Rob Horwich, director of Community Conservation served in the Peace Corps in 1985 in Belize when he helped the community create the howler monkey preserve
Conservation director to speak on Earth Day
By Patricia Curtis Pfitsch/ For the Tribune
Rob Horwich, director of Community Conservation, a non-profit environmental organization based in Gays Mills, Wis., brings hope on Earth Day that people can take care of the environment. He's helping to make that happen.
Beginning in 1985 by helping farmers in Belize create a preserve for howler monkeys, Horwich has traveled the world catalyzing communities to take responsibility for preserving wildlife and wild land in and near their towns and villages.
Horwich found that when a group of individuals-a village, or an organization-can co-manage a protected area with their government (rather than just letting the government do everything without input from the community) the area prospers and the resources are protected.
Through his grass roots efforts people in India, Russia, Central America and the United States have created protected areas in their own communities and saved such threatened and endangered species as manatees, spider monkeys, tree kangaroos, and golden langur monkeys.
Some of Community Conservation's projects are located right here in southwestern Wisconsin. Horwich points to the Valley Stewardship Network and the Kickapoo Reserve Board as two of the empowered community groups that are protecting their lands. The Kickapoo Reserve Board, for example, co-manages the Kickapoo Reserve, located north of La Farge, with the State of Wisconsin.
Now Horwich is taking his co-management vision to a new level. His goal is to show others how to do the work of empowering communities that he and others in Community Conservation have been doing for twenty years. By teaching the process to others, he hopes to multiply the effect of his own organization's efforts. "It's not as much fun as working directly with the communities," he admits, "but it's much more efficient. We can effect major change in a region-or in the world."
He has just returned from a visit to Belize and El Salvador, two countries with strong support for the co-management vision of government and individuals working together to protect areas and resources.
"Their spirit is there," Horwich says, "but their abilities are lacking." The communities need information and training. They might need help managing a bank account or collecting fees. They need to know how to strengthen their own organization by creating a management plan, running group meetings and raising funds. They need to know how to lay out a park. In effect, they need mentors to train them, but also to point them to people who can help them learn these skills. "This is what I did in 1985 Belize when I helped the community create the howler monkey preserve," Horwich explained. "I acted as a support coordinator."
The Peace Corps has begun placing volunteers in Belize to act in this support coordinator capacity-helping communities work with the government to create and maintain protected areas. But the volunteers themselves need knowledge about how to be effective in this support role. During his recent visit Horwich participated in a Peace Corps workshop. "I talked about community conservation throughout the world. I presented some of the lessons we've learned in the past twenty years so they could learn from what was going on in other communities."
He also ran a session on community co-management, teaching the volunteers about an evaluation technique they could use to check the progress of the projects they had been assigned to support. "We developed twenty-six benchmarks," Horwich explains. "Does the project involve a protected area? Is there a group working to manage the area? Does the group have an operations plan? Does it have bylaws?" The volunteers answered these questions about their projects and came up with a sense of how far along the project is.
Projects are usually concerned with developing parks and other protected land areas, like Five Blues Lake National Park in central Belize. The organization working on this project was the first to sign an agreement with the Forestry Department in Belize. "They've been managing the park for ten years. They have a lot of tenacity and interest, but they need a lot more training."
After the workshop, Horwich took at five-day whirlwind tour of the community projects in Belize. "We must have talked to fifteen communities and non-governmental organizations," Horwich said. "We updated our knowledge of what is going on in the country."
Then he flew to El Salvador and, using the information he learned on his tour, made a presentation to the Ministry of Natural Resources there. "The Ministry has been doing a lot of academic homework," Horwich says, "but the communities are at the same level as Belize-they need training."
Horwich's work in El Salvador is similar to his work with the Peace Corps-he is working with people who speak Spanish and will be working with the communities to co-manage environmentally sensitive lands.
The recent war in El Salvador has retarded progress. In Belize, the prospect of eco-tourism-bringing money to communities without depleting the environmental resources-fueled their desire to create and maintain protected areas. But the war discouraged-and still discourages-people from visiting neighboring El Salvador. "I asked them who does come to El Salvador," Horwich said. "Turns out their visitors are families-people returning from the states. I pointed out to them that this is a potential tourist group."
Horwich chuckles as he refers to himself as the Johnny Appleseed of the environmental movement. But he's not joking. "I sow seeds of hope that it can be done by communities," he says. He hopes that he can convince students at Viterbo, and anyone else who hears him speak, that they, too, can make a difference. "I will show them how individuals have made a difference in all these projects. I'll ask them to think about what they could do? The real crystal-the real focus-is to empower communities to take care of their environment. If we do enough of this, the whole world will be taken care of by the communities who live there. That's the dream."
Horwich hopes that by inspiring others to do what he does, the dream will be come reality.
