Today we’re bringing you a timely conversation with Lesli Allison, CEO of Western Landowners Alliance. With major shifts happening in federal policy—funding freezes, staffing cuts, and growing uncertainty—Lesli breaks down what these changes mean for working lands and the people who steward them. 

We discuss the challenges landowners are facing, the opportunities to shape the future, and why landowner leadership is needed now more than ever.  

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Links from this episode

Learn about WLA’s policy work, share your thoughts and contact your reps here.

Read Lesli’s recent letter to the landowner community: Landowner leadership needed now.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Lesli Allison: And I think what’s really important is that we stay solutions focused. It’s really easy to be against things. It’s a lot harder to be for things. I think that’s a central role for Western Landowners Alliance. This is a place where we come together with these different experiences, with a lived experience on the land, and we ask ourselves the questions, what do we want that future to look like?

[00:00:24] What would help us keep these lands intact and healthy now and long into the future? 

[00:00:30] Zach Altman: Welcome back to the On Land Podcast. Today we’re bringing you a timely conversation with Lesli Allison, the CEO of Western Landowners Alliance. Major shifts are happening in federal policy. Funding freezes, staffing cuts, and growing uncertainty, and Lesli breaks down what these changes mean for working lands and the people who steward them.

[00:00:52] We’ll talk about the challenges landowners are facing, the opportunities to shape the future, and why landowner leadership is needed now more than ever. I’m Zach Altman. Here’s my conversation with Lesli Allison.

[00:01:12] Lesli, thanks for joining us today. 

[00:01:14] Lesli Allison: Thank you. Glad to be here. 

The strategic advantages of Western Landowners Alliance

[00:01:15] Zach Altman: So I wanna start things off by quoting your letter. You recently sent out to our membership, you wrote that in today’s highly charged political environment, it’s challenging to find paths forward that unite people and make sense on the ground, but that is what Western Landowners Alliance was created to do.

[00:01:33] So Lesli, how is WLA built to address moments like this? 

[00:01:37] Lesli Allison: Well, that’s a, it’s a great question and it really does go back to our DNA, if you will, at our founding,

[00:01:46] We were founded as part of what is sometimes described as a radical center, and that was actually a word coined by a rancher, Bill McDonald when a group of ranchers were founding the Malpai Borderlands group back in the early nineties. And that was a time of a lot of friction between ranching and environmental groups, and they wanted to sit down and come together and figure out how they could work things out.

[00:02:07] They figured out they probably had more in common than they didn’t, and so they embarked on that experiment. It’s been a really quite a phenomenal pioneering effort. And there have been similar efforts like that in local places like the Blackfoot Challenge, Chama Peak Land Alliance, Altar Valley Conservation Alliance, the Diablo Trust.

[00:02:27] There’s many of those that have sprung up out of the landscape over the last 30 years. And so Western Landowners Alliance was born very much in that spirit.

[00:02:41] We believe that having some way to have sustainable prosperity, for example, while conserving our best lands, wildlife, and resources for ourselves and for future generations is really a common ground and nonpartisan goal. And so it’s really about bringing people together to do that. Then what we know as a working lands community is that the best solutions really happen when you get out on the ground together.

[00:03:05] When you get out and you actually look at the problem, a lot of times the ideological differences that people hold fall away and you can see, oh, here’s a real problem. Oh, here may be a solution. Oh, what if we tried it this way? And you can see the complexities that are involved with that, and that’s a much more productive path to finding solutions.

WLA and federal policy

[00:03:25] Zach Altman: So WLA is a landowner led, nonpartisan organization, always has been. How does that perspective shape how we engage in federal policy? 

[00:03:35] Lesli Allison: Well, I think the first way that it shapes how we engage with federal policy is that we have, you know, what we often refer to as boots on the ground experience. The people in Western Landowners Alliance, for the most part, have that lived experience of.

[00:03:48] Managing land, many cases, owning land, trying to make a living on that land in some cases, trying to make the bottom line work at the minimum. We’ve gotta operate businesses in these places. We’ve gotta be part of our communities, and those things are very complicated and that experience informs. Our perspective as well as our advocacy.

[00:04:09] So we care about the full range of values on these landscapes, and most people do, right? If you are out, if you own a piece of land or you’re working on ranches or farms, it’s because you care about land and you care about resources and all of these different issues. So when I was managing a ranch, for example, in Colorado.

[00:04:26] We had to be thoughtful about and how we made the bottom line work. We had to be thoughtful about how we cared for the environment. We had to juggle all these different competing needs just within one ranch. We had a hunting program, for example, that was very important to us, both for the economic benefits but also for the ecological benefits.

