Nonpartisan conservation, energy policy, and rural stakeholder relations with Benji Backer

TP: After the American Conservation Coalition, you created a new organization, Nature is Nonpartisan. What does it mean for nature to be nonpartisan? How do you approach these conversations?

BB: ACC is focused solely on giving conservatives a voice on climate and the environment. Nature is Nonpartisan seeks to build a durable environmental movement in America that stands up for the breadth of Americans who all want the same things.

They want clean air, clean water. They want healthy communities. They want safe communities. They want America to be a leader in conservation and continue to support our public lands.

As I was going around the country for ACC, I saw a major overlap between what urban communities and rural communities wanted, what liberals wanted, what conservatives wanted. The rational majority of Americans wanted the same things, but that wasn’t being resembled in the dialogue.

I couldn’t think of an environmental organization that didn’t have some political motive. Most environmental organizations lean left, and they have a political motive.

The environment wasn’t always caught up in culture wars. You had Richard Nixon, who created the EPA and the Clean Air Act, and it was done in a really bipartisan way. Those days are gone as of now, but we have to bring them back.

The reason that nature should be nonpartisan is that these issues transcend political boundaries. We should care about the outcomes for our environment and for our communities more than we care about the ideology behind it. To do that, you need all stakeholders at the table. You need the rural communities, you need the farmers, you need the ranchers, you need the foresters, and you need the people in the cities.

My vision for the environmental movement of the future is one that is inclusive of the diversity of political and cultural identities, so that we actually get the right solutions for the betterment of this country, the environment, and for our communities. We need pragmatism and realism, not alarmism or denialism, when it comes to solving environmental challenges.

TP: In the episode, we hear how Morris—a generally conservative town—has achieved local collaboration and made a shift to cleaner energy by emphasizing practicality over politics. What lessons from its approach are broadly transferable to other communities?

BB: What’s happening in Morris is really a blueprint for what can happen elsewhere. What I really like about Morris is that it’s a community-led effort on all sides of the decisionmaking spectrum. You have the local community, educators, scientists, the local government, state and federal government grants, and private entities, all pushing in the same direction.

When you allow local communities to implement those things in the way that they know can work, it works a lot better than trying to tell people what to do and trying to mandate it. I wrote about this in my book: What works in Morris isn’t necessarily going to work somewhere else.

Towns like Morris have been largely told what to do when it comes to conservation and the environment, a largely command-and-control, one-size-fits-all approach. But maybe solar works better in one economy because there’s a lot more sun, and hydropower works a lot better in others because there’s a lot more rain. Those are the sorts of differences that people don’t think about when it comes to conservation.

When you bring the whole community in and you allow them to make the decisions for themselves, you allow for a long-lasting solution that actually works because you’re able to balance everyone’s priorities. Everyone’s priorities need to be a part of the discussion, otherwise they will protest against it.

Morris shows you that you have to put in some effort upfront and build those relationships and build that coalition to make things happen. It actually happens faster when you build the foundation, whereas if you try to rush things and just throw solutions onto people, they fight it, and it oftentimes gets undone because it wasn’t done in a methodical way.

There are so many small towns across the country that are struggling from an environmental perspective. There are towns in the South that have been grappling with economic issues, and they haven’t had the ability to address environmental issues because their other needs are more important on a day-to-day basis, so these other issues persist.

Morris can focus on this because they know that it’s good for their economic bottom line; they have the resources to put into these programs. Bringing in the right stakeholders actually lessens the cost.

I do think Morris is a great blueprint for the rest of the country. It’s the power of convening the right stakeholders at the right time, not just the government, not just private interests, not just the community, not just educators and scientists, but all of them all at once. They can do something that works for the local community because they know it best. Knowing that other places can replicate that, those are the success stories that should be shouted from the rooftops.

TP: Morris’s progress stems from an informal, trust-based “coalition of the willing” (in fact, they haven’t created a formal or “official” organization). What works when trying to build that kind of collaboration and momentum?

BB: Well, I think it’s not writing people off because you think you don’t like them. People are shocked every day that I’m trying to work with the Trump administration or with Democrats, depending on what side they’re on.

