Proceedings of Regional Sustainable Development Conference

The Texas Center for Policy Studies and the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College partnered to bring Valley residents a conference aimed at defining sustainable development in terms of on-the-ground projects and partnerships. We invited project leaders from around the country to come and share their experiences - what's worked, what hasn't, what the challenges are in building a regional sustainable development partnership, and why it's been worth the effort for these communities. About 60 people gathered at the University of Texas in Brownsville on February 8, 2001 to hear success stories and the challenges that other regions have faced in implementing regional sustainable development projects, as well as share their thoughts about the subject. Please see the agenda for a complete schedule of participants.

AGENDA

8:30                 Registration

9:00                 Welcome

- Dr. Tony Zavaleta, Vice President for External Affairs and Director, Cross Border Institute for Regional Development

9:15                 Overview and goals of the conference

- Karen Chapman, Texas Center for Policy Studies

9:30                 Putting Regional Sustainable Development into Practice

                        - Elizabeth Sheehan, Coastal Enterprises, Inc. Portland, Maine

10:15               Break

10:30               Regional Partnerships: Where they’ve worked

                        - Kay Matthews, Northern New Mexico Collaborative Stewardship Project

                        - Lee Fitzpatrick, Sierra Business Council, Nevada

11:45               Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program

                        - John Mayne, SARE, Southern Region, Georgia

12:30               Lunch

12:45               Preparation for a local discussion of Regional Sustainable Development

-Mary Kelly, Executive Director, Texas Center for Policy Studies

1:30                 Environmentally Sustainable Business Opportunities Study

                        - Juan Andres Rodriguez, UTB/TSC

2:15                 Panel Discussion

                        Moderator: Dr. David Tilley, Texas A & M University and Invited local representatives

                        Is it time for a regional sustainable development partnership in the Valley?

                        Who should lead the effort?

                        What resources are needed?

3:30                 Closing Remarks & Comments

A summary of the workshop presentation follows, in the order they were given. For more detailed information about each presentor and his/her organization, websites are provided.

The conference began with a moving welcome from Dr.Tony Zavaleta, Vice President for External Affairs at UT-Brownsville & Texas Southmost College. He told a story of receiving a chemistry set from a relative and going out to study the many creatures who lived in the resacas in Brownsville, amazed at the life forms in these oxbow lakes, and how, years later, he encouraged his own son to do the same, only to find the water appeared bereft of the many creatures he'd seen in the water as a child. Dr. Zavaleta went on to discuss the importance of incorporating appreciation for the natural environment in everything we do. He mentioned the university is very aware of its responsibility to participate in this endeavor and promote the ideals of sustainability into everything from new building design and placement to special projects it is involved with such as partnering on cross-border environmental programs with Matamoros schools and engaging with local (Brownsville) projects.

Putting Sustainable Development into Practice
Elizabeth Sheehan, Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI)

CEI is a private, not-for-profit community development organization created in 1977. Our mission is to assist people and communities, especially low-income communities, reach an adequate and equitable standard of living, learning and work, in harmony with the natural environment.

This morning I would like to talk about how we use a targeted industry sector approach and development financing to promote sustainable development, and how to use development financing (oans, equity) to invest in businesses that generate economic environmental and/or equity benefits.

Our seven points of intervention, or strategies, are:

• Provide financing in the form of loans and equity investments to small and med sized businesses which meet our financial and social goals. (jobs to ppl w/low income) annually we finance 125 bus $6-8 million target creation of about 1,000 jobs for low income people.
• Provide Technical assistance to assist businesses to start, grow and operate; workshops and one -one (marketing, business planing, telecommun) To date-8,000 business counseled.
• Target sectors that we think are important to our rural economy or/for what they create: fisheries, farms, childcare, micro enterprises, jobs important to women -- by doing this we have a greater impact, better determine risk from opportunity. To date we have funded about 100-child care centers or 2000 slots; about 110 marine businesses, 450 women's businesses.
• Target Opportunites -- create jobs and access quality jobs for low income, unemployed individuals and people who have government support programs. Finance businesses to create jobs, develop an employment training agreement with companies to hire and facilitate customized training, or resources for workers like technical skills, transportation or childcare.
• Policy Research and Development-: influence decision makers (public and private), and mobilize resources for community based development organizations. Includes; market research for financial issues and technical assistance for small businesses, environmental firms, and worker ownerships. Also - impact analysis, federal and state legislation and trade association policies; For example, with our trade group, $500 million nationally for comm. development finance (CDFI), $15 million economic development bond in the state.
• Create and Maintain Partnerships with banks, agencies and funders. They are represented on our board and advisory committees.
• Asset Development -- to develop sustainable income and employment opportunities among poor and working families and to take steps to increase their net worth. Also - to develop CEI as a sustainable CDC.

