online: Ed, was an awareness of nature and environment part of your upbringing?

Ed Clark: I had the great good fortune of having an aunt and uncle who spent a lot of time with me. Literally every single weekend, from the time I was just a couple of years old until I was in my early teens, I spent with my aunt and uncle. For the first five years or so, this time was spent on a piece of property they had near the Chesapeake Bay. Until today, my favorite place on earth is a small cabin that at least I like to remember I helped my uncle build, but more likely I was in the way while he was building. It's a sixteen by twenty-foot concrete block cabin in Southern Pennsylvania, in the middle of fifty acres of forest. When I was growing up, that was as close to the Garden of Eden as I could imagine.

online: You taught in a school for the deaf from 1973 to 1978. What did you learn there?

Ed: Well, what I learned there is an awareness of other people's issues. I learned to think about things from other people's points of view... the simple things that so many of us take for granted. I'll never forget the day that we had a fire drill at the school. We all went trooping outside and had lined up when we realized that one of the classes hadn't heard the bell at all. They were still sitting in their room, working away while the drill was going on. It made me aware of how critically important sound is to folks. Language, as an example, letters are nothing more than symbols for sounds. Deafness is much, much more than the absence of sound. It really has sensitized me to an awful lot of challenges that other people face.

online: What did you teach there?

Ed: The first year, I taught cabinet making. The second year, I taught a course for special education kids called "life skills," which was a course of my own invention. It included such things as map reading, how to follow directions, first aid and nature studies, surprisingly enough. It was designed, basically, for children who had very limited communication with their families. Many of these deaf children came from hearing families and, unfortunately and tragically, many of these families didn't know how to use sign language. They were scarcely able to communicate with their own children. Many of these kids didn't know how to do things like hobbies. They just didn't have that in their experience. It was a good opportunity to share with them some skills they would need to function normally in the world... how to balance a checkbook, for example. After designing this class and teaching it for a year, they decided I wasn't certified to teach it so they gave it to somebody else (laughs). I taught history and math for three years.

online: Did you leave there fluent in American Sign Language?

Ed: I came out as an interpreter, actually, so I'm really quite capable of cheating at charades. My intention was never to teach. I was going to go to law school but I couldn't quite bring myself to go straight out of undergraduate, so I decided to sit out for a year. I taught for a year, really enjoyed it and was accepted to law school a second time. I decided to sit out one more year. It finally dawned on me that what I was really doing was avoiding law school, so I just gave up the law school idea. One of the smartest decisions I ever made.

online: What was the process that led you to become president of the Virginia Wilderness Committee, and how did all of that come together to bring you to where you are today?

Ed: When I was at Bridgewater College in the Shenandoah Valley, there was an awful lot of public land around us like the George Washington National Forest. Being rather impoverished as a college student, one of my favourite places to go with a date was out into the forest to a particularly beautiful area and maybe go camping for the weekend or go for a picnic or a long walk. It made me look very sensitive and it was also very cheap, so it worked out well. After I graduated from college, I went back to that area and was absolutely horrified to find that the whole area had been clear-cut. There was nothing but a sea of stumps in this area that was so special to me. I was so angry, and yet I didn't really know at whom I should be angry. The land was there. It was public land. I used it, but I had never paid any attention to how it was managed, who managed it, what the issues were or what the risks were. That created an ember that simmered away in me.

Several years later a fellow who subsequently became my mentor approached me through a mutual friend. I was teaching deaf children and using audio-visuals a lot. Photography has always been a hobby of mine and he asked me to prepare a slide presentation for him about wilderness and wilderness designation. He brought this box of slides in and dumped them on the table and said, "Here you go. Put them together." My first question was "What is it you want to say? What's the message here?" He said: " You put the slides together and I'll think of something." I thought "that foolish old man. He's as crazy as can be." I had to set out to do the research on wilderness and put together the message and the slide program. It was years later that I realized that what he was doing was casting bait in the water, knowing that my ego would kick right in. I managed to put together the program and become very involved in the issue. I really came to understand why my favorite area was clear-cut and what the issues were surrounding it. It became an eight-year-long battle that subsequently resulted in the designation of about eighty-four thousand acres of public land in Virginia as wilderness areas. I feel very good about having led that effort.

online: How long did it take, from conception to realization, for you to found the Wildlife Center? Was it a frustrating battle?

Ed: Well, actually it wasn't much of a frustrating battle... perhaps in hindsight I wish it had been. The old rule, "be careful what you wish for" really comes true! On October 3, 1982, while sitting around with my former wife and another couple, the issue came up of wild animals being brought to the veterinary technology department at Blue Ridge Community College in Western Virginia where my former colleague, Stuart Porter, is the head of the veterinary program. Stuart is a former zoo vet and he had managed to get himself in real trouble with the president of the college because they had built a new building for large animal medicine. He had filled the large animal building with wild animals. The president of the college didn't exactly know that but discovered it one day while bringing a group of VIPs through. He was embarrassed and not particularly happy, so Stuart was lamenting this fact.

At that time, I had left a stint in Washington, D.C. where I was an executive with a national environmental organization. I was working as a management and a political consultant for conservation groups, so I was traveling all over the United States doing leadership development, training programs, and essentially campaign and program development. I just went into consultant mode and said, "Well, here's what you need to do. You need to start an organization, establish a center, get some people behind you, become non-profit, do this, do that... piece of cake!" I won't share with you the exact words of his response, but they certainly expressed incredulity very quickly. He basically said, "You can't do it." I said, "Yes, you can." Testosterone poisoning kicked right in. The dare was on the table. The bet was there.

