Smart Grid to Battery Storage:

These were among the topics deliberated by 45 national workforce and education thought leaders who convened this week at the Pew Conference Center in Washington, DC for “Sustainability Skills Matter,” a meeting hosted by the Greenforce Initiative, a joint-program of the National Wildlife Federation’s Campus Ecology Program and Jobs for the Future with support from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation.  The meeting was co-sponsored by the American Association of Community College’s SEED Center and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS).

“We are seeing a shift in the economy,” observed Kevin Coyle, vice president for education and training at the National Wildlife Federation, but it is in its infancy; we need to be prepared across multiple sectors and our leaders need to be educated.  A smarter grid is one example: $150 billion per year is lost on power outages across the grid.  Battery storage, transportation- will also change soon.”

Brenda Dan-Messier, assistant secretary United States Department of Education, noted that efforts such as this convening help the US ”implement President Obama’s inaugural statement that, ‘We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”‘

Linking Colleges and Strengthening Credentials:

“Connecting community colleges via public transport to the local town or city would be a key way to reduce CO2 emissions and congestion,” explained architect and transportation planner, Susan Herre. ”It would also introduce young people early on to the walk-transit lifestyle, making them more discerning consumers of neighborhood types as they choose where to work and live after graduation.”

To effectively advance projects like these along with students’ skill sets, Jane Weissman, president and CEO of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), encouraged community colleges to offer industry-vetted credentials.

State and System-wide Skills Evaluation:

In addition to offering credentials in specialized industries, Rob Holsten, dean of continuing education and sustainability at Wilson Community College in North Carolina, described the “system-wide curriculum review process undertaken in North Carolina to better align education across multiple disciplines with today’s economy, including adding employer competencies and creating a common core for all technical programs.”

Workforce Priorities for Sustainability Emerge:

Employers, industry association, higher education and ngo leaders from agriculture, renewable energy, manufacturing and transportation sectors, developed more than 150 ideas in nine categories, including ways to deepen engagement with employers, support community college capacity, link the classroom to real-world project experience, increase awareness to expand demand for sustainability skills and improve labor market information.

Eight key recommendations emerged through an on-line comment, prioritization and voting system administered by FacilitatePro.  Among these were:

1. Engaging leading employers to better inform community and other colleges about the sustainability skills they value and want.
2. Integrating sustainability skills into every career pathway.
3. Providing more paid internship programs, mentoring and apprenticeships and other “hands on” training opportunities for students so they can demonstrate skills, knowledge and abilities.
4. Using campus-based projects as an opportunity to teach real-world application of sustainability skills for students.
5. Exploring opportunities to help businesses make their operations more sustainable and linking education and training around sustainability skills to this.
6. Working with economic development groups to identify sustainability skills needed by new potential employers in a region.
7. Connecting sustainability skills to existing state efforts to recruit manufacturing employers and connecting community colleges to these employers for skills development and work experience or employment opportunities, and
8. Identifying industries with an aging workforce and encouraging them to protect the future competitiveness of their industry by partnering with colleges to redesign and redeliver more effective training program (noting the example of PG&E in CA providing internships and apprenticeships together with 27 community colleges.)

“Ultimately, with the help of our community colleges and employers,” said Coyle, “values and attitudes will change and we will have a kinder, gentler and cleaner world.”

Bird watching. Credit Erin Millstead

I also plan to take my daughter to a local hiking trail to look for more birds and wildlife, different than what we see in our yard. Afterwards, we’ll have fun learning online about the bird species we have seen and playing the games and activities on the bird count website. The online bird guide will be a good resource for us.

I grew up in Southern California in the “land of eternal spring.” Swallows, hummingbirds, pelicans, and seagulls were the type of birds I saw around my backyard. From my backyard swing, I often gazed at the huge pelicans that sailed overhead and then plunged down with a huge splash into the sea chasing fish for their dinner.

