Patagonia, the well-known outdoor clothing company, or the “coolest company on the planet,” according to Fortune magazine, manages its product distribution from a large facility in Reno, Nevada. Past the friendly receptionist and up the stairs, you’ll find Patagonia staff working in a large open-design office. And there, in the same open office, you will also find the headquarters of the Nevada Wilderness Project.
The connection between Patagonia and NWP is no accident. Ten years ago, the company encouraged an eager young employee, John Wallin, to spend a couple of months interning with Friends of Nevada Wilderness, inventorying potential wilderness areas across the 48 million acres of Nevada that is federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
Gold Butte; © Ron Hunter, NWP volunteer
"I got hooked on wilderness," explains Wallin, "and my bosses were actually happy about that. They even gave me a desk and said 'go for it.'" So John resigned from Patagonia, but was invited to stay on in the Patagonia building as the founder of the Nevada Wilderness Project. The group initially focused on the huge task of finding effective pathways to turn a map of potential wilderness lands into legally-protected wilderness areas, so-designated by an act of Congress. The Project and its partners in Friends of Nevada Wilderness and other state and national conservation organizations understood the enormity of the challenge, and they understood how the work would have to be done: from the grassroots up.
Most importantly, says Wallin, “We understood that wilderness itself — the beauty of the land and its wildlife — would not be the primary ‘engine’ by which our congressional delegation could be moved to champion conservation on the scale to match what we were envisioning for Nevada." Instead, the engine would be the paradoxical challenge so many Nevadans felt as they both welcomed growth (in one of our fastest-growing states), but worried about the apparent costs in lost scenic, wildlife, and recreational values.
"We knew there was grassroots demand out there for wilderness. We were able to organize and focus it, and the delegation responded," says Wallin.
These two maps illustrate the successes that grew from this approach. The map on the left shows the wilderness areas Congress had established in Nevada by 1989, virtually all on portions of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. The map on the right charts the additional wilderness areas protected by Congress over the past decade. Green areas were protected by Congress in 2000, blue in 2002, purple in 2004, and orange in 2006 — 2,530,000 acres in all. Those laws also protected an additional half million acres in “national conservation areas.” And they enjoyed the support of both Republicans and Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation.
Wilderness remains a core focus for the Nevada Wilderness Project (see last month's newsletter article about the campaign to protect the Gold Butte region in southeastern Nevada), but lessons learned in the efforts to pass those four laws have led the organization to broaden its conservation goals. "In the face of climate change," says Wallin, “we recognize that renewable energy development is going to happen on lands people care about. So we must become proactive, working with energy companies to help them be ‘smart from the start,’ so we can gain the benefits of renewable energy in ways that are most compatible with public lands protection.” Part of this broader mission is to find ways to protect corridors necessary for wildlife species, such as desert bighorn sheep and mule deer, to move across the landscape with room to accommodate the impacts of global warming.
The volunteers and staff of the Nevada Wilderness Project are tackling this revised mission with the same basic tools that have served their wilderness protection successes—grassroots organizing to mobilize public opinion and forging of partnerships, including with local governments and businesses, to seek common ground for the good of all.
