How Private Sector Leadership Can Fight the Biodiversity Crisis (SSIR)

Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning: A Guide to Meaningful Engagement

Margaret O’Gorman

280 pages, Island Press, 2020

The history of the relationship between the private sector and the natural world is not a happy one. Starting during the industrial revolution and accelerating in the post-war years, industry misused land and water with serious negative consequences for people and planet. Today, thanks to government regulations, consumer demand and stakeholder engagement, the private sector’s relationship with nature is evolving to mend the mistakes of the past and find a path to a future that seeks to live with nature in order to allow it to thrive. This evolution is necessary given the global biodiversity crisis and the need to act in every corner of the world.

Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning provides private sector leaders and conservation practitioners a road map of how to mainstream nature into operations and engage in action to benefit biodiversity and business. The extract explores the story of an iconic corporate consequence of lax materials management and shows how a company, in this case Boeing, can change its relationship to the land. It establishes that bad actions can be rectified by good leadership and speaks to the need to continue the evolution in the face of extreme species loss.

The premise of Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning is that all lands are needed to address the existential global biodiversity crisis and that conservation action on private sector lands will be strategic, funded, and long-term when designed to accomplish a business benefit as well as an outcome for nature.—Margaret O’Gorman

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How Boeing Is Changing the Ending

When Steve Shestag was growing up in the Simi Hills of southern California in the 1970s and ’80s, he knew about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL). He knew that it was a polluted place where fuels that sent rockets to the moon were developed and tested. Now, more than thirty years later, Steve works for the Boeing Company, one of the parties responsible for cleaning up SSFL, and has discovered a deeper legacy at the site that is the very definition of a silver lining. In a twist of fate, the damage done to the site saved the historical and environmental assets from destruction by making the land unavailable to developers during the building boom that saw the suburbs of Los Angeles sprawl over the hills and valleys of Ventura County throughout the 1980s and ’90s.

Today, SSFL is a place out of time. It has an incredible density of archaeological artefacts, with one of the best-preserved, most unmolested collections of pictographs in the country. The results of archaeological studies suggest that it was once a place of ritual for local tribes to gather on the winter solstice, when sunlight flows through a slit in the rock to illuminate a pictograph. In addition, SSFL provides the last corridor for wildlife movement that connects the Santa Monica Mountains, to the south, to the Sierra Madre ranges of the Los Padres National Forest, to the north—a critical connection in a fragmented and increasingly fire-prone landscape. Once a place where fuels were tested and nuclear power was developed, SSFL is now home to an incredible array of both plant and animal species, including local populations that are under pressure, elsewhere, from development and human activity. What initially harmed SSFL now helps preserve it.

The story of SSFL’s early days echoes every contaminated site across the world—lax management, mismanagement, and no management. The story of how SSFL was rescued offers hopeful lessons about the kind of impact that citizen activists, government attention, and an evolution in the corporate mindset can have.

The SSFL landscape was harmed during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, a time before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) existed or regulations to protect human health and the environment had been created. At SSFL, researchers developed the fuels that allowed humans to escape our planetary boundaries for the first time. While the technological innovations were groundbreaking, the management of materials and waste was retrograde. An alphabet soup of chemicals has been found at the site, including a variety of radionuclides, trichloroethylene (TCE), perchloroethylene (PCE), metals, and petroleum hydrocarbons disposed with no thought for process or safety.

The damage started during the Cold War when North American Aviation (NAA) was commissioned by the US government to build a rocket big enough to carry a cruise missile to the Soviet Union. NAA and its subsidiary Rocketdyne concentrated on research and development of rockets and rocket fuel throughout the 1950s and ’60s, becoming the largest builder of US rocket engines by 1965.

Rocketdyne tested the fuels for rockets at SSFL, chosen for its location distant from Los Angeles and other major populated areas at the time. While Rocketdyne was testing its fuels, another division established the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States. Over time, ten nuclear reactors were built on the land. Many important innovations in space exploration and energy technology began at SSFL, all without a concern for pollution or other negative impacts.

