“Make no little plans,” the great American architect Daniel H. Burnham is supposed to have said. “They have no magic to strike men’s blood and probably will themselves not be realized.”

Think big! It was a shot heard ’round the conference tables of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not only in the venues of architecture and urban planning, but in commerce and industry and finance as well. As for those newfangled conservationists just beginning to scuff their sneakers in the boonies, thinking big seemed a bit premature. Since you had to start somewhere, small was beautiful. Waterfalls and butterflies. You filled the ark one species at a time. You saved the park by drawing a line around it. That was the prevailing conservation strategy, once upon a time. But old strategies evolve into new ones when one is confronted with challenges undreamed of a hundred or even fifty years ago: global warming, shrinking habitats trashed and fragmented in the most remote corners of the world, entire families of plants and animals snuffed out faster than science can give their individual species a proper name.

At last, in response, the uppercase-C Conservation community has decided to eschew little plans for big ones. Now come staggering proposals to protect vast swaths of land many times larger and morecomplex than the world’s greatest national parks. On such a scale, it is no longer enough to draw another line around a single core area, however sizable, but rather to connect a number of special areas along corridors that, in some cases, overlap international borders.

Lawrence Linden, a visiting lecturer at F&ES in 2004 and now managing director of the Goldman Sachs Group, has served as consultant on a number of large-scale conservation projects, principally in South America. He believes that a solitary protected area can never be large enough to be stable. “Look at Yellowstone,” he says. “The park itself is arguably insufficient to sustain the wolf and the grizzly bear.” According to Linden, effective conservation has evolved from a save-the-critter approach to an effort to assemble plans that can sustainboth biodiversity and traditional human cultures within a larger region. Another devotee of going for the Big Picture is Peter Seligmann ’74, co-founder and CEO of Conservation International, the organization that put biological hot spots on the map in the 1990s and now pursues strategic goals across some 40 countries on four continents. “On a regional scale,” says Seligmann, “if you’re looking for lasting solutions, you have to be engaged with the people who live there. That requires building economies around conservation, so that local people have a stake in conserving their natural heritage. If you don’t do that, everyone loses.”

At F&ES, the torchbearer for large-scale conservation is Susan G. Clark, Joseph F. Cullman III Adjunct Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Policy who has taught a capstone course on the subject – subtitled “Integrating Science, Management, and Policy”– each spring for the last three years. In her writings and course work, Clark has not been timid about discussing the difficulties of achieving large-scale victories. “[Our] institutions for science, management, and policy,” she writes, “are not presently designed to address conservation at large scales, so learning and change have been slow to nonexistent despite many goodfaith initiatives.” For example, Clark notes that “ecosystem management” is still considered overly vague in some quarters, even though the concept “mushroomed” almost 20 years ago. “Some critics,” she writes, “believe that it errs on the side of preservation. Still others see it as overly anthropocentric and utilitarian.”

Among her efforts to help organizations bridge the gulf between science and management, Clark has been active with the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative from its inception in 1993, and has worked on behalf of koala conservation in eastern Australia and protection for condors in the Andes.

With the help of such front-liners as Clark, we have assembled here a selective review of some of the most ambitious large-scale conservation initiatives now being pursued around the world.

The Amazon

Because of its overwhelming size, its rich biodiversity and its vast treasure of largely undisturbed tropical rainforest, the Amazon basin – especially the portion of it lying within Brazil – has long riveted the attention of globally-aware environmentalists. In the United States, Earth Day orators 35 years ago referred to it as “the lungs of the world,” in tribute to its photosynthetic capacity to replenish the planet’s precious supply of atmospheric oxygen. But political realities at the time didn’t hold out much hope for the Amazon. In Brasilia, government engineers were plottinga system of highways that would skewer the basin from the Matto Grosso to the riverine city of Santarem and from the urban centers on the coast west to the mountains of Peru. It was said that a half-million people would be moved from the overcrowded northeast, at government expense, to tame and occupy the forests opened by the road builders.

