🌎 Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast

Dr. Ronald J. McCormick, a field naturalist and systems ecologist, shares insights on complex systems theory, including its application in landscape conservation design (LCD). The discussion provides practical advice for stakeholders interested in LCD—highlighting conceptual modeling as a valuable step and stressing the importance of boundaries within any model used for decision-making processes. The episode serves as a reminder that successful landscape conservation hinges not only on scientific rigor but also on integrating holistic perspectives—including economic realities and cultural values—to resonate with diverse stakeholder groups involved in LCD truly.

Key Points Discussed:

1.      Complex Systems Theory: Dr. McCormick explains that landscapes are much more than just areas of land; they're intricate ecological and social systems that require a nuanced understanding.

 2.      Ecological Modeling: The conversation explores using conceptual models as tools to better understand these complex systems and their myriad interactions.

 3.      Landscape Conservation Design: This is a favorite topic of Dr. McCormick and our co-hosts. It involves designing sustainable landscapes through collaborative participation to combat the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

Insights Gained:

1.   The Importance of Scale:  How changing levels within a system can drastically alter the drivers, context, and constraints affecting it.

2.   Model Limitations & Utility: This section discusses common pitfalls in modeling efforts at various scales, emphasizing that while all models have limitations, some provide useful insights when appropriately applied.

3.   Incorporating Human Factors:  Acknowledging human influence is crucial in landscape conservation design – economic factors, societal needs, and resource availability all play pivotal roles.

4.   Local Knowledge is Key:  Leveraging local expertise alongside scientific data enriches the understanding required for effective landscape management decisions.

Episode Highlights:

1.      Ron emphasizes embracing complexity rather than oversimplifying landscapes into components that may miss critical interconnections or scale-specific phenomena.

2.      He critiques over-reliance on certain types of ecological models without considering broader contexts or potential novel situations like those posed by climate change.

3.      The discussion circles back to practical advice for stakeholders interested in landscape conservation design—highlighting conceptual modeling as a valuable step and stressing the importance of boundaries within any model used for decision-making processes.

Resources:

1.      The iCASS Platform: Nine Principles for Landscape Conservation Design (Campellone et al., 2018)

2.      Toward A Unified Ecology, 2nd Edition (Allen & Hoekstra, 2015)

3.      Dragnet Ecology – ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’: The Privilege of Science in a Postmodern World (Allen et al., 2001)

4.      The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (Waltner-Toews, Kay, and Lister, 2008)

5.       The Collapse of Complex Societies (Tainter, 1988)

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:

[00:03] 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.

[00:32] Rob: Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode five of Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. I'm your co-host, Rob Campellone.

[00:43] Tom: And hi, I'm your other co-host, Tom Miewald. And so, Rob, who do we have on the show today?

[00:49] Rob: We have a really great episode ahead, Tom. We have Dr. Ronald J. McCormick, an ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management. Ron's joining us today to talk about the very broad subject of complex systems theory, but more specifically, things that we call landscapes, and using conceptual models and ecological modeling to understand those systems…and wait for it….my favorite subject: landscape conservation design. And I'm really looking forward to having that conversation with Ron.

[01:28] Tom: Right. Yeah, I mean, our topic is landscape conservation. That's the topic of the podcast. Landscapes are complex ecological and social systems. As a landscape practitioner, I think embracing that complexity is an important mindset for designing and planning at a landscape scale. Knowing the elements of the landscape, the patches of land cover, the mosaics in the landscape, and how they interact and influence ecosystem health is essential for landscape ecology. So, how that intermixes with what Ron will be talking about and complex systems, I think it's fascinating. In the last episode, we heard Steve Marcuson talk about Fire, which is a major disturbance on the landscape, or is it something that maintains the landscapes? I would think that complex systems theory can help us think through some of these landscape events and their impacts over time and space, and it could be a framework for modeling. So, I will embrace complexity for this podcast, and I look forward to hearing Ron's thoughts.

