Thank you.
As Debbie was saying, my name is Jeremy Pittman. I'm a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. I'm part of what's known as the Liber Ero fellowship program. That's an emerging network of young scholars across Canada doing post-doctoral research that's focused on conservation.
I want to thank you all for having me today, and thank the speakers who came before me for excellent presentations.
A bit about myself and what I study. The overarching question I look at is prairie-focused about how to promote sustainable landscapes in prairie spaces. More specifically, I'm from the province of Saskatchewan. I look in the southern part of Saskatchewan at how agricultural landscapes can become sustainable.
I consider the social aspects, and what I mean by that are the people, the ranchers, the farmers who earn their living from these landscapes, the sorts of things that influence their decisions and the sorts of things that matter to them. But I also consider ecological aspects, for example, how species move across landscapes, how different risks, invasive species, things like that—weeds—essentially move across landscapes. Most importantly, how can we integrate them together for the benefit of both? I take both into account and think about these things simultaneously as both social and ecological.
As a very important part of my work, I spend a lot of time in rural Saskatchewan speaking with producers, walking around their properties with them, getting a sense of how they see landscapes, what's important to them, and just really trying to understand their experiences and how they've addressed changing social and environmental conditions, and also how they see conservation fitting within their land management.
I'll speak a little about the problem of context. On the prairies, we're starting to recognize more the role of these private lands in advancing conservation of many species at risk. Some examples are the greater sage grouse; a fairly popular one, the burrowing owl, a very cute iconic species. Others are the Sprague's pipit, the swift fox, species like that. These lands play an increasingly recognized and increasingly important role in private lands' conservation, and essentially conservation in this context has become more of a friend to private landowners as something that's more approachable and something they can engage with more readily to help advance and spread conservation across the landscape.
Landowners make daily decisions that affect the conservation value of their properties, and we need to find more appropriate ways of engaging with them.
What's become apparent over the years has been a lot of history of environmental programs that have worked with varying degrees of success. One thing that I often hear from ranchers is this idea that they don't like prescriptions. They don't like things being determined from the outside that influences what they are doing in their operations. Without considering their ideas, their values, in terms of how you do conservation, I actually run the risk of pushing them away from conservation, alienating them from the processes, decisions, and losing the value that their lands can provide to conservation.
However, I do see, within the Species at Risk Act, section 11 in particular, opportunities for improving how we do conservation on private lands. In particular, the idea of conservation partnerships or agreements is really important. I've done a lot of work with local grassroots NGOs. In the prairies' context, they have a lot of watershed stewardship organizations, farmers, ranchers, sometimes the oil and gas industry, just a broad range of stakeholders. These groups have a lot of capacity to actually do more than you think. As well, they can be an important vehicle and a way of bridging connections with local places, local people.
In a really broad sense, I would recommend as three components that idea of engaging, hearing what's happening in a way that's responsive to local needs and priorities, but also it's the idea of crafting or building tools in collaboration with these groups and then essentially empowering them to implement, take ownership of the programs, roll these things out across the landscape.
In doing that, I have three key messages about how this could become operational.
First, there needs to be a firm demonstration of a willingness to listen and understand local priorities.
With respect to conservation decisions, people choosing to do conservation on their lands happens in the broader context of everything else that they're trying to deal with. I've had many conversations with ranchers. It starts off about species at risk and ends up with them talking about their family, the future of their communities, and things like that. I recall walking across a pasture with a rancher. He was chatting about how he deals with year-to-year variations in the amount of rain, and the grass, and how he has been trying to deal with the variations in his income. One thing he made clear, though, was that he sticks in the game. He keeps ranching just because he wants to be able to teach his children how to ranch, the same way his mother and father taught him. Some things are like how to manage your grass when you move your cows, and how to make sure you have grass for next year. They are simple but really important things, which he wants to pass on.
On that point, I propose that we can improve the success of some of these conservation partnerships by inherently recognizing from the beginning that conservation happens in this broader mix of priorities and different challenges that producers are facing.
In terms of empowering local people, conservation partnerships can be one of the best ways of fostering this kind of alignment with local values and local perspectives. In rural Saskatchewan, at the moment, there's some experimentation, some test pilots, with an interesting way of engaging with producers. We call it a results-based agreement, where essentially the habitat target that you're trying to meet is predetermined. Producers are allowed to meet that target however they see fit, so they can do what they want, that sort of thing. At the end of the year, at a set period, if they've met that target, based on some monitoring, that would trigger a payment or some sort of incentive to provide some recognition of what they're doing for conservation. At the same time, it gives them the flexibility to get there however they need to.
The final point that I want to touch on here today and something that I think is important is the idea that these partnerships can be a way of encouraging continual learning and improvement regarding conservation and sustainability in general on these landscapes.
I know of one older rancher in particular who spends hours a day researching sage grouse, and these sorts of things. He puts a lot of time into understanding the ecology of these species. He has friends who are scientists at Environment Canada who he'll engage with just to get the latest on what we think about Sprague's pipit, and stuff like that. Partnerships can be a way of using this desire and this drive to learn to help advance some of the best science in terms of what we know of conservation in prairie landscapes.
Thank you.