[00:04:44] Being able to manage wildlife appropriately in that system. And we also had. Prescribed fire programs and forestry programs that we were running. And those two things had to work together on the same piece of land. And they had to work with county regulations and they had to work with what our neighbors had going across the fence line.

[00:05:00] So that’s kind of the complex world that a landowner or land manager comes from, and it helps inform the way that we try to develop and and advocate on public policy.

Impacts of recent federal funding freezes and staffing cuts 

[00:05:12] Zach Altman: That kind of brings us to the moment we’re in, at least right now. It’s no secret the new administration is moving really quickly right now.

[00:05:20] How are the recent federal funding freezes and staffing cuts affecting working lands and those who care for them? 

[00:05:27] Lesli Allison: Well, they’re obviously having effects. You can’t cut that much out of the the federal workforce or federal funding without having some pretty pronounced effects. And I think that in the West where we have such a heavy component of federal lands, for example, maybe those impacts are particularly pronounced for our community.

[00:05:49] I think one of the types of challenges that we’re seeing, for example, is when perhaps a producer agreed to change out an irrigation system. They wanna do that in time for spring production season, and they’ve got a contract with federal government and then they put money out front and then.

[00:06:08] Discover because of what’s happening that they can’t get reimbursed in a timely manner. That can create a very real hardship for somebody. Or if you’re halfway through a project and you can’t continue it. What do you do? You can’t push irrigation season just to wait for this federal system to adjust itself.

[00:06:26] So that’s one of the kinds of impacts that we’re seeing. Another is that we’ve got a lot of large landscape projects, as we call them. We have a crisis in our western watersheds. We have growing wildfires every single year, and we’re heading into another very, very potentially bad fire season. So we’re trying very hard to get our watersheds.

[00:06:46] In better condition, more resilient to fire wildfires. And also, really importantly, we’re dealing with a lot of western water shortages. And these watershed projects are important to water quality, water supply, water management, course forest health. And when you get one of these big fires or floods, you also lose soil.

[00:07:08] And soil will impact agricultural production for lifetimes ahead of us. A lot of these kinds of projects are frozen, and when they’re frozen, they not only create potentially the effects that I’ve just described, but just sort of mechanically, we have to apply for grants. These require matching grants.

[00:07:26] So if you’ve got a federal grant, you then have to go out and get a matching grant to be able to make it work, which is great. We leverage different types of monies, but if one piece of that equation is frozen indefinitely, you can’t go out and raise the other half. So these things can have consequences much further down the line.

[00:07:43] And the other thing that’s really hard is that most of these projects require contractors, right? There’s the guys with the big yellow toys, as we call it, guys that come out with their bulldozers or their big machines to fix the watersheds, to harvest the timber that needs to be thinned in these watersheds.

[00:07:59] And those guys have payrolls to make, they have equipment payments that they need to make. And so that stop in federal funding also goes deep into the private sector throughout the west. 

How landowners are feeling about recent federal changes

[00:08:09] Zach Altman: Thank you for laying that out. And I know you’ve been having a lot of conversations with the landowner community lately.

[00:08:16] What are you hearing from people on the ground? How are people feeling? What’s kind of the pulse? 

[00:08:20] Lesli Allison: Yeah, it’s really mixed. I mean, the country is very mixed. You see that in the news and you see it out on the ground. There are areas of consensus, but, um, to talk about the areas of difference a little bit first, there are a number of people that really do feel like we’ve gotta get our fiscal house in order.

[00:08:35] We’ve gotta get the budget under control in this country. We’ve gotta get our spending under control. If you’re looking out decades down the line, what shape will we be in? What will our kids inherit? So I think there’s this sense of financial responsibility that’s a strong thread throughout our community.

[00:08:51] So we wanna see government being responsible and the thought that we would go through and review the programs and see where we can be more efficient in spending is fairly widely shared. There’s also a wide frustration with some of the bureaucratic function in the federal system right now.

[00:09:08] And I think anybody who’s tried to do USDA application for many different things would understand that frustration. And we certainly wish for a less bureaucratic system. The reasons for that bureaucracy are complex. That’s a whole other discussion that you could have. So frustration with some of the bureaucratic issues, concern about the federal budget.

[00:09:30] And people are saying in those cases, Hey, I’m willing to make some sacrifice. I’m willing to wait a little bit and see it’s a worthwhile pain that we’re incurring right now. So that’s sort of one camp. The other camp is very concerned. The other camp realizes that some things when they’re broken can’t be fixed.