[02:26] Rob: Yeah, we devoted the first three episodes of this season's podcast to large-scale change agents, including the climate crisis and wildland fire and human development in the wildland-urban interface. As you mentioned, Tom and I mixed in some climate adaptation planning and strategy implementation discussion just to temper the doom and gloom of the climate change conversation. We did that with intention: to provide a foundation for what the conservation sector is currently up against. And we continue to be up against and will continue to do so out into the future, increasingly so, both in scale and intensity, long after you and I are put to rest. Tom, basically, we wanted to provide a foundation for advocating for a new approach to conservation.

[03:24] Tom: Right. This is a great episode that could bring together a lot of those different concepts as complex and systems theory really helps us bring a lot of different topics together and provide a framework for modeling, for thinking, and hopefully for communicating some of that complexity on the landscape, because that's such an important part. How do we communicate what we know about ecosystems to the public and to decision-makers? And that's an important part of landscape conservation is that communication piece. So, yeah, let's bring on Ron, and maybe do you have a bio?

[04:00] Rob: Okay, without further ado, let me introduce my good friend and co-author of the 2018 paper that the three of us wrote with some additional partners and, stakeholders and colleagues. But today we have Dr. Ronald Ron McCormick. Dr. McCormick is a classically trained field naturalist who came to embrace the ecology of complex systems in his late thirties and has never looked back. With an educational background in soil science, forestry, hydrology, and botany, Ron's early work took him from the woods of Michigan's upper peninsula to the hills of southeastern Oklahoma and nearly all of Florida. It was in Florida where he first called himself an ecologist, and it was there that he formed a deep and lasting land ethic. Ron's decades of thinking about and applying systems theory to social-ecological problems have led him to landscape conservation and landscape conservation design, which society desperately needs…as he says, at this critical juncture. His day job is as an ecologist for the Bureau of Land Management, which offers him access to wild places where he photographs wild spaces.

[05:38] Tom: Yeah, no, I've worked with Ron on our paper on developing The iCASS Platform: Nine principles for landscape conservation design. I know that Ron has a far-ranging intellectual background for thinking about complex systems. So, Ron, just as a starting question, what are some of the frameworks that you find useful and helpful for understanding ecosystems and landscapes? And is there anything that we missed in that?

[06:03] Ron McCormick: There are paradigms, there are ways you think about things. Systems is a meta paradigm. It's the way you think about it. It's how we think about the way we think about. Always in systems, you abstract back one level in the system and start looking there before you look at what's right in front of your, you know, Rob said, during my, you know, was in Florida for seven years, out in the field virtually every day. But yeah, those are the two things that I learned working there. Know, walk around, observe, know where you are, know what's going on, know everything that's going know. Certainly, I knew a lot about botany, but I also did birds. We had to do fauna. We had to do humans. We had a well field that I worked on. So, you started to see all those things. At that time, in Florida, 800 people moved in every day. So, I was working for a consultant company that basically was making that work. We put in the roads and the buildings and the shopping centers. So, I got to see that economic driver as well as the ecological side.

[07:09] Rob: And before then, you were Dr. Tim Allen's student?

[07:15] Ron McCormick: I knew a lot of stuff, but I didn't have a way of organizing it. I didn't have a way of thinking about what systems do and what toward a unified ecology. Tim's probably major work that everybody who calls themselves an ecologist or even an environmentalist should read because it takes that old rule of thumb country vicar naturalist jargon like it's this: there's always a special name because we didn't have a way to separate. If you have an organism on an organism, well, you can't be both organisms. So, we call one a parasite or a symbiote, or there's something else about it. Unified ecology just teaches you there are only six types. There are processes, population, ecosystem, then there's community, landscape, biome, our structural aspects. So, if you have a structure, then you have to have a process, and then you have a structure all at different scales, all operating at different spatial and temporal scales. And if you start sorting any system, including every societal and economic system, it's just ecology using different words. So, that was the biggest thing to come out of my time working in Madison.

[08:34] Tom: You came out of Madison and you got your PhD there, and then you moved on to where I was dealing.