Inevitably, several of the key highways were completed and some of the anticipated settlers managed to subsist and survive in the “green hell” of the interior, but Europeans and North Americans looked with disfavor on these intrusions into what they considered a “global commons,” and so did such institutions as the World Bank. Over the years, the internal political climate regarding environmental affairs in Brazil began to shift its direction. At the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002, Brazil formally entered a joint agreement with the World Bank, the Global Environmental Facility and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to establish the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program (ARPA), with a goal of securing, over 10 years, a network of protected lands covering12 percent of the region. The big enchiladas of landsaving don’t come any bigger than this: 193,000 square miles, an area the size of California. That same year Brazil established Tumucumaque Mountains National Park – ARPA’s “flagship” – on 9.5 million acres situated along the northeastern border with French Guiana and Suriname, described rhapsodically as a place of “towering rock formations, plunging river valleys, undulating tropical forest, magnificent waterfalls, and crystal-clear pools.” It is the world’s largest tropical-forest national park, four times the size of Yellowstone. Then, just last year, two more big national parks were established in the state of Para, creating a biological corridor along the Xingu River drainage, from savanna ecosystems in the south to the rainforests of the central Amazon.

Matthew Perl, director of ARPA for WWF, explains that the hope is to include representative samples of biodiversity, often contiguous to indigenous lands. Overall, the network would seek to set aside 70 million acres of new parks and reserves, direct improved stewardship of some 31 million acres of pre-existing protected areas, and designate 22 million acres of “extractive reserves” or other sustainableuse areas. Among Perl’s colleagues in the ARPA effort is Guillermo Castilleja ’83, Ph.D. ’91, vice president for WWF field programs. “This is a very ambitious program,” says Castilleja. “It is equivalent to building the U.S. National Park System in 10 years as opposed to 130.” Parks, however, are only part of the strategy. Indigenous lands, he says, constitute 20 percent of the total area. Then there are the extractive reserves, in which public land is protected for use by local people, mostly in production of nontimber resources such as rubber and Brazil nuts. And finally, there will be a type of land use ARPA calls “logging concessions,”wherein sustainable timber extraction will be tightly regulated and the cuts will not be converted to pasture or achieved? “Yes,” says Castilleja. “We believe we can get to that 70 percent protection level in 10 years. We’re greatly encouraged by what’s been accomplished already.”

Despite the accomplishments, however, Castilleja concedes some looming problems. Brazil is the second largest exporter of soy products in the world, and much of the soy is grown in the Amazon. Soybean acreage has been expanding in the southeast, along with cattle ranching. During the 1990s, the average annual deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon was about 7,000 square miles a year. That jumped to 10,000 square miles a year in 2002 through 2004, but fell off in 2005 due to reduced soy prices, better enforcement of forestry regulation and newly established protected areas acting as barriers to deforestation.

Amazon deforestation likewise concerns Lisa Curran, associate professor of tropical resources at F&ES. In a report published in March in the journal Nature, Curran and her co-authors warned that conservation strategies focused primarily on protected areas will be insufficient to slow deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

“Expansion of the cattle and soy industries in the Amazon basin,” the study claims, “has increased deforestation rates and will soon push all-weather highways into the region’s core.” Curran and her coauthors assert that in a business-as-usual modeling scenario, “highways currently scheduled for paving will be paved, compliance with legislation requiring forest reserves on private lands will remain low, and new [Protected Areas] will not be created.” As a result, by 2050, 40 percent of the region’s remaining forest cover could be lost. In a “governance” scenario, on the other hand, Brazil would enforce mandatory forest reserves on private lands through a satellitebased licensing system, and growing pressure from international markets and financial institutions would compel cattle ranchers and soy farmers to clean up their acts. Assumptions along these lines, the report concludes, would point to a huge saving of forest cover over the same time frame.

Transborder Protected Areas: Y2Y and Southern Africa

By some accounts, the poster child for the conservation community’s new think-big approach to land conservation is the transborder ecoregion known as Yellowstone-to-Yukon, or Y2Y in the parlance of its dedicated boosters. The dimensions of this international landscape boggle the mind: nearly half a million square miles stretched along the Rocky Mountainsspine from Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton country south of Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon Territory’s Ogilve Mountains near the Arctic Circle; 2,000 miles top to bottom, some places up to 500 miles across. This ecoregion includes headwaters for the rivers Columbia and Fraser, the Yellowstone and the Missouri, the South Saskatchewan, the Athabasca, the Mackenzie and the Yukon; home base for the greatest concentration of large carnivores in North America; the traditional territories of more than 30 First Nations and Native American tribes; and dozens of established national and provincial parks, refuges, sanctuaries and wilderness areas.