Like clockwork, every March I would hear a chorus of birds outside my bedroom window and realized it was springtime and all the birds had again come back from South America to their California homes. In my little world, birds were seen and heard everywhere, because in Southern California, windows and doors were always open to catch the cool ocean breezes. With the temperature ranging from 50-70 degrees in my seaside town, bird calls always accompanied the roar of the Pacific Ocean.

When I moved to the East Coast and started to experience the seasons, I marveled at the glistening snow on the ground, deep green evergreens and bright red cardinals. What a beautiful contrast. Then, when spring and summer came, I witnessed purple martins (an East Coast version of my beloved Swallow) flying around my yard in search of bugs during the early evening hours. When my baby was born, I took her outside to point out all the birds and trees in our backyard so that she felt comfortable with the sights and sounds of nature.

I’m excited to share my love of birds and the outdoors to my child during the Great Backyard Bird Count. I can’t expect her to love the natural world as I do without spending time surrounded by a world of green. I hope the birds will cooperate by giving us a good show. Some great tips for enjoying the outdoors with children are at National Wildlife Federation’s Be Out There website.

What birds do you think you will see this weekend? You might see Cardinals, Pelicans, Canadian Geese, Egrets, and Ducks. Leave a comment and let us know what you find!

Like Be Out There on Facebook, follow @Be Out There  on Twitter, or sign up for Be Out There newsletters for outdoor activities for your kids, news, tips, and resources.

Plant a flower, and you may grow hummingbirds like this one, feeding on a bee balm in the yard of an entrant in the annual National Wildlife Photo Contest.

       “Nothing is truly small, as anyone knows who has peered into the secrets of Nature. . . . Everything works upon everything else. . . .
       “The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action between the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the play of causes in the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation?  The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large, and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity. . . . 
       “Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing. . . . Every bird that flies carries a shred of the infinite in its claws. The process of birth is the shedding of a meteorite or the peck of a hatching swallow on the shell of its egg; it is the coming of an earthworm or a Socrates, both equally important to the scheme of things. Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose.
       “A patch of mould is a galaxy of blossoms; a nebula is an ant heap of stars. . . . In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, borne by the mysterious flow of invisible currents, making use of everything, wasting not a single sleeper’s dream, sowing an animalcule here and shattering a star there . . . . governing, if only by the universality of the law, the evolution of a comet in the heavens by the encircling of infusoria in a drop of water.”                                

                                 [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (New York City: Penguin Books, 1982) pp. 764-65.]

You’re Connected Too

To highlight your own connections with nature, you might want to combine gardening and conservation, or turn your outdoor property into an NWF Certified Wildlife Habitat®.

Bats Are Mammals

Bats grow hair and feed infant young with mother’s milk, two defining characteristics of mammals. Biologists put bats in the scientific order Chiroptera (from Greek meaning “hand wing”), in the same way that carnivores like bears, wolves, lions and tigers are put in the order Carnivora.

Bats Are Biologically Old Creatures

In the fossil record, bats date back at least 52 million years—tens of millions of years before apes and humans appear.

Bats Are the Only Flying Mammals

Other mammal species glide, but only bats are capable of powered flight. Their wings are composed of the elongated fingers of the forelimbs with a thin webbing of furred skin stretching between the fingers. Because these wings are thinner than those of feathery birds, bats are capable of more rapid and precise turns than are birds.

The long ears on this big-eared, or long-eared, bat help the animal to listen to its sonar signals bouncing off its surroundings. Bats can modify the shape of the ears and reduce the amount of sound going into them to keep loud sonar signals–which humans can’t even hear–from deafening them. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Bats Are Very Successful

In biology, a successful order is one that produces a lot of species, showing that it is highly adaptable to many environments. The chiropterans have produced nearly 1,250 living species, meaning that about 20 percent of the world’s roughly 5,700 living mammal species are bats. (Of the various orders of mammal, only one beats bats in species numbers, and that is the order Rodentia—rodents—at roughly 2,277 species, including mice, rats, chipmunks, hamsters and beavers).