Exactly one month and six days later, the organization was incorporated as The Shenandoah Valley Wildlife Treatment and Rehabilitation Center... a name that lives in absolutely no one's memory but my own! Within five weeks, we were receiving our first patients. My former wife and I lived on a large farm. We had a ten-stall horse barn on that farm and half of it was sitting empty, so we converted those stalls to cages and we converted the hayloft to a metal cage area. Because of our connections - my experience in organization management and Stuart's connections with the university system - we managed to get our hands on some surplus equipment. We were in business. It took a rather meteoric rise from day one. During our first ten years we experienced, annually, a twenty-five percent increase in patient load, a twenty-five percent increase in our education programs, a twenty-five percent increase in our budget and, fortunately, a twenty-seven percent increase in our income. It was quite dramatic.

online: Has it become what you initially envisioned, gone beyond that, or are there still things that you would like to see happen with the center?

Ed: Oh, we're just getting started--after seventeen years. I tend to suffer from megalomania in some ways. I guess one of the things that is both my blessing and my curse is the ability to see what could be and probably not enough discretion to know what can't be. Having come out of the national environmental movement in the late seventies when it was quite new and idealism was quite strong and then having seen the environmental movement hunker down in the trenches during the Reagan years, I guess I clung to my idealism. I also very quickly developed a pragmatic and businesslike approach to implementing my ideals. That, fortunately, has helped us.

The thing that I hope the Wildlife Center of Virginia will do is to empower others to change the world. One organization can't do it. I certainly can't do it alone. It took me a while to learn that. It distresses me when I see some of my young colleagues, and some who are maybe not so young but at least inexperienced colleagues, start every sentence with "I". "I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. I've done this. I've done that." In fact, very few of the significant accomplishments anyone makes are made alone. The sooner you recognize that and begin to build your network and collaborate, the more effective you will eventually be.

online: Tell us about the center today. How large is it? What's your caseload like? How many people do you have working there?

Ed: We like to think of the Wildlife Center of Virginia as the leading wildlife hospital in the country and we distinguish that from wildlife rehabilitation center. The Wildlife Center of Virginia is a teaching hospital. Our mission is not to fix broken animals. Our mission is to teach the world to care about and care for wildlife and the environment. That mission statement was very carefully crafted and each word was carefully chosen. Teaching is the core of what we do. We have a state-of-the-art, vet school-quality hospital. 1999 looks like something of a record year and we'll receive in the neighborhood of 2800 animals. That's been relatively stable. That's up about ten percent over our average for the last ten years. There are explanations for that anomaly.

In caring for the animals, everything we do is part of the teaching process. We have, in all departments of our organization, opportunities for people to learn from our professional staff as they go about the business of doing their professional work. We have 21 staff members... employees... and 15 of them are full-time. We have a cash budget of 3/4 of a million dollars next year and about another 1/4 million in "in kind" contributions, services and materials. We are roughly a one million-dollar operation. Be careful what you wish for when you think you'd like a million-dollar budget because it means every year you've got to bring in a million dollars. We are an organization that has been very fortunate.

The hospital itself is a little less than six thousand square feet. That includes our medical treatment areas, our offices and the area where our education staff work. We are not a nature center. We do not have a public visitation center, so that's just where our team does their thing. We also have a 3 1/2 acre compound that is filled with animal holding cages and flight cages, the largest of which is 200 feet long. We have approximately 40,000 square feet of animal enclosures. We have seven large flight cages that are anywhere from 40 to 50 feet long. The 200-foot cage is 15 feet wide and 16 feet tall. It's an L-shaped cage that can be subdivided into two 100-foot cages. The average flight cages are 9 or 10 feet tall. We fly in the face of convention because through experience, we have come to believe that a long, low flight cage forces the birds to fly more vigorously. There's no gliding involved, getting from one end to the other. They've got to maintain control of their altitude and they've got to work to get from one side to the other. There's no "jump off the perch, take three flaps and glide to the other end of the cage". It can't be done in a cage that's 9 feet tall and 50 feet long. Most of our flight cages are 8 to 10 feet wide and average 45 feet long. We have two fawn yards that are 40 feet square and we've got four fawn isolation pens that are about 8 feet by sixteen feet. We've got a small mammal building that is outdoor caging for squirrels, flying squirrels and possums. That building is about 20 by 32 feet. Then we have a passerine flight building that has five 8 by 12 cages. That building is 16 by 40 feet.

We have a large complex of cages for our permanent animals. One of the things that I can really point to at the Wildlife Center of Virginia exists there because of a session that I attended at a rehab conference. It is one of our most efficient and most effective flight complexes for small raptors. It is a building that is 40 feet square and the center of the building is a 16 by 40-foot open courtyard. Off one side are 8-foot holding cages for screech owls and kestrels and on the other side are 16-foot holding cages for Cooper's hawks, broad wings, sharpies and red-shouldered hawks. All of those side cages open into that central courtyard, which is, itself, a flight cage. Our experience and most people's experience is that a raptor just sits in a flight cage most of the day. I attended a session and someone from up in the Midwest had cages shaped like a "Y" with a swinging door between the branches of the "Y". They'd put an owl in one side and a hawk in the other and in the morning they'd swing the door over and close the owl into the small wing and let the hawk have the dogleg portion of the "Y". At night, they'd swing the door the other way and give the owl the dogleg portion of the "Y". That was a backyard cage, and of course we needed much higher volume. We treat approximately 400 birds of prey a year, so we really need to crank some through. What we do is have those rooms open into the central courtyard, which gives us a double enclosure. Then we'll send two or three people to service the cages. One person will go in and clean the cage and the other two will take that patient out into the exercise area. They exercise the bird, monitor its flight and keep daily records on its performance and its aerobic recovery rate, which is one of our key indicators of release conditioning. It's worked out beautifully.

online: Although people often say "Ed's not just another pretty face", your pretty face is, in fact, seen on Animal Planet on a regular basis. Were you comfortable with that sort of public work, or did it require some effort to overcome stage fright?

