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Resurrecting Conservation: A Call to Private Landowners and the Oil Industry

On October 30th, I delivered an opening speech at an event in Dallas. During the speech, I discussed conservation, private landownership, and the future of the oil and gas industry, among other topics.     

First, I would like to thank my hosts, Kirk Rimer, who arranged this venue, Jamey Clement and Kyle Bass, and my board member, Bruce Fogerty.

I have worked in the conservation field for over 50 years. Looking over the arc of my career, I can truthfully state that after the late 1990s, when I was CEO of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, I experienced the peaks of a career that has since observed the federal environmental establishments careening downhill ever since. In the 1990s, some of my greatest successes occurred here in Texas, such as creating the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Private Land Program. Before that, I worked with TPWD Chair Perry Bass to give a portion of Matagorda to TPWD to manage. My last grant was to fund the Texas Ag Land Trust (TALT) in Dec. 1999.

Throughout my career, my focus has always been on how to solve problems. For the past 50 years, the approach to conservation in America has shifted towards public land acquisition and landscape preservation and away from working landscapes of farms and forests. This is a problem of considerable magnitude.

Our nation was founded by farmers: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, et al., and their perspectives and individuality were imbued and encrusted into the foundations of our Constitution and body politic. Today our politics are dominated by bi-coastal metropolitan elites who propel a political leadership that has lost all touch with the land and values that underpin our working landscapes.

Today, I want to discuss how to revive the private land-owning sector as a nationally recognized leadership pillar in conservation that promotes our cultural heritage. I have a subtext for rescuing the oil and gas sector from the regulations and litigation imposed by environmental zealots who use the Endangered Species Act as a cudgel against industry and incidentally prevent species recovery.

For over 100 years, the preeminent focus and policy tool for conservation implementation has been public land acquisition and increasing regulatory overburden on landowners and industry. This approach has not been successful in any meaningful way and just adds $$$ to our debt and deficit. An alternative approach is both simple and advantageous, but before explicating, let me pull a memory point. I was co-chair of Conservationists for HW BUSH. However, because of poor personnel appointments and his less than adept articulation of the “Vision Thing”, his administration never got traction on conservation initiatives, which I find haunting. So, going forward, I want to be both explicit and build upon a real platform for scalable engagement.

Here is the simple equation for moving conservation forward effectively. First, recognize that 71% of land in the lower 48 states is privately owned. In Western states, where federal lands dominate, private lands are five times more important than those east of the Mississippi because they hold the water, supporting concentrations of wildlife. Back in 1949, Aldo Leopold recognized the critical role of farmers and ranchers in conservation when he wrote: “The geography of conservation is such that most of the best land will always be held PRIVATELY for agricultural production. The bulk of responsibility for conservation thus necessarily devolves upon the PRIVATE custodian, especially the farmer.” (A Sand County Almanac, p.207).

The trick to the conservation equation is how to reach our nation’s 12 million landowners on a scalable basis. This part of the equation has a host of subtleties.

(1)The Trust factor: Private landowners, by and large, do NOT trust either government agencies or environmental organizations.

(2) Individuality is paramount and must be recognized: every landowner is different, idiosyncratic, and individualistic. In October 2021, Drew Slattery (TRUST IN FOOD)wrote an article that captures the essence of communicating with farmers and ranchers: “We must prioritize the humanity of farmers-in our communication and interactions with them, recognize that before they put their dirty boots on in the morning, farmers and ranchers are humans first. If we want to empower our nation’s agricultural system to be more regenerative, sustainable, and equitable, then we are talking about empowering them to do so. We are talking about changing humans…Farming is a business; it’s an identity it’s a lifestyle it’s a hobby it is a multigenerational family legacy, and so much more. Every farm operation and every person making and implementing every decision in it is as unique as each person’s fingerprints.”

(3) Recognize demographics: The average age of farmers and ranchers is 61; the age of forest owners is past 71. Forest owners represent 10 of our 12 million landowners across the USA, so they are 4/5ths of the market. All landowners should actively engage in estate planning and inter-generational transfer of their properties.

(4) Listing updating: has to be constant. Federal and state websites are seldom updated and often full of broken links. USFWS spent millions updating their website two years ago and deleted all 155 office contacts nationwide.

