Combining comfort and conservation is foremost at Bear Mountain Lodge, The Nature Conservancy’s newest lodging facility near Silver City, New Mexico, and that commitment extends right down to the furniture.

Almost all of the lodge’s Mission-style furniture was made locally out of small-diameter trees that were cut as part of an ongoing forest restoration project. Santa Clara Woodworks, located not far from the lodge, built the headboards, armoires, tables and chairs from Ponderosa pine thinned from the nearby Gila National Forest. The project was already under way before the 2000 fire season sparked renewed interest in forest restoration.

The custom-made furniture is part of the Jobs and Biodiversity Project, a Silver City - based coalition of community and environmental groups, including the Conservancy, that is developing ways to restore forests to healthy conditions while encouraging economic growth. The project is one of 12 national pilot programs funded by the Ford Foundation to explore turning forest resources into sustainable livelihoods. Other products of the project include wooden fuel pellets and custom log cabins.

—Rachel Maurer

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
People Are Protection in the Tropics

On-site park guards such as these volunteers in Nicaragua make all the difference in protecting tropical biodiversity.

A new study has found that despite all the pressures facing parks and protected areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, the most important factor for protecting tropical biodiversity is the simple presence of on-site park guards. The study, led by Conservation International, was carried out in 93 protected areas in 22 tropical countries. It correlated park effectiveness with basic management, "such as enforcement, boundary demarcation and direct compensation to local communities, suggesting that even modest increases in funding would directly increase the ability of parks to protect tropical biodiversity."

Building on these findings, The Nature Conservancy is working to expand a successful Nicaraguan volunteer forest guard program into Honduras.

The Conservancy originally developed the program in 1993 at the request of indigenous communities in the Bosawas Reserve, where the major threat to biodiversity is deforestation stemming from agricultural colonization. Now there are more than 180 volunteer community members involved, who take turns patrolling the reserve boundaries, educating local communities about the reserve’s natural resources and preventing illegal colonization and logging by outsiders.

The next step is to translate this work to indigenous communities in neighboring Honduras. These residents of nature reserves also see their homelands threatened by agricultural colonization and illegal logging and are open to learning from their neighbors.

—Emily Ross

THE OTHER RED MEAT
Beef Products Aim for Quality and Conservation

Cross free-range, grass-fed cattle with an important conservation landscape, and you get Conservation Beef.

A specialty-beef business partnership between The Nature Conservancy’s Compatible Ventures Group and the Artemis Wildlife Foundation for the past two years, Conservation Beef is now moving beyond mail orders to national distribution, taking the hormone-free beef to restaurants and grocery stores across the country. Its marketing material reads "rapturously tender" and "undeniably charismatic," and it seems that some leading chefs agree: The beef has appeared on the menus of such well-known restaurants as Santa Fe Grill in Berkeley, Calif., and Savoy and Verbena in New York City.

Conservation Beef is the brainchild of the Conservancy’s Bill Weeks and of Brian Kahn, former director of the Montana chapter and now head of Artemis in Helena, Mont. "It’s an attempt to develop a market for exceptional beef, properly raised," says Kahn. "Those are values that the commodity market doesn’t usually recognize."