[08:42] Ron McCormick: With endangered species task force. So, we were trying to develop protections from known, crop protection products, what the rest of the world calls pesticides, pesticides, herbicides and rodenticides, insecticides, all the sides. So, it was very ecological, and you had to understand habitat, you had to understand applications, you had to understand transport through water, different media, and air. So, it did really help. It just wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it was a good starting job, and then I got hired by probably the third person who really helped me focus and train how I operate now, Larry Kapustka, up in Calgary, Alberta. So, we started doing human health and ecological risk assessments for the oil sands in northern Alberta and also worked on a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories. So that is like the epitome of a large, complex social-ecological landscape that you have to understand not only just the basics but you have to understand the drivers working in the oil sands. Anything below $100 a barrel, they just weren't making any money. Anything above it was great, so when oil prices dropped…we all got fired. This, again, teaches you a lot about paying attention to something outside of just your focus, which is my biggest problem; why I've never wanted to work at a university because you have to specialize. I always like the jack of all trades. It's a great statement, but the full statement is a jack of all trades, master of none. And I would say that's exactly who I am. I know a lot about many small things, but I'm really not a master of any particular subject.

[10:28] Tom: Yeah, I often think of that as a great set of skills or mindset for looking at landscapes, knowing the pieces and how they come together. But if you go too far into one piece of the puzzle, you'll lose the perspective of the broader landscape. So, I'm a geographer, and we're very much like that in terms of. Yeah, a little bit. Your knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep, and you try to find those people who are experts in things. And, indeed, geography is kind of similar. The art of putting things together and making interactions between all those different elements of the landscape.

[11:07] Ron McCormick: I'm thinking of Rob's book. And as I told you before we started, I'm basically driving cross country. I left Virginia a couple of days ago, and I'm now sitting in New Mexico and coming through the Ozarks and thinking about, well, where's nature's 50% here? And there's a lot of it there because of the hills, because of the way humans can make a living. It is very small, very specific, and takes a lot of work. And then, as I come down out of the Ozarks into cotton country, I mean, a day and a half of seeing nothing but huge, flat expanses of cotton stubble. But that's what was growing there. That's most of what I've seen. And then, getting into West Texas, went more to know open fields, which I assume they're grain or wheat or something. They're growing there. The minute I started getting to the edge of New Mexico, all of a sudden, Choya mesquite some of the tall bunch of grasses. It was a day and a half off. There's 2%. That is nature's part right there. And now, right where I'm sitting, I'd say, depending on the grazing, it's still maybe 40% nature. So, these are all the issues we must consider if we're trying to get to the 50x50 part. As the economics change with each ecoregion you're working in, the economy changes, the society changes, and the way you can live on a landscape changes. And that's why I'm not an expert in any of those, but I know how to find those people.

[12:39] Rob: That's a main tenet of landscape conservation and, more importantly, landscape conservation design. That ability to look outside of our silos, look outside of our colleagues, and reach out to the broader community to try and bring those folks into the process and acquire their information, their expertise, their information about their landscape, and hopefully through that process, be able to build a system's vision for the landscape. We use conceptual models to try to understand all the compiled information. Do you want to speak to, maybe this is an appropriate time to kind of speak to conceptual models or modeling in general? Ron, if you'd like to. And then we could loop back around and talk about landscape conservation.

[13:45] Ron McCormick: Certainly, that's been a big part of my focus in education. My Master's degree was in hydrologic modeling, and my dissertation was in wildfire spread modeling. But again, I look back through all the theories of why we thought fire spread in a certain way, and it goes back to a model by Rothaermel that was done in the late '60s and early seventy s. To this day, I still hear people talking about using that model. And my question was, well, is there a different way that we can think about this? Can we use something? What are the things that you ask? The question is, how do you know what? Do you think you know? We think we know that Rothard Meltz models are perfect for doing wildfire spread. Maybe they're you. How do we know? So, I basically got somebody to agree to let me use artificial neural networks. What's driving Chat GPT right now is to see if we can tell a computer how wildfire spreads. But just let the computer figure it out.

[14:43] Rob: Ron, what did the computer tell you different from the previous model?

