Prior to his November appointment as Chief Operating Officer, Chris Wood was TU’s Vice President for Conservation Operations. Before he joined TU in 2001, Chris served as senior policy and communications advisor to the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Born in Virginia, he spent his Wonder Bread years in northern New Jersey. [Charles Gauvin continues to serve as CEO]

CTU: What can the grassroots expect from you as COO?

Chris Wood:  One of the things that I’d like to work on is better integrating the work of TU national with local chapters and state councils. I think the biggest threat we face is that of having multiple agendas occasionally running at cross purposes. If we’re not able to better integrate the chapter activist so that he or she sees why what we’re working on back in Washington matters, and if we’re not able to have the policy wonks like me back in Washington able to connect to what that chapter person is doing on the ground, it’s almost like we’re running two separate organizations, and we’re almost guaranteeing that we’ll be half as effective as we could be.

It ought to be the norm that everything we do is transparent enough so the grassroots can engage anywhere they want in the process in a productive way. And the thing I’ve learned is that if you involve people and give them a chance to participate early on, they won't resent it later.

CTU: How are you going to bridge the gap between national and local?

Chris Wood: Well, for one thing, I'm going to try and spend more time with the volunteers. In my last position I was often in the middle of advocating for a bill in Congress, protecting the landscape from oil and gas development, even writing funding proposals. I think we’re going to have other people do more of that work and on a personal level, I’m going to have to spend more time going to chapter meetings, going to council meetings – using the shoe leather approach and spending as much time as possible with the volunteer side of the organization.

Where we have a national staff presence, we ought to be engaging the grass roots in those communities affected by the issues and problems we’re working on. We need to do a better job of communicating what we’re doing and when, and changing direction when necessary based on feedback we’re getting from people.

CTU: Won’t this require a quantum leap in the way we communicate?

Chris Wood: Communication is probably the biggest challenge we have, but that’s not really a surprise. My past two jobs were in very big bureaucracies, and probably the biggest challenge we had in each was effectively communicating within our organization. The same goes for TU. We haven’t been very nimble, but if communications is our biggest problem, I think we’re in pretty good shape, because it’s a problem with a solution that’s achievable. We’re working on communications right now in a number of areas, and I think it’s getting better.

The National office also has to become more adept at engaging grassroots leaders in the development of policy, and I think the grassroots are going to have to become more engaged at communicating upward through the state councils and the chapters to make sure that national aware of opportunities at as local scale.

CTU: So how do you plan to do that?

Chris Wood: One example from recent experience is the decision to work with land trusts. A number of grassroots members have been pushing for us to work more closely with land conservation and land trusts. So we got a small group together that included Paul Doscher [New Hampshire] and Dan Wisniewski [Wisconsin] and others who worked with national staff to come up with a concept of how to engage land trusts and raise money. The idea is to build capacity by getting land trusts to think more about water – and become more involved in trout protection and recovery. And I think that’s one practical example of how we can be running our programs and still have successful outcomes. Having a more open process gets much better buy in.

CTU: How are you going to heal the wounds of the access issue?

Chris Wood: Access in and of itself is deeply important to anglers. And I think underestimating how important is a mistake. I could be wrong – I haven’t been around TU long enough to know for sure - but my sense was that this year’s dispute was about something more than angler access to streams. It was about how decisions are made inside of TU.

Anytime an organization grows like TU has, you have those kinds of problems. Think about it - when Charles [Gauvin] came to TU in the early nineties it was an organization of 30 thousand members with a budget of 750 thousand dollars and a debt of half a million. Sixteen years or so later, we have 160 thousand members and an annual national budget of 23 million. Back then we had one national conservation employee. Today we have 85.

Again, I think the lesson I’ve learned is that if you don’t engage the members themselves and make them vested in the agenda or program or outcome, you’re going to run into problems. I think that in part happened with access. It became symbolic of a larger concern among some that their voice wasn’t being heard any longer. And I hope that I can have some influence in changing the culture at TU so there’s more of a sense of one TU pulling in one direction.

CTU: What are your primary conservation priorities?