In 2000, John Luker was working on a film crew making a documentary about SSFL when he realized the site was a mile from his front gate. Fascinated, he began learning more and exploring as a vigilante trespasser. Now he is an outspoken supporter of the remediation efforts being undertaken on the site, as well as the possibilities for this unique site to be protected for the future. When John talks about the places at the site where, for eighteen years, chemical waste was disposed of by burning in open pits twice a week, he wonders who ever thought it was a good idea. As he says, “Just about everything bad this country produced in the twentieth century went into the ground at this place.”

Today Rocketdyne and NAA no longer exist, thanks to a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions. But SSFL still exists, and the responsibility for it now sits with the Boeing Company, NASA, and the US Department of Energy. Each entity is responsible for a different part of the site. The cleanup of the 2,580-acre site is overseen by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.

As part of the cleanup, the Boeing Company has had to remove contaminated soil and install state-of-the-art bioswales and erosion controls. Today it continues to pump contaminated groundwater to a water-treatment facility to remove the dangerous chemicals. In 2016, Boeing placed an easement on the property to protect it from development in perpetuity, allowing it to remain a critical wildlife corridor and a site with high natural and cultural value.

Today, the majority of SSFL lands are undeveloped and contain a number of important natural communities such as chaparral and oak woodland. Three important threatened vegetation communities in the state—Ventura coastal sage scrub, Southern California walnut woodland, and southern willow scrub—also occur there. The site’s biodiversity is notable: 360 species of plants, 170 vertebrate species, and an as-yet-uncounted variety of invertebrate species have been identified. The undeveloped nature of the location and the variety of natural communities means the site functions as a key connection in a fragmented landscape, allowing animals such as mountain lions to move through the Simi Hills. Its importance as a place of nature within dense suburban residential development cannot be understated. In 2018, SSFL was 60 percent burned in the Woolsey fire, but not before its lands provided important connectivity for species fleeing the fire across a heavily developed landscape. Air-quality studies at the time found no radiation of hazardous materials was released during the fire.

Today, under the leadership of Steve Shestag and a dedicated team at the site, SSFL welcomes 2,000 visits a year, hosts numerous research projects, and partners with a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including the Pollinator Partnership and Monarch Watch, to help preserve the site as an amenity for the community. But it wasn’t quick or easy to get to where it is today. John Luker recounts battles: between Boeing and the activists; between the government and the activists; between the government and Boeing and even between warring factions of activists.

So how did things begin to go right? John identifies a period of about five years when change occurred and he knew that SSFL was on its way to becoming a community asset. It was a culture change at Boeing, a pivot by the company as corporate leadership recognized that stonewalling and secrecy were not working. Instead, they chose to promote transparency and engagement. As John says, “Boeing changed from the Cold Warriors who were protecting America and keeping our secrets safe, to environmental stewards ... trying to protect this environment and make it safe for people to enjoy.” John points to culture change, transparency, access, and information as the keys to allowing him to evolve from advocate against Boeing to advocate for SSFL and a cheerleader for its potential. Steve Shestag also considers the evolution in leadership at the Boeing Company to be key, and he cites an innovation in collaboration that allowed partners external to the company to be engaged, allowing them to bring real value to the company’s efforts to improve the outcomes.

The Need for Action

If what happened at SSFL is the story of every contaminated site, the evolution of the company and its partners is increasingly the story of successful cleanups. SSFL shows that with transparency, collaboration, time, and money, even the most polluted property has potential to become an asset—even if it’s not obvious at first. SSFL is an example of a corporate evolution where change in corporate culture resulted in ecological restoration that has transformed the land, perception of the land, and the community’s relationship with it.

Across the world, the relationship between business and nature has evolved in the same way, mostly driven by government and activist involvement. It continues to evolve today, as communities and customers become better educated and engaged, and compel corporations to repair their relationships with nature, clean up past mistakes, avoid new ones, and maintain a neutral or positive impact within their own operations and across the fences that separate them.