[14:50] Ron McCormick: Well, this is always the problem with, know, sort of black box computer modeling. You can't know. It doesn't tell you anything. Except I figured out a way to. Get this to work. It worked in the province, 212 ecoregion, northern Great Lakes areas, going over through the shield in Canada up to Maine. So that area worked fine. I don't know if it works anyplace else. Again, we never tried it. We never expanded it. What it taught me, though, was all of the inputs that we used for most of the models that existed at that time. This is the mid-90s, so both the modeling systems were archaic, and the available data we had was minimal. I couldn't get those models to actually work because, conceptually, I was trying to use all the inputs that everybody else did. When I took out all the derived, know, the things that we, as humans, said, this is important, this is what we need. I took all those out and just started feeding it raw imagery, weather, just the basics. Then it started to. Tim Allen's favorite saying is modeling is seeing whatever's in the boat, tossing it all over the side until you just get the components that still make you float. So, it's those sorts of things when it comes to conceptual modeling that you have to really start thinking about, do I really need this? It'd be fun to have, be fun to do, but, yeah, maybe you don't necessarily need that. And probably at the peak of my modeling career, the diamond mine that I mentioned earlier up in the northwest Territories had basically four phases. The planning of the construction operation was going to be 30 to 50 years, and that's a lifetime for anybody doing the study. And then close out. And the close-out would be hundreds of years because it was a three-mile-deep mine pit. There was a waste pile that was going to be the highest thing from basically the beginning of northwest territories to the Arctic. That was going to be a brand-new mountain. And because of the pressure of rock and the overburden, it wouldn't freeze for 100 years. So, we had all those things to put together. So, I put together a conceptual model of those four phases, but then also looked at local, regional, territory wise, and global, and asked questions at each of those scales at each of those time periods. So, it was a 16-part model that turned out to be like 75 linked diagrams within Vizio because we were dealing with Denne groups and the visual aspect; we wanted to show we understand you live, work, and play here. We understand the society. We understand the pressures that mining would have. So, we had to include the economics. We had to include disturbance to society but disturbance to the ecology. And it was really fun to do. And I'm going to say it again. Yeah, we got fired at the end of that because the project engineer didn't understand it and didn't want us working on the project anymore.

[17:58] Tom: Yeah, no modeling. It's a tough business. I know landscapes are kind of abstract concepts in many ways. When you were talking about how you were driving through the landscapes of America, and you went from one to another, you don't really know where they begin or end, and they're kind of these elements that you can't grasp without information and data from satellite images or GIS, and also local knowledge as well. That all fits in there. How do you bring that together in a modeling framework that is useful for making decisions? I tend to think that all models are wrong. But some models are useful, right? As you were saying, there are basic inputs that can go into the model that could provide useful information if it resonates with decision-makers. From your perspective, what are some of the most useful models that you've been a part of or seen in your work for landscape-scale decision-making that might support a design or planning effort?

[18:58] Ron McCormick: Models, again, are usually very useful, but people always try and stretch them beyond their foundations. That's the biggest issue. And again, systems ecology teaches you to think about what level you're asking the question: what's the level above it? What's the level below it? When you change a level in a system, you change scale. When you change scale, you change the drivers of that system, you change the context, you change the constraints. So, the model developed at one level in a complex system will not work at a lower or higher level. We forget that all the time. Most modelers only deal with the one part they're looking at and maybe the level below it, or maybe the level above it, and usually nothing more than that, but it looks really good. You can get it all to work. You can run the bad words of verification and validation. So, no model is valid. You just can confirm it works the way you want it to. That's really what it comes down to. I think it's. Naomi (Unknown) has a really nice paper on validation verification, but not really good words to use. You can confirm that it works, but basically, that's all you can do with models. And we should think about that more. What used to be called general circulation models but are now global system models. Basically, all they're doing is they're moving air around the world in three-degree blocks and they're checking to see the temperature. And I'm being asked as a land manager to downscale those very, actually crude models. Yeah, they may appear to be complex, but they're actually just pretty crude models. And try and understand what effect a change in climate will have on a plant community. And you can't make that transition because everything changes at each level you come down. So, the models that we're working with right now, and I'm going to throw in my disclaimer that everything that I'm saying in this talk is my personal opinion. It is not the opinion of or reflects the views of the agency I work for or any other federal agency that I'm associated with. So just forgot to throw that at the beginning. But the best models that we have right now are ecological sites, state and transition models, and ecological site groups that deal with a landscape that has a single dominant and many associated characteristics that we can identify, that we feel statistically safe with drawing a line around something, and that's the modeling that we have to use right now. I'm glad somebody's doing global modeling. I really am. It does inform us about things. It's nothing I can use today to work on the land because, again, we don't know where anything's going. We're in a novel, absolutely novel situation. Your previous podcast talks about fire, and everybody's going, well, yeah, it will burn. We're not sure when; we're not sure how hot. We're not sure where we know it will, though. And so that sort of complex ecological description that is an ecological site and is an ecological site group are the best models that we can use right now if we're going to start doing landscape conservation design.