Y2Y is a loose consortium of more than 200 nonprofit organizations, businesses and charitable foundations, about evenly split between the United States and Canada. Douglas Chadwick, a Montana writer and wildlife biologist, spells out the initiative’s mission in his introduction to a recent book on the region (Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam, by Florian Schulz; Mountaineers Books). “The initiative’s first aim,” he writes, “is to round out the region’s extraordinary collection of protected places with necessary buffer zones and fasten the whole assemblage together through habitat bridges. ... Once such a network is in place, step number two is to combine it with a plan for sustainable use of natural resources in adjoining landscapes.” Such a plan would seek to replace the export of pulp and saw logs out of the region with local, value-added opportunities to manufacture furniture, veneers and other products to keep the money – and the jobs – in the communities where the trees grow.

“Since Yellowstone was declared a national park,” Chadwick writes, science has demonstrated that “the notion of parks as outdoor museums where society can tuck flora and fauna away and come back at any time to find each perfectly preserved is as quaint as a corset. If anything, trying to protect nature in isolated sanctuaries is a recipe for extinction.”

But by the same token, going for connectivity, Y2Y-style, can be a recipe for institutional frustration. The organization’s myriad groups do not always see eye-to-eye on how to confront the larger regional issues. Management plans have been drafted, but some critics see them as overly technological and mechanistic, with insufficient participation by local stakeholders. “You can’t just go on mapping parks and counting species,” says one frustrated Y2Y observer, requesting anonymity for the sake of maintaining his relationship with the initiative. “At some point you have to get down on the ground and engage people at every level.”

Nevertheless, there has been some progress involving First Nations and Native American communities in the process. The Shoshone in Wyoming are working to protect water quality in the Wind River watershed. The Deh Cho First Nations are said to be promoting expansion of Nahanni National Park in the Northwest Territories, and Gwich’in peoples, farther north, are embracing the principles of conservation planning to assure the integrity of critical connections between wildlife habitats.

In the hope of maintaining habitat linkages throughout the region, Y2Y has identified a number of what it calls “critical cores and corridors,” or CCCs. The Cabinet-Purcell CCC is one of these, an area reaching from the northern edge of the Bitterroot Range astride Montana and Idaho, across the Yaak Valley and the Purcell Mountains into the Cabinets of southeastern British Columbia. Threatened by logging and a recent surge in recreational tourism, this CCC is viewed as critical range for grizzly, cougar, lynx, badger, fisher and, perhaps the rarest of the rare, mountain caribou. So far, the Canadian group Wildsighthas reported some progress in negotiating a habitat protection plan with one of the principal forest products companies working in the area. But according to Y2Y, progress on the U.S. side of the border “is not faring so well.”

The difficulties of piecing together connections between protected areas on two sides of an international border are by no means limited to the Y2Y region, where the concept was first tested in 1932 when Glacier National Park reached across the line to shake hands with Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. Since the early 1990s, so-called “Peace Parks” have emerged – at least on paper – on other continents as well, most notably among a half-dozen nations clustered in southern Africa. Of these, the flagship initiative is known as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which would link South Africa’s Kruger National Park; Zimbawe’s Gonarezhou National Park; and a number of parks, sanctuaries and game reserves in Mozambique. Boosters of the endeavor predict that once it becomes operational – and that may still be years away – the Limpopowill stand as “a world-class ecotourism destination” where visitors will enjoy game-viewing opportunities and cultural experiences while hard-pressed local economies reap the benefits. Skeptics,on the other hand, see the Limpopo as a front for “politically controversial wildlife conservancies” beholden to foreign donors and international nongovernmental organizations not inclined to draw local communities into the planning process.

