The ecosystem thinking of Mollie Hanna Beattie.

A forester by training, she directs the Fish and Wildlife Service, while over at the Forest Service a wildlife biologist is chief. With true ecosystem management, Beattie says, "We are now all interchangeable."

The new director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a forester, a northeasterner, a nonhunter, and a woman--factors that distinguish her from her predecessors and unnerve those comfortable with the status quo. At the Department of the Interior, 47-year-old Mollie Beattie is a symbol of change. She finds that her distinguishing characteristics give her a step up on a major conservation trend of the '90s--the move from species to ecosystem thinking.

In the reception area of her office, a glass case holds exotic animal products, among them a handsome pair of crocodile boots and a carved ivory tusk. She explains that this contraband, along with the grizzly-bear hide mounted on the wall, was confiscated by Fish and Wildlife enforcement agents from poachers and smugglers.

As director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Beattie oversees a national network of enforcement agents and a wildlife laboratory modeled after the FBI criminal lab. Such strong enforcement measures reflect the value placed by Congress on protecting endangered species, on managing the National Wildlife Refuge System, and on conserving migratory birds, marine mammals, wetlands, and inland sport fisheries. This is her job description, and she sees no obstacles for a forester in performing it.

Beattie earned a master's degree in forestry from the University of Vermont after receiving an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. The transformation from philosopher to forester--and the two are not mutually exclusive, she is quick to point out--came after college when she was working as a newspaper reporter. The offer of a writing job at Country Journal magazine led her to enroll in an Outward Bound course with the idea of acquiring the outdoor skills needed by a nature writer. Instead, the self-confidence she gained from hiking, camping, and mountain climbing in the Colorado Rockies changed the direction of her life. The eastern tenderfoot not only became an Outward Bound instructor but also enrolled in forestry school.

Her forestry career began with wildlife projects followed by a demonstration project for the University of Vermont Extension Service. She was also lead author of Working with Your Woodland: A Landowner's Guide, revised and reprinted last summer.

Beattie went on to serve as commissioner of forests, parks, and recreation and as deputy secretary for natural resources in Vermont, which is a private-land state. She thus is well versed in cooperative initiatives--the kind that will either make or break ecosystem management.

Ecologists coined the term ecosystem, which has become a buzzword, to indicate a functional unit--often a watershed or drainage area--with all of its associated plants and animals and geologic formations. Since ecosystems do not respect federal, state, or private ownership boundaries, their management requires long-term conservation planning and multi-ownership support. Beattie knows the tax incentives, land trusts, and easement mechanisms that ensure the success of such plans.

In 1990 she was named a Bullard Fellow by the Harvard Experimental Forest. This research fellowship for mid-career foresters allowed her to pursue graduate studies at the Kennedy School of Government, including domestic and international environmental law. Returning home with a master's degree in public administration, she set about raising funds to establish the Richard A. Snelling Center for Government. She was executive director of this public policy institute when George Frampton Jr., former head of the Wilderness Society and now assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks at Interior, recommended her to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for the Fish and Wildlife job.

The move to Washington, DC, has meant adjustments. Back home, she and her husband, Rick Schwolsky, a builder, live in a solar-powered house they built "a mile from the last power pole in the Vermont woods." During the Carter Administration, her husband installed solar panels in the White House.

After eight months on the job, Beattie concludes about managing the Endangered Species Act and the National Wildlife Refuge System: "We can't do either very well unless we have cooperative programs with private landowners, and in the Northeast, that is really what conservation is all about." Her challenges include running a federal agency with a staff of 7,700 and persuading the West that it has something to learn from the East.

Beattie won the support of the environmental community when she served as vice chair of a 1991 commission created by Defenders of Wildlife to study the condition and future of the 91-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System--which she now directs. Her additions to Refuges 2003, a 10-year operating plan for the Refuge System prepared by the Fish and Wildlife Service, came directly from her experiences on the commission.

During Beattie's confirmation hearing last July, western senators quizzed her about her nonhunter status. She assured them that she values hunters as a major conservation support group and does not see hunting or fishing as incompatible with biodiversity goals. On the contrary, she testified that hunting can serve a critical management purpose. On some refuges, without hunting, deer would overpopulate the area and minimize biodiversity by eating it.