I’m laser-focused on one goal: creating a durable environment and conservation movement. I can’t help with every issue. I’m going to build relationships where the Venn diagram overlaps on the issue at hand. In Morris, they did that; they had conservatives and liberals at the table. They had people with different beliefs on probably a million different things, but where the Venn diagram overlapped on this topic, they were able to work together.

It’s also all about validators. When someone has a reputation in your community, it’s easier to sell partnerships because you know that person has your best interests in mind. It’s better than me going into Morris and telling you what to do. The validator can say “I’ve grown up in Morris, and I want you to be a part of the conversation so that we can build this for our community together.” It’s where trust starts.

When you start to disconnect it from community, friends, and family, you start to lose trust. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be built, but it’s a lot harder to build. I think about how my grandma, who grew up in Northern Wisconsin, was very skeptical of climate change because Al Gore and others were the face of the movement. She was conservative and felt like that was a Trojan horse, that these issues probably weren’t as bad as we thought.

Once she realized that her grandson was working on the issues and cared about them super deeply, she became really supportive and was one of the first people to write me a check. So family, friends, community, that’s where the trust builds.

I also think you have to come to the table without a “my way or the highway” mentality. You can’t have some key objective in mind that you are going to get by hell or high water. It’s probably going to change and evolve by the time it’s done. I heard this great quote from the head of the Outdoor Alliance that “Perfection is impossible, but true perfection is when you weave together everyone’s priorities to get a solution that lasts.”

That’s such a beautiful thought, because it shows that if you go in with the mindset of “I’m not looking for the perfect solution,” the real perfect solution is going to be what is created together. People are oftentimes guarded in conversations, especially around their local community, because they feel attacked by outsiders coming in or by some sort of ulterior motive.

It’s important to go in with that ability to work across boundaries. If you start at the local community level rather than the top down, you’re able to build that trust quicker.

It’s also helpful to outline what the ideal end goal is before you get into the details, because then you realize that you’re sitting at the table for the same reason. One person might say, “I want clean water because I’m a rancher, and I want clean water for my crops and for my animals.” Then you have the environmental activist who might say, “I want clean water because the watersheds downstream are being destroyed.”

Both have a different reason, but they have the same end goal. Yet when they don’t come to the table for the same reason, they often get lost in that, rather than the fact that they want the same outcome.

TP: On environmental solutions in places like Morris, what role do universities and young people play?

BB: The best, most creative ideas for conservation in recent years have come out of partnerships with universities, because you have young people who care so deeply working with experienced researchers, professors, and leaders to put that passion and creativity to the test.

Universities, as much as they attract talent from across the country, have a lot of local connections and involvement. At the University of Washington, we had a marine lab at one of the San Juan Islands, a very rural community. They’re doing great work to restore wildlife populations in the Puget Sound. Growing up in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was coming up with unique opportunities for farmers to become more sustainable in ways that would benefit their lives.

You look at what Texas A&M does as a land-grant university for rural communities on how to be better energy developers and support their livelihoods. A lot of the best solutions are coming from universities that have a footprint in their local community.

People are always afraid of a company or a nonprofit fleeing right after they’ve accomplished one thing, or they’ve mined one thing, or they’ve passed one bill. Universities are there to stay, and they care about the success of the local community. If the university is successful, the local community is successful, and vice versa.

That’s why I fear this anti-higher education sentiment. Yes, bias in the classroom was something that I had to deal with; so I’m the first person to say that there are problems.

But the amount of positive impact that these places have on their local community versus the negative is just unmatched. I mean, it’s unmatched. The local involvement of universities is the reason a lot of communities are successful in the first place.

I grew up in a town where we had a small liberal arts college of about 1800 people, and that brought so much vibrant community and economic development to the area. It brought so much research and institutional knowledge, top leaders who wanted to teach there, and they also did so much for the local community.

Even if people don’t go to the four-year university which is totally okay, understanding the important role that those universities play in rural communities is important.

