🎙️Empowering Landscape Partnerships: A Journey Towards Sustainability & Resilience

🌎 Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast

In This Episode:

• Motivating landscape stakeholders and partners about landscape conservation, design, sustainability, and resilience.

• Broadening understanding of large landscape conservation efforts.

• Encouraging conservation among stakeholders and experts.

Featured Discussions:

• The multi-faceted goals of the podcast (00:01:52 - 00:05:15)

• Why a landscape conservation podcast now? (00:08:15 - 00:13:54)

• Landscape partnerships (00:15:17 - 00:17:19)

• Landscape conservation design (00:17:22 - 00:19:23)

• 50-year transformation (00:19:26 - 00:22:11)

Resources Mentioned:

• PNW Landscape Conservation (00:03:19 - 00:04:25)

• The iCASS Platform: Nine Principles for Landscape Conservation Design (00:17:22 - 00:18:44)

• E.O. Wilson and the Global Biodiversity Framework (00:11:30 - 00:11:48)

For More Info:

• …or participation inquiries, visit www.designingnatureshalf.com

Credits:

• Research / Writing / Editing / Production by Rob Campellone & Tom Miewald;

• Cover Art / Logo by Lucas Ghilardi;

• Intro / Outro Voiceover by Tom Askin;

• Music Composed & Performed by Aleksey Chistilin via Pixabay

Transcription:

S1-E1: Empowering Landscape Partnerships: A Journey Towards Sustainability & Resilience w/ Rob Campellone and Tom Miewald

Intro: Mind Matter Media presents Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation podcast, where discussions center around the most current and innovative approaches to landscape conservation and design. This is the show for stakeholders who want to adapt to the climate crisis, halt biodiversity loss, and change the world by designing sustainable and resilient landscapes through collaborative conservation action.

Rob: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation podcast. I’m your co-host, Rob Campellone.

Tom: And I’m your other co-host, Tom Miewald. So, Rob, hey, we started a podcast here, it looks like, and we’re trying to fill a niche out there. We don’t see a lot of landscape conservation podcasts out there. We’re passionate about the work, and we want to bring in some great guests and have some good dialogue about what landscape conservation is. And do you want to add anything to that?

Rob: Yeah, no, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and just excited to kick this off with episode one with you. And we won’t have any guests in episode one, but we will in episode two. And we have a great suite of guests lined up for the season, which will run from January through June. So just looking forward to working with you, Tom.

Tom: Likewise, Rob. Looking forward to having some good conversations with you and our guests. So, what will people be hearing over the course of these podcasts? What are we going to be talking about?

Rob: You know, I think our goals are multifaceted. First on the list is to hope to inspire budding landscape partnerships that are already in place and hopefully inspire them to think about designing sustainable and resilient landscapes. I think we also want to, of course, raise awareness about the broad topic of landscape conservation and, more specifically, landscape conservation design as a means to an end. We want to inspire dialogue amongst those stakeholders that are listening in. Whether they’re undertaking a design process or not, it’s just really important that we begin to think and communicate as a community of practice. So, we hope to inspire that. And last but not least, really, to facilitate learning about other innovative approaches that are taking place not only here in the United States, but around the globe as to how others are undertaking their landscape conservation efforts.

Tom: Right? There are so many different great forums out there to hear about landscape conservation. For example, just a couple of weeks ago, I sat in on a Pacific Northwest landscape conservation forum, and it was a great way for people to share their knowledge, share their experiences, and share their technology and tools to support landscape conservation. And we think those forums are great, and I think the podcast format brings a slightly different way to get information across. Hopefully, there’s a dialogue that develops kind of more intimately between us and the guest. We can bring out their experiences, their thoughts, and the lessons learned in a way that’s different than some of the other forums out there. So, yeah, we’re hoping that the podcast medium is a positive one to bring people in and tell the world about what they’re doing. Hopefully, that builds a community of practice and makes people aware of things that they weren’t aware of before and a way to exchange ideas and something to listen to while you’re doing the dishes, hopefully.

Rob: Right? Yeah, I think that’s right. And incredibly important that we have this platform as a community of practice where people listening in right now, if they’re in the field, if they’re in the expertise, the realm of expertise that falls within the realm of landscape conservation and design, they could reach out to us and say, hey, I think I have something to contribute, and hopefully folks will do that. We’ll have a conversation about what your expertise is and invite you to participate in the but so this really isn’t our podcast, Tom. It’s the community’s podcast, and we’re just facilitating that conversation.

