All relevant institutions [must] actively promote wilderness policy that acknowledges that nature is multi-dimensional, transcending the material and physical realms; and use language that honors the rights and roles of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Knowledge and Wisdom Systems, natural and customary law.” —Hé Sapa Resolution, 2024
Vance Martin speaking at one of the final work sessions of the Hé Sapa Resolution during WILD12. Image: Greg Harman
Internationally recognized conservation leader Vance Martin, recent recipient of the IUCN’s Fred Packard Awards for Outstanding Service to Protected Areas and former long-time Wild Foundation president, speaks with Deceleration about restoring wilderness through deepening relationships and practicing love.
Last month, delegates attending the 12th World Wilderness Congress in the Black Hills adopted a string of resolutions expected to help ‘indigenize’ wilderness conservation and the conservation sciences in the months and years ahead. Resolutions ranged from reforming conservation efforts to recognize “Indigenous science, knowledge, thought, and wisdom” (Hé Sapa Resolution), support Native-led restoration of migratory herds of bison in North America (‘Through the Eyes of Buffalo‘); enact critical protections for the “Water Forests” of Mexico City, ban mining in the Black Hills and across the ocean’s seafloor, and honor the many violated treaties with Native peoples over the past 500 years of colonization.
Though non-binding and non-governmental, these resolutions could still help realize profound results. If recent decades are any guide, we can expect the resolutions to filter into national and international policy and help secure and expand recognition for Indigenous groups the world over. Consider the 2009 World Wilderness Congress’s declaration that “large-scale nature conservation is a first-order climate change strategy.” This led directly to the campaign “Nature Needs Half” and later adoption of 30 percent conservation targets adopted by many national governments, including the United States, that were enshrined in the first ever global agreement on biodiversity, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Famed late biologist E.O. Wilson published a 2017 work before his death that embraced the more ambitious Wilderness Congress goal of 50 percent in Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.
A key actor behind the scenes helping to propel much of this positive movement has been Vance Martin, who served from 1987-2022 as president of the Wild Foundation, which has hosted the World Wilderness Congress roughly every four years for half a century. Martin also has long experience working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international conservation organization, and was instrumental to expanding definitions of wilderness to formally include Indigenous peoples within international conservation frameworks. Today he serves as co-chair of the IUCN WCPA Wilderness Specialist Group and helped advance the Hé Sapa Resolution, which would further “indigenize” conservation by recognizing the critical need for Indigenous peoples to maintain sovereignty and decision-making power in many of the world’s last “wild” places.
Philimon Two Eagle, executive director of the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, speaking on the last day of WILD12. Image: Greg Harman
During WILD12, held in the Black Hills, or Hé Sapa in the Lakota language, and the first World Wilderness Congress to be hosted by a tribal authority, Martin was one of two in attendance to receive the IUCN’s Fred Packard Awards for Outstanding service to Protected Areas.
“Just as nature works towards an intrinsic balance and a sovereignty of elements within the greater whole, my goal has been to get that more into the institutional world,” Martin told Deceleration last week.
The comment was shared during an wide-ranging interview about Martin’s lifelong work in conservation and his considerable efforts to empower Indigenous peoples at a time when their leadership is increasingly seen as a critical aspect of averting climate catastrophe.
In addition to the range of resolutions adopted, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples of the Seven Council Fires used the occasion to sign a new open treaty that commits all signatories to engage in “healing the wounds” of Grandmother Earth. That treaty reads, in part:
“At this time of great imbalance and global crisis, for the health of Grandmother Earth and all those who reside upon Her lap and within her embrace, including our natural relatives and our future generations, and in the Lakota spirit of Wolakota, we solemnly declare—as a natural extension of our familial relationship with Grandmother Earth, our natural relatives, and our future generations—our common and sacred commitment to join in healing Her wounds according to our traditional ways and knowledge.”
Deceleration was the second non-Indigenous signatory to the treaty.
