory written in the gaps and along the borders. In the end, it’s a humanizing project and one worth returning to several times. We already have.

Growing Power's aquaponics operation in Milwaukie, one of two dozen groups and places featured in Douglas Gayeton's and Laura Howard-Gayeton's photo project, "The Lexicon of Sustainability."

Q.This style first came together for your book on Tuscany [Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town]. How did it happen?

A.I was looking to do something different.  Photos are great but there’s no concept of time –it’s just a single moment. Whenever I looked at a photo I had more questions than answers. So I started writing on them and making composites. Some of the images in [Lexicon] are as many as 100 photos meshed together.

Q.This group featured in the show is a mix of kind of vanguard and old school farmers.

A.We said we’re only going to photograph people who defined sustainability and can express it in their own words. Who better to explain than the foremost practitioners of food and farming?

It’s a mix of famous people like Alice Waters and people you’ve never heard of. They’re urban and rural and people of different ethnicities. It’s really the face of sustainable farming. We’re trying to provide people with alternative viewpoint of farming. We can’t fix the food system if people don’t know what the basic terms of the system are.

Q.What’s the experience been like of watching this go viral, in a sense?

A.We didn’t know how it was going to be received when it started. Would people be willing to host their own shows?

Now, we’re finding that the hosts are becoming lending libraries – when the shows are done, they actually let others borrow them and show them.

Q.This project seems like it’s taking the halo off sustainability language?

A.How do you move people? Remove the barriers to language. We’re trying to do that. It’s a critical aspect of this whole sustainability movement — language that’s more inclusive and empowers people.

And because of this project, the next time you drive past farms and farmers markets, you’ll understand how that person working there is more connected to your life than you thought at first.

Q.But it’s still wonky stuff — can people dig into it?

A.We’ve always made the assumption that these ideas were over people’s heads. We learned that we’re just touching the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what people want to know. When people don’t know what you mean, they have an excuse to not get engaged. This project expresses things in personal and simple ways, so you’re creating an army of people around the country who are informed.

Q.There’s a neat succession in one of the pieces of a woman climbing around picking a tomato. What’s the story behind that?

A.If she’s just holding tomato you wouldn’t know she has to jump up and pick that.  That’s ability of this show – it allows you to show movement over time. That piece with Will Allen and his colleagues in Milwaukie was shot over six hours.  None of the people in it were shot at the same time.  It’s a photograph that shows a moment in time that never happened.

Q.What the most surprising thing that’s happened as result of the shows?

A.One of our subjects has worked hard on the issue of eating down the food chain. There was recently legislation introduced in California to protect targeted keystone species [those at the top of the food chain]. It shows what you can do when get people the right information in the right form. Policy makers want to be moved, too.

PBS is now showing three short films based on the Lexicon characters. Here is one on foraging.

Watch Forage on PBS. See more from The Lexicon of Sustainability.

Digging deeper on restoration jobs

May 182012
 

Traditional measurements of success in stream and river restoration, such as numbers of acres treated or stream miles improved, don’t tell the whole story.  While they’re valuable indicators of results from all the tree planting, culvert replacement, and stream channel opening that goes on in restoration, they don’t highlight the important socioeconomic impacts that these projects deliver in communities — especially rural ones where a few extra jobs go along way.

A restoration team replaces an undersized culvert on Battle Creek, in Oregon's John Day basin. Photo courtesy of Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

At the recent River Rally hosted in Portland, OR, we highlighted a new case study we conducted on restoration projects completed in the southern Oregon counties of Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson, and Josephine over the ten year period 2000-2009. In summary, we found that expenditures of approximately $54 million dollars likely contributed an estimated $97 million to $126 million of economic output and supported an estimated 616 to 865 jobs.

Previous studies in Oregon have shown that the majority of benefits from restoration occur locally, with approximately 80 cents of every dollar in project expenditures remaining within the county, and 90 cents out of every dollar of  expenditures remaining within the state of Oregon.

Oregon is fortunate to have significant funds going towards watershed restoration every year under the Oregon Plan and ballot measures that have appropriated lottery revenues to restoration activities resulting in hundreds of millions of state, federal, and private funds spent on restoration so far. And the University of Oregon Ecosystem Workforce Program has undertaken extensive work tracking Oregon’s restoration economy. They’ve found that each restoration investment of $1 million can support  19 jobs on average, and upwards of 24 jobs for labor intensive restoration work such as native planting and invasives eradication. And what’s more, other studies have found even more encouraging numbers, with employment effects of restoration investments well surpassing those observed for other sectors.