While this progress is encouraging, there still need to be significant changes in the corporate sector’s mindset for the private sector to systematically make a net positive contribution to the natural world—that is, to essentially mainstream nature-based decisions into their operations. It is necessary to right the wrongs of the past but also to contribute positively to the ongoing issues of the present.

Action across many fronts is needed. While some measures of the health of natural communities show improvements in certain parts of the world, habitat degradation and biodiversity loss continue apace across the world, especially in developing countries in the southern hemisphere where industrial agricultural practices are driving species to the brink of extinction. In the developed world, unsustainable land use and our everyday throwaway relationship with nature drives declines in common species, disrupting natural systems and impacting ecological integrity in ways that may seem small and singular—but when they are aggregated, they drive powerful impacts on natural populations from backyards to wilderness areas.

All indicators point toward an unceasing diminishment of the world’s biodiversity, or, as George Monbiot writes in the Guardian, “The world is greying, its wealth of color and surprise and wonder fading.” Today the main drivers for extinctions and loss of biodiversity are land clearances for agriculture, black-market trade in wildlife for superstitious uses, and the spread of invasive species and disease, as well as the impacts of a changing climate. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List, the global list of species at risk of extinction, grows longer with every new assessment. The lungs of the planet—its forests—continue to be destroyed for agricultural uses. Valuable wetlands that provide ecological and economic value are being lost at alarming and accelerating rates, and our oceans are under siege from plastic pollution and coral-killing acidification. In 2018, the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report recorded a 60 percent decline in the size of the populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in the past forty years, caused mostly by human activity—a calamity that is occurring quietly and without fanfare. In 2019, the latest global assessment of biodiversity published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) made headlines with its assertion that one million species will become extinct if we don’t change our impact on the planet. The fact that this report made headline news was in itself newsworthy, as biodiversity collapse has long been happening in the shadows of other global crises.

A paper published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that coverage of climate change by the media between 1991 and 2016 was eight times that of biodiversity during the same time period. The study, titled “Our House Is Burning: Discrepancy in Climate Change vs. Biodiversity Coverage in the Media as Compared to Scientific Literature,” found that scientific output on the two issues was not reflected in commensurate media coverage (i.e., lower media interest was not driven by less scientific output). Rather, media coverage of climate change has been largely driven by specific occurrences like dramatic, telegenic weather events. No media channel is dispatching intrepid reporters to the scene of the slow erasure of a species.

The lack of attention paid to biodiversity and the absence of an urgent reaction to the loss of nature is not limited to any sector public or private. Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Costa Rica’s minister of environment, said in 2018 during the Fourteenth Conference of the Parties (COP14) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), “Humans spend more money buying ice cream that we spend on biodiversity conservation.” In country after country, investments in protection of natural heritage represent a tiny fraction of GDP. In the United States, less than 1 percent of the federal budget is allocated to the agencies charged with protecting the nation’s natural resources. In 2019, at Ireland’s first national conference on biodiversity, the minister responsible for the country’s natural heritage proudly stated that she was doubling funding for local biodiversity efforts to all of €1 million. At that conference, the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, underscored both the urgency and lack of attention to biodiversity, saying that if we were coal miners we would be up to our knees in dead canaries right now.

With only 13.9 percent of biodiversity found on publicly owned lands, privately owned lands are critical if we are to arrest and reverse current trends in species loss and ecosystem degradation. Business has a role to play in natural-resources conservation and has a duty from its historical relationship with nature to do so. There is great potential for biodiversity action lying within the landholdings that companies already own, but the corporate sector is responding slowly to the crisis, mostly in ad hoc ways, eschewing strategic integration of nature-based action for one-off programs, offsets, and philanthropy. While philanthropy, in the absence of public investment, remains critical to support governmental and NGO efforts, more robust and strategic engagement with the NGO community at local, regional, and national scales is needed to spur action for a sustainable relationship with nature. While business can be implicated in almost every downward trend of the planet’s natural resources, it can also help reverse these trends through improved processes, materials, and practices.