[22:08] Rob: You raise a very good point there, Ron, about the limitations of modeling. I want to tie this conversation back to our listeners and hopefully make it useful to them, stakeholders in the landscape who are thinking about doing design work to guide their collective application of management actions and otherwise development actions within the landscape. Maybe this whole idea of modeling and or using conceptual models for the complexity of a landscape just isn't worth the time and energy, given what sort of information you're going to get back from those exercises.

[22:59] Ron McCormick: I do agree. I think that conceptual modeling is absolutely necessary and well worth the time, and in any risk assessment that Larry and I ever worked on, we always factored in the first 50% of the job is going to be sitting down and developing a conceptual model of the system. Everything we can think of, all the externalities, all of what we call internals, and really understanding their connection, the effect. There may be a ton of things that are in the system, but you could model them to death, and they'd have one-half a 1% effect. What your final output is. So, it's always, in modeling, it's like, that would be nice to have. Is it really going to help us? But I think the unified ecology I was talking about earlier, thinking about structure versus process, and knowing that if you have a structure, there's a process above it and a process below it that both constrains that structure. So, like a forest system, a forest community has ecosystem processes and population processes that keep what we recognize as a forest community. So, you can do that with social-ecological systems. And I think, in particular, when discussing landscape conservation design, you have to include humans. You have to understand that their ecosystem is information and money primarily. But again, it's also a water source, seed shed, food shed, all of those aspects that keep humans on a landscape and allow them to actively or passively manage that landscape, to maintain or direct it into a state that is desired, which is what iCASS basically, if you follow that process, gets you to that point, then that's really all you need. Local knowledge is important, and indigenous knowledge is important. Knowing what you can do with the system, knowing what the possibilities are, and also knowing where the boundaries are. If you're in, we were just talking about Scotland or Ireland. If you're in Ireland, you drive 500 miles and don't go over a cliff. Then your model says, I can keep driving another 500 miles. You go another mile, and you go off the cliff some more. So, the boundaries are important, and most of what we model is the center because that's statistically defensible. You really need to think about your limits and what inputs are coming into and going out of your system. So, I think water is important. I think seeds are important. Just coming across Texas thinking about how monoculture that is, thinking about if for some reason you couldn't export out of there and you couldn't import have, could you grow enough food? You've got enough land, but could you actually grow enough food? Do you have enough water to support everybody? These are the questions that are, to me, more important than worrying about what a climate model is going to offer you.

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[27:22] Tom: Some of the most useful modeling are collaborative kind of situation modeling, where people identify what their goals and targets are, what they want to protect on the landscape, what's important, what are the things that people care about. And then it's more of a non-quantitative looking at what are the stressors and what are the contributing factors that cause those stressors, and then getting people to agree on that conceptual model. It's not a quantitative model per se, but getting a common understanding of the major drivers on the landscape, I think, has been really important. And then, kind of getting at the ICAS framework, you might then start bringing in various data sets that were developed through models like, for example, a habitat connectivity model or a model that shows biological hotspots, and then collaboratively co-designing based upon those models. So, whether there's one model for the landscape that will rule them all, I think that will have every input and output. But I think conceptually understanding the landscape and then bringing in various landscape models that represent those factors of things that people care about and understanding the uncertainty associated with that, but having enough information then to design what those models are telling us collaboratively; I think there's some value in modeling or using models like that. I have seen many processes say, “Okay, let's wait three years for the perfect model to come out,” and that rarely is a good sign when that happens.

