originally published on Crosscut.com on July 28, 2016

Every four years, at the height of the presidential circus, voters scan a list of unfamiliar, down-ballot names and elect the chief environmental officer for seven million Washingtonians.

The independently elected public lands commissioner, who runs the state Department of Natural Resources, has a big role in the health the state’s waters, forests and open spaces — (though it’s not an exclusive role: there’s also an Ecology Department reporting to the governor).

You can also imagine the office of public lands commissioner as the office of cognitive dissonance.

In the age of climate change and species extinction, Washington’s lands commissioner is required to maximize harvesting of public timberlands. The non-tax revenue (revenue that is “non-tax” is oddly popular) gooses K-12 school construction, the capitol campus in Olympia, state universities, and even the Department of Corrections, to the tune of $200 million annually.

“It’s actually a minor part of school funding,” said former state Rep. Hans Dunshee. “But it always gets waived as a flag for cutting more trees.”

The commissioner, who also chairs the Forest Practices Board and the Natural Resources Board, is a legacy of Washington’s progressive, 19th century constitution. Bust up concentrated power and give the people a voice.

One-hundred and twenty-seven years ago, the state’s leadership was Bernie Sanders in a Victorian bowler, sticking it to big timber, big railroads, and big-business. In 1889, at the time of Washington statehood, the federal government forked over 3 million acres of public land, with the primary goal of educating children here.

The mandate also places Washington’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Natural Resources Board, with the Superintendent voting on trust-land timber sales that supplement K-12 coffers. As the Department of Natural Resources’ website reminds readers, “Free public education was seen then, as it is now, as essential to American freedom, prosperity and happiness.”

The unsubtle subtext: Don’t decouple school funding from public timber sales unless you’re averse to freedom and the American way.

Separately, many of the state’s forest trust lands were forfeited to counties by financially strapped private owners during the Great Depression. These lands are also overseen by the DNR to boost largely rural counties.

Today, the office manages around 5.6 million acres, including more than 2 million acres of state forests and all of Washington’s saltwater tidelands. The commissioner also leases 2 million acres of state lands for grazing, agriculture and mineral extraction. There are wonky, science-based duties, such as regulating navigable river bottoms, along with the labor-centric mandate of regulating 8 million acres of private forestland.

To crystallize the burdens of the job, add “chief firefighter” to all of the above.

The frustration of hitting-up a hidebound Legislature for adequate funding to fight forest fires may have pushed current Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark not to seek a third term.

Goldmark, a Democrat, has been a conscientious, if enigmatic leader. First elected in 2008 with the help of Washington’s conservation community, Goldmark seemed superbly qualified with a Berkeley Ph.D (in molecular biology) and decades of experience as a rancher in the Okanogan Highlands. (He hails from a distinguished public-service family, which includes his father, John, a state legislator unfairly smeared as a communist in the early 1960s, an injustice that culminated in a famous court case, with Bill Dwyer representing the Goldmarks.)

Peter Goldmark’s opponent in 2008, Republican incumbent Doug Sutherland, was branded as too cozy with the timber industry, a charge that stuck and led to his defeat.

By 2012, however, Goldmark had alienated many of the same advocates who helped elect him, a split given expression when he back-pedaled on a promise not to accept campaign donations from timber interests. Ultimately, Goldmark didn’t evolve into the gadfly reformer that his supporters envisioned, and his defensive, politically tone-deaf leadership style magnified the schism.

For enviro purists in particular, Goldmark committed sins of omission. He didn’t cotton to prescribed burns, for example, because of blowback from rural residents. He also didn’t boost timber certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a sustainable-forestry indicator, which was within his purview as commissioner.

Peter Goldman, an environmental attorney and former Goldmark supporter-turned-critic, was especially furious at Goldmark’s unprecedented insistence that state timber sales be exempt from environmental review under the state Environmental Protection Act.

“He’s repeatedly failed to bring state forest management into a more 21st century mode,” Goldman said.

This year’s race has attracted a handful of competitive candidates.

Democrat Hillary Franz, an attorney and former Bainbridge Island city councilmember, is the executive director of Futurewise, a left-leaning enviro-advocacy group. Endorsed by Washington Conservation Voters, Franz has raised the most money at $179,000, and earned a top-rookie nod from the Seattlepi.com’s Joel Connelly. Democratic King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove, a former chair of the state House Environment Committee, is a more established contender, with a lengthy political resume and backing from the Washington State Labor Council and former Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Other high-profile candidates include two more Democrats, management consultant Karen Porterfield, whose campaign is co-chaired by Lt. Gov. Brad Owen, and who has raised the second-highest amount of dough; and Mary Verner, a former Democratic mayor of Spokane, who holds a masters’ degree from the Yale School of Forestry.

And there’s one Republican, retired U.S. Navy Commander Steve McLaughlin of Seabeck. McLaughlin, who hopes to “restore balance” to the office, underlines the commissioner’s core responsibility to bolster school funding. He says he was galvanized to run by the record-setting wildfires. He has raised less than other candidates attracting big attention, but he could be a sleeper who does very well in the primary.