Bats Are Slow Breeders

Females usually produce only one offspring at a time, probably because pregnant bats must fly to find food and can handle only so much onboard cargo. Mothers feed newborns with milk and bring food to older young, which cannot fend for themselves until they are able to fly—a development that may take six weeks to four months, depending on the species. Animals that breed slowly usually live a relatively long time, allowing them to produce sufficient young to maintain the species, and bats are no exception. Individuals of some bat species can live 20 years.

Bats Are Insect Eaters

True, many bats hunt on the wing for insect prey, eating thousands of small insects each night. Many of the small bats native to the United States follow this diet. But some bat species eat fruit, some small animals such as frogs, and some even eat fish.

Bats Are Echolocators

Bats that hunt flying insects may use a form of sonar or echolocation—while flying, they emit sounds that bounce off nearby objects. The echo helps the bat locate what lies ahead, including such prey as moths and mosquitoes. Some bats eat insects on the ground, but they also use highly developed hearing to locate their prey.

Bats Are Not Creatures that Get Tangled in People’s Hair

Certainly not. Their use of echolocation is so precise that

they can fly in complete darkness through a room crisscrossed with stretched lengths of string, compared to which a human is like the broad side of a barn.

Bats Are Little Animals

Yes, in many cases they are. In fact, one of the smallest mammals in the world is the bumblebee bat (also called Kitti’s hog-nosed bat), with a body less than an inch and a half long and weighing around 0.07 ounces. Found in Thailand and Burma, it feeds on insects.

Bats Are Large Animals

Pretty large, sometimes. Fruit bats, a.k.a. flying foxes, of Australia and parts of Asia and Africa can reach a wingspan of nearly 5 feet and weigh 2.5 pounds. Relying on a keen sense of smell and good eyesight to find the fruit on which they feed, they may fly 40 miles in search of a fruiting tree.

Outdoor Fun for You and Your Kids at Hike & Seek

In September and October, join NWF’s Hike & Seek™ in select cities nationwide for a 1- to 2-mile nature hike and scavenger hunt, during which you can learn more about bats at the Mammals Station on the trail, see a barn owl or other raptor up close, make a bug box and find many more activities for children of all ages, especially toddlers to age 10.

Batty Activities for a Pre-hike Kickoff

• Join thousands of other Americans who are turning backyards into Certified Wildlife Habitat ™

• Most bats are nocturnal. What should you do if you see one in the daytime?

• A Kid Quiz on bats

• Building a bat house.

This National Wildlife Photo Contest entry was taken by Anne Zeneski, who built this pond in her backyard in North Carolina. The pond attracts frogs and other wild creatures.

Ant farmers: Humans first began cultivating crops about 10,000 years ago, but ants got into the program long before that: Using genetic studies, scientists determined a few years ago that a pioneering ant species began growing its own food about 50 million years past. The most highly developed insect agriculturalist today is the leaf-cutter ant, which dates back about 10 million years and includes nearly 50 species native to South and Central America and to the southern United States. Here’s how these insects, which live in underground nests that can cover 6,500 square feet and house 8 million residents, go about gardening: Specialized workers called mediae forage around their nest for plant material, cutting off pieces of leaf—they can strip clean a citrus tree in a single day. They lug the plant material to the nest and hand it off to minims, specialized workers that fragment the leaf pieces into a sort of mulch and feed it to fungi being cultivated in the nest. The queen, which is the only member of the ant colony that lays eggs, lives in the fungus garden. There her eggs hatch, and the larvae feed on the convenient food source (adults feed on leaf sap). These ants and their relatives represent the world’s first known farmers.

Termites: Some termite species, which live in colonial nests like those of ants, also grow fungus gardens. The insects build spongy “combs,” which may include nutritious termite feces as an ingredient, and grow fungi on the combs. The termites feed on the fungi, which benefit from the protection of the insects and the habitat they provide.