Q&A: Vance Martin on the Power of Relationship in Global Conservation Efforts
Greg Harman, Deceleration: I am calling you and speaking to you from a land that’s still known by some as Somi Sek, the Esto’k Gna use that name [note: and refer more specifically to what’s today known as San Antonio as Ya Gna Wena, meaning “place where I rest.”] It’s also known as Yanawana, which translates roughly as the Land of Spirit Waters. And that’s used by the Coahuiltecan peoples here. But also this is a land most commonly known today as Texas, which has its own origin as Tejas, meaning ‘friend’ in another dialect. But it’s also a land that’s today 97 private property, right? So when we talk about wild spaces and and preserving those, it takes on a different form of conversation. So I did want to open there. And also I did notice your background going back to the ecovillage/intentional community of Findhorn. I read a book of that period when I was a teenager. And it sort of put a lot of ideas into my head quickly.
Vance Martin: That must have been The Magic of Findorn.
I know you’re a writer. I don’t know if that was your imprint.
No. That was Paul Hawken. And that was what popularized Findhorn, actually.
Did that kind of set your direction in these questions of global conservation, whether they’re the Wild Foundation or other efforts that you would pursue later?
I think the short answer is yes. But I’d had my eyes on and heart in nature since day one. The interesting thing in my career work was that I just always wanted to be a forest ranger. I mean, I didn’t even know what a forest ranger was. I was a suburban kid. And with my mother we grew up, a family of nine, with what they call now sustainable farming. Back then, it was poor white farmers. And so I’d go down in the summer and I’d spend my summers on the farms and hunting, fishing.
Vance Martin
I saw Smokey the Bear and I say, yeah, I wanna be a forest ranger. Well, I turned down a full sports scholarship to a private college in Long Island to play lacrosse. I turned that down to go to West Virginia University, which was one of the top forestry schools at the time, only to find out that being a forest ranger in the late Sixties meant you were a tree farmer. You know, period. The whole concept of ecology was still being discussed at an academic level. It hadn’t really penetrated into any kind of cohesive concept. So I quit that and walked across campus and decided I better stay in college or I’ll go to Vietnam, which was not a a preferred option for me at that time. Even though I eventually did fail my physical.
So, you know, it was just always there. And when I first heard of Findhorn, I liked the community aspect, but what was 97 percent of the attraction was, ‘Hey, a relationship with nature that these people, whoever they were, weren’t just about we can grow things big or we can have a good garden.’ Yes. They did that. But it was because of a relationship. And that’s what took me there for a week. I liked it. I went away. I had started with a partner the first real kind of natural food store in West Virginia back in the Sixties when we were in college. And I went back, and that was gonna be my community effort. Right? And we were gonna bring this relationship with nature into that. But six months later, I felt like, ‘Oh, I think I need a little recharge.’ So I went back to Scotland for a week, and I stayed for 10 or 11 years.
Wow.
It wasn’t so much what you’d learn about ecology or about wilderness or anything. You had the opportunity to really explore what does this mean to be in relation. Because back then, again, you know, this Indigenous worldview of All My Relations hadn’t exactly penetrated through to white suburban guys. And so I could explore that in a whole different way. There was a lot of metaphysics if you wanted to go that way. But it was also just a chance to be in an environment that believed in relationship with nature. So, yeah, that’s a long answer to your very short question.
Those are frequently the best answers. And from there what was your path to the Wild Foundation? Or what facet of that organization took you to organizing globally?
When you were at Findhorn, you worked as a volunteer. Then you got five pounds a week. And a house and a food allowance. But it was very, very diverse. It wasn’t one of these—everybody’s long haired with beards and you have to give all your money away. It was a very new type of community effort. I was fairly central in the operation. I helped to make a lot of arrangements for global outreach and tours and lectures and all that stuff. And in the course of doing that, I was in Australia and met a man who became my mentor, Dr. Ian Player, the man who saved the white rhino from extinction, a very, very famous South African conservationist who, in general terms, had a much more famous younger brother who played golf, Gary Player.