The list rounds out with a lower-profile Democrat, John Stillings, and a Libertarian, aeronautics engineer Steven M. Nielson, who has held state leadership positions for his party.

Today, the question is whether meaningful policy reform is tenable. The next lands commissioner could be a confluence of John Muir and Rachel Carson — with an undercurrent of Al Gore — but they’re still saddled with a public-good mandate for raising money that flows against other public benefits.

“All things are possible politically,” said Denis Hayes, the organizer of Earth Day and the longtime executive director of the Bullitt Foundation.

Hayes notes that the office was conceived when Washington was still something of an American colony, dependent upon resource extraction. The new tech, clean-energy economy centers on making Washington a more attractive place.

Hayes, Goldman and others are vigorous advocates of cross-laminated timber, a more innovative wood product that can be manufactured in economically depressed rural areas. Other reforms include integrating the realities of climate change into forest practices, advancing FSC certification, and ending short-rotation, clear-cut forestry.

Hans Dunshee, now a Snohomish County Councilmember, points out that the office is, “much more than timber.”  The commissioner can sharpen the regulatory end over fish and aquatic lands, for example.

For decades, Olympia has witnessed reformers swing but strike out, laboring to modernize the scope and mission of the office.

In 2016, in the era of rising sea levels and climate change, all the reformist sound and fury will need to signify (and translate) into something real.

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 29, 2016

“There is no such thing as an ex-conservationist,” Franklin Roosevelt said. Conservation was the through-line of FDR’s public legacy, a narrative given new life in Douglas Brinkley’s brilliant, engaging history, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America.

FDR, for all his political smarts, is rarely cast as an environmental leader, a seemingly poor rival to his distant, wilderness-embracing cousin, Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, the Roosevelt presidents complement each other, with TR laying the foundation and FDR enlarging that legacy with his bold use of tools such as the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives a president the authority to designate national monuments.

FDR, an honorary Northwesterner with a daughter and son-in-law in Seattle, defied big timber by advocating for Olympic National Park. Dr. Willard Van Name of the American Museum of Natural History and other conservationists from the right coast advanced the park idea. Proponents worried about a rapacious National Forest Service using the national monument for commercial logging (and for good reason — it was doing just that). FDR’s friend, Yakima native William O. Douglas, subsequently appointed in 1939 to the U.S. Supreme Court, also elbowed for a park.

It took a visit to Port Angeles in the fall of 1937 to cement FDR’s resolve. As Brinkley recounts, the Forest Service blocked the Park Service from participating in FDR’s trip to a disputed area of interest to timber lobbyists. Someone had moved the sign marking the forest boundary, and the president passed a massive clear-cut that actually sat on federal land.

“I hope the son-of-a-bitch who logged that is roasting in hell,” FDR said.

The paradox of FDR’s conservation vision was the notion of “managed” nature, a value that alienated environmental purists. Examples of farsightedness include the appointment of FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano, to lead the National Planning Board. The administration’s land-use noodling ultimately gave birth to the smart-growth movement of the 1970s, and in Washington, to the Growth Management Act of 1990.

But a policy of engineered nature also degraded the environment, with colossal public works projects such as the salmon-killing Grand Coulee Dam (one reason FDR was an avatar of fish hatcheries).

New Deal conservation was hitched to economic recovery, which sometimes demanded unpleasant tradeoffs.

As Brinkley writes, “Even though FDR had saved the Olympics, the one-two punch of the Grand Coulee and Site W [the Hanford Nuclear Reservation] has prevented many from ever venerating him as a true environmental hero.”

Hanford notwithstanding, FDR was willing to one-up the military, blocking the relocation of an army base that would have imperiled a trumpeter swan wintering ground at Henry’s Lake, Idaho. And it took political backbone to finagle Jackson Hole National Monument, a move Wyoming Rep. Frank Barrett likened to Hitler’s “fascist tactics.” (Most of the monument was later incorporated Grand Teton National Park.)

Roosevelt celebrated hydropower as the clean alternative to coal, and the Columbia River Valley was a favorite showpiece. FDR could harmonize (or “juggle” as he called it) a Tennessee Valley Authority or dredging the Mississippi by the Army Corps of Engineers with his “tree army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted 3 billion trees between 1933 and 1942 and employed 5 percent of the male population before World War II.

Brinkley teases out the conservation thread that seamed FDR’s entire career. The president labored to restore migratory waterfowl across the country at the same time he tackled the banking crisis and record unemployment. He goosed the economy with public works, just as he established national wildlife refuges and preserved delicate ecosystems such as the Joshua Tree and Organ Pipe Cactus national monuments. Every year, but particularly during his first two terms, FDR was tireless, surveying maps and visiting flyways and soon-to-be-protected national seashores.

Brinkley throws light on FDR’s consistent, naturalist worldview. FDR was a cradle enviro, rooted in the Hudson River Valley and Springwood, his Hyde Park estate. As a child, Roosevelt’s passion revolved around birding and natural history and, later, “scientific” forestry and landscape architecture.