This is summary of our programs: finance, technical assistance, job targeting, self employment, homeownership and our asset fund balance growth.

Our Fisheries sector project and fisheries loan fund will provide the case study/illustration. First, an overview of Maine:

The current population survey revealed the at 29% of all Maine people and 36% of all children live in households with incomes below the livable wage. A portion of Mainers earning a livable wage increased from 65-68% (95-98) despite a strong national economy.

• Per capita income grew 6% but we are still ranked 37th in the nation
• Forty six percent of Mainers are unable to afford fair market rent for a 2 bedroom unit
• Between 160-2000 people in the state remain without health insurance
• Maine's pulp and paper industry discharges 35 million gallons of waste water from bleaching operations
• In the past 20 years Maine has lost 350,000 acres of farmland - if every Maine family bought just $10 more a week of farmed Maine products$200 million would be generated for Maine farms.

As this illustrates, we had a strong social and economic orientation. So why did we as a CDC committed to assisting people and communities in Maine, particularly low income, start to care about sustainable development?

CEI decided to invest time and resources in incorporating sustainable development criteria into their investment practices after recognizing a harmful pattern -- that when environmental criteria are left out of development decisions, there are related social and economic costs - including costs to public health, clean-up of contamination, loss of natural resource base, and loss of jobs.

What we did: We added "in harmony with the natural environment" to our mission statement. We also participated with a coalition of groups in exploring what sustainable development means to Maine.

Our definition of sustainability: "Sustainable development is an ideal, a moral commitment, and a way of life. It is a set of values and principles, rather than a precise blueprint of techniques and practices. In short, it is development that assures a viable future based on the common-sense idea that we cannot eat the seed corn or pollute the well and expect to prosper in the future."

In our Research and Development department - we targeted sector projects, and meet monthly to push ourselves to look more closely at our interventions, context, and environmental issues, and to write about them together. We could compare how market development was important in both farms and fisheries but financing was very different.

We developed a list of potential criteria to evaluate and measure projects and deals.

Our way of framing this to our work was to call it the three E's:

• Economic; financially viable, sustainable, adds value),
• Equitable; will it create jobs, what kind, for whom are the social benefits/costs
• Environmental; what is the impact- does it reduce waste, pollution, improve management of resources, recycle, etc.

A confession: we have been worrying about how to sustain human systems more than ecosystems by investing, stimulating employment and local homeownership, particularly for low-income people.

Thus, CEI incorporated the three "E's" - economy, environment and equity - into existing programs. Our strategy is to use a targeted industry sector approach and development financing to promote sustainable development.

Historically our strength as a CDC has been in the first two categories - Economy and Equity: We provide support for low income people to acquire resources, jobs, and assets. Entrepreneurs applying for financing are screened on the basis of their capacity to provide good quality jobs to people and loan recipients sign an "ETAG" - commits them to using CEI as a first source to locate and applicants for job opportunities.

For communities - we have targeted locally owned small businesses, particularly those that add value to NNRR or manufacturing industries. We have had a "do no harm" approach by screening projects/investments to avoid the most obvious non-sustainable practices like low wage jobs and environmentally unsafe workplaces. We also believe strongly to achieve meaningful impact, organizations that support sustainable development must themselves survive over the long run-- ourselves and the CED movement. We approach asset development -- to build the assets of those we serve as well as CEI's assets -- through Revolving Loan Funds, equity investments and work on national/state policies to generate resources and capital for our work.

Our work on Environmental Sustainability

The big issue we have been grappling with over the last few years is do we use screens, as in a loan or cash flow (screens show you can repay, collateral coverage, # jobs generated that meet quality standards, etc.) or outcomes, which generally means that we are concerned with helping the loan recipient hire 50% low income people, offer an employer-based childcare center, or make some progress on environmental issues - provide water quality data, for example.

