Three Billion Birds revisited: “We seem to take two steps forward and one step back.”

Last in a series

When Lynn Scarlett was a little girl growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, her mother would take her into the woods near their home to watch and listen to birds. A pair of binoculars always hung within easy reach in the kitchen. Before long, she was learning the names of the sparrows, grosbeaks and woodpeckers. “I just love all kinds of birds,’’ she says.

Those were the origin of a long career that has spanned just about every role in the field of conservation, wildlife and land management. She rose to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior under President George W. Bush, and she has gone on to work with a slew of organizations including the Nature Conservancy, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the National Wildlife Refuge Association and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For a time, she served as interim Secretary of the Interior.

The experiences give her a rare global perspective on caring for the environment in general and birds in particular. So she’s the perfect person for the last of our series of interviews on the five-year anniversary of the Three Billion Bird report.

Scarlett talked about how conservation must look beyond individual species to confront overarching protections in a time of environmental disruption. She sees progress on some fronts, including the spread of partnerships, the power of new technologies and the growing embrace of regenerative agriculture. But she warns that the U.S. is not doing enough to offset the loss of habitat and populations, in part because of the failure of keeping up public funding.

“I just sometimes feel like we take two steps forward and one step back,’’ she said.

Here’s a library of all the interviews that have run through the fall, together offering a rich and thoughtful assessment of where things stand five years after the revelation that North America has lost a third of its breeding bird population since the 1970s. And here’s Lynn Scarlett’s interview, trimmed for space and clarity:

Question: When you look back over what’s happened since the Three Billion Birds report was published in 2019, where do you see progress and where do you see a lack of progress?

Lynn Scarlett: I just recently saw a quote by Madeleine Albright in which she stated, “I’m an optimist who worries a lot.” I think perhaps that captures my current sentiments. 

When the bird report first came out, it was just prior to the advent of COVID and in some ways that created ironically an opportunity for enhanced awareness about birds. There was this enormous upsurge of birding as people started looking out their windows since we were all kind of trapped in our neighborhoods. Conservation ultimately depends on that awareness and depends on that embrace.

The other thing that the report did that was different from many conservation efforts, including bird conservation efforts, was the acknowledgement that conservation has been underway for more than a hundred years, going back to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. There’s been a long trajectory of conservation, but we’re still seeing bird declines — serious bird declines. So this raises the question, why are birds still declining? Can we zero in on the threats and see what’s missing?

I think there’s been progress. I will say that for the broader conservation community and many nonprofit organizations, the lens through which they view the conservation challenge is wider than birds and more focused on scale writ large. So how do we focus on specific species at the same time as we work on a landscape scale? We need to work on the bigger picture.

A balancing act

Question: One way of putting this then is that on the one hand there’s a heightened push to protect individual species at the same time as to work on the big picture. Right now, the impact on big picture is hard to measure. What can you say about the measurements of the broader picture – looking at the condition of the overall environment? 

Lynn Scarlett: So let me say that if you look back, say 20 years, even when I was at the Interior Department, those metrics took the form of things like how many Roseate Spoonbills were nesting in the Everglades, or how many crocodile nesting holes did we have. It was extraordinarily difficult to think about what constitutes a healthy ecosystem.

So there’s been a lot of movement over the last 20 years in the science community, and the conservation community to think about that and to figure out at least, if not direct measures, at least proxy measures for trying to answer the question. Is this landscape and this ecosystem improving and often it’s a composite of measures that would include everything from water quality to soil health to species trajectories. Trying to look at a suite of measures, some of which are less focused on the individual species and more trying to get at the health of landscapes.

“There has been a revolution in technologies that enable us to monitor things in a way that would have been cost prohibitive when you had to send out real people into the woods to do soundings.”

We do need a sort of both/and proposition. We need to understand the specifics of any individual species and where the gaps are and why it might still be declining. But we also need a systems lens. You need to look at the whole, all the interacting parts. So you’re engaged in kind of a balancing act. You may not be able to pursue your ideal measures for species A, but rather measures that are going to work reasonably well for species A, B, C and D and so I think you know this is a growing recognition of that.

Question: I wanted to ask you about avian technology, which is certainly one of the bright spots and you’ve been a part of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on the advisory board so you’re close to this topic. I wonder how much can we expect technologies to be able to help make a difference?

Lynn Scarlett: There has been a revolution in technologies that enable us to monitor things in a way that would have been cost prohibitive when you had to send out real people into the woods to do soundings, to see how many of such and so birds there were. The development of acoustics technology is unbelievable for monitoring and understanding population distributions. It’s really been revolutionary.