Tom: That’s right. I see this podcast as a way to reach out and keep the dialogue going with people that I respect a lot and hopefully get the information out to a whole bunch of different people that are learning about landscape conservation and kind of maybe we should tell people a little bit about who we are and why we’re doing this. I don’t know if there’s any other reason that we’re doing it. Besides, this is something that we’re passionate about and we find interested in, and we’ve had experience in. So, over the past 20-plus years, I’ve been involved in landscape scale conservation as a geographer. So, my background is in geography. I got a master’s degree in it. Then I went into working in working with kind of a tech startup that looked at one of the first uses of satellite imagery for commercial uses, and that got me looking at broad spatial scales. Then I worked into the NGO world for several years, working at larger spatial scales to get people to identify biodiversity hotspots and get people to do something differently in those biodiversity hotspots. And then where we met Rob was through the landscape conservation cooperatives with the fish and Wildlife Service. So, I spent some time there.

Rob: It’s been great working with you. When we were both with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, I was located in headquarters, and you were out in the region. We found each other, in some form or fashion, and started working together to advocate for this design approach to achieve landscape conservation. That was many years ago, but we’ve been able to maintain our relationship over the years. I’m retired now, and you and I are writing a book on landscape conservation and design entitled Designing Nature’s Half: A Practical Guide to Conserving 50% by 2050. We’re doing this podcast together, and I’m still in the game; though I am not officially working with an agency or organization, I am still putting a lot of hours into it. It’s a labor of love, and I’m glad to be doing it and I’m glad to be working with you.

Tom: Yeah, Rob, your perspective is invaluable; looking at things from the outside and your experience brings a lot to the conversation. So, yeah, just great to be working with you on this, and maybe we could talk a little bit about why we’re doing it now. Why do we feel the need for a landscape conservation podcast now? What are the things, the drivers that are bearing down upon society that really, for us, as people who think at that landscape scale, make us feel that landscapes are the way to be or the prism to be looking as a solution to some of these problems?

Rob: Right. It doesn’t really matter if you call it the Anthropocene or the great unraveling or the triple planetary crisis of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. It’s clear, at least at the 30,000-foot level, that the global community is just facing one hell of a wicked problem. We really need to get moving on resolving some of these global threats. And you and I and many others in the conservation community have realized over the past 1020 years or so, 30 years. I don’t know what the exact starting point is, Tom, but we feel as if we need to take a shift from doing conservation at the site-specific level, and that includes planning, and planning is my area of expertise. But moving away from the site-specific planning and implementation efforts to working at the larger landscape level. We call it design. Other experts in the field have called it planning. But regardless of whether you call it planning or design, I do think there’s a difference. But regardless of what you call it, working at these larger geographic scales seems to be the right way to do it given the intensity of the threats and the diversity of the threats that are occurring to natural resources on the ground. They’re coming at us kind of at these broader scales. And so, it just makes sense to do our planning design and delivery at those scales. And we were already facing these five global thresholds, or tipping points; it’s anticipated that we’re going to exceed them by 2030 and possibly three more later in the decade. So, it’s time for a shift. And the conservation community has been in the midst of this shift for quite some time now. And we’re just creating this podcast so that we can have a broader conversation.

Tom: About that shift right at the global scale. Everybody notices this and is aware of these issues, climate crisis and biodiversity crisis, and people are coming up with broad solutions. For example, EA Wilson came up with the idea of protecting 50% of the earth’s surface. The latest global biodiversity framework is pointing to 30% protection of the earth’s surface by 2030. And these are big initiatives that are pointing towards big solutions, which is great. And that is the thinking that we need to have. At the same time, as you said, we’re not going to get there by looking at a site or a small protected area here or there. It really is going to have to take this concept of looking larger, looking at landscapes. Landscapes seem to be the unit where people interact with their environments, where you can start thinking holistically about solutions, not just for conservation, but for livelihoods, and you can start thinking about how you’re going to implement those kinds of visions at a broader scale. And it’s also important to go parallel with that large spatial scale of what a landscape is. And we can discuss what a landscape is to no end. And you may never get anybody to agree on what a landscape is. A landscape is defined by the people who live in it in many ways and by the ecological processes that are there to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services. But, yeah, you also have to think about the temporal timescale, too. There are landscape time frames that we need to start thinking about 2030 years, thinking generationally about this. And how do you develop a governance structure within a landscape that has the ability to think and act and be a cohesive unit over that time frame to implement at landscape scales? It’s definitely a challenge and will take a transformative way of thinking and doing and funding, and, there’s a whole lot that has to go into that transformation, and that’s kind of what we want to get at here.

