Conservancy Tries To Avoid Controversy Growing Group Forms Unlikely Alliances

Washington’s largest conservation group doesn’t spike trees.

It doesn’t file lawsuits to stop logging or save salmon.

Its members don’t harass hunters, chain themselves to bulldozers or throw red paint on women in fur coats.

Instead, the Nature Conservancy of Washington works quietly to preserve endangered ecosystems. It suggests ways to manage public land for threatened plants and wildlife, and buys private land from willing sellers when that’s the only way to preserve an ecosystem.

A flap last year over management of Mount Spokane State Park was a rare controversy for the group, which was named the Nature Conservancy’s best state chapter for 1994.

“We’re free-market oriented, science driven, non-adversarial, non-political,” said Executive Director Elliot Marks.

Other conservation groups are struggling to keep their members. But the conservancy in Washington grew by 7 percent in 1994, to about 30,000 members. Tree spikers would flinch at its list of corporate donors, which includes Weyerhaeuser Co., Westinghouse Hanford Co. and Plum Creek Timber Co., called the Darth Vader of the timber industry by some environmentalists.

“For a company like us, it’s good news to see organizations like the Nature Conservancy that are looking for positive solutions,” said Bill Jirsa, Plum Creek’s director of environment and corporate affairs.

The ability to form unlikely alliances is the organization’s strength, said Marks.

“We have people who are identified as extremists on both sides (of environmental issues) as members,” he said. “The guy who started Earth First! is a member of the Nature Conservancy.”

Anyone who’s ever walked in the Dishman Hills Natural Area has benefited from the Nature Conservancy’s work in Washington. The organization bought the first 80 acres of the 500-acre natural area in 1966.

The conservancy in 1993 bought and fenced 104 acres on a rocky knoll adjacent to Walk in the Wild zoo.

More recently, the conservancy received an $810,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy so scientists could study plants, insects and animals on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Those scientists last summer discovered three species of insects that previously were unknown and one unknown species of plant.

Information gathered from that study, and similar ones at the Army’s Yakima Firing Range and Fort Lewis in Western Washington, will help determine how the three huge parcels of government land are managed.

“We can’t buy it (public land), but we can influence the way it’s managed,” Marks said.

“We don’t influence by suing the agencies or telling them they’re screwing up… We find that good science is often more compelling.”

Some say the conservancy went too far when it encouraged the state Parks and Recreation Commission to set aside 4,500 acres of Mount Spokane as a preserve where recreation would be limited.

Snowmobilers, horse riders and others at crowded meetings blasted the plan as the work of environmental extremists. Allison Cowles, a conservancy trustee from Spokane, resigned over the flap.

“I felt the conservancy actions did not match the policy of balancing the needs of people with the needs of the environment,” said Cowles, adding that she still supports the conservancy’s goal of acquiring property from private landowners.

Another conservancy trustee, Margaret O’Connell, said the group’s stand on Mount Spokane was appropriate.

“If you have a mission of protecting habitat, then that mission has to include informed advocacy,” said O’Connell, a biology professor at Eastern Washington University.

But the group has stayed away from other debates, on issues that directly impact habitat.

For instance, it did not lobby for the Growth Management Act, perhaps the most valuable land conservation tool ever passed by the Legislature.

And the conservancy was silent in 1990, when the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups were promoting Initiative 547.

The initiative, which failed at the polls, would have imposed land-use controls that are far more sweeping than those the Legislature passed in years since.

Supporting the initiative would have put the conservancy at odds with some of its biggest contributors.

Seven of its corporate sponsors spent a total of $250,000 fighting I-547.

Boeing, Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek were among the seven.

Other conservancy donors chipped in lesser amounts to anti-initiative campaign.

Steve Whitney, Northwest regional director for the Wilderness Society, said his organization wouldn’t accept money from the timber industry, even in the unlikely event that the money were offered.

But Whitney doesn’t have a problem with the Nature Conservancy taking the money.

“I tend to focus on their results, and those are extraordinarily positive,” said Whitney.

“As long as they’re applying their funding to worthwhile conservation causes, they’ll have my respect.”