Waterbury LEAP Blog

Last week, LEAP was lucky enough to sit down and talk with David Connell. David is a devoted family man and a passionate environmentalist. These days, David applies his love for protecting our planet with his full time job at the Nature Conservancy, where he works closely on their digital media efforts. You can learn more about David and follow him along on twitter @DavidConnell

How did you get involved with The Nature Conservancy?

I’ve always been passionate about the natural world and in particular the wilderness. I grew up in Danville, Pennsylvania, a very small rural town in the north-central part of the state where the wilderness was part of our lives. Our homes were in the forest, we played in the woods and in streams. We built tree forts and went camping. Many of my friends hunted — but I’ve never really had the stomach for it. So caring for nature and experiencing nature has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I spent a lot of my early career bouncing around DC and when a friend told me about an opening at the Conservancy I jumped at it.

For me, the Conservancy connects deeply with who I am as an environmentalist. They come from a position of inclusion and non-confrontation, they protect tangible places and they base their decisions on science. Activist organizations are vital to the success of the environmental movement — I’ll have more to say on this later — but for who I am, the Conservancy is a great fit.

What is your primary duty at the Conservancy?

My primary duty is to help tell the Conservancy’s story through digital media, get people interested in our work and help them develop a deeper relationship with the Conservancy that hopefully ends with a donation or volunteering at one of our preserves.

Specifically, I’m responsible for explaining our global strategy work on climate change (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/urgentissues/climatechange/index.htm); oceans (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/oceanscoasts/index.htm); rivers and lakes (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/riverslakes/index.htm); and our traditional land conservation activity (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/urgentissues/conservationlands/index.htm) to a general audience. A lot of what I talk about is conceptual, so I tell a lot of stories through interactive graphics. I get to work with amazing graphic designers and talented writers to put these projects together. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten to a point in my career, where I’m not writing myself so much, but I do write occasionally for our blog Cool Green Science (http://blog.nature.org/) on the intersection of tech and the environment.

One thing I want to be clear on: I am here as a private citizen today, not as a spokesperson for the Conservancy. I’m sharing my own thoughts and opinions and none of this should be construed as official comments from The Nature Conservancy, which I am not qualified to give.

The Conservancy is a large NPO – do you ever feel like you are working for a large corporation like millions of other people?

Short answer: Yes, all the time. The Conservancy is by far the largest company I have ever worked for — we have over 3,000 employees, offices in all 50 states and a growing presence in 33 countries. So it’s a big organization with lots of intricacies, departments, rules and regs, you name it.

At the same time, the Conservancy is a big organization made up of lots of little organizations — it almost feels like a federation at times. So, you can walk into the office in Montpelier, Vermont (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/vermont/index.htm) and have a very different experience and feel than you do when you walk into the San Francisco office (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/california/index.htm). This mix of cultures is part of what makes the Conservancy wonderful — but it can also be a challenge for moving broad initiatives forward — we have to do a lot of consensus building here.

Personally, I’m lucky because there are several Conservancy preserves in my area that I can go and visit with my family. For my job, I’ve also been lucky enough to visit some places and experience the impact we have on the ground. A quick story:

A couple of years ago I went on a site visit in Panama. As part of the visit, we went to a traditional coffee farm where the farmer was growing coffee on a gorgeous farm, covered in old-growth forest. To be completely blunt, the trees on this farm were worth more than the coffee that grew under them. The farmer was struggling, because he had not gotten his product certified as shade-grown, fair trade, organic — all of which he was qualified to receive. This gorgeous, rich coffee was literally getting sold in bulk and ending up in Folgers crystals. His farm was losing money, and to make a profit he was considering turning away from traditional farming methods and selling to a large plantation.

The Conservancy worked with local partners to offer him a different way forward. We helped him get his coffee certified and sold at the premium price it deserved. His profits increased and he saw the value nature provided to his business. After the first year of selling his coffee at the certified price point, he was able to buy a gas-powered sheller — we visited him on the week it arrived. Before this, he and his son were shelling beans by hand.

The pride in that farmer’s eyes in both his product and his land is something I will never forget.

So yes, it’s a big organization. But at the local level I believe strongly that we are getting results every day.

The Nature Conservancy works with multi billion dollar corporations. Some of those relationships are very controversial. How do you respond to those who challenge the authenticity of the Conservancy for working with large corporations?

To be completely honest, this is an issue I have struggled with and thought a lot about throughout my carrier at the Conservancy. Frankly, I think it’s something almost everyone at the Conservancy thinks very deeply about and if they don’t, they probably should.

