WASHINGTON - Dean and Toni Lord are typical of Americans who care about our land and want to take care of it.

In recent years, the Lords have joined in voluntary partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a variety of others in their community to remove invasive red cedar and sow native prairie grasses on their 80-acre farm in the Loess Hills near Hornick, Iowa.

"Getting rid of the red cedar and planting native prairie grasses is good for the cows and good for restoring the land back to the way it was," Toni Lord said.

The Lords are among the thousands of Americans across the country who represent the future of conservation in their communities. These citizens are working hard to restore habitat, conserve species and ensure our land and its rich natural beauty are preserved for future generations.

Last week, my department awarded $12.9 million in challenge cost-share grants under President Bush's Cooperative Conservation Initiative through which the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management will fund 256 projects in 40 states and Puerto Rico.

More than 700 partners - including states, local communities, businesses and landowners - are the driving force behind these projects, contributing thousands of hours of labor and an additional $23 million in matching funds.

Included in these grants are $170,000 that Fish and Wildlife will use to work with landowners in the Loess Hills to restore 500 acres of native prairie. The projects involve tree and brush removal, including using prescribed fire to eliminate invasive plants, seeding of native grasses and a long-term monitoring program. The Loess Hills Alliance, The Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups are major contributors to this effort.

Nationwide, these new Cooperative Conservation Initiative grants are funding a wide variety of projects, from restoring wetland prairie habitat in Oregon to building water catchments for endangered desert bighorn sheep in New Mexico to restoring forested wetlands damaged by a tornado in Maryland.

The one thing they have in common is that they were conceived and are being carried out at the local level by local people.

For example, Eagle Scouts are removing trash and restoring wildlife habitat outside Las Vegas. Turkey hunters are sowing an old crop field with native grasses in Cape May in New Jersey. Dozens of volunteers are restoring wetlands within the tidal zone of Tomales Bay near San Francisco.

For three decades, we have often measured environmental success through the advance of regulations. While the nation's banner environmental regulations have helped protect endangered species and move us toward cleaner air and water, the biggest building blocks for sustainable conservation frequently have come from private citizens, working alone and in partnerships.

Regulatory measures can stop harmful activities, but they can't force the enthusiasm and love of nature that motivate many conservation projects.

Citizen-stewards often are our most effective conservationists, and our cooperative conservation programs empower them. The Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, has a program called Partners for Fish and Wildlife, which provides landowners grants and technical expertise to restore and conserve wildlife habitat on their property.

Since President Ronald Reagan created the Partners program in 1987, thousands of landowners have voluntarily restored 640,000 acres of wetlands, 1 million acres of upland habitat and 4,700 miles of streams. President Bush has proposed a 24 percent budget increase for the program, which will allow at least 2,500 more landowners on the program's waiting list to participate.

For example, on a farm in North Carolina, Jutta Kuenzler and her late husband, Ed, used a Partners for Fish and Wildlife grant to help restore a small wetland on a tributary of the Cape Fear River. The Kuenz- lers' partnership included two federal agencies, state and county agencies, a land conservancy and a local native-plant nursery.

In Colorado, local ecologist Gregory Horstman is using a grant under another new presidential initiative - the Private Stewardship Grant program - to work with private landowners to build ponds for the boreal toad, a species listed as endangered by the state.

Horstman is able to rally his neighbors to undertake these voluntary projects in a way that the federal government may not be able to. "It's important the general population support the recovery of a species, rather than the government simply telling people they have to conserve a species," he notes.

In total the Bush administration is proposing more than half a billion dollars to support Interior's cooperative conservation programs in fiscal year 2004 (as well as almost $4 billion in the Department of Agriculture's budget for farm conservation programs).

Americans love the natural world as much as any people on Earth. We believe deeply that we should hand down to our children and grandchildren a country as healthy and whole as the one we inherited.

Working together, we will reach that goal.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------