Ambrosia beetles: These weevil relatives bore into and carve tunnels in dead or dying trees. They carry certain fungi in special receptacles on their bodies and deposit fungus spores in the tunnels, where the fungi grow, drawing nutrients from the wood. Rather than eat wood themselves, the beetles and their larvae feed on parts of the fungi. When larval beetles become adults, they collect fungus spores and fly off to bore into new trees and restart the process. About 3,000 beetle species use this strategy.

Bowerbirds: Lest you think that wildlife gardeners are all about fungus and insects, let’s take a look at the spotted bowerbird, a species studied in Queensland, Australia, where recent research discovered that the birds engage in gardening, of a sort. Male spotted bowerbirds build elaborate nests, or bowers, from twigs and decorate them with various objects to attract females. One decorative object much loved by females, and hence much sought by males, is the yellow-green, often purple-tinged berry of the potato bush—in fact, more berries on the bower means better mating success for the male. Males don’t generally build bowers in areas where the berries grow in abundance, but by the time a bower is a year old, it usually has a few dozen potato bushes growing nearby, giving the male more opportunity to decorate with more berries. The males throw shriveled berries outside the bower, affecting the distribution of the potato bush. Not precisely agriculture as ants and humans may know it, but still a form of opportunistic gardening. It also is the first known example of the cultivation of a nonfood plant by a nonhuman species.

Create a haven for birds and other critters in your own backyard and have it designated as an official Certified Wildlife Habitat site. Certify in the month of May and we’ll plant a tree in your honor!>>

Elk graze peacefully outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a fitting image for NWF supporter Bonnie H., whose wish is for wildlife "to remain truly wild and with the full protection of their environment."

“Wishes for Wildlife” was the brainchild of NWF Membership Department staffers Jenn Watral and Margot Krieger, who thought a list of such wishes would reveal the issues and species that inhabit the dreams of NWF members and supporters.

Here is a small sample of the wishes we’ve received:

• “My wish is for immediate enlightenment and action by the human species to protect, preserve and respect the other species on this planet and to end the destruction of them and their habitats.” – Bonnie H.

• “I wish the world could see all wildlife as being the victims of our wasteful and consuming ways. They need our help in whatever way possible. But it takes all of humanity to care.” – Dan F.

• “With my heart, thoughts, and prayers I wish wildlife’s greatest enemy (Mankind) could appreciate how deeply our mutual survival is intertwined. Every gain is a boost for us all. Every loss will be felt far more than it seems at the time. It is painful to observe how slowly mankind comes to this knowledge. I pray we learn in time.” – Dawn M.

• “May all beings be safe and free from harm. May all beings be free. May every suffering be the door to an open heart. And may the open heart spring to action for every one.” – Elizabeth C.

• “My wish is that all wildlife be safe and happy in their homes…that all those working so hard to save our planet be given the strength and wisdom to continue their work…that all mankind work together to better our planet and stop endangering it.” – A.R.

Wishes may seem a pretty thin foundation on which to build an edifice of change for conservation. As someone once sort of said, if wishes were Ferraris we’d all drive home in style. But history shows us some impressive examples of people turning wishes into reality. Henry Ford wished he could build automobiles, the Wright brothers wished they could fly, and John F. Kennedy wished America could send astronauts to the moon and back.

Wishes help give us a direction, but action and resources give us results. Ideally, as we ring in the New Year, these wishes will inspire us to action on behalf of beleaguered wild creatures and wild places and will inspire support for and commitment to wildlife conservation. NWF presently has 4 million members and supporters. We—and wildlife—can always use more.

To share your wishes for wildlife or to see the wishes sent in by others, go to www.nwf.org/wishforwildlife

NWF has just launched a new online portal called “Choose Your Cause.” Just click on the cause you care about most and enjoy inspiring stories and photos from folks on-the-ground who are working tirelessly to protect the wildlife and wild places we all love.