Additionally, we focused on using financing as a leverage for environmental outcomes, and developed an environmental assessment tool to work with businesses that identifies needs and links them to environmental assistance resources.

From our lessons to date, we have found targeting sectors has tremendous benefits. We have a deeper understanding of economic, equity, environmental risks and opportunities. As a result, decreased risk and increased success of interventions. There is no perfect project - it is messy, deal by deal. It costs money to pay additional attention to loans and ask for and monitor outcomes! Partnerships are key.

The Fisheries Project Case Study:

Let me start by showing a map where this sector is frankly limited to - Maine's coast.

• 5500 plus miles of coastline, about 77 coastal towns
• A world class ecosystem, Gulf of Maine is highly productive
• 52 species, (lobster, farmed salmon, groundfish)
• 7900 commercial licenses - a network of about 1,000 ancillary business -sell ice, fuel, repair, truck, process etc.
• 26,000 jobs tied to the industry -7600 direct harvesting, 2400 processing, and another 15,000 indirect (repair, suppliers, fuel wharves, pounds, etc)
• For each $1 worth of landed species, $2.39 of income is generated -- not just in big ports but smaller ports, like Cundys Harbor and Jonesport etc, which last year generated ¾ billion dollars of income for the state of Maine.

This illustrates the value of the fishery to the state. The industry's ability to be sustainable creates long-term benefits for the economy, coastal communities and the environment. Its value, then, rests upon our capacity to be good stewards of this rich marine ecosystem.

This has been challenging. In New England we have and will continue to face regulations that attempt to rebuild stocks and protect marine mammals and habitats by cutting fishing days, closing spawning grounds and modifying gear.

This is the practical challenge of sustainability: to both rebuild stocks implies enough understanding of the fundamental conditions of healthy stocks in the Gulf of Maine to know what constitutes a "sustainable" portion to harvest. Also, requires an investment in the existing infrastructure but toward new technology in order to fish smarter, cultivate more effectively, add value and access new markets.

If we don't better manage stocks the outcome is obvious and it is also dangerous - the loss of the fisheries industry entirely. On the other hand, if we only focus on rebuilding stocks, we lose the valuable infrastructure - wharves, markets, processing plants and fleet and everything that contributes to a working waterfront.

Our strategy for the Fisheries Project was to use the loan fund as our centerpiece, but as part of a package of research and development, promotion, and policy work.

The Goal of the Fisheries Project: To foster the sustainable development of Maine's fisheries and fishing communities by making investments, initiating projects, supporting policies and assisting marine related enterprises that: generate quality jobs; add value to marine resources; strengthen marine infrastructure; improve management of marine resources; or reuse and or recycle waste streams.

CEI Fisheries Fund

TERM: 7% fixed rate, 5-10 years

MONEY LOANED: $7.9 Million and leveraged an additional $15 million

PARTNERS: 14 plus Banks and agencies

DEALS: 116 loans

PORTFOLIO: 38.9% harvesters, 15.1% processors, 11.9% shoreside suppliers. 11.1% wholesale, 9% infrastructure, 11.1% new marine related, 4% retail

USES: $10.7 million fixed assets, $11.7 million in working capital

LOSS: Loss rate under 1%

JOBS: 953 full time and 172 part time; average job pays $10/hour with some benefits

LOAN REQUEST: $100,000 for working capital

FUND GOAL: below market, bank partners, diversified portfolio, diversified fleet, processors, gear shops, some aquaculture

Economic (Financial Review) Issues: Character is strong, credit reports are satisfactory. However, it is a start up and a new fishery for Maine. The bank partner would take firsts on collateral leaving CEI with a 60% debt coverage.

Equity Issues: The venture projects the creation of 5 jobs earning wages between $27-44,000 a year, pumps approximately $25,000/month into the midcoast economy through off loading fees, purchase of groceries, supplies, gear. The fishery would assist the local shoreside facility in diversifying their revenue -- with an offloading, ice, fuel and maintenance contract.

Environmental Issues: Much of what we know about red crab biology was gathered during scientific studies from the 1970's and early 1980's, when commercial harvesting of red crab spurred interest in developing a better understanding of the species. Hastie (1990) provides a summary of the research on geryonid crabs around the world, and discusses much of the scientific work on red crab in the Northeast.