Ed: Stage fright is not something I have ever been accused of. I know you're not here for the Freudian analysis, but part of it was that when I was a kid, I was really short. I was constantly being picked on and the only way to defend myself was to develop the ability to talk my way out of trouble. Sometimes it was talking that got me into trouble, but in any case, it was something that I was encouraged to do. I've always been sort of a pathological extrovert. What a lot of folks don't know is that I actually hosted a program on public television for five years called "Virginia Outdoors". I've done television work for ten years and public radio work before that as an adjunct to the work at the Wildlife Center. I used to do environmental commentaries on a regional public radio station.

The work with Animal Planet has actually been no work at all, in that sense. Now showing on Animal Planet are a number of films that I did last year with Turner Broadcasting that have now been sold to Animal Planet. I did two films last year and have another one coming up within the next year and a half to two years. One was with Dave Jessup who is the California state wildlife vet and it was actually a profile of Dave called "Wildlife Vet". The celebrity hostess was Alicia Silverstone. Dave's work was highlighted and I went out to California to help Dave and his crew catch sea otters in Monterey Bay and talk about the significance of his veterinary work with individual animals and how that relates to a larger environmental program... the clean water act, particularly. They're worried that run-off and pollution are hurting the otters and, of course, my career is not as a rehabilitator; but an environmentalist and a conservationist. As such, I've spent many years working on the legislation and the policies that protect the environment in which our animals all live.

online: Education is probably the most important tool we have. You educate on many levels, including international media. Are you seeing the results of this work?

Ed: Absolutely. I did my graduate work in education and, as the mission of the Wildlife Center suggests, I believe very strongly in teaching people to care for and about wildlife and the environment. It's what we wholeheartedly believe in. The "caring about" part of it is to sensitize people. Give them an investment and an emotional relationship to the environment, an intellectual relationship to wildlife and then give them the skills... whether it's the daily life skills or the rehabilitation or veterinary skills to take that concern and translate it into a tangible benefit for wildlife.

I remember when we first started doing the education programs for the Wildlife Center of Virginia in 1983. We were feeling pretty smug because in 1983 we gave programs to six thousand children. We'll do six thousand children in a good month now. Usually March and April are "ten thousand kid" months for us. We'll now reach eighty-five thousand people and about 75% of those are children in elementary school. What we have seen in the fifteen years or so we've been doing this is that the sophistication of kids is dramatically increased, in large part due to the high quality of nature programming that they're getting through Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and through public television with programs like "Nature".

We are also seeing that the public awareness across the board, not just with children, is changing. Today, it is unusual for us to receive a hawk that's been shot. When we started fifteen years ago, it was unusual to find a hawk that had come in with anything other than a gunshot wound. We think that's pretty significant. We find people now far more willing to invest the time and energy to rescue and deliver to our care an animal like an opossum, a box turtle or even a snake. A lot of folks still don't like 'em but there are more and more people all the time who don't allow that sort of ignorant dislike to manifest itself in a malicious and violent response. We see education making a huge, huge difference.

On the professional level it’s the training that we do. We also see education making a difference there, because through organizations like IWRC and others we are very active. We have our own series of training programs. We have our own conference. We teach about 25 to 27 skills classes every year at all levels. That's just through our organization, in our region. We have a conference that comes up in November and this will be our fourth year. We anticipate between 200 and 250 wildlife rehabilitators from about six or seven states. What we do at our conference is to present things that are complimentary to our skills training. We are not going to have people come to a conference where networking and interaction is so important and to do things in that opportune setting that can be done some other way. We talk about things at our conference such as ethics, decision-making, collaboration, public information and things of this nature. We can teach somebody how to feed a baby bird any time.

online: You spend a lot of time traveling as a sort of wildlife ambassador. Are you seeing progress on the international level?

Ed: Yes, we do see a change on an international level. The surprising thing to an awful lot of people is in terms of international black market. The leading illegal trade internationally is, of course, drugs. The second illegal trade internationally is firearms. The third is wildlife and wildlife parts. That is a staggering thing for people to comprehend. We are working right now primarily in Latin America. We've been working for about three years in Costa Rica and during September 1999, we attended two conferences and have been doing work in South America in the countries of Columbia and Chile. We found very quickly after our first soiree into Central America that what wildlife rehabilitation is in the United States has little or no relevance to what wildlife rescue and rehabilitation is in Latin America. We're not talking about cat-caught birds. We're talking about a massive problem in wildlife trafficking - a massive problem. Part of that, certainly, is the international trade – it’s probably the largest part of it. We see an awful lot of publicity about the smuggling of birds, such as parrots, iguanas, monkeys and cats to countries like the United States, Europe, the Far East, Japan, Hong Kong... all great consumers of these animals. It's very much a vacuum cleaner operation. They take every one they can find and, through volume, make up for the very high attrition rate that occurs when these animals are being shipped. They may take ten parrots and if one of them reaches the retail marketplace, that's probably better than most.

We're working with the governments, with the rescue centers and with other institutions... non-governmental organizations. We're working in partnership with many of these places with U.S. organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society International, which has sponsored most of our work in Costa Rica. In South America, as a result of the start that the Humane Society gave, local organizations are now beginning to get involved. That's how we've been involved there. We are working to give them the skills necessary to receive these animals that have been in illegal captivity. Through our veterinary program and through my colleague Ned Gentz, we are working with veterinary rescue personnel to handle the basics of an exam. They learn the basic policies and protocols of quarantine, disease diagnosis and nutritional remediation. Many of these animals come in horribly malnourished with metabolic bone disease or other types of problems. All of these animals suffer from behavioral disabilities.

online: We've seen that sort of thing on television. It's difficult to watch.