So, let me preface this by saying again that these are my own opinions and I am speaking for myself. In no way should this be construed as an official statement from The Nature Conservancy.

Generally, the environmental movement is split into two groups that fulfill two crucial roles in making change happen. There are activist organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and there are the large Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like the Conservancy and WWF. The activist organizations are great at putting direct, public pressure on corporations to change their practices. Greenpeace’s recent Barbie campaign is an exquisite example.

A corporation can react to this pressure in two ways: They can put their head down and wait for the storm to blow over, which it will. Or they can do the right, but more difficult thing, and enact changes to make their product or their production more sustainable.

In order for them to do the right, but more difficult thing, they need partners with expertise like the Conservancy and WWF to help them enact changes. These changes are often difficult. They can include identifying issues within supply chains, monitoring farming and forest activities and certifying production processes — all of which the Conservancy and its staff is uniquely qualified to do.

In today’s media culture where news stories have a shelf life of 48 hours, it’s all too easy for a corporation to ignore pressure from activist groups and wait for the next news cycle to push their issues to the side. For instance, how many of us are still hearing about the Barbie campaign? It was in the news for maybe one weekend, even though deforestation in Indonesia is a huge crisis and Mattel is a giant corporation.

The Conservancy and other NGOs need to make it easier and less expensive for a corporation to correct their actions than it is to go through the pain of an a activist campaign. To do that, they need to be ready with tough love solutions and frankly an open hand. David Cleary, our new director of agriculture, has a really interesting blog post on how he’s seen this symbiosis play out in the Amazon – it’s definitely worth a read. (http://blog.nature.org/2009/07/beef-amazon-deforestation-david-cleary/)

At the same time, there are corporations coming to the environmental community now for help who aren’t being targeted with activist campaigns. They’re coming because they realize that having a sustainable business is crucial to their long-term survival and the survival of the planet. These companies often have poor or spotty environmental records, but have made a decision and investments to change their practices.

The environmental community should be celebrating this, because that’s what we want, right? We want these companies to change. But too often these companies and the NGOs that work with them are accused of greenwashing. Personally, I think that’s a real shame.

I truly believe that the way activist groups and NGOs work in symbiosis is the fascinating untold story of the environmental movement. At the same time, I know that a lot of people are uncomfortable with the NGO side of the equation — believe me, I get that. I also think that the NGO side needs the increased scrutiny we receive because we do work with these corporations so closely. So I welcome tough, but fair scrutiny. (Unfortunately, some of the scrutiny we receive is unfair, ill-informed and based on personal attacks.)

For those who care about the environment and want to see change happen, I would ask them to think about which side of the equation they feel most comfortable engaging with and donate their time and money to that side. At the same time, I’d ask them to recognize that both sides of the equation are absolutely critical to success.

What do you enjoy most about your work at the Conservancy?

I love that the organization is building a really big and diverse tent for conservation.

I honestly don’t believe the environmental movement can achieve the changes our planet needs — particularly when it comes to big, complex issues like climate change — if we remain a predominantly white, liberal, bi-coastal movement. It’s simply not going to work. I think everyone in the movement needs to do more to reach out to others, understand where they are coming from and meet at common ground.

The reality is we are not going to get the kind of change we need until over 60 percent of Americans rate improving the quality of the environment as one of their top concerns. Right now, that number is just over 30 percent. We need to double the amount of people who care strongly about the environment and you’re not going to find those numbers in our current base.

There are three areas where I’d like to see the movement make inroads and where the Conservancy is doing really strong outreach:

The first is urban areas and minority communities. The environmental justice community has done amazing work fighting for urban areas, against urban pollution, for open space in our cities, for green jobs and livable communities.

Unfortunately, the big players in the environmental community have largely ignored that great work. That needs to change and is changing. We need to acknowledge the great work they’ve done, help them do more when we can and get out of the way when we should.

At the same time, we need to build bridges between urban and minority communities to the natural world when they don’t exist. The Conservancy’s LEAF program is a great example (http://www.nature.org/aboutus/diversity/leaf/index.htm). The program brings urban youth out nature for extended periods of time to work with Conservancy scientists in the field and supports students pursuing higher education opportunities and career paths in environmental fields. Seventy nine percent of the kids who come out of that program self identify as environmentalists and nearly 40 percent apply for a college environmental program. Also, 96 percent of LEAF alumni went straight to college after high school.

By the way, this program can also have a profound effect on our site manages and scientists who often find themselves working with urban and minority youth for the first time in their lives. This can be a hugely eye-opening experience for them as well.

The second is rural and middle-America communities. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where the ethos is: Get your water from your well, meat from the forest, fish from the stream and vegetables from the land.

