The Program On
Conservation Innovation
at The Harvard Forest, Harvard University

About The Program

Our Vision, Mission, Goals, and Objectives

Vision

The vision of the Program on Conservation Innovation (the PCI) is an international society in which innovative women and men step forward to implement highly effective conservation initiatives – initiatives that can effectively address the complex, emerging threats to open landscapes, waterscapes, and biodiversity.  In doing so, these men and women will be taking their places in a long and distinguished tradition of North American and global conservation innovation.

Mission

The mission of the PCI is to build knowledge about highly effective conservation science, education, governance, protection, and stewardship practices and to communicate that knowledge to conservation practitioners, decision makers, and citizens in the United States as well as across the globe.

Goals

The PCI has five overarching goals:

1. to conduct research that informs advanced conservation practice and focuses attention on the outstanding innovation in the field
2. to educate present-day and future conservation practitioners and involved citizenry regarding emerging approaches to conserving land, water, and biodiversity
3. to award and recognize exemplary conservation initiatives
4. to convene focused leadership dialogues on critical conservation challenges and inventive solutions commensurate with those challenges, and
5. to broadly communicate with a global audience regarding important conservation innovations that may be commensurate with the complex challenges of our day.

Objectives

To achieve our goals, the Program on Conservation Innovation is pursuing the following set of programmatic objectives.

1.  Research

• Conduct research on present-day conservation initiatives and innovations (e.g., the Pingree Forest Partnership which conserved 762,000 acres of forest in Maine in 2000)
• Conduct research on historic conservation initiatives that illuminate the process of conservation innovation (e.g., the 1634 establishment of the Boston Common)

2.  Education

• Develop school curricula that focuses on citizen science, and on the past, present, and future of North American landscapes (i.e., the Discovery Communities Project, being co-developed with colleagues at the University of Kansas, the Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute, the Quebec-Labrador Foundation, and elsewhere)
• Develop university and professional level curricula regarding advanced practices in conservation

3.  Awards Program

• Advise the Kennedy School's Innovations in American Government Awards Program regarding environmental infrastructure and transportation projects, helping to recognize and replicate advanced practices and promising innovations in these fields

4.  Leadership Dialogues

• Organize, in conjunction with the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, annual dialogues with senior conservation executives regarding critical issues in twenty-first century conservation (e.g., Landscape-Scale Conservation: Grappling with the Green Matrix held at the Presidio of San Francisco, June 2003)

5.  Communications Initiatives

• Publish on a twice-annual basis The Report on Conservation Innovation
• Contribute to electronic publications sponsored by the Roy and Lila Ash Institute on Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
• Prepare publications, lectures, and electronic media related to PCI work for both general and research-oriented audiences (e.g., Conservation in the Internet Age, edited by James N. Levitt)

Who We Are

DIRECTOR

James N. Levitt

Jim Levitt is director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  He has written and lectured widely on how communications and transportation networks have enabled dramatic shifts in land use over the course of American history, and how a new generation of networks – the Internet and express delivery systems – is enabling further changes in how and where Americans live, work, trade, learn, play, and interact with nature.  Prior to coming to the university, Levitt developed corporate strategy related to the emergence of the Internet and electronic commerce for Fortune 50 sized companies as a Principal at GeoPartners Research, Inc.  He is active as a Director of several environmental organizations, including the Massachusetts Audubon Society and the Quebec-Labrador Foundation/Atlantic Center for the Environment.  Levitt is a graduate of Yale College and the Yale School of Management.

For further information on the Program on Conservation Innovation, Jim can be reached at james_levitt@harvard.edu or at 617-489-7800.

STEERING COMMITTEE

David E. Luberoff

David Luberoff, executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, specializes in the politics of land use and infrastructure policy. He was formerly the associate director of the Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government, as well as co-editor of The Public’s Capital, a quarterly forum on infrastructure policy published in Governing magazine.  Before coming to work at Harvard, Luberoff worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and was the editor of The Tab, greater Boston’s largest weekly newspaper.  Luberoff received an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government.

John O'Keefe

John O'Keefe, a Massachusetts native, is the Coordinator of the Harvard Forest Fisher Museum of Forestry in Petersham, Massachusetts, where he is responsible for public education and outreach. As a field ecologist, he did his graduate work at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst . O'Keefe has served on the board of the Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust since 1995 and is very interested in environmental education, forest and land use history, and land stewardship.  He is the co-author of New England Forests Through Time: Insights from the Harvard Forest Dioramas and serves as a member of the Executive Committee for the North Quabbin Regional Landscape Partnership.

David R. Foster 

David Foster is the author of Thoreau's Country – Journey through a Transformed Landscape and New England Forests Through Time.  He is also the Director of the Harvard Forest, Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology since 1983.  At Harvard University, Foster teaches courses on forest ecology and environmental change, directs the graduate program in forest biology, and serves as Principal Investigator on the Long Term Ecological Research Program.  Foster has a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Minnesota.