Ed: You don't need to go very far to see it, unfortunately. Anybody in this country who has an exotic animal that is a wild-caught exotic animal is just as much part of that problem as the person who is killing the mothers to get the babies.

online: Is that message getting out?

Ed: That message is not getting out. In the same way that the drug user in the United States is ultimately part of the drug criminal ring that is crippling a country like Columbia, the person who consumes exotic pets in this country is very much a problem. We have this wonderful way in this country of absolving ourselves of responsibility. We drink coffee and criticize people for cutting down the rain forest to grow it. We've got a real ability to put up blinders and to forgive ourselves or absolutely fail to accept our responsibilities.

To get back to your question, the things that we are dealing with there are very complex. We're dealing with a long cultural history. At the same time, we're dealing with the training, veterinary and rehabilitation issues, facility design issues and animal management issues. My particular role is to talk about the human dimensions. How does the rescue center deal with farmers in the countryside? How do they deal with the government agencies? We in this country can point our fingers at everybody else in the world and say, "Well, why don't they just enforce the laws?" In the country of Costa Rica, as an example, which is thought of as being the most environmentally sensitive country in Central America, a recent survey was conducted by a professional international polling firm. They went door-to-door and took a sampling of 1200 homes and found that one in four either currently has, or in the last five years has had an illegal wild pet. If they go in and confiscate those animals, which is the cliche, knee-jerk answer that people in this country might give, the question is begged, "what are they going to do with them?" Right now, every rescue center we have visited in any Latin American country is full - full to the brim - overfilled, in most cases. They are struggling to keep going. The confiscation of all the animals out there would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 180,000 animals at one time. Now, what's going to happen to those animals? We are not able to come in with "one size fits all" answers. It took us about thirty seconds to realize. What we think we know in this country is just not relevant to other people's experience and what we need to do first, in order to help them, is learn from them and then take our experience and our expertise and adapt it to their conditions.

online: That's very depressing.

Ed: I guess the thing that keeps me going is the fact that most of our work in wildlife care and rehabilitation or even in education is done on faith. We do our work, we free our animals, we talk to the children and we leave. We hope that something that we have done has made a difference. I have a little treasure chest of letters and things that I've received and the older I get, unfortunately, the more of them there are. This is a good thing, but it's also a curse because people who write letters say: "When I was in elementary school you came to my school and now you're at my children's school." I hate that. But one of the things in which I take great pride... I don't take credit, but I certainly take pride... is to look back on the career paths of a couple of people. When we first got started, I met a young woman named Jamie Reaser. Jamie was about 13 or 14 years old, going on 63. She wanted to do a science fair project about predation. Frankly, I just didn't want to fool with her. She was wanting more than I felt we had time to do. She honestly just bugged the fire out of me until I finally said, "Okay already. We'll help you do it." I think about the few hours that we invested at that time and one of the reasons she was so fired up about it was that her grandparents lived next door to Len Souci at the Raptor Trust. Lennie, of course, is one of the legends of wildlife rehabilitation and one of my dearest friends.

This young woman did a science project on "What is a barn owl worth?" She literally got permits to go out and trap mice and measure how much grain they would eat. She interviewed horse farmers in Charlottesville, Virginia, where big horse country is, to find out how much damage was done to tack and other things through rodents. She figured out how many mice a barn owl would eat, not counting the multiplier effect of feeding young. How long is their average life span? She calculated that over its life, one barn owl living in a horse barn in Albemarle County, Virginia, would be worth one hundred and ten thousand dollars. Some of the assumptions that she made were not as sophisticated as they might have been, but they were more sophisticated and more thought provoking than you would possibly have imagined. She won the science fair in her school. She won the biological division of the science fair in the State of Virginia and she was runner-up in the National Science Fair Competition in Chicago that year.

She went on to become a volunteer at our center. Of course, we became quite invested in her career. Today, she is a P.H.D. Conservation biologist, having studied with Paul Erlich at Stanford University and she is one of the biodiversity officers for the U.S. State Department, setting environmental policies for our Foreign Service worldwide. She is managing the U.S. policy on coral reefs, on biodiversity and on amphibian conservation. I think of what might have happened if I had just said, "I'm sorry, we don't have time for you."

I don't take any credit for what she's done in spite of some of the dedications in some of the books she's written. But I look back at that and say, "Now, there's an example that I'm not changing the world, but by opening a door or at least being receptive to somebody who maybe has the capability to change the world, something really important is happening. One animal, one experience in saving an animal - like taking a small bird from a child who has rescued it - can have an impact in that child's life and through that child on the world that we'll never know.

online: You like scuba diving. What does scuba diving do for you?

Ed: Scuba diving gives me a chance to literally immerse myself in the natural world and not be responsible for it. The focus that is necessary to be a good diver (I'm certified as a master scuba diver) is very much a form of meditation for me. When I'm diving particularly at night, which is my favourite time to dive, to watch the intricacies of life in the oceans is staggering. The more you look, the more you see. So many divers that are in it for a target heart rate or some kind of adrenaline rush from seeing the big shark or whatever it may be miss what's there. It's just like the person that goes to Yellowstone and only wants to see a grizzly bear and misses out on the other things that exist in such a beautiful place.

