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The Conservation Foundation & World Wildlife Fund
Q: It didn't necessarily, but that was a good path. What did you learn from your earlier experiences with The Conservation Foundation and World Wildlife Fund?
MR. REILLY: The Conservation Foundation's niche was to recognize those issues on which the country was stalemated or which were not being very successfully addressed but in which we saw an opportunity. In the mid-seventies when the oil shocks hit and the economic crisis occurred, there was a sense that we had bitten off quite a lot in the environment. We had passed laws on air and water and strip mining and toxic substances and coastal zone management and endangered species - many of them quite ambitious and virtually all of them more expensive and, in some cases more obstructive of other interests, than had been understood.
The economic community, which was capable of helping us refine and make efficient many of those laws, had pretty much opted out of their early formulation. They had fought them so bitterly that they weren't really at the table in helping craft regulations. Yet, it seemed to me, that the environmental community could not take those laws much further alone, and certainly couldn't ensure their successful, efficient implementation without the involvement of business. These laws were coming under heavy fire for their cost and bureaucracy, particularly at a time of national economic difficulty. The business community was being driven crazy by some of the early costs of regulation, the demands being placed on them, and also by the public image they were getting as obstructionists. And yet, any reasonable reading of the polls, it seemed to me, indicated that the nation was wedded to environmental values, wanted to see those laws kept, and, in some cases, wanted to see them strengthened. The environment was entering the core values, as the pollster, Bob Teeter, has put it, of our people. If you think of those two sets of interests - of environmentalists wanting to see the laws they had championed work, and industrialists realizing that environmentalism was here to stay and therefore the realistic goal was to achieve more cost-effective implementation - you realize there is a common basis for getting some agreements between business and environmental groups.
Based upon that, in 1974 we developed a program in business and the environment which tried to get consensus on critical, divisive issues such as on road building in national forests, which environmentalists prefer to keep as little intrusive as possible and which the timber industry also doesn't want to have to build wider or more expensively than necessary. Toxic substances control and the early implementation of a new toxics law was another issue we took on then. We sponsored a project on natural gas with the Committee on Economic Development. Project participants advocated deregulating natural gas prices in order to bring on a fuel that would really help the environment and was in plentiful supply in the United States.
We had a program on groundwater chaired by Governor Babbitt that included business leaders, environmentalists, state and Federal officials. It designed measures that would protect groundwater and give some clarity and certainty to the development process. Babbitt had done that very well in Arizona. We followed that project up with a major task force on wetlands, chaired by Governor Kean of New Jersey, and that was designed to try to bring people together on that very divisive subject. Out of that group came the recommendation for no net loss of wetlands, the recommendation that President Bush committed to in the 1988 campaign and later became a priority of EPA and the Administration. The groundwater report fed into policies that we implemented at EPA also. Those reports had far-reaching impact.
The Conservation Foundation's operating style was relatively quiet, very inclusive, with a sense that we wanted to look for ways to bring people together around policies that would endure. It always struck me as a conservationist that those policies will not endure that do not have the adherence of the economic sector. We simply must embrace economics in our environmental formulation, just as I think the economic sector has to factor in the environment and health now to a degree that it did not used to do, if we're to have a sustainable economy and also public support and acceptance of a lot of what the industrial sector does and wants to do. So, that was our philosophy.
World Wildlife Fund, of course, was almost exclusively an international institution. It was active in Latin America, in Africa and Asia. It, too, largely avoided stridency and confrontation. We worked in some countries with rotten governments, with undemocratic systems, that we had to make peace with if we were going to continue to operate. We worked through local institutions, generally. We tried to build up non-governmental organizations and local pressure groups in many countries that lacked them. We did not, ourselves, go in making noise to their public as Americans, but rather tried to get locals to study and to appreciate their environmental treasures, in many cases, their wildlife, their flora and fauna. We had access to decision-makers to a degree that most environmental groups did not, simply because the organization was a worldwide group with then 24 - now, I think, 28 - national organizations headed internationally by Prince Philip, with significant people on most of the national organization boards. So we had a good bit of influence.
For a conservation organization, we also had a fair amount of money and resources. But, compared to the size of the problem or to what the economic sector deploys, we didn't amount to a rounding error. I gave, again, with that institution, a priority to bringing economics and the environment together. Our flagship program there was something called "Wild Lands and Human Needs," recognizing that the traditional approach to protecting animals, of punching a hole in the map or putting a fence around an area, wasn't going to work. Hungry, needy, land-poor people can't be fenced out. Conservation must work for the people, the culture in which it finds itself. We had to find ways to accommodate the very legitimate development and economic demands of quite poor people who were multiplying in number, who were often poaching in these parks or going in for resources - like cutting down the timber or gold mining in Corcovado in Costa Rica. People living near those great reserves had to gain by them, had to see them as helpful to them. Very often we could do it - reconcile wildlife and human needs - with programs like eco-tourism or agro-forestry. Timber could be harvested in areas adjacent to important wildlife preserves and cut and marketed by cooperatives. The object was to help people exploit the resources of their own environment but in a way that would allow them to continue to use and enjoy the environment over the long term, while conserving a critical mass of species of flora and fauna.
I heard this concept put very well by President Salinas of Mexico a few weeks ago. I accompanied him for three days as he was dedicating some new reserves in Mexico. In the Yucatan, deep in the jungle, with the camposinos as his audience, he said,
This forest is very valuable. The ancient monuments here are valuable - not just because people pay good money, which they do, to come see the monuments and enjoy the jungle, as important as the money is - not just for the wildlife, which is also very valuable, but it's not as valuable as you are. The reason to keep the forest is that out of the forest your ancestors and you have come. It has sustained the ground-water under it, it has created and made possible your culture and your society, and only if you keep it will it continue to do so for the children of your children.
I don't think I've ever heard a head of government speak so simply and persuasively and eloquently to the nature-culture relationship as he did. People believe him and that's one reason he's still popular in Mexico. That, essentially, was my, much less eloquently put, vision for World Wildlife Fund when I was there and one that I think we did a good bit to advance at that time.