[00:09:48] Once the watershed’s gone, it’s gone. Once the farm is sold and developed, it’s not coming back. Once a life is lost or a species goes extinct, those are things that we can’t recover. And so people are very, very concerned about what is often described as indiscriminate cuts that really are kind of pulling the system apart in damaging, in unpredictable ways.

[00:10:11] And that will take time and maybe even more money than we’re saving to recover those things. And, that maybe we’ll break some things that we can’t fix. And so a great deal of concern on that side as well. So you get the tension between these two. 

[00:10:26] But where you see, I think a lot of people coming together is we do need to take a hard look at the efficiencies and the effectiveness of government from the federal side and how we can better partner across the federal, state, and local governments across the public and private sector to take more shared responsibility for these kinds of things. And there are some real opportunities to do that.

[00:10:55] So for example, I mentioned earlier these collaborative conservation organizations. They’re already out on the ground. These are producer led efforts. They’ve got broad and trusted networks and do a lot of good work connecting the dots for federal agencies. They’re working across BLM Forest Service, private and state lands, doing big watershed scale projects, helping deliver Farm Bill programs, and we’d like to see more partnership with the federal system in the execution of these programs, we think we can actually save some money and get some very good, better directed work done on the ground. 

[00:11:32] So looking for those partnership approaches and those collaborative approaches, I think there’s consensus that there’s a very important ongoing role for the federal government. It’s threaded through so much of our lives and certainly in the West, there’s an ongoing federal responsibility to the federal lands management, to the communities that are affected by that. There continues to be a need for effective government and we don’t wanna dismantle that in a way that makes it worse instead of better.

[00:11:58] So that is an area I think of fairly broad consensus. I think there’s a great deal of consensus on wanting to strengthen our local communities. Empower them to be more self-reliant, but that also that we find consensus of this doesn’t mean cutting the federal purse strings. It doesn’t mean leaving states and communities high and dry, fend for themselves.

[00:12:20] So I think that’s where we find quite a bit of consensus. 

Calling for landowner leadership

[00:12:23] Zach Altman: This brings me to my next question for you, Lesli. In your letter you call on landowners to take a leadership role right now, what does that look like? Or what could that look like in practice? 

[00:12:36] Lesli Allison: What it really means is for landowners to be able to speak up.

[00:12:38] We need landowners to not sit on the sidelines. This isn’t a moment to wait and see and not weigh in because no one knows better than the people who own and manage these lands on a day-to-day basis and understand everything from the ecological side of it to the business end of it are the experts in the room.

[00:12:58] So when it comes to the managing of these lands and natural resources, it’s really the landowner community and the working lands community as a whole that really needs to be speaking up, saying what do we most need from government? What’s working? What’s not working? Where could we make improvements?

[00:13:14] And I think what’s really important is that we stay solutions focused. It’s really easy to be against things. It’s a lot harder to be for things. I think that’s a central role for Western landowners at Lands is a place where we come together with these different experiences, with a lived experience on the land.

[00:13:36] And we ask ourselves the questions, what do we want that future to look like? What do we need to get there? What would help us keep these lands intact and healthy, now and long into the future?

[00:14:04] And, and I think the thing that I would like people to really remember is that the working lands, these are the lands that are actively managed by people for a variety of different resource values, from food and fiber to wildlife and energy production. These are actively managed lands, and that includes both private lands and the public estate.

[00:14:22] The multiple use lands on the public estate. So these working lands are absolutely essential to our survival and wellbeing as people, they’re essential to our ecosystems. It’s really where you have your richest soils, your water resources, all those different things. They’re more biologically productive by as much as an order of magnitude compared to public lands in many cases.

[00:14:45] And so these are, this is an incredibly important land base. For our national security and our national interest, and we’ve gotta take good care of it. So this is really an important time for the people who actually do that, who are now fewer than 2% of the population to step up and have their voices be heard.

[00:15:02] And so that does look like calling your congressman, calling your governor’s office, calling the US Department of Agriculture, calling the Department of Interior, writing letters, getting together in local organizations and talk about these issues and do it in a constructive way. How can we create the future that we wanna see?

The anatomy of successful partnership program

[00:15:19] Zach Altman: You spoke to this a little earlier, but I, I want to come back to it. In your letter, you highlight all these successful partnership programs. We have the USDA – Wyoming Big Game Partnership. We have community led watershed restoration and conservation trust funds, for example. So I wanna open the floor for you to break down what makes these programs work so well, and how can we build on that success.