At a much more prosaic level, online tools like eBird and Merlin Sound ID are engaging citizen scientists in a way that simply was not possible before their advent. I can’t tell you how many people who learn I’m a birder tell me, oh, I have my Merlin app, and they say how they have put it on and listened to such and such woodpecker or whatever. It’s the largest citizen science endeavor in the world. These are getting more and more sophisticated and that knowledge enables more understanding of what species are where and what the trends are.

Technologies are a tool

So, the technologies are incredibly important. But you know, technologies are a tool. They can’t do the doing. They can inform and they can even inform in revolutionary ways. But ultimately, when push comes to shove, you need money and people to deliver the action on the ground. I mean, you just do.

“That collaborative muscle has really strengthened. In the 70s and 80s even into the 90s, they often stayed in their own lanes: “This is my mission. And that’s your mission.”  That has really, really changed a lot.”

Question: I want to ask you about how the various players doing their part in conservation. You’ve worked in positions all across the landscape, from top government service to nonprofit to board positions in a variety of organizations. How well do you see all the different players working together? 

Lynn Scarlett: In the last twenty years, there’s been a very significant increase in what I dubbed collaborative conservation in which local governments, state governments, tribes, federal agencies, the private sector and nonprofits partner for conservation. That collaborative muscle has really strengthened. In the 70s and 80s even into the 90s, they often stayed in their own lanes: “This is my mission. And that’s your mission.”  That has really, really changed a lot. And I think there’s a great appetite for that collaboration.

On the other hand, partnerships are incredibly difficult. One of my frustrations, and I’m part of a group called Network for Landscape Conservation (that pushes collaboration and larger-scale practices.) One of the frustrations is that funding does not flow to the undergirding, the operational capacity of these collaborative endeavors, which is essential to keep them going. So there’s been a lot of growth in partnering and across all those different kinds of entities, in cases with a conscious inclusion of birds. But it’s still very hard to sustain these efforts. Very hard.

Question: State and federal agencies have a particular challenge because leadership and policies shift back and forth with different administrations. The current presidential administration has a very different view than the incoming one. How does that affect the ongoing, long-term role of conservation when we’re talking about wildlife and birds in this case? 

Lynn Scarlett: Well, it obviously makes it more difficult when the pendulum swings back and forth. In this administration, you have guidelines on large landscape conservation and you have various and sundry other tools on let’s say climate resilience. And then along comes the new team.

But let me say a little bit more optimistically. For many, many years now, the states have developed state wildlife action plans. There are varying degrees of sophistication, but there remains a general embrace of those. That embrace seems to transcend one administration to another at the state level. And there remains federal support for the funding to those state agencies and for their conservation endeavors, some of that driven by hunting and fishing constituencies. You do see a continuation of those action plans across Democrat and Republican governorships.

“So we look at the stated desire to dramatically slash budgets. Well, you can’t do something with nothing, and many of these federal agencies, state agencies, too, are already very cash strapped.”

The other thing I will say on behalf of continuity and continuation is that there’s an awful lot of things that get done whether in state governments or in the federal government that really are below the top leadership radar screen. Certain issues rise to the attention of the top leadership, even the President, or some rise to the level of a secretary of a particular department. But there’s a lot of ongoing management of wildlife refuges or management of the conservation areas. I don’t want to say out of sight, out of mind, but it’s below the radar screen of those who might have a counter agenda.

The different visions can certainly make a difference. So we look at the stated desire to dramatically slash budgets. Well, you can’t do something with nothing, and many of these federal agencies, state agencies, too, are already very cash strapped. With the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Wildlife Refuge system has seen its budget decline so much that some of these refuges have no personnel at all. Some of them have perhaps a refuge manager, but nobody to do any of the science, for example, that might flow from the work reports. The same is true of other agencies, although it’s been especially acute with the wildlife refuge system. The idea that you’re going to have even greater cuts severely challenges the ability of these agencies to do their work, and it challenges the ability of them to partner with others.

So there’s the money issue, but then there’s also a kind of hostility or skepticism for public lands that has been stated, and even some statements about transitioning some of those lands out of the federal government and even for housing development. The real question is to what degree is that rhetoric? 

“Nature’s not just nice, it’s essential. It’s essential to the well-being of people.”