In this election year, you’ll hear plenty of job creation estimates of various sorts put on the table. In Oregon, at least, we’re finding the gains from restoration work are real.

Ecotrust has published both a summary and a longer analysis of restoration work in southern Oregon.

Generation Restoration

Apr 102012
 

Today’s young people are carrying on the work started by Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, the 1933 New Deal program that put young men back to work restoring our nation’s forests. Current programs, such as Northwest Youth Corps, now provide tens of thousands of young women and men with job skill training through reforestation, trail building, and habitat conservation work.

Public agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are coordinating across jurisdictions to restore habitat, and they depend in part upon these youth corps to do the hard work of cultivating native plants and fighting back invasive species. So youth corps’ work provides the heart and soul of restoration work — the on-the-ground sweat equity invested in more resilient forests, streams and salmon populations that will pay dividends for generations to come.

This video from the BLM shows youth corps and Ecotrust staff in action working on the recovery of endangered salmon and steelhead, including work on Ecotrust Forest Management land on Waldron Creek in Oregon’s Tillamook County.

Kate Carone is program coordinator for Ecotrust’s Whole Watershed Restoration Initiative.

The Future Patagonia National Park

Mar 232012
 

Landscape photograph of Patagonia National Park

Valle Chacabuco, Chile –Twenty years later, Doug and Kris Tompkins are still at it.

They are buying land, restoring farms and ranches, experimenting with organic agriculture, building extraordinary infrastructure and creating future national parks; over two million acres in Chile and Argentina and counting. It is a veritable Versailles of design-with-nature unlike anything, anywhere in the world, at any time in history.

The future of the planet depends in part on making the country a beautiful and rewarding place to live, Doug argues. The vast and growing numbers of people in cities supplied by an industrial system of energy, food, transportation and building is consuming one quarter to one third of Earth’s total photosynthetic capacity, destroying biodiversity, degrading critical life support systems and making many people both unhappy and unhealthy.

Douglas Tompkins, founder of The Conservation Land Trust

Doug Tompkins

Which is certainly true; we know our current path is headed over the brink. Whether solutions are found in city or country is less clear; Presumably, they will arise from both.

But Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation, describes nature’s way of inventing fresh ideas by “connecting not protecting.” Many of the ideas necessary to reverse the overwhelming pattern of degradation come from people in dense urban populations, the place from which Doug himself derives. The number of patents in a city grows geometrically as the population increases. Homo sapiens is most often a social animal. Good land use clearly needs to arise from the myriad and careful interactions of people who live on and by the land, but it would certainly help if we could enhance mutually reinforcing encouragement from the city.

Life in the country for many billions has been and remains today short, brutish and ever so limiting, especially for women who often have little choice but to marry young and bear children early. We need what Doug and Kris call “conservation as a consequence of production,” profitable ranches and farms and forests that are self-sustaining and job-creating/maintaining, while improving environmental conditions.

Kristine Tompkins and a gaucho with a horse

Kris Tompkins with gaucho ordering up a sacrificial lamb for an asado

What I see so hopeful in the Tompkins’ extraordinary devotion to land is their “development” process as much as their product. They are designers, architects, scholars, owners, entrepreneurs, and employers all at once. They pay special attention to natural and human history, the particular cultural, social, environmental and economic characteristics of each of their distinctive ownerships.

Building materials come from each place, reclaimed wood in some small farmhouses that follow local tradition, stone from a local quarry in a drier environment like Valle Chacabuco, almost 200,000 acres in southern Chilean Patagonia where trees are scarce. Energy comes from small hydro in one place where there is abundant water falling off high mountains, the latest solar technology for another where there is abundant sunlight. When designer and user of the land are one and the same, and development is gradual, local and incremental, where mistakes are made and corrected, the development process is evolutionary in nature — co-evolutionary actually between people and place. The process is bottom up, rather than one-size-fits-all top down. It is built to last, with a special eye for integrity and beauty.

Exterior detail of the Lodge at Valle Chacabuco building

Entry to one of the new buildings

When Doug and Kris acquired Chacabuco in 2006 it was a working ranch with over 25,000 sheep and cattle. While they sold most of them to begin the grassland restoration process, all the gauchos and their families were offered jobs — different jobs — for as long as they all wanted to stay. The full time trapper who hunted puma — mountain lions — stayed on to become tracker for biological studies of the lion’s movements. Long term jobs, restoration economy jobs that employees can feel good about are now available for local people to prepare for as many as 150,000 expected visitors per year to what will soon hopefully become Patagonia National Park.

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