A valley’s lesson in balancing nature, resources, way of life

An hour outside Missoula, Mont., the Blackfoot River flows through a valley of breathtaking beauty once depicted in the movie “A River Runs Through It.” Pioneers over a hundred years ago built homes in the valley, raised cattle, and battled drought, grizzlies, wolves and snow.

Today, valley residents are again pioneers — pioneers of a sustainable future for their children, their communities, and the lands, waters and wildlife of the valley.

In the 1990s, residents of the valley became concerned over growing environmental issues including degraded water quality, loss of wetlands, fragmentation of wildlife habitat, and the development of vacation homes that threatened the valley’s traditional rural way of life.

In many places, this could have led to a deluge of government regulation and litigation. Instead, more than 500 local landowners, 27 state and federal agencies, and a number of nonprofit organizations created the Blackfoot Challenge.

The partners in this endeavor voluntarily have contributed more than $5 million to restore and enhance more than 2,600 acres of wetlands, 38 miles of streams, and 2,300 acres of native grasslands. Private landowners voluntarily have set aside nearly 90,000 acres of their land permanently through conservation easements.

Together, these partners took an honest look at the entire landscape — the landscape where they live and work and play and raise families; the landscape they share with all kinds of wildlife.

Together they found ways to accommodate the change and development while protecting the natural environment and landscape they cherish. 


Valley ranchers, for example, are jointly restoring land health by removing invasive weeds, re-establishing historic creek flows and nurturing regeneration of native plants. They have introduced practices to reduce grizzly attacks on livestock, thereby creating conditions for a kind of coexistence with the bear. They are placing lands under conservation easements to prevent land fragmentation while capturing some dollar value from their lands. And they are continuing to raise cattle, thus sustaining livelihoods and lifestyles rooted in over a hundred years of working these lands.

It is a model of sustainability that will be the heart of 21st century conservation.

As secretary of the interior and guardian of 507 million acres of public lands, I daily experience the challenge of crafting a sustainable future that was faced by the residents of the Blackfoot Valley. Our mission lies at the intersection of people, land and water — and that often means conflict.

Some citizens want access to these lands for recreation; others for energy and minerals; and others for hunting. Still others want wild places left undisturbed.

Everywhere, too, are demands for water — for agriculture, ranching, communities, industries, and to sustain ecosystems and wildlife. These are all legitimate purposes.

We can’t —everywhere and all the time — manage lands and waters for all these things at the same time. Nor should we, however, entirely neglect some purposes for the sake of other purposes.

The pioneers of the Blackfoot River Valley, working with public land managers, are striving to find the right balance in a decision process that holds promise for this nation’s other communities.

When I launched America’s Healthy Lands Initiative, I had this sort of sustainability in mind. In the West, large tracts of lands are rich in energy resources — resources critical to this nation as energy prices soar, foreign production is vulnerable to disruption, and other nations like China and India compete for supplies.

Yet these same lands are home to diverse wildlife intrinsically important as part of our natural heritage — and also important to those who maintain traditions of hunting and fishing. As access to these resources accelerated, I could see we were on a collision course in which either wildlife would be imperiled or access to energy would be curtailed.

The Healthy Lands Initiative is a work in progress, but it sets the stage for what I believe can be a sustainable future. It includes funds for restoration partnerships, but its central purpose is to overhaul how we do land-use planning by enlarging the scale by which we assess lands.

With this more holistic, ridgetop-to-ridgetop lens, we can then identify wildlife corridors, key sage grouse nesting habitat, and other sensitive areas and set them aside as protected areas or as areas in which no surface disturbance is allowed.

We will not accomplish this vision overnight, as it requires recalibrating our land use plans over time. Our Healthy Lands Initiative uses science to guide our decisions and monitoring so that we can assess how well we are doing in achieving our land health goals.

Science is a key pillar of sustainability. It lies at the foundation of another of our initiatives — our Birds Forever proposal set forth in our 2009 budget. Years of bird surveys now show 20 of the most common birds experiencing plummeting populations. Meadowlarks, field sparrows, bobwhites and other common birds have population declines, on average, of 70 percent over the past four decades.

Our initiative will expand our joint ventures with states, tribes, cities and citizens to protect bird habitat and sustain the science that will help us identify species at risk and strategies for reversing course.

Science also must set the stage for meeting the water needs of this nation. The nation faces a dilemma.

Water demand is growing in tandem with population increases in the West, where water has always been scarce. Demand is also increasing in the Southeast and elsewhere, where infrastructure constraints and periodic droughts result, increasingly, in water crises across the nation.

We need to know what we are consuming, and we need to know more about our groundwater and surface water supplies. Yet no water census has been done in three decades. Consistent with state water laws, I have proposed the Water for America Initiative to get the information states and communities need to manage water.

There is a tendency to think of sustainability as synonymous with the embrace of certain technologies and products — renewable energy, clean fuels or recycled products, for example. These technologies have tremendous potential, which is why the Interior Department is creating opportunities for investment in these technologies on public lands and using these technologies in our own buildings and fleets. For example, since 2001, the Interior Department has issued hundreds of wind and geothermal energy leases on public lands; we’re moving forward with solar energy projects; Interior is regulating wind, wave and other renewable energy off our coasts; 18 percent of the energy we use at our 47,000 facilities comes from renewable energy sources; in fact, the Interior Department is second only to the Defense Department in the use of photovoltaic cells.

Sustainability is not confined to environmental protection; it must include pursuit of sustained livelihoods and healthy communities. Because it requires this blend of goals, sustainability must spring from collaborative action that gives voice to many viewpoints.

Sustainability requires, above all, a thought process through which we explore how to lighten our environmental footprint while still assuring energy, water, food, housing, education and opportunity for Americans.

Kempthorne is secretary of the interior.