"A Woods Hole for Wetlands," The Caddo Lake Ramsar Wetlands Science Center
Statement of Don Henley
April 10, 2001
Reno, Nevada

Mr. Chairman, thank you for permitting, me to address the committee today. First let me thank Congressman Sandlin for his positive efforts on behalf of this local initiative. His introduction and his photograph provide an excellent overview of our vision. I also thank the committee members for hearing our concerns about a possible need for oversight and support for community-based initiatives at fulfill important federal conservation commitments.

My remarks today will address not just the local, but also the national and global conservation benefits that could result from Congressional support for The Caddo Lake Ramsar Wetlands Science Center Program.

However, my comments about our Caddo Lake program apply equally well to other community initiatives that are also fulfilling important federal conservation commitments. One example is the Elko habitat restoration program in your state of Nevada, Senator Reid. My conclusion will note some features and needs which both programs seem to share

We have provided the committee with a pamphlet about our Caddo Lake initiative. The front cover contains the Caddo Lake scene Congressman Sandlin showed you, prefaced by the phrase "A Woods Hole for Wetlands." That phrase was coined in a local editorial several years ago, referring to the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. This editorial is in the pamphlet. Together the picture and the phrase show the reason for, and the essence of, this local vision. This booklet also controls schematic plans for the Center's campus, the office building for our Research Coordination Network interpretive and accessory support buildings. A possible hemispheric mission is noted in the letter from John Rogers, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Finally, the pamphlet contains the 1999 Costa Rica Conference Resolution of the Ramsar Nations, which endorses powerful guidance to maximize the involvement of local communities in management of Ramsar wetland sites. The resolution notes that the approved guidance was co-authored by the Caddo Lake Institute, among others. Thus this rural Texas initiative has already influenced both the local and international practice of wetland conservation.

The Caddo Lake Ramsar Science Center is a proposed public/private partnership between the Institute, as the local facility manager and program coordinator, and two Department of Interior agencies, which love special expertise.

These federal agencies are the National Wetlands Research Center of Lafayette Louisiana and the International Affairs Office of the C.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Washington DC. Both agencies have been our informal partners at Caddo Lake since 1993.

The purpose of this Ramsar Center is to institutionalize a brilliant community achievement that could light the way for other communities. The Center is charged with demonstrating nothing less than the "exemplary fulfillment" of an important U.S. treaty commitment, specifically the Ramsar Convention on "Wetlands of International Importance, especially as waterfowl habitat." Our national credibility in keeping this commitment underpins our ability to ask other nations to manage wisely the wetlands in their parts of our common flyways. In addition, the Caddo Lake Ramsar Center fulfills an official pledge by the United States Government and the Caddo Lake Institute to more than 100 Ramsar nations at their 1996 Conference at Brisbane, Australia.

At Brisbane we jointly pledged to establish at Longhorn the first U.S. Regional Ramsar Center. To assure the availability of the facility and fulfill the pledge, the Caddo Lake Institute leased a 1,400-acre old growth forest at Longhorn far conservation research purposes, as well as a 14-acre campus and buildings for eventual renovation. We originally pledged $100,000 to this purpose. We have incurred expenses greatly in excess of that amount to fulfill our share of the Brisbane Pledge.

The purpose of the requested appropriation is to augment the Department of Interior's budget for our partner agencies to underwrite the costs of the Center and its programs for community members and scientists. Together we will create operate and demonstrate the Caddo Lake wetland management plan, as an exemplar of the best Ramsar guidance. The renovation plan contemplates that the facility will be a learning venue. It will include powerful modeling tools for this wetland and its watershed. Interpretive and outreach programs will showcase the practical realities of a community-based wetland management program, and its watershed science foundation.

Because of its wetland science expertise and proximity, in Lafayette Louisiana, we think the National Wetlands Research Center (or NWRC) is the logical agency to receive a budget augmentation to fund and provide oversight for the Caddo Lake Ramsar Center program. Although we know it to be an excellent science agency, we believe NWRC is "fiscally underappreciated" within the federal budget. It deserves both the funding, and the credit it will earn by Congressional augmentation to provide its expertise to local Ramsar communities -- a task we know that NWRC does well. FWS International Affairs, which executes our government's Ramsar obligations, would be reimbursed for its costs of provide Ramsar oversight and U.S. policy coordination. We understand that FWS may also wish to use some Center resources to assist other Ramsar sites whose requests for help are currently underfunded. This new assistance capacity might include training at Caddo Lake, and support for delegations of our citizens and scientists who visit other wetland communities in response to their requests for advice or assistance.

We use the term "budget augmentation" purposefully. It should be counterproductive to compromise the historic missions of NWRC or FWS International Affairs by reallocating to our program any of their shrinking resources. NWRC would reimburse itself and other federal agencies from this budget augmentation for direct federal agency costs as well as NWRC's costs of fiscal and wetland science or oversight, passing through the balance of at lease 80% to finance the locally managed program.

