Winter 2003
Joyce Kelly's for the birds
Photo by Tom Lane
When James Watt was Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan, Joyce Kelly's lunch-hour jog served a dual purpose: Kelly could keep fit while subverting the anti-wilderness agenda of her boss.
"I would jog by the Lincoln Memorial and hand off to reporters stuff I had copied from our office," says Kelly, who was director of wilderness programs for the Bureau of Land Management. "I had code names for the reporters from the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Sierra Club."
These stealth operations were a matter of conscience for Kelly, a 1962 CLA international relations alumna who has since found less covert ways of protecting nature: Working in the open, Kelly has earned an international reputation for forging links between traditionally adversarial communities--corporations and environmentalists.
Thanks to Kelly and the Wildlife Habitat Council (www.wildlifehc.org), a not-for-profit organization she founded in 1988 based in Silver Spring, Md., today some two million acres of corporately owned land are managed for wildlife in 48 states, Puerto Rico, and 15 countries around the world.
An estimated 25 percent of privately held land in the United States is owned by corporations. Kelly has plied her skills with such landowners as U.S. Steel, Amoco, and DuPont. From a ledge on a Baltimore office building that became home to peregrine falcons, to a corridor of sweetgrass near Charleston, S.C., that provided livelihood to African-American basketmakers, to a wetland in northern Spain restored to sustain native plants, birds, and bears, Kelly has helped provide plans, involve employees, and innovate for nature. "No site is too small to be of value," she says.
Kelly also has been a senior natural resource policy analyst with the President's Council on Environmental Quality and the U.S. General Accounting Office, and on the board for Wilderness Watch; and she is a past executive director of Defenders of Wildlife in Washington, D.C.
A Minneapolis native, Kelly credits her love of nature to the Twin Cities' famed access to the great outdoors. "I love being outside in any kind of weather," says Kelly, who shares her Ellicott City, Md., home with her husband Christopher, VP of finance for the Association of Manufacturing Technology; two Dobermans; a cat; and a pond full of fish. "Birds and wolves are special to me, but I really like just about everything. I'll stop in the road and pick up a snake and rescue it."
For her skills in negotiation and critical thinking, Kelly credits CLA. "CLA's role is one of teaching and honing analytical skills," says Kelly. "I learned how to think and to ask questions, to put information together. My success as a leader, speaker, and writer come from my liberal arts education.
"When I was at the U, Mulford Q. Sibley was a professor; few institutions in the country would have allowed him on the faculty," she adds. (Sibley was a very popular but outspoken political science professor.) "Intellectual freedom, independent thought, and exposure to a wide range of ideas have always been encouraged there, and also relationships with students and student involvement in the administration of the University."
CLA has "great, stimulating professors," she says, and "they're genuinely interested in students. I had a lot more interaction with professors at the U than I did at Johns Hopkins University, where I did graduate work."
Kelly's hope is that CLA will create courses in the politics of the environment, forming what she calls a "public policy center."
"Too many people in the sciences forget you need to be an articulate spokesperson and a strategist to carry a message out. Much of current society seems to believe technology is the most important training--setting that in opposition to the environment and neglecting the liberal arts."
As Kelly has pointed out for decades to big business, "The economy and environment go hand in hand." Indeed, in applying her CLA world view and skills to bridge human and natural resources, Kelly has proven you can "improve labor relations, productivity, and corporate profitability while at the same time helping to preserve the environment."
Conservation is especially urgent now, says Kelly, who characterizes the Bush administration's policies (such as its failure to sign the Kyoto Accord, a global treaty to cut greenhouse gases) as a setback for a nation "once at the forefront of the environmental movement. "I learned at the U the value of building bridges and understanding interrelationships," she says. "I learned you can't go it alone."
Another urgent cause, she notes, is support for the U: "Insufficient legislative support means private donors need to help out." And she is doing just that; she has made a very generous bequest to CLA.