NWF Executive Assistant Diana Kalaly makes calls to donors, expressing NWF's appreciation for their commitment to and interest in wildlife conservation.

I picture these NWF supporters as dedicated to protecting the natural world and to curbing the ecologically reckless excesses of human society. I imagine some of these benefactors living on limited fixed incomes but nevertheless determined to share their money with the cause of conservation. I think of such people every time my work requires me to spend NWF funds.

Until recently, I never had a chance to thank these contributors personally for their support. But this year, as Thanksgiving approaches, NWF offered staff the opportunity to phone individual donors directly and show our appreciation for their generosity.

Saying Thank You

As part of this process I phoned 30 people. Most of my contact with these folks came in the form of their answering machines, but the individuals with whom I actually talked seemed surprised that NWF would take the time to thank donors personally. From my perspective, I would suggest that it is a pity we can contact only a small fraction of the thousands of people who make the Federation’s work possible.

I talked with other staff who also made calls. Pat Raitt, NWF associate vice-president for development, said he was impressed with the enthusiasm he encountered when he reached donors. “One said, ‘Well, just so you know, we’re sending in a check this year, too,’” Raitt recalls. Another told him that she made NWF the beneficiary on her life insurance and “wanted to be sure we know it.”

Mark Wexler, editor of National Wildlife magazine, found that donors appreciated the calls. One told him that she gives to a number of groups, but NWF was the first to make a thank-you call. Another said, “It’s nice to get a call like this, where there is no motive other than to say thank you.”

Staff also enjoyed the nature of these calls. Garrit Voggesser, director of tribal lands in NWF’s Boulder, Colorado, office, said he was pleased with the opportunity to reach donors and supporters this way. “The holidays make a good time to pause in our work and thank these people for helping us get that work done,” he says.

One of the most moving calls was made by Diana Kalaly, an NWF executive assistant who is Hungarian by birth, when she reached a donor who is a 103-year-old doctor with a Hungarian surname. “After my quick thank you,” Diana told me, “he said: ‘This is wonderful, if you are just calling to say thank you. But if you are calling for more money, I usually wait until the second half of December to see how much money I have left after the holidays.’ I quickly reassured him that I was just calling to say thank you. He thanked me for pronouncing his name correctly, and guess what? It turns out he is Hungarian. From there we had a great conversation in Hungarian, and he said he thought it was very important to protect wildlife and he thanked me for the call. What are the odds of this happening?” 

Individual Members

I found that the calls helped me to get a better understanding of our donors and of their commitment to the NWF cause. Some radiated a personality that gave you a sense of why they were NWF partners. My favorite was a South Carolinian who declared via answering machine, “I’m out looking for the sun. I’ll get back to you if I find it.”

To the extent that the sun is a metaphor for better days, you might say that all of us who work for or support NWF are seeking a brighter future for wildlife, people and the planet. Consequently, the Federation observes Thanksgiving this year as a special moment in which staff can say thanks to all our partners in conservation for enabling our search for sunlight.

Donor Opportunities

Do you want to help conserve wildlife and wild places? NWF has just launched a new online portal called “Choose Your Cause.” Just click on the cause you care about most and enjoy inspiring stories from folks on the ground who are working tirelessly to protect the wildlife and wild places we all love.

Watch Asian carp spread across the country.  Then, see how invasive mussels traveled to California.

In less than 30 seconds, one map traces the spread of Asian carp from a pond in Arkansas in 1975 to 23 states and counting today. In less than 20 seconds a second map shows how Zebra and quagga mussels spread from ballast water dumped in Lake Erie in 1986 to all the Great Lakes, two Canadian provinces and33 states in the U.S.   

Asian carp, zebra and quagga mussels are all filter feeders. They strip the ecosystem of food that many fish depend on to survive. Zebra and quagga mussels are causing the population of many fish in the Great Lakes to plummet. Add the voracious Asian carp to the mix, and most native fish in the Great Lakes could starve. 

Take action to advance the Stop Asian Carp Act!