[28:58] Ron McCormick: Some of the things that we've been playing around with recently, and we were doing it when I was still in Canada, are using Bayesian belief, know Bayesian inference models because they're very good about, you can just use expert knowledge. If you don't know the exact number, you can say high, medium, and low, and you can rank things or connect things or disconnect things, and you can put in lots of modules, but you don't have to use them all. So structurally, I think it's more intuitive for somebody who's not a modeler to understand how they fit together. And also, because it's visual, it's a good place to start discussing. If you got your experts, and I have my experts, and my expert says x, and your expert says y, you can punch x into the system, see what comes out, put y into the system, see what comes out. And if the answer is virtually the same, then you realize X and Y aren't that important? Let's focus on something else.

[29:51] Rob: I really liked your previous response, Ron, when you were talking about the importance of trying to understand the connections between the socio side of the model and the ecological side of the model and the relationship between the two in landscape conservation design. I think it's incredibly important to be thinking about the socioecological system as a whole, as opposed to thinking about the ecological system and thinking about connectivity modeling. And where could we get the most bang for the buck? No doubt incredibly important work. I'm really glad that the design community is moving into that space and doing that work, trying to implement those connectivity designs on the ground 100%. But I think the next iteration, the future of landscape design work, is moving beyond that. And how do we do that? And as it pertains to this particular episode of our podcast, how can modeling contribute to that exercise, that evolution in design? It's incredibly complex, but it's something that if we're thinking about designing sustainable landscapes, we have to crack that code. Any thoughts there, Ron?

[31:23] Ron McCormick: Yeah, I usually use sustainability as the goal. It's the top part. It's really hard to pin down. Resilience is actually the thing that we can do. That's the part we can work on. Modeling can help us with that. But to me, resilience comes down to figuring out what people need to stay on a landscape to live, work, and play there to make a living, but also only take what they need. More than not, think about economics as your driver but think about place and being. When we were working in the Walla Walla, there was a guy that grew strawberries, a huge field of strawberries, hundreds of acres. And it was a senior water rights user. And the Walla Walla used to go dry every year for 60 years. So, salmon populations, the tribes and the local people would be out filling buckets up with fish and trucking them up to the top of the watershed. And when we sat down and talked to him, we said, well, I don't care if I grow strawberries. He enjoyed employing a bunch of high school kids during the summer to come in and work on the farm, teaching them community, teaching them a connection to the community, connection to the land, getting a job, being responsible, showing up on time, all of those things. So, we started to think, well, okay, so if we can figure out a way you could do that without taking half of your water right out of the river every year, would that work? And he was going, yeah, we could probably make that work. So, you have to do both. You have to have a large concept. Here's the structure of this landscape and what we want from it, what we expect for goods and services to come off that, how many people will support, and how will the people manage that system? But it's also down to the individual person as well. So, it's all those levels in the system, and yeah, that's just really complicated to the point of being just complex. If you can't model it, it's complex. If you can model, it's just really complicated. So, if you can start modeling things, then you know you're at least getting somewhere because if you don't have a model, the system is too complex. The way you're looking at it, you have to rethink the way you approach it.

[33:32] Tom: Right? As you talk about complexity, I reflect upon my current role. I work too for the federal government. And like your disclaimer, nothing I'm saying is on their behalf or contradictory to what they're doing. I feel like the way that we've created these government bureaucracies, they all operate within a particular silo where one is focused on forestry and one is focused on endangered species, another bureaucracy is focused on water or these particular land management units and feels like bracing. Complexity becomes a little bit more difficult when you have these kinds of rigid distinctions, and each one has kind of created their own kind of agency and organization that they want to maintain and not necessarily cross lines. And sometimes, I feel like the structure of the government is somewhat opposed to this concept of holistic landscape management, not because they don't think it's a good idea. It's just that's the way that has formed over the past century in terms of our natural resource bureaucracies. There's a question in here somewhere, but is there a way to move beyond that? I thought that landscape conservation cooperatives were kind of getting there as a way to bring people together to have a holistic look at the landscape. Do you have any thoughts on that? To what extent are we doing that in the agency world? Are there roles for NGOs to do that? I don't know. Just a very broad question about complexity and how you work with that.