We started a fishtag pilot project, partnering with Aquarium Herring research. This is now standard procedure for our fish loans - we are using development financing to generate an "environmental" outcome just as we have historically used it to create specific "equity social outcomes" jobs for people with low incomes. We are also looking to finance to increase capacity to carry out research. Companies that recycle marine by-products help identify markets for marine products to stimulate investment.

Place-Based Needs

I talked about the loss of working waterfronts - we are launching a new fund this month to specifically target private wharves and pier owners to assist them in maintaining infrastructure critical to the industry's well being.

Finally, it is important to measure and track your progress and celebrate successes; re-examine sustainability of the fund, the social and environmental benefits etc. Posters: each year Maine fishermen's wives groundfish group. Highlight species, work on how you can adapt to management plans and markets too, integrate the economic and environmental.

In summary - we practice sustainable development through one primary tool -- loan funds that integrate 3E's.

The benefits are concrete, build market constituencies, focus on the issues and more likely to have success, generate income, steps are incremental, and capital is not always what is needed (not alone - planning policy). At times, however, there are messy trade-offs with which not everyone is always comfortable.

This type of effort takes partners - cannot do it without industry, state federal, banks, and the environmental scientific community.

Sideline Examples

Proctor Wells: Proctor is in a unique position to take advantage of this new scientific data market. He holds a multispecies permit after selling his previous boat. He is the current President of the Maine Fishermen's' Cooperative. He is well known in the industry, weighs in on important policy issues and is the selectman for Phippsburg. He has solid experience and a reputation for working well with a variety of people. He also has experience with research --having worked on 2 prior research projects with the DMR.

Coast of Maine Organics: Company converts marine waste into high quality compost and gardening products. The product will help suburban gardeners replace chemical fertilizer with natural ones. The production facility is located in our coastal county with the highest unemployment rate. They signed an Employment and training agreement committing to hire low-income people for 50% of the new jobs.

Stinsons Marine used financing to leverage increase in the hourly wage. This involved the Seafood Company of Bath, Belfast and Prospect Harbor (a processor canning and marketing herring, both domestic and abroad). The opportunity: to utilize an abundant offshore herring resource to expanding the shoreside facility to diversify into frozen export herring and mackerel and extend seasonal employment across the year. The issue: adding value to marine resources does not necessarily translate into creating quality jobs for people with low incomes. The company needed the ability to access the resource and effectively compete in the global market. Loan: $250,000. A variable interest rate is assigned, starting at 10% and hinging on performance. If starting wages improve to $7.00 hour then: -1% if meet goals, +1% if made no effort to meet social goals.

For more information about CEI's programs, visit their website: www.ceimaine.org.

Northern New Mexico Collaborative Stewardship Project
Kay Matthews, La Jicarita News

I live in a beautiful village called El Valle in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. There are approximately 20 families in my village, which lies in the valley of the Rio de las Trampas, or River of Traps, 2 miles off the paved highway, 8 miles from the town where our kids go to school, and 6 miles from the Pecos Wilderness. El Valle is one of many villages that were settled over 300 years ago by the Indo-Hispano people in this upper Rio Grande watershed that was the aboriginal home of the Picuris Indians. Sixty years ago everyone in El Valle made their living from the land, raising cattle or sheep, pigs and goats, growing all their food except for a few staples like coffee and sugar, grinding their own wheat at the El Valle molino, and cutting their firewood. Adult men often had to leave the community to work in the mines of Colorado or the sheep camps of Wyoming, but the women stayed and took care of the children, animals, and gardens, and the men always returned to plant the crops and irrigate the fields.

Today, of course, the cash economy has crept into even El Valle, and the villagers make their living in a myriad of ways. Some work at the independent school district as teachers, bus drivers, and secretaries, some commute to Los Alamos, where they work for the department of defense, several work for the Forest Service, and a few of us manage to work out of our homes as furniture makers and writers.We all grow hay and gardens, though, and some of us still raise cattle, summering them in the mountains and wintering them in the fields that run from the houses down to the river. I would guess the median age of my neighbors is about sixty years old: the viejitos, in their 70s and 80s, who lived entirely on the land; their children, who are my age and who commute to the jobs; and our children, who are just starting out in the world. It remains to be seen if they will continue to be members of the El Valle community like their parents and grandparents. This is the critical question in our lives, and the reason I am here today talking about collaborative stewardship. What do we have to offer these children that will make them want to stay?