The good part about diving is that it makes me one with a world about which I care and to which I've dedicated my life. The bad part about it is that in the last four years, I have seen in some of my favourite diving areas a catastrophic decline in the quality of coral reefs. Within the last eighteen months, something in the neighbourhood of sixty-five percent of the world's coral reef systems have experienced a very dangerous problem called bleaching. The beautiful colors are gone from many of these reefs. The coral is pure white. If that continues, over time these animals (each coral head is a community of individual animals) can't survive. It's thought to be primarily a function of global warming. Coral reefs live in a very narrow temperature band in the oceans, which is why they're only found at certain depths anywhere around the world. As the temperature increases, it gets outside that tolerance level. Coral doesn't migrate. It can't get up and move. Unfortunately, some of my favourite areas in the Florida Keys - reef systems that four years ago were considered among the most beautiful in the Keys - are dead. What that does for me is it just reinforces my personal investment. We can't leave it to other people. Every one of us within our own capacity, whether it's housewife, business man, school child, wildlife rehabilitator or professional environmentalist... every one of us has our share of the problem for which we are responsible. I drive a car, probably too much. There are places that I go in airplanes. I have a hot tub. These are things that are my contribution to the global warming problem and yet I do have an opportunity through my organization, through my experience, and through the mentoring I received from others wiser and more experienced than I, to do what I can.

online: Is there hope?

Ed: Of course there's hope. Absolutely, there's hope. We see all over the world situations that were once thought to be catastrophic or irreversible problems now turning around. Some of the rivers in this country that used to catch fire are now places where people go to swim. It's not going to happen easily. As the world becomes a more complex place and as we close in on six billion people, those problems are going to become far more complex. We're not going to be able to approach them with parochial attitudes. Yes, there's hope. Look at a species like the Eastern Bluebird. It was essentially gone and has been brought back truly and simply through human intervention.

We have seen endangered species such as the Bald Eagle recover its population to the point where we can have a discussion about removing it from the protected list or from the endangered species list. That's hope. Look at the restoration of habitats. Here in Southern Arizona, The Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge was at one time overgrazed bare dirt. Through conservation efforts it is now restored as the Sonoran Grassland. Pronghorn are back. Birds that haven't been seen in Southern Arizona in fifty years are back. There is hope. On the other hand, there is also a sense of urgency. We have all got to embrace our personal responsibilities. Because we have some responsibility, we also have an opportunity to make it better.

online: Are you familiar with a book called Ishmael?

Ed: I'm familiar with the book.

online: The implication is that it's ten thousand years of farming and the mentality of our culture that is largely responsible for what has befallen this planet. Do you think we're turning that around?

Ed: I don't think we're turning that around yet, but I think we've got it in our sights. I think the problem of an exploitative ethic is part of Judeo/Christian culture. "God gave us this earth to use". Somehow, the people that embrace that mindset missed the chapter on stewardship. They missed the interpretation on having been given dominion over the earth. We also have responsibility to care for it. That, unfortunately, is something that we still overlook. We pretend to look at somebody else as the problem: it's the corporation, it's the big polluter, it's the Third World, it's this and it's that. In the infamous words of Pogo, "we have seen the enemy and it is us."

online: Do you think there's hope for the burrowing owl?

Ed: I think that there's hope for the burrowing owl in the sense that we are beginning to embrace ecosystems instead of species. The demise of the burrowing owl, in large part, has come about from the war on prairie dogs. We had cattlemen killing prairie dogs so that cows wouldn't break their legs, so they could take more off the land. They'd eat the grass down to the dirt so that we could have cheap beef. With the demise of the prairie dog came the demise of the burrow, and with the demise of the burrow came the demise of the owl, the black-footed ferret and many other species.

At least here, in the United States, one of the organizations with which I'm involved, The National Wildlife Federation, has filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the black-tailed prairie dog as a threatened species. That animal is still killed as a varmint in most of its range and yet we find that this animal has been reduced to one or two percent of its original range. If that's not threatened as a species, I don't know what is. That range has been fragmented so that there are vulnerabilities. Conservation biology is the way of the future, where we look at conserving systems, eco-regions, watersheds and food webs. We have tended to try this surgical Band-Aid approach to conservation. It won't work.

online: We live at the edge of the boreal forest, near a provincial park. People who have cottages there complain about bears and want them killed. That mentality is one of the real problems.

Ed: Part of that is very much still the manifestation of the European mentality of "management of nature". The debate that goes on in resource management is "are we the guardians of things wild or are we simply gardeners of things wild?" Certainly if you go to the forest in Germany, you don't find a diverse biological community. You find the animals there that they want there, as if nature is some type of a catalogue. People have been conditioned to believe that we have ultimate control. Since the industrial revolution, we have tried to answer every problem with technology, every problem with an intervention. That mindset, that we are bigger than nature as opposed to being part of nature, is something that's going to take a hundred years to get rid of. People who go to the arboreal forests are people who want to be close to nature but for some reason, they just don't know what nature is. They have some calendar picture version of what nature is, some two-dimensional sanitized Walt Disney version of nature in which all the little animals are really little people in fur coats and feathers. When they confront real nature, they're ill equipped to deal with it.

That's one of the reasons why I feel so strongly that education of children is going to be a problem if we fail to vigorously embrace it. We are not going to change the values of adults. If you don't like snakes when you're twenty years old, I can talk to you until hell freezes over and I might get you to stop killing them, but I'll never get you to like them. The fact is that children form the values that they carry into adulthood when they're about ten to twelve-years-old, which to me is the most critical time for education, particularly environmental education. That's the age on which we focus our energies and that's the age on which I encourage my colleagues in the rehabilitation community to focus their energies. Teach values and ethics and some sense of responsibility. Let the teachers in school teach them the facts. We need to teach them to care. Once they care, they'll want to learn; but if they don't care, it doesn't matter.

online: When you've given a presentation and it's worked, and you receive enthusiastic stories, pictures or poems, you know that some of those children are going to be okay. That makes you realize that education really is the key.

Ed: It really is. Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of highly-motivated people can change the world. In fact, that's all that ever has." That is true. If we go into a school with three hundred kids and we reach six kids, those six kids carry that motivation into adulthood. Those six kids are going to be the small group of highly motivated people that lead the rest. It's a powerful opportunity. Through our work with animals, we have the capacity to make things accessible. One of my very strong beliefs is manifested in our education program. You know, we've reached nearly three-quarters of a million people with formal education programs in our seventeen years. We have animals in our rehabilitation centers across North America that are victims of virtually every environmental problem, whether it's habitat destruction, whether it's environmental contaminants, whether it's poaching, whether it's electric wire... what have you, you pick it.