Nothing is more important to conservation, she believes, than getting people out into the natural world, and she finds that nine out of 10 conservationists can trace their interest to a childhood spent in the outdoors. Beattie's early influence was her grandmother, Harriet Hanna, for whom she is named. On her farm in upstate New York, Grandma Hanna knew the scientific names of all the plants and animals and kept an injured deer, a crow, and raccoons. Mollie inherited her ethic, "If it moves, feed it"--not a bad ethic for a future director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

As a past board member of AMERICAN FORESTS and a past chapter officer of the Society of American Foresters, Beattie sees her forestry background as an asset in managing the nation's fish and wildlife. Her technical forestry training focused on habitat management rather than timber at a time when habitat loss became the limiting factor for wildlife nationwide. While early conservationists worked to keep wildlife populations in balance with the size of the habitat, the focus today has shifted to saving shrinking habitats. Her first job out of graduate school was managing tracts of private land for gamebirds in the midst of significant habitat loss.

Forest management can be crucial to maintaining wildlife habitats--in the deeryards of the Northeast, for example. When deer could find the habitat they needed by simply moving around, it didn't matter that a south-facing softwood stand they favored in winter became shaded out and succeeded by hardwoods. Now, with so much of the nation settled and developed, managing a deeryard means keeping the hardwoods out of softwood stands--in effect, freezing forest succession at a particular site--because the animals have nowhere else to go.

Beattie concludes that, "The skills of keeping forests in a successional state that benefits wildlife--of maintaining, through human effort, the conditions that used to move around naturally but no longer do--is one of the skills most in demand at the moment. That's true of wetlands and other types of natural habitat that normally would have gone through some kind of succession. Now they have to be maintained where they are, as they are."

Beattie finds biodiversity concepts a good strategy for maintaining wildlife. "I don't think that managing for the maximum possible number of any one species is in the long run of advantage to that species--for instance, waterfowl. If you manage for the maximum possible, you'll end up with too many birds congregating in one place, and inevitably disease." Keeping the habitat of a target species intact with all of its associated plant and animal species results in a healthier condition.

Multiple-species recovery plans, allowed by the Endangered Species Act, aim to do just that. They are the direction that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going, and Beattie concludes, "Where you might have endangered or threatened species listed here and one listed there, maybe that's really not in the end terribly significant, but where you've got multiple listings, you've probably got a sign that the ecosystem is unraveling."

Beattie regards the Endangered Species Act as environmental law at its best, and has two goals for it. First, she wants to improve and maintain the Act. The improvements she seeks would be mostly administrative. As Congress considers reauthorizing the Act, competing proposals to increase or decrease wildlife protection are being heard. Beattie opposes relaxing the Act so that it fails to "protect ecosystems as well as we do now."

Her second goal is never to use the Act. By preventive management, she hopes to keep species from ever needing the protection of a threatened or endangered listing. Presently, though, some 3,500 candidate species await consideration, and to speed up the review process, she is enlisting the help of the new National Biological Survey, now in its formative stages at Interior.

She especially likes the way the Endangered Species Act limits balancing the long-term interests of the ecosystem against short-term economic gains. "Ecosystems need to be maintained," she says, "both for ethical reasons and also for our own self-interest." She finds the Act much more flexible than opponents would have the public believe. It allows cooperation up to the point when a species actually goes on the Endangered Species List. "All the way up through Threatened, it allows for all kinds of opportunities to cooperate with landowners and developers and industries to prevent that from happening."

On a partisan note, she observes that over the last decade there was "a strategy of waiting until the last minute, waiting until something was listed and then having this tremendous fight. Instead of waiting until we get to the point of collision, we're trying to begin to use the flexibility in the Act."

Critics of the Clinton administration's use of this flexibility, however, are not pleased with compromises reached for either the spotted owl or the red-cockaded woodpecker. Beattie believes that in pressured ecosystems like the Pacific Northwest, if the government comes in and lists one species one year and another species another year, it wears people out--the users and the managers. Dealing with all the species that are in trouble in one long-range conservation plan is synonymous, she believes, with the long-term sustainable development of the timber resources on which the fish and wildlife species depend. The Pacific Northwest is in crisis but recoverable, she believes, and she includes the recovery of old-growth forests. Yes, it is possible to manage forests for old-growth. "On public lands, that is a policy choice. We certainly know how to do it technically. On private land, because of the carrying cost of the land, we may have to find ways to assist owners in carrying timber to old-growth status, but it is certainly technically possible. If you are going to talk about sustainable development--which is, in many ways, the same term as natural-resources conservation--taking a long-term view of natural resources and truly managing from one generation to the next, then the rotations on timber are going to extend."