There are two things that particularly define the geography and the politics of where I live. The first is the legacy of the land grants, deeded by the King of Spain and the Mexican government to the indigenous Native Americans and Hispano settlers of northern New Mexico, granting them ownership and use of the forests, rivers, and meadows to cut their firewood, water their crops, and graze their animals. These land grants were recognized by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, ending the Mexican-American war which ceded the southwest to the United States. But over the course of the next 50 years, most of the land grant heirs were dispossessed of the grant lands by the US courts, and today, these heirs own only their homes and small acres of garden and pasture. The common lands, or ejidos, are now largely under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, who of course do not recognize the sovereignty, or use rights, of the land grant heirs.

The second feature is the acequia, or irrigation system, that still defines the landscape and also the social structure of the villages and pueblos of northern New Mexico. Everyone in my village, like in almost all the villages across the north, is a parciante, one who owns a water right tied to his or her land, and who water our fields to grow hay for cattle, our gardens of garlic and household vegetables, and our orchards. But we are all also members of the Acequia del Arriba or the Acequia de Abajo or Acequia del Llano, our community acequias that are the political structures of our communities. We are all responsible for the maintenance and repair of the dams, or presas, that divert the acequia water from the river, for the ditches themselves, which we clean and repair every spring before irrigation season, and we are all part of a process that has been going on for hundreds of years, where community members must work together for the common good.

So it is largely these two factors that set the stage for the collaborative efforts being made in northern New Mexico. Because of the history of the land grants there is a strong attachment to the land, and a feeling of ownership among the Indo-Hispano people of el norte. Because of the existence of the acequias, there is a commitment to maintaining an agricultural land base, which has spawned not only a resurgence in small scale agriculture but has also spawned forest and grazing restoration projects that protect and enhance upper watershed resources to insure better water quality and quantity.

Which means we have to maintain and protect a relationship with each other and with the public lands agencies who manage the lands that are critical to these efforts.The brief description of our collaborative stewardship project in your agenda states that the Forest Service, tired of the appeals and litigation by both environmental groups and development interests that were making it impossible to address issues of forest and community health, began the collaborative process. This is only half the truth. The other half of the story is the historical intransigence of public lands agencies to look more closely at how their policies-policies largely determined at the national level and controlled by federal dollars-directly affected the social and economic fabric of northern New Mexico. Do we continue with business as usual, which is accomplishing nothing except filling the pockets of environmental lawyers, or do we, the people who live in the communities directly affected by Forest Service policy, demand that that policy reflect the needs of our communities, which are directly tied to the health and sustainability of our forest and water resources. So we literally threw the forest plan, the 10-year document that reflected the national imperatives of getting out the cut or developing recreation as a billion dollar business, out the window. Instead, we looked at our traditional land-based activities-community forestry, public lands grazing, and agriculture tied to acequias-and came up with the projects that define collaborative stewardship in northern New Mexico. I will highlight three examples of the projects currently guided by collaborative stewardship.

1. Contract stewardship began as a pilot project in 1998 between Carson National Forest and La Montaña de Truchas, a wood yard established to provide economic opportunity for community members and restore degraded forests around the village of Truchas. Because of a long history of over cutting by multi-national companies since the beginning of the 20th century, most of the forests in northern New Mexico are now overstocked with second growth, small-diameter timber that the large corporations are not interested in harvesting. Most of the multi-nationals left the area in the mid 1990s, in response to a court injunction that shut down the forests of New Mexico for 18 months to protect Mexican spotted owl habitat.

Community members and forest service personnel began to talk about how to form a partnership that could restore the forests through thinning and prescribed burning while at the same time provide economic opportunities to community members. What they came up with was contract stewardship: The Forest Service determined sections of forest that needed treatment, divided them into acre blocks, and marked the trees for cutting. La Montaña workers then applied for the blocks, cut the marked trees, and removed the wood to the woodyard for sale as firewood, posts, or vigas and latillas, which are traditional building materials. Once all the blocks in the section had been cut, the Forest Service set prescribed burns to clear the underbrush and restore the natural grasses that have been unable to grow due to the overstocking of trees. Over the past 50 years our grasslands, which are critical to the health of our watersheds, have been encroached by woody material at the rate of 1% a year. After the success of this original pilot project, the local district increased the number of sections and opened up the program to all community members throughout the district. There is currently a waiting list for contract blocks.