When most environmental educators talk about the environment they talk about global problems and things on a grand scale to try and show the seriousness of the problem. For kids, that's an abstraction. When you talk about habitat loss by describing how many square miles of rainforest are lost every year, kids will shake their heads and sound like they're concerned, but they don't get it. It's an abstraction. Adults don't get it and when you talk to them about square miles in parts of the world they've never visited and countries they've never heard of.

What we do when we talk about habitat loss is we bring in a red-tailed hawk that was permanently disabled when she was still a chick in the nest because the tree in which that nest was located was bulldozed so that an amusement park could expand a roller coaster. Now, they didn't do it deliberately. That was, in fact, an accident...but then we asked the kids "how many of you like a roller coaster ride?" Most, of course, responded favorably. "How many of you like a hawk?" They all responded favorably. "Well, which do you like the most?" That's a non sequitur that challenges their thinking and certainly gets their attention. Then, when we explain that this hawk lost its wild life - it's freedom - so that you can have a roller coaster ride. Now, this hawk would live twenty years in the wild, but it will never live a day in the wild so that you can take a three-minute ride on a roller coaster. We're not indicting roller coasters because it could have been a power line, a road, a grocery store... it could have been a hospital. The bottom line that we're trying to illustrate is that for that bird, one tree was its habitat - one single tree.

Every single tree that is removed from the forest is the home of some wild creature. We're letting these kids meet one and look into the eyes of one animal that is the living embodiment of habitat loss or the victim of habitat loss. Then we start relating that back to the grand scale of how many oak trees are on an acre of ground. How many acres of ground are in a square mile? How many trees are in a square mile? Well, then how many square miles are being lost? How many trees is that? We are working within the curriculum so the teachers love this stuff, because suddenly this environmental lesson is a math lesson. Then we talk about an art lesson. Let's illustrate that. Let's do a poster. We talk about language skills...let's write letters. Then we also talk about personal responsibility because what are we going to write that letter on: a piece of paper. What's a piece of paper made from? It's made from a tree. Gosh, how many of you have made a mark on a piece of paper, then crumpled it up and thrown it away? Well, does that make you a part of the problem? It all boils down to when we leave that school and they think about a red-tailed hawk, they think about the personal responsibility they have. They think about the word habitat loss and they see that problem in the face of a red-tailed hawk.

I think our most powerful program, bar none, is our outdoor education program through which we bring children into the out-of-doors to spend the day in the forest, not as kids looking at animals, but as kids actually in the role of animals. We teach them in the classroom basic information about one of four animals that lives on our site. We've got 360 acres of national forest that is set off as a special use area for which we are responsible. That area is nothing special. It's just woods. It's special in its ordinariness. We have the kids go out as opossums, as snakes or as owls and we have a series of activities, which enable them to perceive the forest through the primary senses of their representative animal. The kids go out and they do a quick look around. They run through and do their kid thing...their human thing. But a kid who is an opossum has got to go through and smell the forest because that's how the opossum gets around.

We have a series of activities that we got from many other places. We didn't make up most of them. We'll say, "Go dig a hole in the soil. Smell it. What does it smell like?" In our part of the country we have sassafras that smells very much like root beer. We have a wild wintergreen population with twenty species. Certain molds smell just like chocolate. Other places smell just like old tennis shoes. We get the kids to think about that smell, mark their hole and then describe what their particular nose hole smells like and then see if the other kids can tell which one it is by the description of the aroma. We have games that have little scent cups so that they smell different things and try to describe everyday things based on what they smell like without seeing them. Many times these scents are familiar to them, but they're so connected in their normal life to a visual cue. We're removing their visual cue and then sometimes we'll describe: "this smells like such and such". This smells like bread cooking. What is it"? Well, it's yeast, for example.

We force the kids to begin to focus on that one particular sensory input. My favourite of all is the activity that we do with owls. Everybody knows that an owl sees in the dark, yet most people do not know that an owl's primary hunting mechanism is its sense of hearing, not it's sense of sight. Of course, most rehabilitators know that well. We take the kids out into a clearing in the forest, give each of them a clipboard and a blank piece of paper and instruct them to put a small x in the center of the piece of paper. That's you. Now, close your eyes and listen. Every place you hear a sound, you need to draw a little x on the map or a little picture of what you think that sound is. We're going to map the sounds of the forest. It takes thirty seconds. The kids sit there and some little boy will say, "I don't hear anything." Listen harder. "I still don't hear anything." Suddenly, somebody is going to get it. "There are birds over here, screaming in the trees. There's a grackle over here. There's a sparrow over here... a radio over there. Somebody's talking over there."

Suddenly, those kids that didn't hear anything in the forest hear the twig snap, the wind in the trees or grasshopper over there and there is a quantum leap in awareness that takes them to a plain of connectedness with that place that you can't teach them. They've got to experience it. They've got to discover it. Frankly, we don't give a damn whether they know what any of those sounds are. We don't care whether they know the name of a tree. Never again in their lives will they go into the forest and not hear anything. We've changed their perspective unalterably. We haven't done it by preaching at them or lecturing to them or making them read anything. They've gone out and experienced it. That knowledge and that awareness is theirs.

online: A lot of rehabilitators don't have the resources to take the kids into the woods and things of that nature, but anyone who does education can do that on a smaller scale.

Ed: The reason we do this program is to develop training materials that we essentially give away to other people. We don't want to do this program. We want to teach you to do this program. You can do this program on a vacant lot. You can do it on the seacoast. You can do it in an alpine forest or in the desert. It is not site-specific. We run it with volunteers. The way that our program is set up with the schools, we require the schools participating to have parent volunteers for each class: so many parents per so many kids and the teachers also have to participate.