She also sees a need for getting back to some form of natural diversity in stands and mentions as an example the intermountain West, where a monoculture resulting from past practices has created disease problems. "It is the same problem," she says, "as too many ducks on the pond--they set up a situation in which disease can spread." A swing back to some element of diversity, even in tree plantations, will benefit wildlife, which doesn't really respond to monocultures, she says.

Once asked by a congressman for her position on wetlands, Beattie replied, "I am for them." One of her responsibilities is to consult the Army Corps of Engineers on Clean Water Act permits to dredge and fill wetlands. At the same time, her agency is subject to that permit process for dredge-and-fill operations on refuges. The public can become upset when a government agency is allowed to fill large areas of wetlands on public lands, but a private owner has trouble getting a permit to fill part of a building lot. Since she is for wetlands, she is also for their restoration. Following the recent floods on the Mississippi, her agency funded an Emergency Wetlands Reserve Program that bought up wetlands in some areas rather than replacing flood control.

In a 1993 report, the Inspector General of the Interior Department found that her agency was not requesting enough funding to maintain the current 494 units of the National Wildlife System let alone to acquire new lands. In allocating funds, Beattie has come to think of the refuges as anchors in ecosystem management--places that protect special elements of an ecosystem. They must do this in addition to meeting the statutory goals that Congress has set for them. Rather than designating an overall goal like biodiversity, Congress requires some refuges to be managed for the recovery of one or more endangered species, while other refuges are set aside to protect a particular game species, such as elk, deer, salmon, or trout. In the proposed FY 1995 budget, the Fish and Wildlife Service receives a funding increase to $1.2 billion, with most of the increase going to endangered species. Beattie believes that the new emphasis on ecosystem management and the controversy surrounding the spotted owl helped account for the increase, despite the President's call for reduced budgets.

Last September, about the time she was sworn in, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued a ruling stating that some Forest Service timberlands in Montana already contain more roads than are compatible with the health of the grizzly bear. The ruling could affect future timber sales in the area. Since roads generally do impact grizzlies, Beattie recommends that their density be kept to one mile of road to a square mile of land. Configuration also matters, especially in areas of critical bear habitat. She explains that if a bear comes out of the woods and sees a mile of road in either direction, that bear is unlikely to cross. If roads are configured so that the bear does not see a great expanse of roadway, the impact can be less severe, although roads still bring in loggers, hunters, and other visitors--the bane of the bear's existence.

People will say to her in the most reasonable tones, "Well, you really should do cost-benefit analyses on this." To her way of thinking, cost-benefit analyses on saving the grizzly bear, for instance, will just end up in a fight over how to do the analysis---what's a bear worth? Her role model, Aldo Leopold, was a forester, the father of modern wildlife management, and the original proponent of a conservation land ethic. Mollie Beattie, the Harvard-trained administrator and philosopher-forester, concludes, "There is no math you can do to resolve these issues. Ultimately, conservation is all a question of philosophy and ethics."

CURBING THE PUBLIC-LAND TURF WARS

The Department of the Interior, with more than 400 million acres of public land, now claims to be the nation's principal conservation agency. However, it was Gifford Pinchot, founder of the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture, who in 1907 coined the phrase, "the conservation of natural resources."

Back then, the Forest Service was the conservation agency, managing national forests, parks, and wildlife. The Bureau of Land Management's predecessor, the General Land Office, disposed of public lands, and among the Fish and Wildlife Service's predecessors, the Biological Survey was in Agriculture and the Bureau of Fisheries in Commerce. Today the Soil Conservation Service remains in Agriculture, while Interior has reinvented a National Biological Survey. The turf wars between agencies, especially Interior and Agriculture, triggered President Clinton's recent call for a truce.

With a forester in charge of fish and wildlife and a wildlife biologist in charge of forestry, peace may yet come to the public-land agencies. Concepts like biodiversity and ecosystem management have the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service planning joint tours of areas with forest-wildlife problems.

Rather than a battle, Fish and Wildlife Director Mollie Beattie sees ecosystem management as more like those three-legged races at Fourth of July picnics. Among other partners in the race are the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and National Park Service--all in Interior--and the National Marine Fisheries Service in Commerce. There's no finish line for one without the other.

Barry Walden Walsh is a freelance writer from Garrett Park, Maryland.