Suzanne Laverty, Northwest field representative for Defenders of Wildlife, often sees hackles raise when she enters a roomful of livestock producers. “I get such opposition and such open hostility that there haven’t been many opportunities to build bridges,” she says. “You’re looking at each other as the enemy.”

Margaret Soulen Hinson, third-generation Idaho sheep rancher, knows exactly what Laverty means. She’s tired of the “blanket descriptions and assumptions” that producers and environmentalists make about one another and is downright weary of the “rhetoric and bashing” that has accompanied lines drawn in the sagelands.

Laverty and Hinson (pictured at right) now find themselves “in the middle together” as governing board members of the Policy Analysis Center for Western Public Lands. Hinson describes Laverty as “really honest and upfront” and Laverty says Hinson is “one of the most honorable people I have ever met.”

They’re exactly the kind of board members that center director Aaron Harp depends upon—widely distributed across perspectives, politics, and values but patient, open-minded, and operating right where the wheel meets the dust of public land management strategies.

Launched in October 2000 by the University of Idaho and a dozen other western land-grant universities, the center selects public policy issues common to Western states, then invites ad hoc teams of experts to examine and summarize available research and determine which information could improve policymaking. “The first step toward solving an issue is to strip away the husk of the problem, and a lot of the husk is scientific disagreements,” says Harp. “Some scientific positions are more legitimate, with more evidence, and some are less legitimate, with less evidence. It comes down to, ‘If you’ve got data, bring it forward.’”

In the process, as Laverty describes it, scientists who “rarely encounter each other sit down, talk face-to-face, compare information, sort through all of the myths, innuendoes, and extra baggage, and talk about what the science is.”

“When we know the teams have been put together in a balanced fashion, when we know the information that comes out is representative of all of our views, when we have buy-in upfront from a diverse governing board that says ‘We support this,’ then that puts a lot of strength behind what we’ve done,” says Hinson.

That’s what Harp had in mind when he and UI Extension range economist Neil Rimbey joined others in hammering out the center concept more than five years ago. “Not only are we addressing issues of importance to Western public lands and the communities that depend upon them, but we have access to resources from all over the West,” says Rimbey.

So far, the board has selected three issues:

Can—and should—pinyon-juniper stands be economically removed and converted to biomass energy in areas of the West where they have invaded sagebrush and grassland ecosystems?

What are the ecological, social, and economic issues and impacts associated with a potential Endangered Species listing of the sage grouse?

What would be the impacts of allowing the purchase and subsequent retirement of ranchers’ grazing permits?

The first project concluded that pinyon-juniper stands could be used for energy if biomass removal were both ecologically justified and subsidized, and it provided a comprehensive list of questions that board members agreed researchers should answer before policymakers step in. The second project is in draft stage, and the third is in planning stage.

Rex Pieper, emeritus professor of animal and range sciences at New Mexico State University, had worked with pinyon-juniper encroachments for at least 35 years before accepting the invitation to lead the technical team assigned to the center’s initial project.

During a “fairly intense” three-day working session at the UI’s Caldwell Research and Extension Center, Pieper and other team members hammered out a draft of their report. He calls the experience “unique” and “enjoyable.” “It was very gratifying that we could all get together and work on a common problem.”

“It was an adventure,” says wildlife scientist Jack Connelly, who has worked with sage grouse so long that the bird has become his e-mail moniker, and who was part of the 15-member scientist team assigned to the second project. “If sage grouse become listed, we are going to have remarkably difficult problems.

Because of the bird’s far-flung habitat, an Endangered Species designation “will potentially affect the livelihood and lifestyle of virtually every small town, large town and agricultural community in much of the Western U.S.,” Connelly says. “It’s much better to take the route the Policy Center is taking: Let’s figure out how to fix the problem—stabilize or increase the grouse populations —before it gets so bad that we have a salmon kind of issue to deal with.”

No one expects a quick fix to declining sage grouse populations. The grouse’s needs are complex; a little bit like putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The issue will demand all the unbiased information that can be brought to bear on the problem.

“Now is the time to engage some real science in this issue,” says governing board member Mike Ford of The Conservation Fund. “It needs to happen now before politics take over.”

With the University of Idaho and the University of Nevada contributing the largest shares of the center’s financial support for the first two years, Harp and colleagues at NMSU are now investigating alternative federal funding approaches.

Bill Howell, a governing board member who represents the fourcounty Southeastern Utah Association of Local Governments, says “There’s a lot of good ideas out there that are looking for a patron saint and this is one.”

Howell says one reason he’s a “fan” of the center is that “land-grant colleges are ideally situated to participate in this impartial diagnosis of highly contentious, natural resource controversies. That’s a contribution they’re uniquely designed to make.”

In the long term, will the outcome of the center’s efforts be better public policy? Will comprehensive examinations of issues by diverse teams of scientists generate welcome light in the midst of political heat?

Harp certainly hopes so. “That’s what this experiment is about.”

© 2002 University of Idaho, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.