And Ian and I struck it off. And he saw some promise in this young man. I don’t know how old he was then. I was 27, 28, and he became my mentor. He said, ‘You need to do this World Wilderness Congress in Scotland at Findhorn.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ And he said, ‘Yes, you do.’ And we went back and forth for about a year, and I finally said okay. So that’s how we got into it. And then after that was done, he said, ‘You need to be in the States, because you’re an American. You’re an American. You shouldn’t be in Scotland. You should be in your home country. And by the way, why don’t you go back and do the 4th World Wilderness Congress? And that’s very much how he kind of operated. He said, ‘Look, I started a Foundation there years ago. They raised some money. That’s now in a shoebox in the attorney’s office. You can do whatever you want with it. The good thing is there’s no money. You can do anything you want, and I’ll come over once or twice a year and try to help you raise some money.’ That’s how it started.
So I refigured that organization. I renamed it, restructured it, new board. Did the 4th World Wilderness Congress. And then spread out and did more global work for wilderness, working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and things like that. And hence that award I got. I don’t know if you were there for that but that was kind of a big surprise. It was for 40 years of dedication to the wilderness concept.
That was early in the conference.
Right. I was quite honestly a bit gobsmacked. I didn’t know about it. The word had not leaked out to me, but a lot of other other people knew it. I was very, very pleased because it is quite a high distinction in that global organization. What was funny, Gregory, was that, 40 years ago, the IUCN wanted nothing to do with wilderness. There was no protected area category. Every time, I would suggest it to them [and] all of my early entreaties were rebuffed quite clearly. But you find the right champions within the organization and you can move things along. It took us 12 years to actually get the category. Ten, 12 years. A long time.
Today they’re in the original framework of protected areas, but there was nothing about wilderness. But we got that in. And then from there we could build a specialist group, a journal, guidelines, global guidelines. Next month, we’ll launch in China. The Chinese translation of the IUCN management guidelines for protected area wilderness. So that’s been kind of a subtext for my work. And I’m not really much of a policy wonk. I have to tell you. If there’s a lot of policy work to be done, I’ll hire somebody. But it’s, again, it’s just like relationship in nature. It’s building relationships within institutions. Create your own ecology that you can then draw on and have an expanding set of relationships. That’s just what you learn in nature.
That’s part of why I wanted to reach out to you. Because, I mean, obviously, even if you don’t claim a policy wonk title, you understand the labor that goes into that work. I mean, it takes a special person, and teams of special people, to put that together. But I think you must have from an early stage been able to observe what it takes to identify that we have to create definitions to begin with, right? A definition for what is a wild space or wilderness. And then to continue to advance that work as a sort of architect.
It’s all about seeing who understands, you know, and building your relationships. I’ve always been very nomadic. I travel all the time all my life. And you go by your intuition as much as your brain. And you find people and you start to do things. Magic is possible even under impossible situations.
I first became aware of the World Wilderness Congress in 2009. I was living in San Antonio. I was fairly new resident here, but I was writing a lot of environmental stories. I was contacted by an editor in the Northwest territory somewhere. And so they just kinda, ‘Oh, you’re close to Mexico. Maybe you’ll go.’ So they hired me to go and I reported back a few stories for both the local San Antonio weekly paper but then the Environmental News Service. And I was impressed. I knew I wanted to go back. I was keeping tabs on the group because of the results. WILD9 in 2009 was, of course, where Nature Needs Half was rolled out. There was that declaration of Half Earth and the E.O. Wilson book that came many years later. And so I’d been thinking about this opportunity to go to WILD12 from the beginning to the end.