2. The Santa Barbara Watershed Restoration Project also addresses the rehabilitation of an overstocked area of the forest, but grew out of the economic needs of public lands cattle grazers, who are members of an association of approximately 14 permittees who run 200 head of cattle. Their Santa Barbara Canyon allotment, in the upper portion of our watershed, needed to be thinned and burned to restore habitat for both wildlife and cattle as well as protect the riparian area that is the heart of the allotment. The dilemma was what to do with the cattle while the Forest Service committed to restoring the allotment, through both contract stewardship plots and small thinning contracts. So the Rio Pueblo/Rio Embudo Watershed Protection Coalition, a group of farmers, ranchers, Native Americans, environmentalists, and community groups brought together the partners needed to address this problem. The partners include: The New Mexico Environment Department; the Quivira Coalition, a Santa Fe-based conservation group that promotes sustainable ranching and innovative techniques such as grass banks and herding; the Conservation Fund, which manages a grass bank on the Santa Fe National Forest; the Forest Service; the Santa Barbara permittees; and La Jicarita News, a local community newspaper which is an organizing tool for the partners. The Environment Department supplied seed money to begin the restoration work with an Environmental Protection Agency grant. The Quivira Coalition negotiated a deal between the permittees and the Conservation Fund to move the association cattle for three summers to the Santa Fe forest grass bank, a stretch of country currently not being grazed by livestock that is made available on a short term basis to ranchers and their cattle so that the home range can be rested and restored ecologically. The Forest Service committed to thinning and burning hundreds of acres within the allotment, building upland earthen water tanks to keep cattle away from the riparian area, fencing certain parts of the river corridor, and rehabilitating trails. Another partner, the Jornada Experimental Range, will monitor the work. Monitoring is critical to the project to determine whether the prescribed work is successfully restoring the allotment, and whether this kind of project can be replicated in other areas of the forest.

3. "Value added" is the economic concept of community forestry, grazing, and agriculture. As more and more agricultural land is lost to housing and development, farmers in the upper Rio Grande Valley have had to find ways to add value to their crops of chile, tomatoes, garlic, and corn or specialize in niche crops that bring a good price at the market. The Farm Connection, an information exchange and educational resource for New Mexico farmers, the Quivira Coalition, the Santa Barbara Grazing Association, and La Jicarita News have formed a partnership to explore and promote organic crop and meat certification programs. The Farm Connection is already working with the Sangre de Cristo Wheat Growers, who have revitalized the wheat crop that once labeled their area of northern New Mexico the bread basket of the state The wheat is grown organically and the growers are setting up their own mill to process the grain. The Farm Connection also partners with area farmers markets, and organized a Community Sustained Agriculture program in our valley. Now we are also exploring the organic certification of cows grazed on public lands, specifically with the Santa Barbara permittees who would like to sell their healthy meat locally and make a profit at the same time.

All of these projects are examples of economic development, not economic growth. Maria Varela, a longtime community organizer in northern New Mexico, explains the difference this way: "Economic growth increases the amount of money running through a community's economy but may not increase that economy's capacity to steer its own direction. Growth is characterized by dependence on outside capital, technologies, and management talent. Economic development, conversely, increases the capacities of the people in the community to attract and pool capital and acquire technologies and management skills. Most of the wealth stays in the community."

Of course all of these projects have taken many turns and twists over their lives as we struggle to overcome the bureaucracy involved, the internecine fights that erupt, and the overwhelming threat of development and globalization. We also have to deal with the agendas of national environmental groups who are seeking to shut-down all public lands to logging-Zero Cut-and grazing-Zero Cow, or as some refer to it, Zero Cud. It is some of these same groups that have created the controversies you've all heard about involving the Quincy Library Group or the Applegate Partnership, where members have been accused of being too cozy with the timber industry. We've had our share of this same complaint; along with community people feeling threatened by the Forest Service and the Forest Service feeling threatened by the communities.