[00:15:44] Lesli Allison: Yeah. I’d say the things that work really well: positive relationships, partnership. Those are the two things that make all of these things work really well. The land and natural resource needs of the country are large, and our impact as a society on these resources is large, and the management and the stewardship of these things can’t fall to one individual landowner.

[00:16:09] It can’t fall to one poor county or even one state. It’s really a whole of society effort. There was that old thing about, you know, it takes a village to raise a child. It really does take a whole of society to care for our natural resource base that feeds and closes us all. How do you do that then?

[00:16:27] How do you harness the contribution of society into this? You could do it all through the federal tax system and depend on the federal bureaucracy to deliver the programs on the ground. And honestly, that’s a lot of what we do in this country today. But there can be inefficiencies in that. The top down management that we get out of Washington is something that many people are really unhappy with because by the time that gets down the chain, lands on the ground, sometimes it makes no sense.

[00:16:53] Sometimes it’s ideologically driven. So there are challenges. Trying to lean on the federal system to answer that need. And so what I think these successful programs do is they better distribute that responsibility through different channels. So the federal system remains really important, but states have a really important role to play and so do counties and townships, and then the individual landowners that are out on the ground and the other stakeholders and these partnerships bring all of those inputs together both our understandings and our experience together, and also our financial contributions. So there are different pathways of having all of society work together. So like in Wyoming, Wyoming came up with a solution to you could conserve big game migration corridors and also support the working lands that make those corridors possible.

[00:17:47] Wildlife is very important to the state of Wyoming. So is energy development. So is ranching. How do you manage all those values? Well, Wyoming came up with a way to do that and the US Department of Agriculture stepped in and said, well, we can be a helpful partner. We can bring you some resources.

[00:18:01] And so the state put resources on the table. The Feds put resources, the nonprofit community stepped up and we put a capacity in people to help out. We had philanthropists step up and contribute to this, and so it became a whole of society effort focused on things that we all care about, and that was really successful.

[00:18:20] You see that in something like a conservation trust fund, where you can collect funding contributions from many different sources, and then you can deliver them under community guidance appropriately to the landscape. That’s a great example. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, by the way, works similarly, combines public and private investment, works in partnership with landowners and has great outcomes on the ground.

[00:18:43] So I think that’s really what underlies these kinds of successes. 

How can society better support working lands?

[00:18:47] Zach Altman: You also talk a lot about the need for strong economic drivers to support working lands, and these, these programs are definitely a component of that, but are there any policy changes in your mind right now that could support working lands right now?

[00:19:01] Lesli Allison: That’s kind of the giant nut we need to crack.

[00:19:09] We need to take care of the lands and the natural resources. We need to take care of our ecosystems and our watersheds, but they’re really not what we would call economic drivers that support that society as a whole will pay for a house. They’ll pay for oil and gas. They’ll pay for food that somebody’s produced, but we don’t really have a way to pay for wildlife, say, or, you know, functional watershed, things like that.

[00:19:38] And so we’ve really leaned a lot on government to come in and try to make up that gap, what the public doesn’t pay for. The government’s gonna help landowners and communities to, to take care of. But it’s a fraught system. It tends to end up being politicized. It doesn’t have enough scale to it.

[00:19:51] So our question has really been how do we align economic drivers with supporting the values that we really wanna see on these landscapes in addition to the ones that we already support. And there’s this thing called ecosystem service markets or environmental markets. It’s another word for it. And it’s the idea that you could set up some kind of market system where you could sell credits.

[00:20:15] And you see this, for example, in the carbon markets today, people can sell credit for sequestering carbon in the soil through different practices. There’s a very new emerging biodiversity credit market that would pay landowners, for example, to take care of wildlife, and then you’d get a payment through a credit system.

[00:20:33] So that’s what we mean by those markets. They’re still very new. And they’re confusing and they’re very volatile right now. There’s a lot of politics around them so it’s not something that we can lean on at this point very heavily, although people are very interested in them. And so what we are looking to do is to develop simple.

[00:20:53] Market-based mechanisms like habitat leasing where a landowner might be doing livestock production, but also has to hold in the winter times a huge herd of elk that is migrating across his or her land, and that those elk come with some cost to the landowner they consume. The same forage that the livestock consumes.

[00:21:15] So it reduces their ability to run a certain amount of cattle and stay economically viable. So the habitat lease we developed in Wyoming in partnership with Department of Agriculture was one that would compensate landowners for acres that are being impacted by elk, they can still graze.