[35:08] Ron McCormick: Within our siloed world, yes, narrative matters. Fire. Fire is bad. Fire takes out communities. Fire burns saleable timber. Fire does this and that. So, for decades, the narrative, the zero-dimensional narrative, is fire bad. Put every fire out. But then, as the 70s came in and we couldn't put every fire out, the climate warmed up and dried out, and all of a sudden, we were getting the Yellowstone fires, and nobody thought they could ever burn that amount of area in one fire. But you add dimension to the narrative, and that's part of what landscape conservation design, the LCCs, iCASS, that's what all of these things are doing in different ways. Yes. Fire on the landscape. Yes, yes. It can take out communities, and we should do what we can to give them defensible space. But also, if you're in a jack pine community, it's the renewal process. You do have to burn it at some point. If you work in a long-leaf pine in Florida, every three to five years, you want to burn it just to keep the understory down, keep it an open forest. So, as agencies, yes, we have dogma. This is the way we have always done things. Sometimes, we have conflicting legislation that says, you will do this, and you will do this. We'll protect endangered species, but we'll also try to eliminate fire. Sometimes, that's in opposition to each other. What you need to do for fire is fire breaks, thinning all of that. There may be species that are dependent upon both fire and those denser, thicker communities. So, you have to have a narrative that includes all of the dimensions. And from that, then you can have a conversation. If you're just saying, green New Deal, 100% all over the place, do it. That doesn't have any of the complexity about how you could possibly put all of this, all electricity. Just driving across the last section of Texas I was in, we had about 100 windmills that weren't turning yet. The wind here is in the 30 miles an hour range today. So again, why not? What was happening? Where in the system did that? Because right across the highway there was a whole group that were. So, it's a very Gordian knot type of system that we have brought ourselves to. And unraveling it will be clumsy; we'll make mistakes, but if we don't try, we know what will happen.

[37:31] Rob: You know, Tom, my response would be building upon what Ron just mentioned. I think there's general recognition, and there has been a recognition over the past 25, 30 years, if not longer, that any one single entity in the landscape, whether it be an agency or an NGO or a state organization, no one entity has the ability to untie that knot kind of alone. And we missed a really great opportunity with the LCCs, which was that bridging entity, that convening body, that brought everyone together to try and untie that knot. And they're gone now. And we really need to begin to think about what the next iteration of the LCCs is. Who and what is that next convening body, that next bridging organization that will bring landscape stakeholders together to work together through a design process, in my mind, and I don't think either of you will push back on that. But working through a design process to untie that knot, I think Ron was correct in stating, now, sometimes the agencies have conflicting missions if not adaptive management approaches to how they want to proceed in untying that knot. But collectively, all sitting around the table, I think we'll be able to smooth out those disagreements and begin to work together to do that. At least, I hope so. That's the very basic tenet of landscape conservation design, as you guys know. I guess I'm kind of speaking more directly to our listeners here, and I'll give you guys an opportunity to chime in, but there are landscape partnerships already in place all over the country, and they're trying their best to come up with adaptation strategies to address the wicked problem that we face. But in my mind, only going through a thoughtful, participatory design process, will they actually be able to come up with some strategies at the tail end of that process. And I'll turn it over to you guys for any thoughts you have in that regard.