I want to ask about the resolutions that came out of this congress. Some of them were planned; some that were not. But I wonder what they mean to global conservation efforts as well as local solidarity work in terms of creating ideas, creating definitions. Sometimes, as you say, things just don’t exist until they’re defined. A challenge is defined only in new terms. And we’ve certainly come out of this long walk where we’re all great at calculating carbon. Especially environmental journalists. We’re great at calculating carbon, but maybe not always great at understanding the value of wilderness, wild spaces, and Indigenous cosmologies, conceptions, and framing. This congress was so rich at that intersection point that at Deceleration we’re going to be unpacking that for a while yet. But I’m wondering what your thoughts are in terms of what the significance is of the efforts at WILD12? What were you going into this congress for? And where do those efforts and resolutions go now as global policy efforts and in relational dialogue?
As we developed the wilderness definition for the IUCN, it it went through a lot of iterations. And then even once we got it and we went and we did the guidelines, which was a very, very important part of the process at the IUCN, there was some Indigenous consultation. But not very much. In fact, one of the strongest consultants was Illarion [Merculieff]. And he he contributed quite a bit, but I’d always felt that it was really a weakness of what we had done at the IUCN. You know? But back then, there were hardly any Indigenous organizations in the IUCN. I mean, it was like, ‘Hello?’ Nobody. And so that organization has had a lot of catching up to do. And it’s doing that now. For this congress, Amy Lewis [CEO of the Wild Foundation] came to me and said, ‘Look, I know you don’t really wanna be involved in this congress, but I do have a a request, because I know it’s up your street at the [IUCN] Wilderness Specialist Group. You want to deepen this concept of the wilderness with more relational values.’ Amy was meeting with the Lakota people and the Treaty Council [Oceti Sakowin Oyate, or People of Seven Council Fires]. And I said to her, ‘You know, this is how the world will happen.’ It doesn’t happen by, you know, you receive three or four bids from state conference agencies and you choose what to do. It happens through where people come forward and suddenly the idea is right. And I said, ‘I think this idea is right, and it’s all yours.’ She knew that in my position as chair of the Wilderness Specialist Group that I had a great interest in adding more Indigenous values and perspective to the wilderness concept. And she said, ‘Here’s an opportunity, because we wanna make it the number one resolution coming out of this congress.’ So I took that on. Yeah.
With Dr. Gwen Bridge, a First Nations member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, who’s a marvelous person. And we got along very well. And we co-chaired a process that was about seven months with a committee that was half Indigenous and half non-Indigenous. It was not an easy process. In fact, we had one person drop out of it because he didn’t agree with it. He was a very good friend of mine and we remain good friends.
I heard a little bit of that at the congress when you had your breakout conversations. What was the issue at that point?
One of the things that we tried to manage in the process of building this resolution was to hear, recognize, and honor the grievance—of which there is considerable, and of which the Lakota Nation up there in the Black Hills is probably ground zero. For the politicization of the grievance about stealing land and eventually it becoming conservation land. Well, we had an awful lot of that, especially at the beginning. We wanted the document to come out of it and be 90 percent celebratory and investigatory and forward looking. And for quite a few months, it was a lot of managing grievance. And that was one of the big issues. That caused one of our colleagues to say, ‘No. I’ve had enough of this.’ And I don’t blame him or anything. We’re still very good friends. He acted on his conscience. But what finally brought this group together on this resolution was right at the very last meeting after seven months. And probably the last hour of the meeting was just this profound acceptance of the need to hold multiple truths. That the object is not to say, ‘You’re wrong and I’m right.’ It’s to say that there are many nations. And there are many relationships with nature. And many good relationships with nature. And trying to do this process in English was almost by definition an impossible task. Because you’re dealing with millennia of oral history. So funneling all that into an English language document is, as I say, by definition, is going to be a little bit flawed.
There are some concepts that I’m sure you’ve encountered that just don’t have an English equivalent—especially in this realm of integrative ecological knowledge or Indigenous environmental knowledge.
A main issue that we kept coming back to, it was just this thing that we are in relationship. Wilderness is not just a spatial recreational scientific concept, which is largely how it started, with a little bit of, it is also a place to reflect on one’s, you know, one’s heritage and reflect on the future, right? That was important but it was a minor thing when [the wilderness concept] came into institutions. The main institutional focus was always spatial, scientific, and recreational. There was nothing in there about this is a relationship concept. It is how do we come together and work together just like we see nature doing, which doesn’t mean you don’t have arguments and all that kind of stuff.