William Wolmer, an environmental research fellow at the University of Sussex in Great Britain, posed a rather biting questionseveral years ago in a critique of the Limpopo for the Journal of Southern African Studies. “Is there a contradiction,” he asked, “between the promises of [transfrontier conservation areas] for economic renaissance, based on selling ‘Walt Disney’ African wildlife experiences to tourists, and the socio-economic development” of actual on-the-ground communities? Meanwhile, at F&ES, a doctoral candidate with field experience in southern Africa ponders the same dilemma. Catherine Picard studied community attitudes toward protected areas, largely around the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park on the Zululand coast of South Africa, while she was working on her master’s at the University of Michigan.Between there and Yale, Picard spent several years reviewing grant applications at the MacArthur Foundation. “We kept seeing more and more proposals to establish or connect transboundary ecoregions,” she recalls. “The science was there, all right, but there was rarely enough thought given to the organizational, political or cultural challenges that transboundary conservation must contend with. The social realities were just not as solid as the science.”

The Great Bear

And let us consider the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia, said to be one of the largest – if not thelargest – temperatecoastal rainforests left on Earth. From Bute Inlet opposite the north end of Vancouver Island, the Great Bear Rainforest sweeps up the coast 250 miles to the Alaska border, embracing along the way more than 20 million acres of mostly red cedar and Sitka spruce wildlands, tumbling salmon streams and remote valleys productive of prime habitat for grizzly and black bear, including the latter’s rare subspecies, the so-called Spirit Bear, endowed with a recessive gene that colors this ursine critter white.

The effort to protect this rainforest from intensive clear-cut logging got under way a decade ago, spearheaded by Greenpeace,Sierra Club of Canada’s British Columbia Chapter, Coastal Rainforest Coalition (now ForestEthics) and Rainforest Action Network, among other environmental organizations. The groups soon formed a joint initiative, the Rainforest Solutions Project (RSP), which aims to place some 5 million acres into reserves fully protected from logging and to develop ecosystem management plans for an additional 16 million acres of federal, provincial and First Nations lands. To achieve the management mission, RSP is counting on The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to help package a $120 million endowment fund designed to assist ecologically sustainable business ventures in First Nations communities. So far TNC and a number of Canadian and U.S. foundations have nailed down almost $60 millionin private funds: the provincial government has pledged $30 million to the endowment, and RSP hopes to secure the final $30 million from the Canadian government. According to TNC, the private funds will be used to create restoration projects and stewardship jobs (such as “forest watchmen”) among First Nations stakeholders. Government funds, on the other hand, would be invested in such sustainable ventures as ecotourism, shellfish cooperatives and small-scale value-added forestry concerns.In the absence of such grass-roots opportunities, industrial clear-cutting continues on some First Nations lands, occasionally without the communities’ consent and, according to Greenpeace, with little or no direct economic benefit to the indigenous peoples.

RSP looks pretty impressive on paper, but on the ground the prospects for success are daunting indeed. Studies by the Forest Action Network and the David Suzuki Foundation indicate that as of 2005 nearly 70 percent of the Great Bear Rainforest remained open to logging and mining and that more than half of all prime grizzly and salmon habitat in the central coast region lacks any protection whatsoever. And there are other threats beside the chain saw and drill bit: an explosion of salmon farming along the coast, with its associated problems of chemical pollution and the spread of parasites to wild native stocks; the prospect of oil and gas development offshore; and continued trophy hunting for grizzlies in some protected areas too small to guarantee “no net loss” of bears.

“The Great Bear Rainforest cannot be saved in pieces and it will not be saved until we can give real meaning to the connection between the economy and the environment,” TNC declared last year in an executive summary of its campaign. “The chance to ensure a healthy future [here] reaches beyond the piecemeal preservation of a few isolated valleys and sets the stage for a broad-based transformation in land use and forestry practices. Ultimately, the opportunity in the Great Bear Rainforest is about more than the preservation of one beautiful place. This project is a model of what conservation must become in the 21st century – an inherent part of economies, environment and cultures. But we must act now, or our best chance to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest will be lost forever.”