These complaints cross the geographic and political lines that separate my high mountain watershed and yours here in the lower Rio Grande. The more theoretical analyses of collaborative efforts have been explored in magazines like Chronicle of Community, out of Montana. In the Autumn 2000 issue one of their writers, Jonathan Lange, wrote an article called Exploring Paradox in Environmental Collaboration and listed all the pitfalls: 1) pressure to enter collaboration by outside agencies rather than by self-motivation; 2) who gets to be a "stakeholder" involved in the partnership or are some excluded because of ideology, or because they are outside of the affected community, for example, national environmental groups that claim all Forest Service lands belong to the "public" and they represent that "public;" 3) the imbalance of power in relationships where, for instance, government agencies like the Forest Service ultimately retain final say over the outcome of projects or how they are ultimately implemented, and 4) my own question about the collaborative process, does collaboration simply mean compromise.

The fact that our collaboration is grassroots born and voluntary is the most important component. I've spent plenty of time at mandated and facilitated roundtables and mediation sessions that were a total waste of time. No one particularly wanted to be there and everyone came to the table with their own agendas. The facilitator would spend the whole time promoting listening and behavior modification techniques when all we wanted to do was figure out what things we could work on together and how to get started. So eventually those groups that could find common ground forged partnerships that were voluntary and locally based, where the members had a direct stake in the collaboration. This did not mean that people outside of our watershed were not involved. Some of our staunchest supporters have been members of the Santa Fe Group of the Sierra Club, which has bucked their own group's national policies like Zero Cut and Zero Cow to work with indigenous people, the Forest Service, and whoever else is interested in environmental and social justice in northern New Mexico. The Quivira Coalition is based in Santa Fe and run by two local Sierra Club members. We understand that our communities are inextricably linked to our neighboring urban areas: they are dependent upon the sustainable management of our forest and water resources, while we are dependent upon the economic and social programs generated and managed by urban agencies.

But without the participation of the people who live on the land and who are directly affected by the decisions made on how to manage that land, there would be no collaboration. We constantly struggle with the fact that the Forest Service does indeed retain final say over certain decisions, but their power has been greatly diminished over the last few years as their timber dollars have dried up and they are completely dependent upon community people to do the work in the woods that their staff cannot afford to do. There is only one full-time timber person on the district who is in charge of stewardship blocks. Without the cooperation of the communities he wouldn't be able to complete a single restoration project. Because of this depleted staff the Forest Service has also found itself in the position of having to further adjust the forest plan to reflect what they will actually be able to accomplish, and community people and activists have been effective in determining what those projects should be. Now, instead of responding through the NEPA process to what the Forest Service proposes, we are at the table determining what the proposals are.

Collaboration addresses the needs of all its parties because without it our individual work would be severely limited, and we are actively implementing that work on the ground through trial and error and constant monitoring. This is not compromise, it is finding out what works and how to replicate that work in other situations where people are willing to find common ground. In the words of Ike DeVargas, president of the small, community based logging company La Compania Ocho and longtime Hispano activist, "You know, it's a pain in the butt when you have to make a pact with the devil to survive. I hate it. But they're not alliances for life. They're alliances for one issue."

While we don't think the Forest Service is the devil, we do wish it worked faster and more efficiently. While we wish that the social problems that make progress in our communities so difficult didn't exist, and while we wish we didn't have to fight so many battles with groups who don't understand the cumulative impacts that their policies effect, what choice do we have?

Hall Rothman wrote an essay in the High Country News several months ago asking the question, "Do we really need the rural West?" essentially saying that we're a drain on the country's economy, that we're using up all the water, and that we need to get out of the way of the urbanites who need that water to drink and water their golf courses and need the land for recreation, to camp, ski, hunt and ride ATVs. At first I thought, this essay must be tongue in cheek, but the editor of the newspaper didn't think so, because he responded to Rothman's question, yes, we need the rural West to take care of the land in a sustainable fashion so there are healthy watersheds producing that urban water, providing healthy, regionally grown produce and meat, and preventing our forests from burning down and taking whole towns with them. But the answer to that question from the people who live in my watershed, and those of you who live here in the Laguna Madre region would of course be that this is our home, this is the land that our ancestors have cared for for hundreds of years, this is the birthplace of our culture, our language, our way of life. We will not give up our lands to Disneyfication by the recreation industry or to suburbanization by the development industry. We are the last bastion of hope against homogenization, the end product of the global economy. So we must work together, at whatever level possible, to take control of our watersheds and our lands so that we can ensure their sustainability and our own. Quoting Maria Varela again: "Rural communities are more than pretty backdrops to sell jeeps, butter or laundry soap. Rural communities contain important cultural wellsprings, which recharge the cultural diversity of this nation. Rural communities are critical buffers to watersheds, wildlife and human habitats, sacred places and scenic treasures. Many rural human habitats contain generations of people with long term experience in living on and watching the land. They have learned through experience and mistakes the sciences of sustainability where they live." So good luck on your work here in Laguna Madre, where the potential for diverse relationships is enormous.

