Former state officials discuss stewardship ethics

Published 2:50 pm Thursday, November 12, 2015

Virginia’s secretary of natural resources sometimes faces ethical dilemmas in protecting the state’s air, water and land. The challenge posed by climate change, on the other hand, is clear-cut, the current secretary and three predecessors said in a recent Longwood University panel discussion on global sustainability.

“Climate change is the great environmental public policy issue facing us today,” said L. Preston Bryant Jr., secretary of natural resources under Gov. Tim Kaine.

“Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina produce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to South Korea, and we know how industrialized South Korea is,” he said. “If you add Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, those six states’ collective greenhouse gas emissions are greater than all but six countries in the world. People say, ‘What can Virginia do for this global challenge?’ A lot, frankly. A state, much less many states, can have a pretty significant impact.”

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W. Tayloe Murphy Jr., secretary of natural resources under Gov. Mark Warner, also emphasized the importance of confronting climate change. “Some people say, ‘How do we adapt to climate change? How do we accommodate the effects of climate change?’” he said. “The question is how do we address climate change, to stop those impacts.”

Another former secretary of natural resources, John W. Daniel II—who called the Norfolk area “probably the second most vulnerable area to climate change in the country”—and the current secretary, Molly Ward, also participated in the event Nov. 2.

The discussion, sponsored by Longwood’s College of Business and Economics (CBE) and co-hosted by CBE and the university’s Hull Springs Farm, focused on the ethics of environmental stewardship.

“There are intense pressures when it comes to people’s pocketbooks to convert natural assets, and you have to stand up against that to make sure your legacy outlives,” said Ward.

Many people who want to develop and conserve land, she said, “think short term. They’re not thinking about our long term responsibilities to be good stewards of the environment for future generations.”

One thing that helps promote stewardship is Article XI in the Virginia Constitution, pertaining to conservation, which says Virginians “basically have a right to clean air and clean water, but they also have a responsibility with respect to all natural resources for future generations,” said Daniel, who moderated the discussion.

“The beauty of Article XI is that it speaks to everybody in a different way,” he said.

“It’s literally a trust. The corpus of that trust is our natural resources. These resources don’t belong to me or anyone else; they belong to all of us. These commodities are different from dollars and cents. These things are irreplaceable and interrelated to virtually everything we do.”

Daniel was the first secretary of natural resources, having been appointed in 1986 by Gov. Gerald Baliles. “It’s the greatest job God ever created. It can also be humbling but incredibly rewarding,” he said.

Murphy discussed not only Article XI but also the “public trust doctrine,” which he said originated in Roman times and was part of English common law and thus should still apply to Virginia unless changed by the General Assembly. He is concerned that private rights are sometimes granted with public resources; for example, with owners of marinas in the Tidewater region renting slips to boat owners.

“You’re appropriating public property to private use, and in most cases without any compensation to the Commonwealth,” said Murphy. “That’s depriving individual citizens of a right to that property under the public trust doctrine. I think that’s an extremely valuable tool we should be using much more than we do to protect our streams, rivers, creeks and bays. We need to be protecting them for the public, and if we do grant a private use, the public ought to be compensated.

Bryant is proud that during his tenure the four-year goal of doubling land conservation was met, the first-ever climate change commission was created and about $1 billion was invested in water-quality initiatives, mostly wastewater treatment plant upgrades. Normally the four-year goal for conserving land is 200,000 acres; some 423,106 acres were conserved.

Bryant had to deal with an ethical dilemma regarding the blue crab fishing industry, which is important to Virginia and Maryland. Crab fishermen in Maryland had for years complained of winter dredge fishermen “scooping up pregnant mamas” when they went to Virginia to spawn.

“What to do? Should we regulate this harvesting? We worked with the chief regulatory agency of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission to, in effect, put about 50 or 55 of these commercial winter dredge fishermen, many of whom lived on Tangier Island, out of business.”

The two blue crab-fishing states split a $30 million emergency grant from the federal government, which in Virginia was used over three years to “phase out these fishermen and give them other skills. We gave them sonar equipment for their boats, and they scientifically started pulling ghost crab-pots off the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay floor,” said Bryant.

Ward is facing an ethical dilemma of her own. Some people who farm and harvest oysters, concerned because cownose rays are believed to eat oysters, host tournaments in which they beat the cownose rays to death with baseball bats, which she has asked the Virginia Marine Resources Commission to regulate. Her request is under advisement.

“I thought it was crystal clear that you should not beat animals to death for fun, but it’s not so clear, because people growing oysters care more about their crop than about the ethics of killing cownose rays,” she said. “It was an eye-opening experience for me that some people think it’s OK.”

Murphy, a semi-retired lawyer who lives in Westmoreland County, has been a leading voice for environmental issues for decades and has played an instrumental role in developing key legislation, regulations and policies.

He and Bryant, now a senior vice president at McGuire Woods Consulting in Richmond, are former members of the Virginia House of Delegates.

Daniel, also of Richmond, practiced environmental law for 25 years and now is deputy attorney general for Virginia. He is a former member of the Longwood Board of Visitors and has been involved in environmental education efforts at Longwood’s Hull Springs Farm.

“As human beings on this planet, we have to make the world a better place every day,” said Ward.