Why Understanding and Communicating about Policy Matters to Me (and it should to you)

When Ms. Mueller asked me to be a guest blogger for FOR 242, I really struggled with what to write about.  I feel as though you know so much about me and I have taught you much of what is in my wheelhouse already.  After three semesters, aren’t I one of the last people you would want to hear from?  I had even drafted a page and a half on how species status (endangered, threatened, game, furbearer) is determined in PA before I tossed the whole thing in the Computer Recycling Bin.

As I started to write, it became clear that it might be valuable to a take a few minutes to talk a little bit about me – those things you probably don’t know.  After all, how we perceive things are just an accumulation of all of our experiences.  It affects who and what we are.

My dad was born on a farm outside of Blacksburg, VA and grew up in rural Maryland.  My mom was raised in the mountains of West Virginia.  Before Kindergarten we moved to Virginia where I grew up in a lower-middle class suburb of DC – it was a mostly black and immigrant community, I was certainly in the minority growing up, but I didn’t recognize that at the time.  My parents are exceptionally good and honest people.  My mom came from a steel mill family – my grandmother spoke five languages at home because of the all immigrants at the local Catholic church which was the center of my mother’s world.  My mom is gifted with numbers, but wasn’t given any career guidance as a woman, and worked as a part-time typist so that she could spend most of her time at home with my sister and me.  My dad was no stranger to hard work with a farming background and two teachers as parents.  He also happened to be brilliant at math and a gifted economist and political scientist.  Growing up inside the Beltway, I talked politics before I could read.  He could have made five times the money he made working for the government with his skillset, but my father was a firm believer in regulation.  He sacrificed a lot, and faced a lot of resistance, because he believed strongly in reigning in corporate wrongdoing.  My dad’s love and understanding of policy was second only to his love of the outdoors.  He was an avid outdoorsmen and competitive marksman.  Some of my earliest memories are shooting with my dad or playing with snakes with him the backyard.  Despite the rather urban setting, within walking distance of my house was a large County Park with a large forested area, boardwalk and wetland.  Rivalling any of the PA State Parks, I spent hundreds of hours exploring Huntley Meadows with my friends in my youth.

My grandmother (and grandfather) at my parents' wedding. She didn't know it, but she was sick here.

Three key events formed a strong interest in environmental policy and regulation.  The first, which actually occurred eight months before I was born, was the death of my mom’s mother.  Due to unregulated working conditions and exposures at the steel mill, where she only worked for a short period of time before she had children, she died at the age of 46 from an aggressive cancer.  We still don’t know if it started in her breasts or lungs, but it ravaged her body.  She was one of the first women to have a radical double mastectomy.  Unlike the careful mastectomies of today, in a panic over the aggressiveness of the cancer, they literally just sliced her breasts off.  She died shortly after.  In my late teens I was rocked by the death of my parents’ best friend.  He had contracted mesothelioma from his work at the mills.  He was bought off for a pitifully small amount and died painfully, but mercifully quickly.  I know that my parent’s strong pro-Union, pro-healthcare, and pro-environmental regulation stances, which they still echo today, comes partially from those two events.

The third key event was a professional one.  One would think I was primed early on for an interest in environmental policy and science, but it wasn’t a straight path.  After attending a high school for science and technology, I enrolled in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania (I was a classmate of Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk).  I took every wildlife and outdoor-related class the University offered, but for some reason I still thought I wanted to be a veterinarian.  That dream was derailed due an incredibly sexist and inappropriate professor at the University.  I worked several temporary jobs after graduation, but after taking a couple graduate-level policy classes at a local University at night I was hired as an environmental consultant.  Most of my work was for the Environmental Protection Agency, but we frequently contracted for private companies.  One of the last contracts I worked on before I left was for a major railroad.  While a complex situation, we were basically charged with defending the company and its plans to reroute a new route (which would carry both toxic materials and create noise pollution) from a more affluent area that had gotten wind of the plans and lawyered up, to a poverty-stricken area where no one had the money, education, or time to care.  We were using real data, but the absolute lowest or highest estimates in different equations until we get the results we wanted.  Have you ever asked yourself how much your soul is worth?  I have.

By the time I had left my environmental consultant position and enrolled full-time in graduate school at Penn State, I had made a deep and sincere commitment that I was going to:

1.      understand environmental policy and regulation

2.      use solid data to make decisions about policy, even if it went against the grain or what I grew up thinking

3.      allow myself to change my mind if new data was presented to me

4.      make the communication of the importance and understanding of policy and regulation part of my life’s work

I had seen what de-regulation or lack of regulation had done to people that I loved, I was not going to allow it to happen to places where I recreate and species and ecosystems that I care about.  Given my job, on a daily and routine basis this is rather easy to do.  With even a modicum of effort, I attempt to make the traditional bounds of my job.

Sometimes though, it is harder.





Northern long-eared bat

I am the current elected Co-Chair of the PA State Mammal Technical Committee.  We have members from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, private consulting, and universities.  Twice I met with the Executive Leadership for the Game Commission and submitted strong evidence-based proposals for the state listing of two bat species.  We were prepared to submit proposals for three bats, but the northern long eared bat had just been federally listed as threatened and once a species is federally listed it must be automatically added to the state list.  These proposals weren’t voted down, they were never brought to the Board of Directors, despite the fact that the proposals were partially drafted by their own biologists.  The Director serves as the pleasure of the Board and there was fear the Board didn’t want to hear anything that might anger their constituents, or more specifically, lobbyists and legislators.  One particularly powerful state Representative had railed against state-listing of species, endangered species legislation, and sent letters to logging and gas and oil extraction companies about the impact of state listing.  Every single example he used in his letter and when talking to newspapers though was from a federally-listed species.  It demonstrated that he either didn’t understand the difference between state and federally listed species (we have no control over a federally listed species and we only have four birds or mammals that are in PA) or purposefully used the wrong examples as scare tactics.  He also happens to be the force behind of the Endangered Species Coordination Act we talked about in WILDL 208w that essentially attempted to strip the state agencies of any state list.

 

The auditorium where PGC public testimony is presented (I arrived an hour early).

In March of 2016 I presented public testimony to the board about a proposal to list porcupines has furbearers (they listed them as game species several years prior because one of the board members dislikes porcupines).  Although I was reading a prepared statement on behalf of the Mammal Technical Committee, I was really speaking on behalf of the biological staff of PGC, none of which wanted the status change.  Despite being summarily dismissed by the board, I took the opportunity to remind them of their mandate to all native bird and mammal species and citizens in the Commonwealth.  While the Board still voted to list porcupines as furbearers, giving the public testimony was one of the most rewarding, and frightening, actions I have ever taken. 

 

One last note, do yourself a favor and check out the state endangered species list at http://www.pgc.pa.gov/WILDLIFE/ENDANGEREDANDTHREATENED/Pages/default.aspx .  Do you notice the northern long-eared bat, that has been federally listed as threatened since 2015 on there? No, you don’t.  Spend some time thinking about why that might be despite the requirement according to federal law.  In the end, I challenge you to think about making your own commitment regarding conservation, legislation, regulation, and policy.  Use data to make decisions, support environmental regulation and help other people understand why we have those regulations in place.