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Rob: Unfortunately, in many landscapes, partnerships have already formed. Some of those partnerships are multi-jurisdictional, and some others are even multisector, which is wonderful. And that’s kind of the first step in the design process that you and I speak of these collaborations, these partnerships at the Landscape scale, a diversity of entities coming together and beginning to work through a design process. And it’s huge that we’re already kind of doing that in many places across the country. Some have even begun to take the next step, which is assessing the current and future condition of the landscape, developing prototypes of what that landscape might look like in the future, and identifying priority areas for where to direct conservation action on the ground. The whole thing is really exciting, and all we want to do with this podcast is empower those partnerships to take it to the next step and keep moving forward because that’s ultimately how we’re going to address the Anthropocene and The Great Unraveling and the triple planetary crisis, is through a design process that ultimately lands on who’s going to do what, where, when, and how in the landscape through a collaborative effort. It’s great news. We’re starting. Let’s keep it moving, right?

Tom: You talk about that design process a lot, and that’s kind of, as you listen to this podcast, you’re going to find that that is kind of the prism that we use to talk about landscape conservation, this concept of bringing people together, convening people, assessing landscape conditions, developing strategies, goals, objectives, developing priority places and things you do in those places. But the key thing in the design process, and I think what we found in this paper that we wrote a few years back, is that these are the common elements that you find in any landscape conservation planning process. You can boil it down to kind of some key elements of convening people, assessing spatial design, and then developing a strategic plan that meets the goals that the collaborative, the collective, and the landscape collaborative have identified. And I think to us both, that strategic plan is kind of the key thing, and the key output of the design process is what can we do? What’s the theory of change for our landscape that can move us from our current condition to a more resilient and hopefully protected situation? So, it’s one thing to develop that strategic plan, and then the other component of that is developing a funding plan to look at the landscape as well. So, we hope to bring in guests who can talk about how they’ve developed strategic plans and maybe some innovative thinking on conservation finance actually to implement that plan into perpetuity. As I said, this is a long-term undertaking to go into landscape conservation. So how do you maintain that, and how do you maintain financial flows into that goal?

Rob: Know? You. You mentioned E. O. Wilson earlier in our discussion, Tom, and he and Robert MacArthur, in 1967, wrote a book called The Theory of Island Biogeography. And in my mind, that was the starting point of this 50-year transformation we find ourselves in 50 years. The conservation community has been thinking differently about conservation and, at times, struggling with how to implement this theory of change that you mentioned earlier. Then, Jared Diamond, 1975, wrote this seminal paper about how you design reserves at large landscape scales and what those design features look like in size and shape and configuration and relationship to each other across the larger landscape. Really cutting-edge kind of stuff. And that was in 1975. There’s been a multitude of scientists and planners, organizations, and agencies have been trying to sort this design concept out for decades. And here we are at just another milestone in this long transformation that we have been in. You and I are again providing this platform as a way for the community to continue to brainstorm and discuss and hopefully move the needle in a positive direction toward a sustainable and resilient landscape. That’s the goal. When we get there, when and if we ever get there, where we could say, okay, we did it, we achieved it. But we also recognized that this started, according to Campellone, back in 1967. And to think about being a part of this larger movement, in my mind, is very empowering. Tom, we’re not alone here. We’re just the next chapter.

Tom: We’re going to bring in guests who represent that next chapter and will talk about their ideas, experience, initiatives that they’re leading, and their thinking. We don’t have all the answers. We just have inquisitive minds, and we want to bring in some guests who will help us understand the complexities, challenges, and successes of landscape conservation. And yeah, maybe that’s where we leave off.

Rob: I think that’s a great idea, Tom. We’ve probably said everything we could say right now, but there’s a lot more to come, and listeners will have an opportunity to hear it from experts in their field. We’ll be bringing them in to talk about it. It won’t just be you and I. So, thanks, Tom, for this first episode. It’s been an invigorating conversation. I always enjoyed talking about this stuff with you, have for a long time and look forward to continuing to do that out into the future.

Tom: Yeah, likewise, my friend. And with that, let’s sign off.

Rob: Yeah, sure. So, thanks, everyone, for listening to episode one of Designing Nature’s Half the Landscape Conservation podcast. I’ve been your co-host, Rob Campellone.

Tom: I have been your other co-host, Tom Miewald, and we look forward to being with you biweekly for the coming months. Thank you.

Outro: Rob Campellone and Tom Miewald researched, wrote, edited, and produced the Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation podcast. Lucas Gallardi created the Designing Nature’s Half cover art and logo design. Tom Askin is the voice behind the intro and outro, and composer Alexi Chistilin wrote and performed the music via Pixabay.

Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation podcast is a proud member of Mind Matter Media, a startup multimedia network whose mission is to change the world by design, mining sustainable and resilient landscapes for people, planet, and prosperity.

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