As a New York state legislator, he chaired the Forest, Fish and Game Committee, concentrating on the need for reforestation along with expanding and improving state parks.  Who knew that early in his public career, FDR developed a brain trust of agronomists and forestry nerds or that every month he devoured American Forests magazine?

FDR was influenced by Gifford Pinchot’s wise-use theory of forestry, but the real driver was his mentor and friend, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Ickes had a more difficult time harmonizing FDR’s contradictions. In a 1938 speech to the Northwest Conservation League in Seattle, Ickes celebrated the effort to create Olympic National Park, but he downplayed the need for additional roads and better access. Nevertheless, for FDR, confined to a wheelchair, access was a touchstone.

Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood was emblematic of FDR’s vision, mixing natural architecture, recreation and access. What’s the matter with roads if they contour and blend with the landscape?

A couple of hypotheticals still linger: What if Nebraska Sen. George Norris and others hadn’t blocked Ickes’ effort to move the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior, establishing a Department of Conservation? And what if FDR’s dream of a post-World War II global conservation conference had come to pass?

Brinkley vividly captures the paradox of Northwest conservation, a contradiction very much alive at least through the era of the 1980 Northwest Power Act, which sought a fish-wildlife-public power balance. Older Northwesterners have seen the paradox, and it is us.

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 21, 2015

In Congress, it’s death-by-inertia. Rip an institution down to its studs and allow the clock to run out. Voila!

On July 1, the federal Export-Import Bank, a boon to Boeing and other Northwest employers, went gentle into that good night. (The Ex-Im homepage reads like a Depression-era sign: AUTHORITY HAS LAPSED).

And in less than seventy days, Congress’ make-policy-by-not-making policy may halt reauthorization of the country’s bipartisan, wildly popular Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).

“Of course there is a real chance they will snuff the LWCF,” says U.S. Rep. Denny Heck, D-Olympia. “Why wouldn’t you believe that possible? This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”

The gang may want to improve its aim. For half a century, the LWCF has been the nation’s trademark outdoor recreation and conservation program. The formula is basic: Apply a portion of lease royalties from offshore oil development to pay for wildlife habitat, parks, trails and sustainable forests. No need for taxpayer dinero.

Royalties from public resources owned by all Americans are looped back into places such as Deception Pass State Park, the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, and the Mountains to Sound Greenway. Since President Kennedy requested its passage, the LWCF has helped 600 projects in Washington to the tune of $600 million.

So what gives?

“The Ex-Im comparison is perfectly valid (with LWCF),” Heck says. “Both are long-standing programs, which traditionally enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. And the termination of both was considered unthinkable until a short time ago. I don’t know what is going to happen, but if inertia is on the side of the anti’s—such as an affirmative requirement for reenactment—then they are advantaged.”

Gobsmacked greens never figured on death-by-inertia. And so, the scramble.

Fund supporters set up an online clock, a sort of fluid version of the doomsday timepiece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Wilderness Society developed a comprehensive map of all the LWCF projects nationwide. And congressional advocates, Republicans and Democrats alike, are sounding the alarm.

For years, the focus has been on full-LWCF funding. Despite the uptick in offshore development and increased conservation needs, 55 percent of the fund’s revenues have been siphoned to other interests. For 49 out of 50 years, Congress played the shift-money shell game, creating more project backlog.

Heck, who has championed revival the Ex-Im Bank (“It may live to see another day,” he said) credits lawmakers such as Republican Rep. Dave Reichert and Democrat Rep. Derek Kilmer with keeping LWCF’s hopes alive.

In June, Reichert and Kilmer joined with Sen. Maria Cantwell to call for permanent LWCF reauthorization. In a conference call, Reichert, co-chair of the House National Parks Caucus, said that last year’s passage of the Pratt River additions to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness was his proudest achievement. He also noted that permanent reauthorization includes set-asides for sportsmen and public access.

The LWCF is more than Gary Snyder-ish landscapes where the Skagit River rises to meet you. Four million dollars from the fund’s Forest Legacy Program, for example, was recently green-lighted to underwrite a conservation easement on 20,000 acres of working forestland in Mason County. It’s phase one of a three-phase process to keep the forest in production. That translates into timber jobs, recreational access, and decent water quality.

Much of the LWCF narrative revolves around economics. In Washington, recreation generates $1.6 billion in state and local tax revenue, $7.1 billion in salaries and wages, and 227,000 direct jobs, according to a 2013 Outdoor Industry Association report. But the aesthetic, can’t-be-recreated-online windfall isn’t so bad either.

Cynics love to quote now-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that, “you never let a serious crisis go to waste.” But it’s the second part of the quote that resonates. “It’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

As politicians game-out various scenarios, the best case may be to hitch the LWCF to must-have legislation. It’s a strategy that also could resurrect the Ex-Im Bank.

With future political monkeying, lawmakers might consider the Emanuel mantra, and do those things that they thought they couldn’t do before, such as fully fund and permanently reauthorize the LWCF.