ED WARNER
path: RON PAUL > NM:CONTRACT LISTING BASIC" > CANDIDA ROYALLE > DYANNE PETERSON > ED WARNER

Topic: “Cooperative Conservation: The New Environmentalism”.

I made a career out of 'thinking outside the box.' Having developed the Coalbed Methane play for Amoco Production Company in 1976 and a major gas discovery in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, the Swan Field extension (1986), which made a Denver gas company fifty million dollars, I finally found the elephant for myself (and my partners). Everyone in the gas business thought we were crazy, drilling in an area where everyone knew there was no commercial natural gas. Thus, we ended up with 90% of the Jonah Gas Field (along with it's neighbor, the Pinedale Anticline) (1993) which turned out to be the largest natural gas discovery After a thirty year career as a geologist in oil and gas Exploration, I retired five years ago to pursue a second career in conservation. The environmental movement in the U.S. can be explained by the anti-capitalist mentality of it's philosophy. For the first forty years of the 'green' movement, command and control, and stewardship by legislation, regulation - with the understanding that, in order to do good, people had to be coerced, regulated, controlled or removed from the natural environment - was the methodology employed. The negative consequences to these 'noble' intentions, are legendary. In the background, during those first forty years, was a vastly different philosophy espoused by Aldo Leopold and described in his 1949 (posthumous) publication, "The Sand County Almanac." Leopold described a Land Ethic by which landowners and community stakeholders were responsible for good stewardship: "When land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer we do not."

Today, this relationship to the land is called 'Cooperative Conservation.' Instead of coercion, landowners, community stakeholders, government agencies and academia are coming together to promote stewardship joint ventures which combine public and private lands. Through the use of devices that protect private lands like 'Safe Harbor Agreements' and easements, national legislation like the Endangered Species Act and the Wetlands Act can now be used as tools that enhance habitat for endangered or threatened species while at the same time protect property rights. The 'New Environmentalism', an Age of Private Lands Conservation is upon us.