[00:21:31] They just have to manage their land in a way that enables the elk also to find some forage there. So you have a kind of a harmony as much as you can between the elk and the livestock. And so that would be like a habitat lease and you could apply that to a lot of different types of scenarios where we are asking a landowner or producer to do something for the public benefit that comes at a cost to their economic bottom line.

[00:21:56] It’s a fair and simple exchange for that. It’s very flexible. So that’s one of the things we’re looking at. 

Lesli’s concerns about the future

[00:22:02] Zach Altman: So I wanna move us towards looking ahead to the future. You’re the CEO here at WLA, you. You’re talking to landowners, you’re talking to people in power all the time across the west and beyond. What are your concerns moving forward?

[00:22:18] Lesli Allison: I think my biggest concern is that we don’t have a unified vision in the country of where we want to go. I think in the back of most people’s minds, we envision a landscape, say in the West, that has farms and ranches. It has wild places for wildlife. It has places for people to recreate. It produces energy.

[00:22:41] It does all of this in a responsible way, so that all these values can be there in the future. I think in the sort of larger picture, I think that’s where most of us would land, but there’s some details and things that need to be worked out philosophically about what that future should look like, for example, in the American West.

[00:22:57] So we need to work on that vision. And then I worry that given the difficult politics, and I don’t just mean in this moment under the new federal leadership, I mean, the politics have been increasingly polarized and challenging for quite some time now, and they make it very difficult for us to find those successful paths to that future that we wanna create.

[00:23:18] And I worry sometimes that because of that, we won’t get there before we lose some of the things that we really don’t wanna lose and really can’t afford to lose. We cannot afford to lose the lands that feed us. We can’t afford to lose the ecosystems that keep us alive. We’ve really got to invest in those things.

[00:23:37] People have to understand that that is a national interest. It is a national security interest, but it also has to be done with respect for private property, for the people on the land, for what it means to have to earn a livelihood. There’s a lot to it, and we have to come to some resolution about that and the politics gets in our way.

[00:23:54] And that would be, I would say, probably my biggest worry. And I guess another one is I don’t wanna see this country split any further apart than it already is. I’d like to see us get on a path to getting closer together. And I think we do still have vastly more in common than we have apart. And so I do worry that social media and all the influences and the disinformation today is not helping us in that regard.

Lesli’s hope for the future

[00:24:20] Zach Altman: To wrap up today, what gives you hope and are there opportunities in this moment that landowners should seize? 

[00:24:27] Lesli Allison: So what gives me hope is the conversations I have with people all over the West, and I have to say Western Landowners Alliance has the complete political spectrum. In our membership, we have as far left and as far right and everything in between.

[00:24:40] Every age, every parcel size, every type of occupation and land interest, we have a very diverse membership . And yet when I talk to people, the thoughtfulness, the care that they bring to the conversation, the fundamental decency that they show to one another to, to the care they have for future generations, it’s all there. People care a great deal. And when you sit down, one-on-one or in small groups without the rhetoric and all the pressures from the outside people really have good intentions. I don’t know anybody in our membership that isn’t trying to make the world a better place in their own way.

[00:25:20] And again, once you get down, you get close to the ground. A lot of that ideological battle, it just fades away and people can begin to talk to each other as real human beings. And that’s very encouraging, ’cause what comes out is quite lovely and I’d like to see us get back to that in this country.

[00:25:34] And that’s where my hope rests entirely. 

[00:25:37] Zach Altman: Well, Lesli, thank you so much for your time and thank you for your leadership. 

[00:25:41] Lesli Allison: Well, thanks for the opportunity to visit today, Zach. It’s always great talking with you.

[00:25:48] Zach Altman: Thanks again to Lesli for joining us today. We have a webpage where you can reach out to us. You can also quickly look up contact info for your representatives and you can learn what WA is doing on the policy front right now. That is linked in the show notes. On Land is a production of Western Landowners Alliance, a west wide organization of landowners, natural resource managers and partners dedicated to keeping working lands whole and healthy for the benefit of people and wildlife.

[00:26:17] This episode was hosted and produced by me, Zach Allman. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you next time.

Credits

Thanks again to Lesli for joining us today. We have a webpage where you can reach out to us, quickly look up contact info for your representatives, and learn what WLA is doing on the policy front right now.

On Land is a production of Western Landowners Alliance, a West-wide organization of landowners, natural resource managers and partners dedicated to keeping working lands whole and healthy for the benefit of people and wildlife. This episode was hosted and produced by Zach Altman.  

If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend, leave a review wherever you get your podcasts