We teach parents and teachers to lead the program. We go along simply as resource people, to coach. Our staff, who go and participate, are volunteer docents. They're not paid staff; they're people who are just private citizens. It's not science. That's the whole thing. It's not something for which you need to be a teacher or you need to be some technician or some biologist. You just need to know how to do it; but the big thing you need to know is how to keep your damned mouth shut and let the kids do it for themselves. We've taken this program to Latin America and tried it on a pilot basis. The hardest thing we found was not getting the kids to embrace the learning experience, but getting the teachers to shut up and stop trying to tell the kids what to do. The Latin American education system is very traditional. The concept of experiential education is very foreign.

online: What's the worst mistake you ever made and what did you learn from it?

Ed: The worst mistake I ever made was in not trusting my own judgment and not doing the right thing when I knew it was right and thinking that doing the right thing was going to get easier. That is not a single episode. How it manifested itself in the Wildlife Center is that the Wildlife Center needed to change its basic focus in order to fulfill the mission it had the potential to fulfill. Because that change was going to put our activities outside the comfort zone of some of the people involved with the Wildlife Center, I didn't encourage that change quickly enough. We lost a little momentum.

We're back, and right now in our organization, change is the constant. We are hiring people and telling them when they come in, "if you're not comfortable with change or you're not comfortable with growth, this is not the organization for you." One of the things I appreciate most is working with Ned Gentz, who is now the director of our veterinary program and a close personal friend as well as being a valued colleague. He tells people that one of the things he likes best about working at the Wildlife Center of Virginia is the fact that when somebody asks, "Why do you do that?" "Because we've always done it that way" is not an acceptable answer. I never thought about it like that, but I take that as a real compliment. I heard someone refer to it as "giving it the 'so what' test". That's my rule of thumb. When somebody comes in and says: "We're doing this and we're doing that" and my response is: "So what, (not always quite that cynically) don't tell me what you're doing. Tell me what change is going to be brought about as a result of having done it." That has become a real culture at the Wildlife Center. For so many of our colleagues in rehabilitation, it's a difficult thing. They're so focused on their activities that many times they don't spend enough time deciding what they want their accomplishments to be. Your activities and your accomplishments are not the same thing.

online: At the conference, we had a meeting of the ARC group, which is the IWRC Regional Representatives Program. We touched on the premise that, instead of rehabilitators working as individuals in their own little thing, we should network together. We should network not just with other rehabilitators, but with everyone in our communities. We should network with the parks department, with the local law enforcement people and so on, and as a result, we would all become a big cohesive unit.

Ed: I'm not sure there will ever be a cohesive unit, but at least a collaborative unit. One of the things in my career that has contributed significantly to my mindset is that I was trained and worked for a while as an environmental mediator. The training in mediation is the training to dissect and analyze conflict. Part of that training is to back away from the point of conflict far enough to arrive at a point of agreement and then move all the parties forward as far as you can in the direction of that conflict but building agreement as you go. So often conflicts, whether they are conflicts in communities or conflict between centers or most often, conflicts within centers, which are so ubiquitous within our line of work, are people arguing over different things. They are apples and oranges arguments. One person is saying, "you're not doing this right", when what they really mean is, "you're not giving me respect for the way that I do it." Another person is taking some other tact.

We tend, often, to criticize what other people do without stopping to ask why are they doing it that way or what are they hoping to accomplish as a result of doing it that way. We get criticism, as I'm sure many folks do for caring for "nuisance" species. "Why do you take care of a starling?" Why do you take care of a pigeon? We take care of starlings and pigeons and they get the same quality of medicine that everyone else does. People ask us about that. We often get that knee-jerk criticism. When we stop and point out to people "we're a teaching hospital. Every single animal that receives care is providing an opportunity for our students to learn." We train students from 3/4 of the veterinary schools in the United States and Canada. We train veterinary students from other countries as well. We train rehabilitators from all over the United States who come to our center to gain experience. We train people who are in wildlife management and environmental studies in wildlife rehabilitation, to give them the experience of not just how to get out and manipulate habitat in order to protect species; but to come to know the individuals that make up that species. People make their decisions based on their own realities and I guess one of the things that I've come to appreciate is if you don't understand other people, they'll never understand you. That's a tough one. That's a tough thing to teach to people who are very focused on animals.

online: So one has to be aware of parochial attitudes?

Ed: So many times, people think that the way to elevate themselves is to push everybody else around them down. What I have learned and what I hope that some of my colleagues will soon learn is that the more you give away credit, the more credit you get. The more you give away power, the more influence you have. There's a big difference between influence and power. There are the rule makers and the table pounders who really don't have that much influence because as soon as somebody gets the opportunity to ignore them, they do. The person who holds a title is not necessarily a leader. Nobody ever became a leader because they printed a business card or were given a title. You become a leader by empowering ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

online: What's your inspiration when things get rough?

Ed: It's John Kennedy's inaugural address. I was there. I was about ten years old in 1961, when he was inaugurated. As I mentioned, I was one of those kids that was very precocious. I hung out with adults all the time because I was so little, all the other kids picked on me. I read the newspaper and my aunt and uncle, with whom I spent every weekend, were big democrats and big fans of John Kennedy. I became very enamored of John Kennedy, as did so many people... a whole generation. I was in Washington the day he was inaugurated and heard the speech.

In the speech was what was not, as we now know, his original line. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." I swear I thought he was talking to me personally. I carry that today as a burden, because I was also there when he was killed. I attended his funeral because he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. My father, when I was born, was the Sergeant of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. That's where I played as a kid. That's all very personal to me. It seriously affected me, and it still does. I can scarcely talk about it.

online: It's amazing how many have been moved by that man. Were you affected by the recent death of his son?