Beyond fulfillment of the Brisbane Pledge, there are compelling reasons to create a program of this type at Caddo Lake. The Caddo Lake communities have made a solid beginning in showing that rural communities have the potential to manage an internationally significant wetland conservation program. Last summer we facilitated a "Lake Residents Working Group" to master and make local presentations of lake management science information. Many Working Group participants, like our grocer and guide Robin Holder, are also members of key local businesses, community groups and the local navigation district. Our initiative formalized the practice of regular consultation with our colleagues of Texas Parks and Wildlife fisheries and waterfowl divisions, as well as their personnel managing their Caddo Lake Wildlife Management Area, the original 1993 Ramsar site. Together, they represent the nucleus of the Ramsar-like structure that joins community groups with science experts, a structure which this appropriation would enable us to formalize to manage the Caddo Lake Ramsar wetlands.

To assure that there will always be a sound science foundation for this ambitious program, we have expanded our historic academic monitoring program. It has become a much broader Research Coordination Network (RCN) The RCN's mission is to provide scientific information to our communities for exemplary implementation of Ramsar guidance, not just for Caddo Lake but also as a model and encouragement to other wetland communities. Today the RCN is composed of scientists from Texas A&M;, Stephen F. Austin State University, East Texas Baptist University, Wiley College, Panola College and Louisiana State University, Shreveport. Anticipating that some committee members may be alumni of other Texas universities, I hasten to note that both University of Texas and Texas Tech University, among others, have been invited to participate. This network includes agency scientists from Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Wetlands Research Center. Next week the RCN meets in Jefferson, Texas to reviews Ramsar guidance and to create interpretive materials about "what we know and to define research projects about "what we need to find out" to manage better. These Conference products will become part of the annual Research Action Agenda for the Center. The Center's interpretive program will routinely showcase the findings of this applied research, and how such research informs the management of "critical issues" in the Caddo Lake Basin. These critical issues include by way of example: how to maximize and measure the effectiveness of community management itself, how to deal with invasive species, how to maintain hydrological integrity, and how to assess and monitor risks to ecological character. Examples of risks already calling for sound science are: measurement of the effects of acids, and nutrients and trace metals from airborne and point sources, including levels of mercury and other pollutants found in the fish and wildlife throughout the basin.

Community members of the lake management Working Group will attend the annual RCN Conferences, as full participants, as a part of their ongoing wetland science orientation. Therefore, much of the funding will be passed through to implement or showcase the Research Action Agenda that the RCN will produce annually with the community management entity. As a result, we expect that the Center will become a model of an advanced research and educational facility for our participants as well as natural science visitors.

Congressman Sandlin perceptively stated a belief we all share at Caddo Lake: Like politics, all conservation is "local" conservation -- at least the best kind is. That has been true in our case. Contrary to popular characterizations of rural southeasterners as being alarmed by local federal conservation activities, our communities are proud of the Ramsar designation, understand its value and use the designation as a tool for stewardship.

During our preparation for this hearing we noticed that similar local initiatives were happening with the sage grouse habitat initiative by rural people in Elko, Nevada. Both programs even share the feature of local people recruiting two willing Federal agencies. We suspect that these may be two examples, perhaps of many similar situations, where extremely important federal conservation commitments are actually being fulfilled by local initiatives - just because local people decided it was the right thing to do.

But community-based initiatives, especially those pursuing federal conservation commitments are very vulnerable. The local effort required to create them is potentially exhausting. If they are not institutionalized and incorporated into local cultural pride, they can rapidly deteriorate. They may be undermined by the death, aging and the personal and family needs of key participants. Local efforts can also be demoralized by indifference, or by "turf wars" or manipulation by the agencies whose missions they are furthering. They may die simply for want of an appropriate institutional vessel to carry them on. Often these local efforts achieve a critical mass --and their greatest promise and vulnerability -- just when their need for costly institutionalization is also critical.

Survival of model community conservation initiatives, like survival of model conservation bureaucracies, requires funding to pay for expertise and institutional structures which foster continuity of programs and personnel, as well as the means to retrieve essential information, to plan, manage, train, and recruit successors. We believe that helping to institutionalize model community programs, which fulfill federal commitments, is justified, especially where they are funded to support other local efforts.

So we suggest that, as we examine how we accomplish conservation in this country, we should make note of and accommodate the flashes of community brilliance that occur to illuminate and fulfill a federal conservation commitment. I believe one such situation is occurring in our Caddo Lake Ramsar Communities. This significant conservation effort can be continued as a model for our nation and the world, especially if the vessel for institutionalization is the local vision; like our vision of "a Woods Hole for wetlands," the Caddo Lake Wetlands Science Center.

Thank you.