These are folks who are really living a strong sustainable lifestyle, but are skeptical of — if not downright hostile toward — environmental organizations. It absolutely should not be that way — we have so many common interests. Clean water and intact wilderness are basic tenets of environmentalism and essential to many rural people’s way of life. We’re natural allies that have been driven apart by issue-based partisan politics.

I’m really proud of the Conservancy’s long history of working with rural communities, ranchers and farmers to preserve land. As much as we’ve grown and changed over the years, this work is still the bedrock of what we do. I’m also proud of the work we’ve done with groups like Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited on wetland protection and stream restoration. I would love to see us do more public outreach to rural communities and talk more about the importance of rural areas to the environment.

Right now, there is a real opportunity to do this type of outreach over the issue of fracking, which may prove to be devastating to rural communities across the country. The Conservancy has been deeply involved in the Marcellus Shale issue (http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/pennsylvania/explore/the-energy-equation.xml), providing interactive maps (http://maps.tnc.org/paenergy/) of what the Pennsylvania wilderness could look like if Marcellus is fully developed and calling for stricter regulations, better planning and more oversight of the Marcellus development.

The third is the corporate sector, which has such a huge impact on the environment that, in my opinion, it’s irresponsible not to reach out to sector leader and try to create change within the community. I’ve already talked at length about this, so I won’t go into it much further, except to say that I’ve seen how corporate leaders can help deliver our message.

In 2009, I was privileged to be part of the Conservancy’s delegation in Copenhagen for the UN climate change conference. Our South Carolina trustee, Arnie Nemirow was also part of that delegation. Arnie is a retired paper executive who came to the Conservancy through our sustainable forestry work and has since gotten deeply involved in climate change issues. So here is a former paper and pulp executive from South Carolina, traveling to Copenhagen in December to talk to world leaders about the importance of addressing climate change and saving forests. In an overheated, carnival atmosphere like Copenhagen, Arnie helped deliver a unique and credible message on climate change from the business community.

You have a knack for blogging. How did that come about?

I come to it as a writer. I was an English major in college, spent some time as a reporter here in Washington and took some time off to get my Master of Fine Arts in fiction and write a short story cycle about — of all things — environmental degradation and duck poaching on the Chesapeake Bay. Sounds really marketable doesn’t it?

So writing has always been a passion. What I love about blogging is that it gives everyone a publishing platform and it provides instant gratification. I’ve always approached blogging as a mode of self-expression. My blog has taken many forms over the years, but it’s always been about my unique set of interests and sharing those interests with whoever happens to find it. Of course, this means that it gets very little traffic. But now at least my friends and family know about it through Facebook and Twitter, so a few people are reading it.

As you know, it’s always gratifying and cathartic to write and it’s really gratifying when someone reads what you’ve written and responds to it — even negatively — because you know that what you’ve written has provoked some thought.

You are very tapped into emerging technology. How do you find the balance between your love for the digital world and the natural world?

It’s difficult. I struggle with the amount of waste we’re producing as a technological society and how much we have to mine for rare earth metals to produce these gadgets. Not to mention the working conditions these things are made in to keep costs low. With the exception of food production, which you know so much about, I think gadget production is one of the most difficult issues facing our world today. There’s just so much to consider when we’re buying these products and technology is going to be so important as we move toward a future without fossil fuels.

From a personal tech perspective, I have a few rules. One is to never be an early adopter. When a new technology comes along, there is always a steep ramp up of new features with each subsequent generation of the product. This generally starts to plateau around the third and fourth generation. The iPhone is a good example of this. When I buy a product, I want it to be at its best so it won’t be obsolete in a year.

Second is to never buy cheap. I know this sounds snobby, but the truth is if you buy a cheap computer, it has a greater environmental footprint than a more expensive one because it probably lacks energy efficiency standards and you are going to have to replace it sooner. The long-term costs of buying cheap are just not worth it. My last laptop lasted ten years. With proper care and maintenance that’s the kind of performance a good product should give you.

Third is to only buy what you need. Gadget lust and gadget addiction, especially as they become cheaper, can be hard to overcome. But you have to know what you’re going to use and what you need.

I’ll also say that I think technology can really help us experience nature in new and exciting ways. Hiking with a smart phone can be an amazing experience. It gives you maps, wildlife guides, journaling capabilities all in the palm of your hand. Plus apps like Leafsnap (http://leafsnap.com/), StarWalk (http://vitotechnology.com/star-walk.html) and iBird (http://www.ibirdexplorer.com/) can increase educational opportunities when hiking and camping with kids. Even something as simple as giving kids a digital camera that let’s them see the photos they’ve just taken can really keep them engaged and exploring.

