Urgent Call for Action at the National Convention

In Green Bay, the Izaak Walton League kicked off its national convention July 18-19 with an urgent appeal for action in the face of mounting challenges to conservation in the United States.

The convention began with an energetic address from Jodi Labs, as she closed out her term as national president. Describing the challenges for conservation and clean water — like the growing nitrate crisis –Labs borrowed a football theme to describe the League’s response. The nation’s great outdoors is our home field, and we know how to play defense, she said.  

The theme of the 2025 convention is Defending America’s Great Outdoors: A Promise to Future Generations. “Let’s not be the team who fumbles the future,” Labs told the packed convention venue.  

Executive Director Scott Kovarovics spoke to the need for bold action to counter attacks on bedrock conservations laws and policies. He cited the Supreme Court Sackett decision that hollowed out Clean Water Act protections for wetlands, a halt to investments in clean energy and threats to develop cherished public lands among other challenges.  

The keynote speaker, Matthew Winden, Ph.D., provided an economist’s view of value of the nation’s natural resources. Winden, an associate dean and economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has spent his career examining and measuring the value of natural resources in the U.S.   Winden said commercial interests have a well-accepted vocabulary and metrics for discussing the value of developing land: for instance, tax dollars generated, jobs required and economic activity.

He said there are also economically measurable benefits of conservation, which he spelled out: dollars spent on travel and visitation to parks and other places for outdoor recreation, clean water, hunting, fishing, flood control, water filtration and the measurable added tax revenue gleaned from higher real estate values near parks and healthy waterways.  

An additional value he cited, “bequest value,” is the value that people assign to the importance of preserving healthy land and waters to future generations.   We need to institutionalize environmental valuations into debates about land use, Winden says. It should be embedded in planning policy, and we should equip decision-makers with robust data economists collect that demonstrates these real values.  

This type of data and analysis helps the conservation compete with development when land and water use decisions are debated. Every state has economists who can help provide this data and perspective, he said.  “The stakes could not be higher,” Winden told attendees.  

National Officers Elected

Elections for National Officers were also held at the national convention. New officers are:
President: Scott Meyer
Vice President: Jim Storer
Secretary: Anita Stonebraker
Treasurer: Craig Enneking  

More topics at the national convention: panel discussions on harnessing natural resources to combat climate change, how League scholarships foster careers in conservation, proposed policy resolutions, national and membership awards and a very well-attended Youth Convention.