Program Updates, Spring 2009
Thank You Marnie!
For the past nine years, our restoration program has been led both fearlessly and creatively by Marnie Criley. In mid-2008 Marnie informed us that she was ready to move on, and that she would be leaving Wildlands CPR at the end of the year. Even though we had about six months to get used to the idea, it’s still pretty strange not having her as an official part of the Wildlands CPR team. As we continue to adjust, we thought we’d take this opportunity to share with you, our members and readers, the amazing story of what Marnie started with, what she built and where our program is as a result of her work,
It was January 2000, we had just finished a major push to press the Forest Service to change off-road vehicle management, and the roadless rule was about to be finalized. Wildlands CPR had been involved at the inception of the roadless campaign, and as it grew into a major DC-based effort, we complemented the endeavor with a focus on place-based road restoration. By the time the rule was adopted, people understood that wildland roads can be quite damaging. We created a full-time position, enabling us to aggressively expand our emphasis on watershed restoration through road removal.
Marnie was working as a restoration practitioner with her partner Mark, but she had a very strong policy background. She and Mark had attended several Wildlands CPR workshops, most of the time ending up as de-facto instructors to Forest Service participants. Marnie was clearly perfect for the job, and apparently she thought so, too, because she took it!
Within a short time, Marnie directed Wildlands CPR toward research into the economics and socio-political aspects of watershed restoration through road removal. She became a key participant in the national effort to develop a set of restoration principles, building alliances with partners in the community-based forestry movement. Marnie helped many understand that restoration could result in win-win situations and move us away from tiresome jobs vs. the environment arguments, and she oversaw the development of a formal economic analysis of the jobs creation benefits of road decommissioning. Today it seems everyone is jumping on the green jobs bandwagon, but Marnie blazed a trail those many years ago. We’ve expanded on and promoted the results of that first report (Investing in Communities, Investing in the Land) ever since, with Marnie becoming a sought-after expert in developing high-skill, high-wage, green restoration jobs.
While the agency was beginning to engage in watershed restoration through road decommissioning, there were a lot of false starts around the country. So, Marnie developed another project to identify what works and what doesn’t in road decommissioning. The result was an extremely valuable report including a fantastic flow chart to help agency staff implement socio-politically acceptable road decommissioning programs on national forests. If they could head off opposition, and even more importantly, build public support, then, theoretically, the agency would be able to implement better restoration programs. This report and several others became known as our “road removal toolbox.” Now we needed to get the toolbox into the right hands . . .
Since our inception, Wildlands CPR had implemented citizen workshops to teach people how to document roads in the field, work with the agency to change road management, etc. And while we had invited agency staff to our road decommissioning workshops, our focus was still on the general public. Marnie took our workshops in an entirely new direction, identifying agency staff as a prime audience. In 1.5 years, more than 100 agency staff attended workshops that Marnie coordinated, all focused on the toolbox. Staff from Forest Service regions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 all attended. Wildlands CPR has since led trainings in both our restoration and ORV programs for more than 300 agency staff.
During all this time, Marnie was engaged in many state and national efforts to combine labor and environmental advocacy – especially as a result of the economics/jobs work she had been doing. In 2006, she got more heavily involved in Montana restoration, after our board finally relaxed their “don’t focus so much on Montana” rule. Marnie worked with the Montana governor’s office and Wildlands CPR became an original cosponsor, along with the MT AFL-CIO, of the Governor’s Restoration Summit in June 2006. More than 300 business, tribal, conservation, university and government representatives participated in this meeting. Just this fall the governor held a follow up meeting focused on building a restoration workforce in Montana, and Marnie presented at that as well.
As an outcome of the governor’s 2006 summit, Marnie began coordinating a group of summit participants from industry, labor, university, timber, conservation and hunting communities to promote recommendations from the 2006 summit. We began calling this ad-hoc group Restore Montana, and Marnie was the unofficial leader of the pack. We set an agenda for the 2007 MT legislature, and when all was said and done, we ended up with $34 million in new state funding for restoration, the creation of a state office of watershed restoration, and a new messenger, Governor Schweitzer, on the importance of building a restoration economy in Montana. During 2007, Marnie also took a leadership role with a group of agency staff, timber, hunting and conservationists who were developing a set of restoration principles for Montana.
This review includes just some of the big projects that Marnie has been involved in, but throughout the past 9 years, she’s been helping Wildlands CPR grow into the diverse, respected organization that we are today. When Marnie left Wildlands CPR at the end of 2008, she did so with one primary goal in mind – to turn Restore Montana into an effective organization promoting a restoration economy in the state of Montana. She’s got a board of directors (which includes Wildlands CPR E.D. Bethanie Walder), she’s in the process of raising money, and she’s got a vision for how to move forward. Restore Montana is a coalition effort, and Wildlands CPR will continue to be a big part of it. We hope this brief review of Marnie’s impact on Wildlands CPR provides a small token of our thanks for all her hard work with us. Marnie, we wish you all the luck in the world — we hope you’re as successful at this next endeavor as you were with Wildlands CPR — we’ll miss you!