My foundation, Land Conservation Assistance Network, LandCAN, was designed to include and incorporate all of these subtleties… We started building LandCAN in 2000, months after I departed from NFWF. My last executive action was to create a private land grant initiative, which my Clinton administration successor immediately canceled. LandCAN today encompasses more than 230,000 pages; it is a national site with 11 state LandCANs (ME, CA, MS, LA, AR, ID, CO, VA, TX, GA, and AL) designed for county-level listing aggregations. Why county level? In rural America, that is where the action and interpersonal communication are; thus, there is market uptake. Our Texas LandCAN is our largest, most successful, and most heavily used site. In 2023, TexasLandcan had 103,000 users; this year, we are past 111,000 users in October. We also host an endangered species recovery site, www.habitatcan.org, encompassing sage grouse, lesser prairie chicken, and monarch butterflies. In 2024, we are averaging 85,000 users monthly and should close out 2024 just under a million users. To put this in perspective, the latest USDA census finds just 1.9 million farms and ranches across the breadth of America. And yes, we host all 155 USFWS offices, just mentioned, and over 3,300 USDA offices nationwide.

Unique for a conservation platform, LandCAN hosts over 57,000 for-profit businesses serving rural America.

Getting oil companies to say yes? In the last two decades, I have worked for PBPA briefly and for Pioneer for a decade. I have always supported the US oil and gas industry. During my tenure at NFWF, I set up Exxon’s Save The Tiger fund after getting invited to Dallas by CEO Larry Rawl in the wake of Valdez, and I worked closely with his successor, Lee Raymond, and Exxon Foundation lead, Ed Ahnert. The Tiger Fund was a stellar success for over a decade, significantly boosting tiger populations in SE Asia and Russia’s Far East. I also set up Shell’s Gulf Of Mexico Conservation initiative. The point is that oil companies have and can make meaningful investments and contributions to conservation and restoring endangered species. However, for most of the last 25 years, companies have backpedaled in the face of climatistas attacks and tried to adopt climate-focused passive energy investments, which do not work. As Alex Epstein and Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright bravely point out, the oil and gas industry has lifted two billion people out of poverty worldwide in recent decades. Today, China’s coal plants' CO2 exceeds the entire energy output of CO2 in the USA. For God’s sake, oil companies should stick to their guns and gushers. I applaud Kelcy Warren’s punch-back suit of Greenpeace; we need more of that response to environmental bullies. I am with Trump on the Drill Baby drill and only ask the oil sector to give me a small side investment to drive endangered species recovery. This is not greenwashing but a demonstrable opportunity that can translate to meaningful conservation progress and marketing. Today, the USFWS cannot recover species, partly because over 80% of endangered species habitat is found on private lands. The private sector needs to step forward to drive recovery. This is an eminently doable proposition.

I am going to quote Carl Sagan: “A fact is information minus emotion. An opinion is information plus experience. Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. And, stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.” Today woeful levels of historical and geological ignorance drive environmental advocacy. We need a return to facts and experience to drive successful conservation on the ground that supports both rural economies and our national security. We witness the UK, Germany, and Brussels driving the EU to an exercise in economic and energy seppuku in the name of climate change.

I have always liked the definition of a maverick: (1. An unbranded range calf, traditionally considered the property of the first person who brands it. 2 One who refuses to abide by the dictates of his group; a dissenter. 3. One who resists adherence to or affiliation with any single organized group or faction, an independent. After Samuel Maverick 1803-1870).

A recent Substack post yesterday by Irina Slav yesterday quotes Bloomberg:” Reports are growing sour on transition investments. Of 500 hedge funds surveyed, more are betting against Transition than are betting for it!” Many environmental investments are proving to be pie-in-the-sky (see GND) solutions and are completely falling flat through the floor of both economics and physics. LandCAN has proven with absolute certainty that it works as a comprehensive resource for farmers, ranchers, and forest owners and for species recovery. I urge you to consider supporting and investing in something that works 24/7, 12 months, year in and year out. We have experienced 20-55% growth every year since 2016.

I relish the USA's leadership role as a maverick in today’s world, where we support and celebrate private landowners as leaders in conservation and a vibrant, unbranded oil and gas industry to propel the world’s poor to greater health and prosperity.

I welcome questions and any points of discussion.