By Mimi Hall, USA TODAYWASHINGTON — President Obama plans to direct the federal government to foster community-based efforts to save the nation's rivers, coastlines, farms, forests and other outdoor spaces as part of a new approach to conservation.
Instead of just designating vast tracts of land to be protected from development, pollution and overpopulation, Obama wants the government to embrace a grass-roots approach to conservation that has quietly taken hold in recent years in U.S. cities and towns and across international borders.
"Communities are uniting to protect the places they love," according to a directive Obama is scheduled to sign today at a White House conference on America's Great Outdoors.
The memo notes that farmers and ranchers, land trusts, recreation and conservation groups, community parks coalitions, governments and industry are working together.
"However, these efforts are often scattered and sometimes insufficient," the directive says.
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The president instructs his Cabinet chiefs not to spend any new money.
But by Nov. 15, he wants a report that catalogs successful programs and lists the existing federal programs that could be tapped to support them and help establish new ones.
Nearly a century after Theodore Roosevelt held a conference to establish the national park system, "we are now in a new era," said Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a non-partisan land-use organization
Large and small regionally run conservation efforts that could serve as models: the Crown of the Continent, a 10-million-acre area stretching from western Montana across the Canadian border into Alberta, and the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, a 46-mile run of river from Worcester, Mass., to Providence.
The administration's plan to help local governments, private groups and others put together projects to protect natural resources is aimed at more than preservation. The plan also:
• Encourages people to reconnect with the outdoors, a tie-in with first lady Michelle Obama's campaign to tackle childhood obesity.
• Promotes economic development. Cities that have revitalized their riverfronts have cleaned up the environment while providing a place for people to spend money and enjoy the outdoors.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says the conference and the ongoing effort will bring together groups that often have been at odds over land use.
"Conservation is a unifying issue for America," he says. "Hunters, bikers, joggers and outdoor enthusiasts — they're not divided into Republican and Democratic camps, conservative and liberal camps. This is a very unifying agenda for the country."
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