The Bering Sea

When it comes to picturing large wild areas in need of protection, people generally color them a terrestrial green – or white, if a polar region should pop into mind. But the largest, wildest part of this planet happens to be, in a manner of speaking, maritime blue. And one would be hardpressed to choose a swatch of it more worthy of protection than the Bering Sea. Sweeping north from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to the far shores of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering’s million square miles of shallow continental shelves and deep-water basins provide half of the annual seafood catch (mostly pollock) for the United States, and a third of Russia’s; and its aggregation of largely unspoiled coastal spawning streams and rivers accounts for the densest concentration of wild salmon in the world (five species in all, from the lordly chinook, or king, to the multitudinous pink, or humpy). The sea and its scattered islands support huge seabird populations – murres and auklets by the millions. Its waters welcome bowhead and northern right whales, the endangered Steller sea lion and the northern fur seal.

But now the debt of decades of resource exploitation is beginning to pile up. Halibut and crab populations have been slipping at the rate of 10 percent a year, and the turbot isn’t far behind. Sea otter populations have plummeted; sea lions are in decline. The suspected causes? Overfishing, for one; destruction of ocean-bottom habitat by fish-factory trawlers, for another. Oil spills. Wasteful bycatch of nontarget species (half a billion pounds a year, by one estimate), not to mention the bycatch of seabirds impaled on the baited hooks of commercial longliners (though now much reduced in Alaskan waters, thanks to technologies developed by the fishermen themselves).

Working with government agencies in the United States and Russia, with commercial fishermen on both sides of the Bering and with local communities, WWF is spearheading an effort to staunch the environmental hemorrhage. Among the Fund’s top operatives are two F&ES alumnae who, though unrelated, happen to share the same name. Margaret Williams ’93, based in Anchorage, Alaska, is director of WWF’s Bering Sea Ecoregion Program. Laura Williams ’99 has just set up shop in Kamchatka to help frame the program from the other side of the pond. (Other F&ES graduates involved in Bering Sea conservation work include Randy Hagenstein ’84 of TNC; Eric Siy ’88, executive director of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council; and Guido Rahr ’94, president and CEO of the Wild Salmon Center.)

In their new assignments, the Williams women are closing a circle they started to sketch more than a decade ago. In 1993, WWF posted Laura to Russia to open an office in Moscow and assist with the monitoring of that country’s vast network of scientific nature reserves, the Zapovedniks. Stateside, meanwhile, Margaret was appointed director of the Center for Russian Nature Conservation and soon became the founding editor of Russian Conservation News, the only English-language journal reporting on conservation issues in Eurasia. Now the two women are collaborating on a number of Bering Sea initiatives: salmon conservation; improving shipping safety (in the wake of a disastrous oil spill off Unalaska two years ago); promoting sustainable livelihoods for indigenous peoples through ecotourism and reindeer herding; and launching a “Climate Witness” program, in which residents from coastal communities in both countries monitor and report the observable effects of global warming in their own “backyards,” such as the retreat of sea ice (affecting the range and density of polar bear populations) and indications that tree lines may already be creeping northward. “In the long run,” says Margaret Williams, “and maybe not so long at that, climate change will prove to be the most critical factor affecting life in the Bering Sea Ecoregion.”

By most accounts, the buildup of greenhouse gases is likely to alter, over time, the dynamics of virtually every protected area and ecoregion on Earth. To be sure, some naysayers will point to the ups and downs of climate over the long history of life on this planet and, citing the icy record of Pleistocene extinctions, argue that we’ve already been there and done that. But those were time frames measured in tens or hundreds of millennia – episodes during which some species had sufficient time to survive through adaptation. The fast-track warming trends of our own time are far less forgiving. “We can already see that some species are beginning to shift their ranges, generally northward,” says Oswald Schmitz, professor of population and community ecology at F&ES. “And one of the critical issues is trying to anticipate what’s going to happen next. As some places lose certain species, other places will gain them.”

