The University of Arizona Press

September 5, 2024

Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs. The book contains 153 color images. We interviewed author Stephen E. Strom to learn more about his research and photography for this book. All photos by Stephen E. Strom unless noted otherwise.

Grasslands adjacent to Sonoita Creek in Arizona

Why did you write this book?

The rapid growth of the West continues to fragment landscapes, threaten watersheds, and undermine the complex interactions among plants, animals, and people, disrupting the natural functions and equilibria of ecosystems.  In the 170 years since gold was found in Sutter’s Creek, more than 165,000 square miles of the West’s “wide open spaces” have been lost to development: an area larger than that of the entire state of California.

The consequent loss and fragmentation of open space has undermined the health of forests, grasslands, and watersheds, with resulting detrimental effects on wildlife, species diversity, and water supply. Ecosystems that could otherwise store carbon have been lost or disrupted, and the unquantifiable values of scenic beauty and solitude have been diminished. Climate change threatens to exacerbate the magnitude of these threats and to compress the time available for ecosystems to restore balance and function.

The urgent need to address the challenges posed by the rapid and continuing growth of the West motivated me to explore a number of pressing questions: What lands do we need to conserve or protect in order to foster functioning ecosystems? How do we conserve them? Is it possible to restore some of the damage already inflicted on lands and water? And how do we meet the goals of both sustainable land stewardship and economic vitality in a context where cities, suburbs, and exurbs continue to grow in response to increasing population?

To gain insight into how these questions might best be answered, I spent the better part of three years listening to individuals whose interests and expertise span a broad range of interests and ideologies—ranchers, developers, conservationists, ecologists, representatives from government agencies and NGOs, along with citizen activists. Their message: achieving critical conservation and land stewardship goals will require an all-hands approach involving broad public participation in shaping strategic plans to steward and protect landscapes on scales of hundreds of thousands of acres, and to address the economic, cultural and spiritual needs of citizens who live among and adjacent to these lands.

Pronghorn

Forging a Sustainable Southwest describes four large-landscape conservation efforts, each of which provides an example of how to integrate human and environmental needs on regional scales, and to as well create a positive social context for long-term cooperation among multiple stakeholders.

As Matthew McKinney, Lynn Scarlett, and Daniel Kemmis suggest, forming such collaborative efforts to address large-landscape conservation challenges “might well result in a healing of not only ecosystems, but also related human systems. As traditionally adversarial conservation, community, and economic interests search for common ground, one arena of shared interest is a growing recognition that unscarred landscapes, clean water, fresh air, and a rich biodiversity based on healthy ecosystems, are becoming the best economic engine available to many local communities. Perhaps even more appealing is the prospect that, in the course of working hard to discover and claim that common ground, the people who inhabit those ecosystems will have contributed to the strengthening of their civic culture, and to expanding their capacity to address the next set of challenges.”

Catalina State Park, Arizona (photo credit: Catalina State Park)

How do organizations get people from across the political spectrum to work together to preserve large landscapes?

In Forging a Sustainable Southwest, The Nature Conservancy’s Peter Warren reflects on his experiences in working with groups committed to large-landscape conservation efforts:

To come up with a cohesive conservation approach to something on the scale of one hundred thousand acres, or five hundred thousand acres, or a million acres . . . requires collaboration among different landowners and land managers. I’ve come to view successful collaborations as team problem-solving, troubleshooting, brain-storming efforts based on shared experience.

To develop successful conservation strategies across a large area with multiple landowners—public, private and Tribal—requires ongoing collaborative efforts in which people share a common vision for the future. Most successful conservation efforts start out locally, where individuals motivated by attachment to and passion for a place initiate conversation about the effects of land use on their future. Efforts that endure are those that include individuals with diverse interests—from large-scale landowners and ranchers to the business community and entrepreneurs in the region, other advocates for conservation, and community members who care about the place.

The groups and individuals that shepherded the four successful conservation efforts described in Forging a Sustainable Southwest share the following attributes: recognizing and respecting cultural and ideological differences; understanding with compassion the fears of individuals about their future; taking the time to build relationships and trust; and finding a way to harmonize economic, cultural and conservation goals.