Ed: It didn't affect me as much as I would have thought. I respected him, but in my work over the years I've had the opportunity to meet an awful lot of famous people. I've been to the White House and I met two presidents; I'm acquainted with President Clinton through a number of things. I had breakfast with him the morning he signed NAFTA. I know many members of Congress and a lot of celebrities and they're just people. They may do fancy glitzy things, but by golly, they put their britches on one leg at a time.

Two things affected me a lot last year. My friend, John Denver died and I'd known John for seventeen years. I met him at the White House the first time in 1980, when we were working on the Alaska Public Lands bill. My senator from Virginia, John Warner, was one of the holdouts and a real pivotal vote. I had been working with him and had gotten him moving in that direction. That's when Senator Warner was married to Elizabeth Taylor. He was really kind of into that star thing. John went up to Senator Warner's office when we had a big rally in the senate and personally invited him to come down. Of course, that's when John's popularity was at its peak. I subsequently got to know him through the National Wildlife Federation. He was very close to that. He died tragically and had some real personal problems in his life... substance abuse and alcohol particularly... and then Jacque Cousteau died. My hero. I had the chance to meet him. One of my most treasured possessions is a letter he wrote to me when he moved the Cousteau Society Headquarters to Virginia. I was the head of the state's environmental coalition. I was sort of his official greeter on behalf of the conservation environmental community. He wrote me a very kind letter. It's framed on my wall in my office.

John Denver was about 5'7". Jacques Cousteau was about 5'5". Wiry little guys, and yet we think of them as giants. When you look at Cousteau and his advocacy of the oceans and what John Denver did to just get a lot of people thinking about nature and singing songs and doing things that just reinforced what we believe anyway... I can't sing and I'm probably not going to end up being a Jacques Cousteau, but we all do what we can.

online: If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

Ed: Coyote. I guess how I have succeeded is through adaptability, flexibility and quick reactions. God bless the coyote. We have been making war on the coyote since we got off the boat from wherever we all came from, and there are more coyotes today in this country and in North America than there have ever been. Thriving in spite of us, and infrequently, because of us. I just think they're cool animals. I sure don't see myself as an eagle or anything glitzy and glamorous. I don't see myself as a predator in that sense. Maybe a mouse muncher, but they do the best they can. They get along. I've taken the gifts and capabilities I've been given and try to do some good with them and not take myself too seriously. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got and the thing I pass on is "don't take yourself too seriously. Take your work seriously." And don't believe all your own press releases.

online: If you were a coyote, what would your message be?

Ed: I guess some of the Indian legends about the coyote being the trickster and the messenger and the teacher…my message would be: "it's a lot easier to pull the rope up the hill than to push it up the hill." We, as a species, keep trying to push the rope up the hill. By denying the obvious, we fail to acknowledge that common sense works outdoors as well as indoors and we fail to acknowledge that we're part of the web and not some distant, stand-offish creature that looks down on all things living. We need to learn to live with nature and respond to nature rather than to simply deny it and build what we want and expect nature to go away. The earth has the capacity to reclaim itself at any time. If you look at things in the eons of time, we're pretty insignificant.

online: How about IWRC, Ed. How are we doing? Where are we going?

Ed: IWRC is revitalizing itself and it's being reborn as an organization to meet the needs of its constituents, whether the constituents recognize those are the needs yet. The board is made up of a group of very dedicated and very confident people with a healthy amount of respect for one another and, hopefully, a healthy amount of dissention on priorities and styles and approaches. The one thing I will say is that even with the people on the board with whom I disagree, I have to give them tremendous credit for being well motivated. Everybody's there for the betterment of the group and the betterment of wildlife. That's pretty exciting.

online: What's your general feeling on what we call backyard rehab and what do you feel the future is for backyard rehab?

Ed: To me, backyard rehab is here and needs to stay here. Center-based rehabilitation cannot solve the problem and should not solve the problem. You asked me a while back about the biggest mistake I ever made. It was in our organization's failure to acknowledge the value of what we call community-based wildlife rehabilitation. Some of them do it in the back yard and some of them do it in the dining room. There are competent and incompetent people doing home-based rehabilitation. There are lavish, expensive centers that need to be closed because they are so incompetent. The size of the facility or the size of the group is no measure of its competence but may simply be a measure or an indication of its potential.

We realized very graphically about five years ago that our organization, as large as it is, was drowning in animals. We are a very sophisticated hospital. A baby bunny that is otherwise healthy does not need hospitalization. It needs nurture, nourishment and rehabilitation. What we found, in fact, was that in a hospital setting, with a lot of people moving around and a lot of activity, is the worst place for that bunny to be raised. The best place for that bunny to be raised is in a quiet room in somebody's home where one person can focus on a small group of animals and do a good job. It's not where a team of people focuses on a large volume of animals and do the best they can.

We changed our entire attitude. The one line version of our telephone response was "bring it in". If it needed to be cared for, bring it in. Our response to that now is to have very extensive training programs that train the community-based rehabilitators to do a good job at home... to offer them advice, support, assistance and often equipment and supplies. Instead of being something above the community- based rehabilitators, we very much consider ourselves to be a service organization and part of the constituency.

We serve our community-based rehabilitators and the other smaller centers or other smaller organizations. We have capability that is matched by no other center in the country or certainly not exceeded by, simply because we have such a big hospital. We have such a specialized facility. We've got a board-certified wildlife veterinarian, one of only 62 in the United States. We have the relationships with the sophisticated laboratories of pathology. We have the capabilities to do an awful lot of stuff. There are very few animals that really need all that stuff. The overwhelming majority of animals need competent compassionate care and rehabilitation. We can give people the skills to provide that, the support to provide it well and the respect to do it in a collegial way.