To reach Kay Matthews or for more information about the Collaborative Stewardship Project, contact www.news@lajicarita.org.

Leigh Fitzpatrick
Sierra Business Council

Presentation summary pending.

John Mayne
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program Southern Region (SARE)

Presentation summary pending.

Panel Discussion

Regional leaders were invited to discuss sustainable development concepts and how they might apply locally. Panelists included:

Dr. William Berg - Professor, Department of Engineering, UTB
Mary Cloud - Education and outreach, McAllen International Museum
Dr. Andrew Ernest - Dept. of Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M Univ.
Dr. Martin Garcia - Veterinarian and Landowner
Bonnie Gonzalez - CEO, Rio Grande Valley Empowerment Zone
David Hall - Director, Texas Rural Legal Aid
Jeff Rupert - Manager, Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge
Dr. SJ Sethi - Data and Information Systems, UT Pan Am, CoSERVE
Chuck Snyder - City of Hidalgo Historic Pumphouse
Gary Stolz - Public Outreach - South Texas Refuges complex
Barbara Storz - Sustainable Agriculture program, Texas Agricultural Extension Service

Panelists were asked to discuss the following:

• Is it time for a regional sustainable development partnership in the Valley?
• Who should lead the effort?
• What resources are needed?

Panelists talked about the concept of partnerships - the tying in of opposing points of view, and how arbitrating those points of view may eventually elevate sustainability to practice and reality. However, individuals also mentioned the difficulty of tying sustainability into day-to-day decision-making, and the challenge of overcoming self-interests that perpetuate the status quo. Two panelists mentioned that the people who are already keyed into sustainability or at least receptive to the idea were in attendance, however we need to be reaching out to the development councils and those who make the decisions about how the region develops. Conference organizers mentioned that they had made a substantial effort to involve the EDC's, but were largely unsuccessful in attracting their interest. Part of the challenge, then, is conveying the idea that incorporating environmental sustainability into economic development practices is not a choice but a necessity.

Some local examples of sustainable practices were offered: specifically projects to increase water availability and infrastructure for colonias (low-income, unincorporated housing developments that often lack access to basic services such as water and wastewater), and efforts to attract businesses that can re-use or re-manufacture waste products generated by existing businesses. No specific examples were provided of such businesses.

The group discussed the importance of providing incentives - that trying to "regulate" sustainability would backfire, and firms need to be provided with a reason for incorporating sustainability measures into day-to-day operations.

Regional planning seems to be carried out mostly by the Economic Development Corporations. Panelists talked about the cyclical problems created by continually attracting low-wage jobs to the border region, which in turn attracts more people to the border in search of jobs, and perpetuates high unemployment rates. The jobs available are low-wage jobs but there aren't enough of them to go around.

Several panelists talked about the importance of educating people about sustainability and about ecological issues in general. Some pointed out that science education is low on the agenda of local K-12 curricula. Students who do express interest in ecologically-oriented careers at some point may be passively discouraged from pursuing such careers, given the emphasis on technology training and on learning for higher-paying jobs over career satisfaction and life fulfillment objectives. One panelist offered an example of a local college student who loved ecology but was spending all her time learning to create web pages in order to get a high-paying technology job.

The discussion turned to ecotourism as a local sustainable industry, though one panelist pointed out that locally, increased tourism around birding and nature hadn't really achieved a higher measure of wealth for the community, as most of the jobs associated with ecotourism were still low-paying service sector jobs. Others claimed tourism was a clean industry and as such should be encouraged. Others thought regional planning would help but there was no real consensus on an appropriate entity, plus some said the region had never been able to plan anything together with any measure of success.

A presentor offered the suggestion that beginning with a sector approach and targeting ecotourism, recycling, etc., then working for tangible, incremental success through work with an existing industry could begin to make a difference in addressing sustainability.

The conference concluded shortly thereafter.

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