[40:14] Ron McCormick: Yeah, I agree. And honestly, I do feel that within the multiple federal agencies, both interior and agriculture, there is a definite recognition and a consensus that says we have to stop worrying about where our boundaries are. We have to think about and design cross-boundaries cooperatively. And we are in many places; we just have to sort of ramp up that concept to actually do good ecoregional plans and then allow people within that either private NGOs, cooperative groups, other agencies, state agencies, state wildlife groups, they can tier-up to what the larger eco regional plan is and they can do smaller projects, know fit within their budget and their knowledge and their expertise. And I think that's how we do it. The LCCs were never supposed to be top-down, but I think they were also a little bit too hands-off by some of the federal agencies. Some of them worked very well, some didn't. I think this will have to be all stakeholders ' regional planning, but individual groups do their own work and develop their own projects that fit within the larger plan.

[41:29] Tom: Yeah, no, right. I agree with that. And I think having that kind of from the ground-up process, you do see that. I see that in Oregon and likely in other places around the US. I'm sure that you get these landscape partnerships that develop out of a shared understanding that there's an issue that no one organization can address themselves. And so, they embark on a process. And what better way to deal with the complexity of a landscape than to have as many of the local stakeholders play a role in conversation and dialogue and thinking through conceptual models for the landscape? I think what is needed is some of those landscape partnerships need support to keep going, and they need some science and information, and they need that kind of. I think what the LCCs could have provided was support directly to those emerging landscape partnerships. And I think that it would be a great model to have some sort of a body that provides either financial or technical support to keep those partnerships going. Because when you think about landscape, you think about a particular geographic area, but it's also a temporal aspect. So, the big problem is that these partnerships form, and then, okay, then they may get together, have some meetings, and then there's entropy enters in, and they need to have a longer 20-to-30-year time frame for thinking and for maintaining that partnership. But, yeah, no, to me, a system like that would be a way to get around the siloed world, which is the status quo.

[43:05] Rob: The way I think of landscape conservation and the design process to further landscape conservation is this multi-jurisdictional, multisector, stakeholder, driven, participatory science process. And by science, I don't necessarily mean just the natural sciences but also the social and economic systems as well. And the challenge in developing that system, as you mentioned, Tom, is that there's no convening body to do it. We lost that opportunity with the LCCs, and the Biden administration isn't currently stepping up and filling that void, though they've put out a great 30 x 30 initiative, basically asking partnerships to identify priority conservation areas within the landscape kind of. But it's really kind of hard to do that if there is no convening body. If there were Biden administration part 2.0 later this year, my brothers would be for the administration to begin to think about putting that convening body in place to pull these partnerships together, to work together through a facilitated process to design sustainable landscapes.

[44:31] Ron McCormick: My agency, again, my views of what my agency is doing is very much focused on the next 14 months. Or I guess we're down to ten or twelve months to implement. They're very focused on restoration, very focused on resilience. Again, yeah, it depends on what happens next November, but I think we've got a structure that we can use to do that, and I think we can bring the rest of the federal land management agencies in. We just have to figure out what the politics and the economics are going to be for the next five to ten years.

[45:05] Rob: Thanks, Ron. Tom, do you have any final thoughts?

[45:08] Tom: Yeah, no, I don't want to kind of speak about the political wins in the future, but I think this is something we should be thinking of regardless. That's just something that needs to happen through developing these landscape partnerships and thinking at that landscape scale because that way, you can tackle multiple of these complex issues together by having that landscape perspective to bring it back to complexity. I mean, yeah, landscapes are complex systems, and we have the people and we have information and data and science that can help us support making good decisions and better decisions that are optimal for sustainability. And so, yeah, that's my hope. And that's kind of what I feel like this whole landscape conservation and design is all about. So, I love the conversation, and I'll kick it back to you, Rob.

[46:00] Rob: Okay, well, thanks again to our guest, Dr. Ronald J. McCormick. Thank you, our listeners, for tuning in to Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. I've been your co-host, Rob Campellone.

[46:17] Tom: And I've been your other co-host, Tom Miewald. Join us every two weeks for another informative episode of Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. Thank you.

[46:26] Intro / Outro: Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast is researched, written, edited, and produced by Rob Campellone and Tom Miewald. Lucas Gallardi created the Designing Nature's Half cover art and logo design. Tom Askin is the voice behind the intro and outro, and the music was written and performed by composer Aleksey Chistilin 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 designing sustainable and resilient landscapes for people, the planet, and prosperity.

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