Monadnock Perspectives V19 #2

VOLUME 19, NUMBER 2, 1998

Monadnock Perspectives Commentary on Rural and Urban Design

© 1998 Monadnock Perspectives

Corporate Homes for Wildlife

BY CHRIS SOTO

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orporations and environmentalists working together? Ten years ago, this was a radical idea. But it’s exactly what the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) did when it opened its doors in 1988: brought together two unlikely partners to establish wildlife habitat on corporate lands.

The Maryland-based nonprofit organization ventured where no one had gone before. “Private lands represent one of the last opportunities for protecting and restoring many endangered species,” said then-WHC president Joyce Kelly. “All private lands, from industrial sites to rural settings, offer opportunities for wildlife. It is impossible to regulate all these lands, but it is possible to set up voluntary partnerships through cooperative actions.”

This is the principle upon which WHC was built: establish voluntary wildlife teams at a corporate site, provide the team with a site assessment and report, then guide the team in its work to change the typical manicured, corporate lawn into viable wildlife habitat.

Ten years ago, WHC started work with just seven corporate members and four conservation groups. The roster has grown to include 112 corporations and 27 conservation organizations. The 112 corporations own 547 sites which generate about 550,000 acres for wildlife worldwide. WHC’s goal is one million acres for wildlife by 2001.

This green frog (Rana clamitans melanota) makes its home in the protected wetlands of Duracell’s environmentally friendly corporate headquarters in Bethel, CT. Designers and site planners factored in alternative energy sources, recycled building materials, and also received WHC input on ways to protect and improve wildlife habitat. Photo by Chuck May, May Media Group.

WHC works with companies in the U.S. and abroad, and has regional offices in Detroit, Michigan, Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Greenland, New Hampshire, and Ashland, Kentucky. The biologists based in these areas, as well as the Silver Spring, Maryland, headquarters, travel in their regions to aid sites in starting a wildlife habitat program, then follow-up with their site contacts throughout the year. All employee wildlife teams are encouraged to work with local groups

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such as scouts or gardening clubs. In this way, the corporations partner with the communities in which they do business.

The regional offices also provide a base for work on whole corridors of habitat, specifically along rivers such as the Cooper, St. Clair, Ohio, Big Sandy, Allegheny, Monongahela, and Youghiogheny. In these “Waterways for Wildlife” projects, multiple partners are brought together to protect large areas.

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The Cooper River Corridor Project, for example, encompasses about 150 square miles and includes industrial and community-based organizations as well as residents. The St. Clair River Basin Project spans U.S. and Canadian areas.

The benefits of WHC membership are many, ranging from improved relationships with regulators to positively affecting a company’s bottom line.

Deere & Company’s Engine Works facility in Waterloo, Iowa, restored a native prairie and reduced its annual grounds maintenance costs by $638 an acre. DuPont Company, one of WHC’s founding members, estimated saving $5.3 million in new plant construction costs in Spain as the result of enhancing the site’s existing natural drainage system rather than constructing a concrete canal system.

Often, a company’s image of itself is dramatically changed. The new Duracell headquarters building in Bethel, Connecticut, is a monument to sustainable

building practices. A team of employees, tion phase, ensuring a minimum of 50 senior management, consultants such as percent of all building materials, interiWHC, and conservation groups or and exterior, contained some recycled mapped out a strategy for conserving on every aspect of the project, from the drawing The chair of the building steering board to the finished product.

The chair of the building steercommittee . . . “wanted to ensure ing committee stated in a final that we did not end up with the report that he “wanted to ensure that we did not end up standard headquarters of a gray with the standard headquarters of a gray monolith with monolith with tinted glass set in tinted glass set in immaculately manicured lawns with no immaculately manicured lawns sensitivity or relationship to the surrounding environment. with no sensitivity or relationship It was particularly important that as the building matures to the surrounding environment.” it should grow old gracefully, integrating with the environment in which it resides.” content, and distributing $200,000 Some examples of the sustainable worth of used office furniture from the plan include preserving as many mature old building to community charities betrees as possible during the construc- fore the move. The town’s Inland and Wetland Commission was so impressed with Duracell’s plan that it waived the requirement for a second hearing.

Of course, wildlife habitat was incorporated in the new area. David Barrett, vice president of environmental afTOTAL TOTAL TOTAL STATE ACREAGE STATE ACREAGE STATE ACREAGE fairs, said “WHC helped us develop a plan for preserving the natural habitat Alaska 4650 Kentucky 800 New York 4895 for species such as wild turkey and Alabama 13,070 Louisiana 5513 Ohio 39,325 deer.”

Wildlife habitats don’t have to be on Arkansas 3287 Massachusetts 2055 Oklahoma 223 the same scale as Duracell’s, though. At Arizona 11,750 Maryland 5547 Oregaon 20 one time, WHC had as a member the California 15,560 Maine 195 Pennsylvania 5538 U.S. Fidelity & Guarantee company, whose offices were in a high-rise in Colorado 21,142 Michigan 9411 South Carolina 10,544 downtown Baltimore. Its wildlife habiConnecticut 272 Minnesota 13,606 Tennessee 35,741 tat area? A window ledge that provided Delaware 1365 Missouri 342 Texas 54,848 a haven for a pair of peregrine falcons.