But just as nature works towards an intrinsic balance and a sovereignty of elements within the greater whole, my goal has been to get that more into the institutional world. And so that’s the next step. With this resolution and declaration, now we need to work it into the IUCN context. And the specialist group will produce what is called a technical note, very dry kind of concept. But that’s how we do it. We’re not looking to change the definition because we worked very hard to get a very simple definition. But what we will do is we will keep expanding it and deepening it. We’ve already done it once with the concept of remoteness. And now we’re going to our next effort. It’ll take a year or so [but] we will have a technical note on Indigenous values that are intrinsic to the wilderness concept and they need to be recognized. There will also be some kind of motion at the next World Conservation Congress, the IUCN Congress. That motion process starts in November of this year and it closes in January or February.
The World Wilderness Congress resolutions are tools to use that are not binding on anybody and are useful as long as people use them. And that’s one of the great things about the World Wilderness Congress is that it’s a tool to be used, and not a set of rule books to guide your life.
So that’s how we’ve always set it up. And it’s why a lot of the men and women in the global institutions, the United Nations, the IUCN, they always told me: ‘Don’t change this. Don’t make it any more formal than it than it already is.’ It’s just formal enough, but we could come here and talk off the book, and we can get some things done, and get it into the system so that a body of knowledge and a body of awareness can continue to grow and expand and change.
The Hé Sapa resolution was described as an attempt at indigenizing conservation. I heard that word a few times while we were up there. It seems like a values shift. So you say, for instance: ‘We declare that we want to prioritize these questions of land tenure, you know, that these Indigenous peoples, one: stay on their lands, or are restored to their land so they can practice their lifeways.’ That is a core value of “wilderness,” and of conservation. Is that how you would interpret the way this may move through these systems?
Yeah. We made it when we did the guidelines, which is the IUCN book on what do we really mean and how do we manage wilderness. We made it very clear early in the first chapter that the main issue with wilderness was humans or visitors who do not remain. The most important thing was: what is the human impact? Not the human presence. And so that’s at the core of the wilderness concept globally now. And that’s what we’ve tried to do and tried to push.
So I like the concept of indigenization of nature conservation. I like the concept. It’s a much more positive concept than the very familiar, very well-used decolonizing conservation. Which I find, not incorrect, but I just find it a negative approach.
So we had quite a lot of that in our group, a lot of decolonizing. You know, let’s recognize that. Let’s not avoid these issues, but it’s not up to wilderness to solve it all. There’s a lot of issues out there like Land Back. The people in our group really wanted to get the Land Back thing into this resolution, into this declaration. And we finally decided as a group that no, that’s a separate issue. It’s an important issue. And if you feel it’s important and you wanna work on it, make a different resolution. But this is really about deepening the wilderness concept.
There was a Land Back resolution, ultimately. Resolution 8: Honor the Treaties was that resolution. Did you anticipate that coming forward? I sat in with you one day as this resolution, the Hé Sapa resolution, was negotiated. And some of these issues were raised in that setting. And this idea that there are, what did you say? Many ways of viewing the world? That we hold many truths, right? That was a concept you said was critical to this resolution. I think that idea permeated this whole congress. I hear that when I go back and play Ilarion Merculieff’s final message from Saturday, kind of this statement that he wanted to deliver that we’ve got to prioritize our personal healing. That all this work in conservation, everything’s still being piecemealed and we need this total consciousness shift. I’ve embraced that. And I think we’re really still stirring in the echoes of those words here in San Antonio and among our community that has had access to that message.
But it’s also, you know, there’s this twist. The wrinkle in there is that humanity’s presence on the planet requires both that healing but also the work in Nature of repair. I feel like the delegates were charged, by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices to be about the work of repair. That is true even if another truth may be that more at the essence of our need, the healing, the recovery of our awareness of who we are. Would you say that was a theme?
