The Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) began with an Obama memorandum in 2010 that directed the Department of Interior (DOI) to create Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC) across the United States, there was no Congressional legislation. LCCs were partnerships between federal and state agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGO), land trusts, Tribes, and other entities, even Canada. The LCC mission was to "coordinate, facilitate, promote...large landscape conservation". Funding has now ended for LCCs.
One NGO member in the GNLCC was the Heart of the Rockies Initiative (HOTRI), a partnership of 22 land trusts including Canada, one goal being conservation planning. HOTRI focuses its work in central Idaho that extends into Montana through the High Divide Collaborative (HDC). Participants in the HDC include Salmon Valley Stewardship (SVS), Lemhi Regional Land Trust (LRLT), Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y), and the US Forest Service (USFS) along with many other NGOS and state agencies. Merrill Beyeler, former Idaho Representative; Toni Ruth, current SVS Executive Director, Kristin Troy, LRLT Executive Director in 2014-2015, and Jim Tucker USFS have served on the HDC Coordinating Committee, right along the side of Kim Trotter, Y2Y. At the GNLCC Steering Committee Meeting, held Oct 15-16, 2014, Gina Knudson, SVS Executive Director at the time, Kristen Troy LRLT, and Merrill Beyeler were part of a panel discussion on Community Based Conservation at the Landscape Scale in the High Divide, Idaho and Montana. According to the DOI, community based conservation is "Collaborative and community-based approaches to natural resources management are... manifested in the increasing numbers of partnerships, consensus groups, community-based collaboratives, watershed councils, and similar groups ...collaborative conservation draws upon theories of democracy, international development, and alternative dispute resolution." Hey DOI, we are not a democracy and clearly have no intention to develop the SCNF for international purposes. By all appearances, this approach has been implemented through the SCNF revision plan, and is really about stacking these groups with NGO members and others who hold the same ideology and agendas. A total of $307,100 was given to the HORI to accomplish this goal in 2015-2016. Michelle Tucker, SVS, Breann Westfall (Green), Tom McFarland, and Bob Russell from LRLT, Amy Baumer USFS, and Dave Schmid USFS also attended this workshop. The overall focus of the meeting was on the "High Divide, shared landscape outcomes, and landscape conservation design (LCD)" and "Utility of Landscape Conservation Design for an Ecologically Connected Landscape". LCD in the High Divide "...seeks support to identify and evaluate future landscape configurations that address the needs of local communities while conserving the High Divides unique landscape resources. In this landscape we emphasize wildlife connectivity between large protected core areas." Michelle Tucker was also a panel member in a 2014 National Forest Foundation workshop to discuss "developing and implementing projects in a way that allows collaborative productivity to persist" along with the USFS, Nature Conservancy, and Wilderness Society. Collaboration among these groups seems to be fine as long as it only includes their own. While this LCD document outlines recommended practices for designing a landscape for conservation, page 19 specifically addresses the High Divide. It states the reason for creating the HDC was because of resident and community leader mistrust of outside organizations and governments, so they set out "...to develop a broadly collaborative assessment of conservation priorities, and LCD became our framework." For all of their claims to collaborate with all "stakeholders" for perspectives, to this day they remain only locked into their own ideologically compatible groups. They also identified "the geographic boundaries for our area of interest" and then "develop science to inform the current status of conservation targets." When has the HDC or any other similarly aligned group included anyone with a different perspective than theirs in their group discussions? LCD is nothing more than a methodology of designing landscapes into different types of conservation, ignoring all jurisdictional boundaries and authority, and private property owners. An HD workshop, held March 15-16, 2016, described the High Divide as "...the center of connectivity between the Greater Yellowstone, Crown of the Continent and Central Idaho." Members of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Center for Landscape Conservation, and multiple federal agencies were at this meeting. One presentation was just on wildlife connectivity. Gina Knudson, SVS, and Jim Tucker, Salmon-Challis National Forest gave presentations on Communities and Wildfire and discussed the dichotomy between "environmental groups want less cutting, communities want fire protection", deciding to reframe their message to issues of "personal safety" in order to be "be more proactive and move forward" (pg 14). Another conclusion was "We need more fire on the land"! Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC), Wildlands Network, and Y2Y authored the Importance of Connectivity - 2012 Forest Planning Rule - Best Practices for Connectivity Planning in 2015. This document gives recommendations for how to include connectivity in forest planning. CLLC took credit for "persuading the United States Forest Service (USFS) to incorporate wildlife corridors and ecological connectivity into its newly minted Forest Planning Rule." SVS has attended workshops with CLLC. Seven HDC goals were listed at this workshop. Goals included conserving: working ranch lands; ecological linkage between protected core areas to conserve...elk, antelope, and wolverine; nationally important dispersed recreation lands and waterways; national trails; restored headwaters; crucial core and migratory sage grouse habitats; open land in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) to protect life and property; and reduce community fire-fighting costs. In the 2015 Great Northern LCC Connectivity Pilot Project Preliminary Report, the strategies for the HD are on page 12, much of it centered around conservation projects. In spite of the heavy involvement in the GNLCC, SVS has no mention of it on their website, nor does LRLT. However, in the Summer 2011 Newsletter, there is a piece on Beyeler, Knudson, and Troy going to Washington, D.C. for "sharing our place-based experiences with policy makers." In their 2017 tax form, SVS net assets were at $217,718 compared to $120, 924 in 2014. LRLT has fared much better, they grew in assets of $370,523 in 2012 to $2,091,313 on their 2017 tax form. It seems conservation is certainly a lucrative business. All of these SVS, LRLT, and USFS individuals have actively engaged in hidden agendas for conservation, planning for connectivity scenarios with the federal and state governments, and side by side with NGOs. Now they have a heavy influence over the SCNF plan revision process. If anything leaves the communities voice out of the decisions, this certainly does.
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