These maps enable us to visualize just how quicky invasive species can move once they get loose.  A flimsy elecric barrier is all that stands between jumping, jumbo-sized Asian carp and the Great Lakes.  But it’s not just the Great Lakes that are in jeapardy.  Zebra and quagga mussels spread from the Great Lakes to infest most of the U.S.

It is imperative that we reestablish the separation between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basins so that destructive invasive species like Asian carp, zebra and quagga mussels do not spread between them, engangering wildlife and degrading habitat forever.

 I hope you will join me at National Wildlife Federation’s 75^th Anniversary Gala on April 13 in Washington D.C.  We’ll honor Robert Redford and the many other conservation heroes who have helped protect wildlife.

 Here is my upcoming editorial in National Wildlife magazine which addresses a critical component of what we need to do to protect wildlife today:  create a national clean energy policy.

 In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama promised to end billions of dollars of annual giveaways to fossil fuel interests, get a million electric cars on the road and set a goal that “by 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.” He was not the first to make such a pledge. On a segment of his television show that aired during last year’s BP oil spill, comedian Jon Stewart showed video clips of the past eight presidents— Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama— each promising to end our addiction to fossil fuels.

 Yet today our country is more dependent on fossil fuels and more vulnerable to unintended consequences than ever before. In 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations released a report titled National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency, which warned that “the lack of sustained attention to energy issues is undercutting U.S. foreign policy and U.S. national security. Major energy suppliers— from Russia to Iran to Venezuela—have been increasingly able and willing to use their energy resources to pursue their strategic and political objectives.”

 Failed energy policies are making us not only more vulnerable politically, but also more economically unstable. In a recent analysis, the National Defense Council Foundation reported that the hidden costs of imported oil include: 

• Almost $49.1 billion in annual defense expenditures to defend the flow of Persian Gulf oil;

• The loss of 828,400 jobs in the U.S. economy;

• Annual losses of $159.9 billion to the country’s Gross National Product;

• Annual losses of $13.4 billion in federal and state revenues; and

• Total annual economic penalties amounting to between $297.2 billion and $304.9 billion.

The report concluded if these costs were reflected at the gasoline pump, the price of a gallon of gasoline would exceed $5.25. But instead of paying the true costs at the pump, we are passing on the bill in the form of a financial and environmental debt to our children’s generation—with interest.

Solving the energy crisis will create a promising pathway to restart the economy with millions of private sector jobs. In 2008, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and the Center

for American Progress jointly published a report called Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy.  Among other things, it concluded that building a clean energy economy through a comprehensive low-carbon energy strategy would create 2 million U.S. jobs by “investing in retrofitting buildings, expanding mass transit and freight rail, constructing smart-energy grids, and expanding production of wind and solar power and next-generation biofuels.”

Why have eight presidents failed to deliver on a rational plan that provides clean, secure energy to run the nation’s economy while protecting the environment?  Sadly, the answer is that 700 oil and coal lobbyists who buy access to the halls of Congress have far more political horsepower than even our president. Their power comes from their limitless capacity to dole out campaign contributions and undisclosed independent expenditures to groups such as Americans for Prosperity. The result: the inability of Congress, in the face of all this dirty energy money, to set a new energy path for the country. In response to this threat to our national security, job growth and efforts to reduce the risks of climate change, National Wildlife Federation recently joined the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental organizations.  We also are working with a large number of business, sportsmen and faith groups.  These important partnerships unite millions of Americans in pursuit of a clean environment and green economy.

Together, we are working to gain passage of comprehensive clean energy and climate change legislation that is based on two overriding principles: the best scientific advice on pollution reduction targets and solutions that create and save millions of U.S. jobs.

We are committed to forging a large movement all across the country to challenge powerful vested interests that are thwarting progress on energy security. The future of wildlife and the future of our economy depend on our ability to establish a national clean energy policy. To learn more about NWF’s work promoting clean energy policies, visit www.nwf.org/globalwarming.