Mountain spring in southern Arizona

Pygmy owl and long-nosed bat

Do you know of other collaborations outside of the southwest that are working toward similar goals?

Efforts to work collaboratively to effect large-landscape conservation have grown significantly over the past twenty years. The Four Forest Restoration Initiative and the Wyoming Landscape Initiative represent two notable examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborative conservation in developing strategies for stewarding and protecting lands in regions facing very different environmental and political challenges.

The Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) is a restoration initiative for 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pine forestland along the Mogollon Rim in Arizona encompassing four national forests: Apache, Coconino, Tonto, and Kaibab. The principal goals of the program are to restore forest ecosystems so that they are more resilient to naturally and human- caused fires; increase the diversity of plants; protect springs and streams; and promote industries that depend on wood products to the benefit of local economies. The collaboration involves local, county, and state governments, representatives from industrial and environmental communities, as well as other stakeholders.

4FRI has successfully implemented large-scale forest thinning operations to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. The Initiative has also significantly improved habitat conditions for wildlife species, enhanced the health of watersheds, and provided economic benefits to local communities through job creation and the promotion of sustainable forest industries.

Rain in the mountains next to Animas Valley, New Mexico

The Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (WLCI) is a partnership including representatives from the BLM, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Wyoming Department of Agriculture, Wyoming Game and Fish Department, six county commissions, eleven conservation districts, and industry and landholders. Its dual goals are to conserve and enhance fish and wildlife habitat at landscape scale using science-based programs, and to support responsible energy, mineral, and other development.

WCLI has been successful in developing conservation agreements with ranchers and private landowners, which have helped to preserve open rangelands and to maintain traditional land uses like grazing. By working together with local communities, these agreements have conserved critical habitats for wildlife, such as sage-grouse, mule deer, and pronghorn, while allowing ranchers to maintain viable operations.

Furthermore, WCLI efforts have helped to restore riparian areas across Wyoming—vital for maintaining healthy watersheds and provide essential habitats for fish, birds, and other wildlife. The restoration work includes planting native vegetation, reducing erosion, and improving water quality, benefiting both the environment and local communities.

The initiative has also worked with energy companies to minimize the impacts of oil, gas, and wind energy projects on sensitive landscapes and wildlife habitats.

Chiricahua leopard frog and Swainson’s hawk

What are the challenges of photographing large landscapes, fitting so many square miles into the frame, and how did you overcome them?

I envisioned photographs playing a pivotal role in conveying why the regions discussed in Forging a Sustainable Southwest merit a mix of protection, sustainable stewardship and in some cases restoration. To document the wide range of landscapes discussed in the book, required capturing them from a variety of perspectives. For more intimate evocations, I used a DSLR camera, while aerial images obtained from drones and light aircraft flying from heights of 400 to 4,000 feet above the ground enabled me to capture the sweeping expanses (up to 60 miles in all directions) of the area’s grasslands, forests, riparian areas and watersheds.

Capturing the beauty inherent in these landscapes presented a new challenge for me, as much of my previous work (Death Valley: Painted Light; Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land; Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land; and The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands) focused on interpreting dramatically different landscapes dominated by deep intricate canyons, majestic buttes, colorful badlands and windswept deserts.

Cienega Ranch, Arizona

What project are you working on now?

I’m currently gathering ground- and aerial-based photographs to complement The Northwest in Transition: Envisioning the future of the Columbia River Basin, a book currently in preparation by journalist and author Rebecca Robinson. To quote Rebecca: “The book aims to capture a pivotal moment when a confluence of events has inspired an urgent search for solutions to a decades-long debate over energy, economic development, and tribal treaty rights in the Columbia River Basin, a 258,000-square-mile region encompassing parts of seven U.S. states and southern British Columbia, Canada.” Robinson is the author of Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground for which I provided images of landscapes throughout the Bears Ears National Monument in southeast Utah.

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Stephen E. Strom has spent forty-five years as a research astronomer after receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in astronomy from Harvard. He began photographing in 1978, after studying the history of photography and silver and nonsilver photography at the University of Arizona.