TP: In small towns, progress inevitably hinges on a few leaders. How do we build succession and institutional capacity, so progress continues?

BB: We need more touch points. It’s not this touch-and-go, “We finished this solution—now we can leave or we can give up.” We need to build these relationships for the long run, not just for a one-time deal.

There is no perfect way. You can’t reach everyone. You can’t get absolutely everyone to the table. You can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. But you can continue to make sure that communities are talked to, that stakeholders are engaged, and that you’re following up. You show people that you’re in it for the long haul.

I think a lot of people pack up and leave once they’ve had the success. If you don’t do that, there’s really no way to fail because you can continually evolve with what needs to be done.

TP: Given recent federal policy swings around climate change and clean energy, how should communities plan and think about long-term energy and infrastructure investments?

BB: At some point, people and our leaders are going to have to decide that we want stability. It’s problematic to have the pendulum swinging back and forth so much between political parties. Rural communities specifically lose the most in that back and forth, because they are the most sensitive to economic changes.

People just want reliable energy. Because there’s this back-and-forth, energy prices go up, energy reliability goes down, and people are more at risk than they were before.

Americans are going to have to wake up and say, “I’m done with the social media-fication of politics. I don’t just want to do whatever sounds good in a sound bite. I want stability. I want progress made across party lines so that both sides have their voice at the table.”

When you only have it one way or the other, you get nowhere. Think about how little progress we’ve made in 10 or 15 years on energy because both parties can’t support the other side’s agenda. China and other countries love that, and they’re laughing.

We don’t have a path. We know that if we go one direction, it’s just going to get undone. Then no one wants to invest in communities because they’re worried that funding is going to get pulled or that the program will be reversed.

Everything has become temporary, short-term, reactive solutions to really big problems. There are no proactive solutions regarding what could happen in five or 10 years.

TP: What do you see as the role of government in fostering new innovations and technologies that serve our environmental and social needs?

BB: The divisiveness raises the importance of community and private sector leadership, because then you can mitigate the political divisiveness. If you’re just leading at the community level, you can do things your way and not worry about the government. If you’re a private company that can help lead new technology to the marketplace without relying on the government to make it happen, that’s the best way forward.

But we can’t solely rely on that. We need the government to be a part of these solutions. I’m in rural Oregon right now touring this small town, and they have a nonprofit that runs a cafe that runs all these community outreach and youth development programs. It’s almost all funded by government grants. So, there’s a balance. Yes, we need communities to lead on their own. And yes, we need the private sector to lead on its own. But you can’t always just lead on your own.

For-profits need seed capital at the beginning to get off the ground. Every industry, oil and gas, airlines, the automotive industry need federal investment. When the federal government is broken, we are all worse off, and while we can survive without the federal government working, it’s way harder than it needs to be.

And our federal government does not need to be heavy-handed. When Ronald Reagan talked about limited government, he didn’t mean no government. He meant government for the people: To help support communities, to help encourage innovation, to help make people work hard, and to provide seed support to allow American communities to thrive. That’s the limited government view that I think most Americans want.

TP: In our polarized era, how can Morris’s model for community problem-solving be exported to inform national policy?

BB: I think we have to get back to basics. There’s a lot to learn from local communities that are actually doing what the national model needs to replicate. Local communities have continued to do that and persevere throughout time, despite the federal government going through ebbs and flows.

I got 25 CEOs of the largest conservation groups in the country to sit down with each other and actually figure out a roadmap. It was left-leaning groups, center groups, the hunting and fishing conservative groups, all across the spectrum. We were able to sit down and hammer out a plan within three days. It hadn’t been done in the conservation NGO ecosystem for many years.

It’s sitting down with each other, building relationships, understanding what each person’s end goal is, and figuring out how to get there in a way that works for all sides. It really feels simple to say, because it feels like it should be obvious. Morris and other places have shown that it’s possible.

Despite the federal government being paralyzed with division and polarization, somehow these small towns, and Americans in all places across this country, are keeping it together.

I absolutely believe that we can use Morris as a model to show federal policymakers that there needs to be a completely different way of thinking here. The country is yearning for solutions.