“For the nature of tomorrow, we must be the change that the world desperately needs today”

 Also posted on National Wildlife magazine:

I HAVE LONG THOUGHT of the National Wildlife Federation as part of my family. After all, the organization had only existed for 14 years when I was born into an outdoors-oriented family that was one of its earliest champions. Mom and Dad belonged to the Breakneck Beagle Club, one of the Federation’s many local affiliates at the time. Dad was the club’s membership secretary and I remember sitting at our dining room table stuffing envelopes for mailings, which always included NWF stamp art sheets to encourage donations to the National Wildlife Federation.

Three mentors from my youth became prominent NWF board members and one of them, Lenny Green, became chair of the board. I owe a lot to Lenny and the others for helping to steer me into a career in conservation. Much has changed since those early days, but NWF is still one big family devoted to a common purpose: to inspire Americans to protect wildlife for our children’s future.

That family has included a long list of dedicated people who have played key roles in our organization’s 75-year history. Many prominent people served as volunteers on our board and as Wildlife Week chairs, including “Ding” Darling, Aldo Leopold, Shirley Temple-Black, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, Stewart Udall, Hopalong Cassidy, John Denver and this year’s recipient of the J.N. “Ding” Darling Conservationist of the Year medal, Robert Redford. You may not know the names of other volunteer and staff leaders who are no longer with us, such as Jay Hair, Tom Kimball, Trudy Farrand, John and Bob Strohm, John M. Phillips, Havilah Babcock, Ross Leffler, Fred Scroggins, Cliff Young, Ralph Abele, Maurice K. Goddard, Charlie Shaw, Doug Miller and Craig Tufts, but each were important strands woven into NWF’s varied and colorful quilt.

For 75 years, our annual meetings have been special events where the NWF family gathers to celebrate our efforts to protect wildlife. During those events, we have had our share of laughter. Who can forget Kermit the Frog, who supported our work for many years and served as chair of Wildlife week, officially announcing his run for president of the United States during the 1984 annual meeting in Atlanta? As the audience shouted “Run, Kermit, run,” the tuxedoed Muppet promised to be the nation’s first truly green president.

We’ve also had our share of inspiring and touching moments. In one of his last public appearances, weakened by disease, Arthur Godfrey told us that while hospitalized he memorized sections of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and wanted to share them. Hearing Leopold’s beautifully written words in Godfrey’s deep melodious voice at the annual meeting was, for me, a deeply moving experience.

At another annual meeting in 1985, we honored Congressman Morris Udall for a lifetime of conservation accomplishments. Though hobbled by advancing Parkinson’s disease, Mo talked about his deep passion for nature, punctuating his remarks with his unquenchable humor. In his parting words, he urged us to fight on. Knowing that we may never see him again, we cheered and cried as this courageous leader made his slow course off the NWF stage. Since then, we have not forgotten Mo’s charge to fight on. Neither has the Udall family. Both Senator Mark Udall of Colorado and Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico are clarion voices for conservation.

Looking forward, we will continue to stand with the Udalls and with the other families all across America that cannot bear the thought of losing wildlife or wild places. NWF is needed more than ever today to protect important public lands for wildlife, to restore damaged habitats and waters, and to confront climate change.

We are facing uncertain times with the planet becoming overdosed with heat-trapping carbon pollution. Scientists have repeatedly warned us that we must act now. We must do everything possible to help fish and wildlife adapt to a warming world. Above all, we must find solutions to this grave threat to our children’s future. For the nature of tomorrow, we must be the change that the world desperately needs today.

This year’s 75th annual NWF meeting promises to be a special gathering of some of America’s greatest conservationists who are working together to tackle these urgent challenges. It is my privilege to serve with so many dedicated volunteers, donors and staff leaders who continue to shape our organization as a stalwart voice for wildlife in the 21st century. You can be a part of the celebration at this upcoming historic meeting in Washington D.C., on April 13.