I think it was certainly one of the foundational qualities of this congress and the resolutions. I would agree entirely.
Were there other resolutions or other outcomes that you weren’t expecting or that you think we’re gonna be looking back years down the road, as with Nature Needs Half? Resolutions holding that level of impact that we should expect to move through these relational settings?
When we presented the [Hé Sapa] resolution from the plenary stage, Gwen said it very well. And if she hadn’t said it, I would have said it. And that is: This is not the answer. It’s the next step. And I think that’s true with all of our work, with intercultural work, with nature conservation. You know, we live in a rapidly changing, evolving world, one that’s fraught with issues. Meanwhile, we need to get on with what we can do to heal our world and to heal the cultures. You know, despite all this stuff. The world is a rough neighborhood. We admit that. Well, let’s get on with those concepts, those practices and protocols, which can make the world a better place, which can integrate cultures to the extent that they want to be integrated and still retain their own sovereignty. That to me was the core of this congress. And, in fact, when we did the resolution that came out of the Hé Sapa declaration, one of the calls to action was something like: allow Native people to stay on their lands if it is gonna be a designated conservation area. And I insisted and eventually won that we add the words ‘if they wish.’ Because I’ve worked all over the world with a lot of cultures that want nothing more than to move to a better place because—either through their actions or other people’s actions—the place is not as habitable anymore. So, you know, this word sovereignty is so important.
I really appreciate that. It is kind of something that I’m just teasing out. So there’s a cynical view of the march of progress and conservation, too. Especially in regards to Indigenous nations, First Nations, and, you know, a 100 million deaths—that is a working estimate of how many lives have been prematurely cut short because of European colonization in the Americas. There’s a lot to unpack with that. And so I look at conservation with this history: fortress conservation, dislocation, eviction, genocide. There was a recognition early on in this congress that so much of the remaining wilderness resides with Native peoples. And the work can’t be accomplished if they are not empowered to be partners, to be leaders. Is there a risk of kind of passing the buck if we don’t make land tenure clear or support Indigenous peoples on the other side of this?
The ball is rolling quickly now. If you would have asked me this question five years ago, yeah, I would have said, I think there’s a very good chance of the process not being as wholesome, the process towards sovereignty and recognition and leadership of Indigenous people. It was not as probable. I think the short answer to your question is: I think the momentum towards indigenization of conservation is very strong now. By and large, I think the momentum cannot be turned around now.
So maybe just one more question: Our challenge with Deceleration as a kind of a bioregional journal, a lot of our readers are in the South Texas and Texas borderlands area where there’s obviously lots of individual and communal struggles and efforts and visions. But what would you say in general for those at a local level, at an individual or neighborhood scale? To people who think about global conservation, restoration, repair? Do you have any shorthand recommendations, like, ‘These are three things that they would want to be thinking about,’ or actions they can take at the local level?
Well, absolutely. It’s the same whether it’s global or whether it’s local. It’s that, good human relations is one of the fastest ways to good nature relations. That if you’re a real believer, if you’re a nature lover, if you’re an activist, go out of your way to make friends even with your enemies. Now, look, some people, it’s impossible. Some people have one thing they want and that’s power, and you have to deal with them in a different way. But, as old Dr. Ed Wayburn said, you know, long term president of the Sierra Club, one of the 20th century’s great conservationists in America. He said, ‘There’s some people that just don’t wanna hear it and they just want power. Well, you gotta fight them, but fight them clean.’ I always liked that.
So one thing is: Use your heart. If there’s one thing in deficit in our world, it’s love. And you can learn to love your enemies. Doesn’t mean you like them or that you wanna spend a lot of time with them, but you recognize them for who they are. And, sometimes you have to use some strategy in order that they do not ruin what we all are working for, which is a better world, just for their own ego. But still practice love. Practice love, and then practice it again.