Technology has its place, you just need to keep it in check.

What efforts do you take to work within your community offline to make the world a better place?

I’ll tell you, it’s hard to feel like you’re making a difference when you and your wife are both working full time, you have two kids, a dog and you live in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. It feels like Tracy and I are constantly running from work to daycare to home, with barely a breath in between.

That said, where we live comes with its advantages. We live in Reston, Virginia, (http://www.reston.org) one of the nation’s first planned communities. It’s a high-density community with a lot of open space. We live in a townhouse that backs up to a network of suburban forest with lots of trails and beautifully restored and surprisingly clean streams. This allows our kids to experience nature right in their backyard, which is so important. Frogs, toads, foxes, snakes, salamanders and of course deer — they all live back there. So we’re living within our means and we have access to nature.

We try to be mindful of what we eat as well, but within our budget. We go to farmer’s markets and local farm shares in the spring, summer and fall and we limit our meat consumption to once or twice a week — and usually stick to fish and poultry since they have a lower carbon footprint. When shopping at the grocery store, I only buy produce grown in the United States and in season and I use The Monterrey Aquarium’s Seafood Watch app (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_iPhone.aspx) to make responsible choices.

For transportation, we have great access to buses and the DC Metro and we drive a Prius, which is truly a wonderful car. We need to bike more than we do and Tracy and I both want to start doing this — especially, now that our five-year old is learning to ride a two-wheeler.

We don’t have as much time to volunteer in the community as I would like, but I do coach my oldest son’s soccer teams, which is both hilarious and, at times, maddening.

In short, we’re making mindful choices when we can but we can do much, much better.

Fatherhood is something you are very proud of. What do you hope to teach your sons about protecting nature and future generations?

I have two sons, ages five and two and they are my life. They’re really what this is all about. In many ways, our society is short-changing our kids. No matter what we do from here on, we’re leaving them a planet that is going to be appreciably warmer, less natural and frankly less livable. The single biggest reason I’m involved with the environmental movement is to stem the tide of degradation and work to ensure there is wilderness left for my sons to explore, oceans they can swim in and rivers they can drink from.

At this age, it’s about instilling a sense of wonder of nature and helping them appreciate and not fear the natural world. Certainly, we teach them to respect nature and be stewards of the environment. But really we just want them to know it and love it. So we hike, we explore, we take them down to the creek out back to look for frogs and other creatures. We point out animal tracks and listen for woodpeckers. There is a pair of owls that live in the woods behind the house and we listen for them at night. We want them to have a sense of wonder when it comes to nature.

It’s funny, my oldest son is a real scientist — he’s always asking me to look up species on the computer (Thank you, Wikipedia!) and he’s constantly learning about different species. He told me today that platypus eggs are the size of grapes. I had no idea, but he picked this up somewhere. My youngest is going to be the daredevil though — he runs headlong into everything without a care. He’s the first to want to jump into the creek or run through the woods. He’s going to be the adventurer.

I hear you are a sports fan. Care to elaborate?

Yes, I am a fan of all sports really — I love story and drama and sports are just full of it. But I am especially interested in soccer — the US league, Major League Soccer (MLS), and international soccer. It’s a game I grew up playing, and I just fell in love with it during the 1994 World Cup, which was held here in the US.

What I really love about MLS is that the players in the league, while far from the World’s best, are really playing for the love of the game. The starting salary in MLS is something like $30,000 and with a few exceptions — the older players from Europe, like David Beckham — none of them are making millions. A lot of these guys start out by holding down second jobs, living in group homes and that sort of thing. There’s something very attractive to me in the underdog/for the love of the game spirit of it all.

Plus, going to an MLS match is a just a wonderful experience. At least here in DC you can be sitting next to a Salvadoran family, on one side, a punk rocker with face rings on the other and behind you is a troupe of suburban soccer moms with the kids in toe. And they’re all yelling and screaming and banging on drums. It’s really quite special. Every year, the game in the US improves and more people come out. But I don’t think it will ever be bigger than say hockey in the US. Selfishly I’m kind of glad about that, because I think it will always be a very authentic and earnest league — even if it’s not the best league.

As for international soccer, I just love the spectacle of it, and the world-class play you get at the highest level. Soccer is truly one thing that unites the world and you have to be completely jaded not to acknowledge the power of the World Cup to bring the people together in a global celebration. It’s truly a single shared experience. Certainly, at that level the sport has its problems at the executive level, but when it comes to the play on the field, I think it’s magic.