Q & A

Browner on Board

Katherine Lambert

Carol Browner left the Environmental Protection Agency in January as its longest-serving chief ever. Her current work on behalf of the environment includes a seat on the Audubon board of directors. She recently talked to Audubon in Washington, D.C.

Q: This issue of Audubon is devoted to the Everglades. Tell us what it was like growing up nearby.

A: I was blessed to be born next to such a beautiful place, a place that has inspired me in so many ways. It's the sky that counts, and the clouds were my mountains. And there's the serenity, the majestic sweep of the grasses. One of my favorite experiences from childhood is being out in the Everglades and watching a storm come up and roll across. The shadows and light change, and then the rain comes. It never rains for more than two hours. Then there's the beautiful sense that the earth has been cleansed.

Q: You made repairing the Everglades a mission. Are you optimistic about the restoration?

A: Yes. I think we have an incredibly good blueprint. What will become tricky is how we adjust. It's like spending years with an architect, building a perfect house. You know that when the walls go up and something isn't quite right, you have to adjust.

Q: What do you make of the Bush administration's decision to back out of the Kyoto agreement to control climate change?

A: I don't think anyone thought they would just walk away from an issue that has been debated, discussed, and acknowledged for nine years. No agreement is ever perfect.

Q: Is Kyoto dead?

A: My hope is that they will return to the Kyoto platform and see it as a starting point. If you read between the lines, that seems to be a possibility. This is such an important issue in Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world. No environmental challenge we've ever sought to address comes close to global warming.

Q: What's the political price to pay for weakening environmental regulations?

A: I think that the public's desire for cleaner water and air is constant. It's one of the things that government does, like putting police on the street. I've yet to go to a city where people say, 'Gosh, my air is too clean, so go away.'

Q: Finally, you've expressed excitement about Audubon's campaign to create a network of 1,000 nature centers nationwide.

A: I've always found that when the government engages people about a place they know and love, the decision making vastly improves. When people understand what the Everglades was, and what it is in danger of becoming, they will be prepared to make far better decisions. That's what the nature centers will do: give people the tools in their communities.

 

Strawberry Plains Audubon Center

Making It Right in Mississippi

The Strawberry Plains meadow leads children to the education center.

Susan Salinger

The breakthrough came from the brush pile. As Jim Nolan tells it, he was sitting with some local birdwatchers in the sunroom at the new Strawberry Plains Audubon Center, a few miles north of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Nolan, the center's director, had piled up branches and vines near the antebellum mansion that serves as headquarters. As juncos, cardinals, and fox sparrows twittered in and out of the brush pile, one man said, "Gosh, I didn't know birds would go in there! Do you think they would come to my backyard if I made a brush pile?"

Director Jim Nolan displays a bluebird nest whose eggs never hatched.

Susan Salinger

Absolutely. In fact, that's one of the messages that Nolan and Jesse Grantham, director of Audubon's Mississippi state office, are trying to deliver.

The 2,500-acre Strawberry Plains sanctuary--the name derives from the wild fruit that once grew there--was willed to Audubon in 1982 by Ruth Finley and Margaret Finley Shackelford. The former cotton plantation had been in their family since the 1830s, and the sisters wanted to make sure it was never developed. Audubon began managing the sanctuary in the spring of 1998.

Much of the time since has been spent, in Nolan's words, "getting the infrastructure stuff done"--turning a sharecropper's house into an education center, creating a bus turnaround, removing an unsightly fence, mowing a meandering path through a former lawn that's growing into meadow.

Briana and Javian Griffin peek at an eastern box turtle--from a safe distance.

Susan Salinger

Meanwhile, Grantham, a veteran Audubon biologist, has had time to realize that there are not as many birds on the property as there should be. During a Winter Bird Count the center held in January, Grantham says, "we would hike for 15 or 20 minutes and not see or hear a single bird. We saw 69 species, but I would have expected 75 to 80, and more individuals." When he looked around, though, he understood why: "There are no berry-producing plants, no seed-producing plants, no cover."

He sees a number of culprits. The state wildlife agencies emphasize game species--deer, turkey, quail--to the exclusion of all else. But a surfeit of deer has meant a dearth of greenbrier, holly, hackberry, sumac, and other understory plants that songbirds prefer. "People don't plant wildlife-friendly plants because they don't know what to do," says Grantham. "The information isn't available." The list of recommended trees for the local Conservation Reserve Program, for instance, is heavily slanted toward oaks, whose acorns feed deer and turkeys.

Residual chemicals may be affecting the plants and wildlife as well. DDT, arsenic, and chlordane are known to have been used at Strawberry Plains. Another problem, erosion, dates to the cotton boom of the late 1800s. "Everybody was farming everything they could get their hands on--clearing right down to the edges of streams, taking their little woodlots out," says Grantham. "So there are huge erosion ditches everywhere. They look like streambeds, but they're not. It's estimated that two to six feet of topsoil has eroded off north Mississippi."

Nolan and his two assistants are working hard to improve the habitat here. They're planting native shrubs and trees, such as bayberry, wax myrtle, American holly, bald cypress, and possumhaw. They allow deer hunters onto the property. And they've got those brush piles. "Within 15 minutes," says Nolan, "there were birds going into them."

Lauralee Fant and Emma Elgin explore a farm pond by canoe.

Susan Salinger

As he works to attract birds and other wildlife to the new sanctuary, Nolan is welcoming human visitors, too. The local HeadStart program has brought some 200 preschoolers out for nature walks. Adults flocked to a Hummingbird Celebration in September and Migratory Bird Day on May 13, 2000, as well as to the Winter Bird Count. A group of fifth graders came to learn about the ecological history of the sanctuary. And Grantham and Nolan are planning workshops for local landowners, where they can share the lessons they're learning about restoring habitat.

"If you're trying to make a difference in a part of the country," explains Grantham, "first you need to identify some of the local issues. You've got to come up with a solution and put that in your educational program, so it has a direct impact on your community." Even if it's something as simple as building a brush pile.

--Mary-Powel Thomas

To arrange a visit to the center, call 662-252-4143 or visit www.msaudubon.com.

 

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© 2001  NASI

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