Chris Wood: I’m really excited about and committed to the whole concept - Protect, Reconnect Restore and Sustain - that we’re trying to move through the organization. First, we want to protect the highest quality habitats – which are most often found in the headwaters of streams. Second, we work to reconnect those high quality habitats and riparian corridors to downstream areas by working to remove dams and increase instream flows. Third - and this is the bread and butter of TU, engaging in watershed scale restoration to recover some of that downstream habitat that is biologically significant but has been historically degraded. And fourth, we need to sustain those improvements by engaging local communities and strengthening our commitment to educating the next generation of stewards.

CTU: With all the talk about landscape scale and watershed scale projects, where do the grassroots fit in?  Are we giving up on “chapter-scale” projects?

Chris Wood: We are developing a big picture policy agenda, but I think that advocacy truly manifests itself through volunteers working on the ground.

On the protect side of things, our national staff can focus on and drive landscape level protections like roadless areas or wilderness designation in Washington, but the fact is that if decision makers in the Forest Service or Congress don’t have constituents supporting or advocating for those changes, it doesn’t matter how tight your policy agenda is; you’re not going to get it implemented.

There’s a crucial distinction – and it’s one of the key reasons I decided to work here –and that’s the grassroots network of members and volunteers. Decision makers listen to their constituents a lot more closely than they do DC wonks.

We’re always going to go after those large scale policy changes like changing western water law to keep more water in streams, or taking out dams on the Snake River, but until those happy times come, we need to engage with the grassroots in individual state campaigns to connect with their elected leaders and help convince them to change the laws in a way that benefit fish. We need those local volunteers and local relationships – to convince landowners to achieve irrigation efficiencies or install gates on culverts that block fish passage, or simply to take part in other on-the-ground projects that improve habitat connectivity.

With restoration, it’s great that we have home rivers projects that are funded and staffed by the national office, but if we had to rely on just those efforts we’d have maybe 10 active restoration projects. If we want our vision that within a single generation we’re going to recover wild and native fish to be more than words on paper, we need to have thousands of volunteer restoration activities going on.

Finally, when you talk about the sustain part of the model, especially when it comes to youth education, national  TU  is a Johnny-come - lately compared to local chapters, who have been leading youth education efforts for decades.

So, to come back to the beginning, I’m so jazzed about this model because it’s one that you can get behind if you’re into conservation from running a policy agenda at the national level , but it’s also one you can get behind if you’re a chapter member who cares about improving fisheries and stewardship in your local community.

CTU: What else is on your radar screen?

Chris Wood: Climate change is all the rage in environmental world. And that’s good for a number of reasons for us. There have been a number of scientific studies and research that showing that trout aren’t going to fare so well in a warming climate. Studies out of the Southern Rockies and the University of Wyoming that show wild native fish in the Rockies could decline as much as 60% with projected increases in stream temperatures. It’s even worse in Southern Appalachia. Scientists with the Forest Service predict that -depending on the increase in temperatures - declines of wild and native trout says mortality of trout could exceed by 90%.

One of the things that I think a lot about is that while the environmental community and congress are focusing on ending the causes of climate change, maybe we should be the group that works on mitigating the effects of the warming climate.

Our PRRS model may be the best model available for ensuring viability of salmonids - rebuilding resiliency in stream systems and ensuring that we have trout for future generations, even through a warming climate.

CTU: How we’re going to grow our organizational effectiveness and perhaps attract a wider following that just anglers?

Chris Wood: I wanted to work for TU – as opposed to some other conservation groups - because they have a sizable membership and because they’re a really active membership. But when we ask members, maybe 10-15% are actively engaged in conservation projects, youth education or local legislation. In light of a 15% drop in the number of anglers, we may or may not be able to grow out membership significantly. But if we can get 20-30% of our members involved instead of 15-20%, it would make a huge difference.

Secondly, one of strengths of our mission is that ultimately water affects everything and everyone. To the extent we can draw parallels in local communities between the need for water supplies and water quality and trout streams – and the need to protect landscapes in the face of urbanization, the more effective we’ll be and the more people who aren’t anglers will be drawn to our cause – maybe not as dues paying members, but as they’re advocates for the things we care about.

The more people get to know us and see the scope and breadth of our work, from local efforts to protect the Roan plateau from oil and gas development, or members lobbying the state legislature to change Colorado water law, the more people will recognize that we’re not just about improving fisheries – we’re about recovering entire landscapes.

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