Just over a month ago I attended the fourth bi-annual National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, held in Baltimore. It's been a crazy month since then, as I moved on to Chicago, then to Ohio, then back to Chicago, then San Francisco, then finally home, and completed a Hine's emerald dragonfly population estimate along the way.
The ideas from the conference are worth sharing, so better late than never. Here are my notes, mostly taken in live-time at the conference. I'd originally intended to upload them right there, but the host hotel had limited wi-fi access and when I tried to dash down to the lobby it inevitably resulted in either running into someone I hadn't seen in ages, or responding to some important bit of work e-mail instead of doing blog posts. So here's the first of a few entries:
August 1. It’s bigwig time, also known as the plenary session. Thus far we’ve heard from Assistant Secretary of the Army JoEllen Darcy on Corps of Engineers initiatives, including an upcoming revision of guidance for water resources projects; and Assistant Secretary of the Interior David Hays, with a litany of collaborative federal/state/local efforts.
Now it’s Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s turn, and in addition to his polished political delivery, he comes across as knowledgeable on environmental issues, leading off with a discussion of the restoration of Chesapeake Bay. He’s using two key words, words that I hear too seldom from politicians: accountability and transparency. And he’s a metrics geek, as evidenced by the BayStat slides he’s showing us. It’s basically a series of GIS maps to track output instead of input… that is, to track delivery of government services, to measure performance. He's on to something that too many have missed.
He says that the greatest challenges aren’t technological, or financial; that they’re political and spiritual. We’re out of balance, and that we need to use expectations to change behavior.
... more to follow...
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