Florida 102,167 Mississippi 790 Utah 85 Small or large, what counts is the effort of the wildlife teams and the enjoyment Georgia 11,453 Montana 10,965 Virginia 5291 many get out of doing the work. WHC Iowa 2226 North Carolina 8246 Washington 8285 receives numerous stories from employIdaho 3887 North Dakota 662 Wisconsin 3516 ees such as the man who was amazed to hold an eagle chick in his arms, or the Illinois 7774 Nebraska 600 West Virgina 4990 woman in awe of the variety of butterIndiana 13,883 New Jersey 3541 Wyoming 88,690 flies visiting an employee-built garden.

Kansas 130 Nevada 1865 TOTAL* 538,745 Boosting employee morale is often a result of a WHC program at a site. * This total does not include foreign acreage commitments.

Acreage Made Available by Corporations for Wildlife Habitat, Totals by State

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What all WHC programs have in common is the goal of certification.

WHC certification provides third-party validation of exemplary wildlife programs that meet a set of stringent criteria. Each year at WHC’s annual meeting, wildlife teams whose programs have attained certification enjoy receiving acknowledgment at the awards banquet. “It’s like the academy awards for wildlife habitats! When the team is

called to the stage, there’s a lot of cheering and congratulating going on,” one WHC staffer observes.

Christina R. Soto is the Communcations Manager for the Wildlife Habitat Council. For more information about the Council, please call 301/588-8994 or write to WHC at 1010 Wayne Avenue, Suite 920, Silver Spring, Maryland 20910. E-mail: whc@wildlifehc.org.

Monadnock Perspectives, Inc. BOARD OF DIRECTORS

David Weir, President, Peterborough John J. Colony, III, Treasurer, Harrisville Dean E. Shankle, Jr., Secretary, Troy Christopher V. Bean, Jaffrey H. Meade Cadot, Jr., Hancock Howard Mansfield, Hancock Daniel V. Scully, Dublin ADVISORY BOARD

RECOMMENDED READING The Assault on Ultimate Nature Jon Krakauer Into Thin Air Anchor Books paperback, 1998 (Villard Books hardcover, 1997)

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his bestseller account of an disastrous commercial expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest provides a symbol of the global assault on nature. The reader learns that the world’s highest mountain ( 29,028 feet) is no longer treated with the reverence or even respect accorded it by earlier climbers and, still, by the Buddhist Sherpa communities that live at its base.

Amateur adventurers seeking a “trophy” climb are guided and sometimes even literally towed to the Everest summit by professional guides who receive up to $65,000 per person for their efforts. The guides, whose businesses have such names as “Adventure Consultants” and “Mountain Madness,” stay in touch with their home offices by satellite telephones. The leader of Krakauer’s expedition even phoned his last thoughts to his wife in New Zealand before freezing to death, because he had stayed too long on the summit to help a client bag his trophy climb.

At the Everest base camp, more than 300 tents housing 14 expeditions greeted Krakauer when he arrived with the “Adventure Consultants” group to make his bid for the summit. Sponsors’ promotional banners adorned many of the tents and communications links spread advertising endorsements and public relations messages worldwide.

Mt. Everest, an unmatched symbol of wild nature, had become a money machine.

The commercial desecration of the mountain could easily be eliminated by such requirements as a one-to-one guide/client ratio or the banning of bottled oxygen. However, neither Nepal nor China, the countries that control access to the peak, are likely to do so, because they want the hard currency revenues that the commercial expeditions provide.

Nevertheless, read the book. Krakauer is a meticulous and evocative writer.

The subject matter is horrendous, however. The book goes from being a page turner to a volume you can’t bear to open. When you are done, even wee thoughts you had of doing a trip like this yourself will be gone forever! – DW

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Robert P. Bass, Jr., Concord Michael B. Beebe, Hollis Paul O. Bofinger, Concord Eleanor Briggs, Hancock Daniel M. Burnham, Dublin Bruce Clement, Westmoreland Thomas S. Deans, Gorham John W. Derby, Sharon Jennifer DuBois, Peterborough H. Kimball Faulkner, Stoddard Mary Louise Hancock, Concord Nancy P. Hayden, Marlborough Mary E. Monahan, Harrisville Richard Monahan, Harrisville Karl G. Robinson, Marlborough Robert B. Stephenson, Jaffrey NEWSLETTER EDITOR

David Weir TYPESETTING AND DESIGN

Jill Shaffer

Monadnock Perspectives, Inc., P.O. Box 95, West Peterborough, NH 03468-0095; (603)924-9114; e-mail: perspec@monad.mv.com.

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HANDS-ON SEMINAR

Requiring Permanent Open Space in New Subdivisions Saturday, October 31st, 9 am (8:30 Registration) – 1:30 pm Historical Society of Cheshire County, 264 Main Street, Keene, NH Led by nationally-known consultant Randall Arendt, author of numerous publications, including Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley, Rural by Design and Growing Greener –Putting Conservation into Local Codes. Arendt will present approaches that have been successfully implemented in other regions; then assist seminar participants in drafting potential ordinance changes for their own towns. Members of town boards and other interested participants may include their town’s needs on this agenda by registering in advance with Carol Ogilvie at the Southwest Region Planning Commission (603-357-0557), which is co-sponsoring the seminar with Monadnock Perspectives, the Harris Center for Conservation Education, the Antioch-New England Graduate School, the City of Keene Planning Board and the Historical Society of Cheshire County. BYO bag lunch.

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