Freedom [106]
The warbler on its cover looked nondescript to Katz. Bluish, small, unintelligent. “That’s a bird all right,” he said.
“Just wait,” Lalitha said. “It’s not about the bird. It’s much bigger than that. You have to wait and hear Walter’s vision.”
Vision! Katz was beginning to think that Walter’s real purpose in arranging this meeting had simply been to inflict on him the fact of his being adored by a rather pretty twenty-five-year-old.
The cerulean warbler, Walter said, bred exclusively in mature temperate hardwood forests, with a stronghold in the central Appalachians. There was a particularly healthy population in southern West Virginia, and Vin Haven, with his ties to the nonrenewable energy industry, had seen an opportunity to partner with coal companies to create a very large, permanent private reserve for the warbler and other threatened hardwood species. The coal companies had reason to fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains. Vin believed that they could be persuaded to help the warbler, to keep the bird off the Threatened list and garner some much-needed good press, as long as they were allowed to continue extracting coal. And this was how Walter had landed the job as executive director of the Trust. In Minnesota, working for the Nature Conservancy, he’d forged good relationships with mining interests, and he was unusually open to constructive engagement with the coal people.
“Mr. Haven interviewed half a dozen other candidates before Walter,” Lalitha said. “Some of them stood up and walked out on him, right in the middle of the interviews. They were so closed-minded and afraid of being criticized! Nobody else but Walter could see the potential for somebody who was willing to take a big risk and not care so much about conventional wisdom.”
Walter grimaced at this compliment, but he was clearly pleased by it. “Those people all had better jobs than I did. They had more to lose.”
“But what kind of environmentalist cares more about saving his job than saving land?”
“Well, a lot of them do, unfortunately. They have families and responsibilities.”
“But so do you!”
“Face it, man, you’re just too excellent,” Katz said, not kindly. He was still holding out hope that Lalitha, when they stood up to leave, would prove to be big in the butt or thick in the thighs.
To help save the cerulean warbler, Walter said, the Trust was aiming to create a hundred-square-mile roadless tract—Haven’s Hundred was its working nickname—in Wyoming County, West Virginia, surrounded by a larger “buffer zone” open to hunting and motorized recreation. To be able to afford both the surface and mineral rights to such a large single parcel, the Trust would first have to permit coal extraction on nearly a third of it, via mountaintop removal. This was the prospect that had scared off the other applicants. Mountaintop removal as currently practiced was ecologically deplorable—ridgetop rock blasted away to expose the underlying seams of coal, surrounding valleys filled with rubble, biologically rich streams obliterated. Walter, however, believed that properly managed reclamation efforts could mitigate far more of the damage than people realized; and the great advantage of fully mined-out land was that nobody would rip it open again.
Katz was remembering that one of the things he’d missed about Walter was good discussion of actual ideas. “But don’t we want to leave the coal underground?” he said. “I thought we hated coal.”
“That’s a longer discussion for another time,” Walter said.
“Walter has some excellent original thoughts on fossil fuels versus nuclear and wind,” Lalitha said.
“Suffice it to say that we’re realistic about coal,” Walter said.
Even more exciting, he continued, was the money the Trust was pouring into South America, where the cerulean warbler, like so many other North American songbirds, spent its winters. The Andean forests were disappearing at a calamitous rate, and for the