Question: The nonprofits certainly in this generation have grown and become stronger and a lot of conservation and scientific leadership flows from them. You’ve been a part of that. But the dimensions of the challenge have grown significantly. How well are the nonprofits – Audubon, American Bird Conservancy, Cornell, the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited – positioned and funded in a time when there’s greater need than ever? 

The pot needs to grow

Lynn Scarlett: Every single nonprofit that I’ve been involved in with, and those that I am not directly involved in, would say that they’re cash strapped. With the changing climate, all the impacts of a changing climate on lands, water and wildlife, the needs become even greater. So the resources are not commensurate with the challenge.

It’s interesting, too, that in the U.S. some of the foundations have shifted to a global focus, whether it’s global biodiversity or global climate. It’s not that other nations and global challenges are not out there, they are and they’re out there in a big way. But the pot needs to grow; it can’t just simply shift.

So money is a challenge. I will tell you that I have never been in a nonprofit organization that at one point or another doesn’t say what we need is more corporate funding. In my view, that is not a very promising avenue. It’s not that corporations don’t care. It’s that they tend to fund local charities, and sometimes that could be conservation work. But you know if they happen to be located, say, along the Great Lakes, they might focus on some Great Lakes clean up. The giving pie for conservation has always remained just a tiny sliver, so I can’t tell you how many nonprofits I’ve been with and their boards say why can’t we get more corporate funding. The development staffs always sort of sigh and try to bring a reality check.

The other popular recent theme has been that of ecosystem services. That nature brings benefits and why can’t we monetize, for instance, the value of carbon in trees or the value of carbon in grass lands. Or beyond carbon, why can’t we capture the water purification value of wetlands or whatever? There’s some selective opportunity there, but I think it falls way below some folks’ expectations or hopes and there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some of them have to do with the question you asked earlier. Just real challenges on measurement. It’s not easy to capture the value in a typical market way. So I don’t think there’s going to be much opportunity there. I don’t think its commensurate with the task we have. We need public funding. You know, we just need public funding, state and federal public funding.

Question: One of the developments we’re seeing is a recognition of the role of private land owners and industry. How significant is this going to be in figuring out solutions in conservation?

Lynn Scarlett: One of the encouraging things — and it has to do with birds but also goes beyond birds – is the growing embrace of sustainable agriculture. What’s happening now is a much broader embrace of concepts of regenerative agriculture, as farmers have come to recognize that they have very poor soil that adversely affects productivity. And so you get farmers even in some of the traditional Midwest big farm areas beginning to embrace things like lessening the use of chemicals, whether herbicides or pesticides, and engaging in no or low tillage. They’re beginning to understand that the soil is in poor health. I’m part of a group called Sand County Foundation that focuses as a nonprofit on working with farmers and ranchers (on ways of promoting regenerative agriculture.)

Nature is essential

Question: So sort of winding things up, we’ve talked about how birds are facing real challenges, deep-seated, tough problems in the environment and habitat and other fronts. You mentioned in the opening that you were optimistic with plenty of worry. So the question is, how do you see the long-term outlook for birds and for the environment in general?

Lynn Scarlett: So I would amend Madeline Albright’s statement. For myself, I would say I’m hopeful with a lot of worry, not maybe quite at the point of being optimistic, Some days I’m quite I’m quite beside myself. I’ll put the optimist hat on and then the pessimist hat.

The optimist hat is yes, we have far more knowledge and far more tools to bring to bear so that we know what’s what, what’s where, how to analyze the challenges. Endeavors like the bird report and the five-year relook (plans to repeat the Three Billion Bird study addressed in an earlier interview), these give us information that could help us to focus and prioritize. The growing awareness about birds partly from the unexpected result of COVID isolation has broadened the extent that people care – and many are younger people. You used to go out with birders and they would all be in their 60s and older. Now I bird every day and there are a lot of young folks and they are really good birders.

On the other hand, we need public agencies, federal and state working on behalf of wildlife. And so the negative narratives about so-called bureaucrats and the associated narrative about $2 trillion budget cuts comes out of the mouth of Elon Musk. That’s really unhelpful. Honestly, I have concerns: I just sometimes feel like we take two steps forward, one step backward. So it’s troubling. I’m hopeful that conservation energy is up to the task, but boy, there are a lot of challenges.

To end on a slightly more optimistic note: I do think that the knowledge coupled with the passions can make the difference. Nature’s not just nice, it’s essential. It’s essential to the well-being of people. So there’s not simply a narrative about beautiful birds. There’s a narrative about the well-being of people that is increasingly understood. And I think that helps.