In a report published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, Schmitz and his co-authors assessed the extent of turnover of mammalian species that might be experienced in eight selected U.S. national parks should atmospheric CO2 levels double over baseline levels. Their analysis indicated that the eight parks would stand to lose an overall average of 8.3 percent of their mammalian diversity, and that the two southernmost parks studied, Big Bend and Great Smoky Mountains, would suffer the greatest losses, largely because of changes in vegetation (Great Smoky, for example, shifting from a temperate deciduous forest ecosystem into a warm-temperate mixed forest type currently found farther south). Yellowstone, by contrast, was seen as gaining 49 mammalian species from points south, but losing none of the 53 species currently within its borders due to “a heterogeneous mix of forests and alpine habitat that should not be altered dramatically by climate change.” In summary, the Schmitz report concluded, “the effects of global climate change on wildlife communities may be most noticeable not as a drastic loss of species from their current ranges, but instead as a fundamental change in community structure as species associations shift due to influxes of new species.”

Elsewhere

There are a number of other largescale conservation efforts in play around the world, too many to describe here. Yet the sad fact of the matter is that we now know the precise limits of the last of the Earth’s last great places, and know too that there will be no second chances should we ever lose any. After that, the name of the game would no longer be conservation, but restoration. And heaven only knows if the human race has the smarts, the attention span and the staying power to beat the long odds on besting that kind of challenge.

Possibly the world’s oldest-established wildland is the Chang Tang Wildlife Reserve in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, at 134,000 square miles one of the largest protected areas on Earth. Set aside in 1993 largely in response to the work of scientist George Schaller of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, Chang Tang is a frigid, windy, desert-like plateau averaging 16,000 feet above sea level. Its rolling steppes are dominated by grasses, sedges and forbs sufficient to maintain populations of six wild ungulate species, including the chiru (Tibetan antelope), kiang (Tibetan wild ass), blue sheep and wild yak, not to mention such predators as the snow leopard and the brown bear. Though several thousand pastoralists maintain domesticated herds of yaks and goats along some fringes of the reserve, the Chang Tang is still regarded as one of the last rangelands anywhere that has not been degraded by domestic livestock grazing. But, like most protected areas, this one faces imminent threats to its ecological integrity. Commercial hunting has become a big problem as road builders begin to peck away at the preserve. Wild yak are taken for their meat, and the chiru is pursued for its wool, a fine-textured fiber, shatoosh, prized in the markets of South Asia.

In Central Africa, a consortium of organizations backed by the World Bank has been working to protect the planet’s second-largest tropical rainforest (after the Amazon) across the Congo Basin. The forest encompasses a million square miles, stretching west from the Mountains of the Moon in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Atlantic coasts of Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Among its diverse assemblage of some 400 mammalian species are forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, bongos and okapi, as well as more than 1,000 bird species and an estimated 10,000 species of plants, a third of which are said to be found nowhere else in the world. Much of the region has been trashed in the aftermath of civil wars, creeping urbanization, logging and commercial bushmeat poaching, yet corridors of undisturbed forest still link many large wilderness tracts already targeted for inclusion in a network of protected areas. At the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gabon President Omar Bongo announced that he was establishing a system of 13 national parks that would protect much of the forest in his country, or about one-tenth of the nation’s total landmass. Africa watchers are crossing their fingers in hopes that Gabon’s good example will inspire other republics in the Congo Basin.

Another great tropical rainforest ranges across the alluvial flood plains and lofty mountains of New Guinea. Conservation International rates it as the largest remaining wilderness area in the Asian-Pacific region. Shared by the Indonesian province of Papua and the independent nation of Papua New Guinea, the island’s 300,000 square miles are home to thousands of endemic species, ranging from the storied bird-of-paradise to the tree kangaroo. According to Conservation International, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis have shaped and reshaped the landscape over millions of years, creating “pockets of biodiversity where unique plant and animal species thrive.” In the isolated valleys of the interior, a certain cultural multiplicity thrives as well; New Guinea’s indigenous Melanesians are believed to represent the most linguistically diverse people on Earth.

Not surprisingly, the island faces many of the same threats bedeviling other rainforest regions: logging of tropical hardwoods; large-scale hardrock mining operations; conversion of forests to monocultures of export crops such as palm oil; and, in the case of Papua, the continuing resettlement of Indonesia’s teeming urban populations from overcrowded islands westward.

As F&ES’s Clark and her colleagues continue tracking these large-scale conservation initiatives in the years ahead, increasing numbers of F&ES graduates no doubt will move on to work with some of these organizations, where making small plans is no longer allowed.