Steve Blank is not one to fall into poetic rhapsodies when talking about birds and nature. When he speaks of these things, he tends toward the more familiar lexicons of economics and science. He is clearly someone who is more comfortable with demonstrable facts, not emotional vagaries. While this might distinguish him from many conservation leaders, it doesn’t make him any less formidable a defender of the environment. In fact, the opposite is true. Witness his withering interrogation, as a California Coastal Commissioner, of the backers of a proposed toll road through a state park in Orange County (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). Opponents of the toll road were mighty glad he was on their side. And that’s the feeling a lot of us advocates for birds and nature have felt for a long time.

Blank came to the Audubon California Board of Directors in 2000 after retiring from a 25-year career as what he calls a “serial entrepreneur” in Silicon Valley. He took over as Board Chair in 2005, and also served for a time on the National Audubon Society Board of Directors. Admittedly is not very good at staying retired, Blank is now a lecturer at Stanford’s School of Engineering and at the University of California Berkeley Haas Business School, where he teaches classes on entrepreneurship. He was appointed to the California Coastal Commission in 2007, and sits on the boards of the Peninsula Open Space Trust and the California League of Conservation Voters. Late last year, Blank handed the chairmanship over to fellow Board member Wendy Pulling, but remains on Audubon California’s board.

Given Blank’s contribution to the organization’s remarkable growth over the last 10 years, we thought it would be interesting to sit down with his and hear his reflections.

So how did a non-birder like you become so engaged with an organization that is known for being all about birds?

The real power of Audubon is that our focus on birds explicitly gives us a much larger mission - the conservation of birds and their habitat. My interest was about the whole ecosystem. I found it really fascinating to work on this larger mission where our members were passionate about birds but also are acutely aware of the places birds nested, traveled summered and wintered. I think we all understand that we’re not going to see a lot of birds if these habitats are paved and built over. And that Audubon California could play an active role in preserving critical habitat in Important Bird Areas.

So how is the Audubon California of today different from the one that you joined?

When I joined the Audubon California board in 2000, there seemed to be a set of implicit tests of becoming an Audubon board member. It felt like we wanted to be a subset of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club with explicit views on gun control, political parties, abortion, etc,. I sat in those early meetings confused, thinking that unless I misread our charter, Audubon California should be about birds and their habitat and not about any one set of political beliefs. It wasn’t that I didn’t find myself agreeing with the positions of the existing board members, but I believed if we broadened our worldview on the board, our membership and our effectiveness could grow substantially. But it required us to partner with people who care about birds and their habitat without making the rest of their political beliefs a litmus test of whether we would allow them to work with us. I thought our board and membership ought to be much, much broader - from the Sierra Club to the Bohemian Club. And that was a phrase I uttered a lot as Board chair. The other major change was winning the lottery twice in our choice of executive directors; first Glenn Olson and then Graham Chisholm. No state has had two directors of this caliber.

What was something you particularly enjoy about being on the Audubon California board?

As a California Coastal Commissioner, I think I’ve seen almost all of the 1100 miles of the California coast. As an Audubon board member, one of the great things has been the meetings in all those separate venues around California. On Audubon California’s board, I’ve seen more of the state’s interior, so much diverse habitat and Important Bird Areas I probably never would have understood or appreciated. Every one of those trips for board meetings has been a unique education.

How would you say the strict business approaches that you brought with you affected the way that Audubon California has planned and handled its finances?

Being on the board when the Dot-Com bubble burst and seeing the cuts and management changes we had to make was a real eye-opener. It turned me into a fiscal conservative when it came to managing our finances and planning. Two years ago, I started raising alarms about the downturn that was coming, and really pushed the organization’s leadership to take aggressive steps earlier than any other state that, I think, allowed us to avoid major cuts with flat revenue.

You attended three Audubon California Assemblies during your tenure as Board Chair, and each time spoke about the importance of chapters.

I’ve always been pretty clear that I thought the choice between building Audubon Centers at the expense of abandoning local chapters was a false economy and an egregious mistake. I’ve always believed that the success of Audubon – California and National – is based on the birders in the chapters.  They are the core of the Audubon experience. That’s why I always felt that the National Audubon and the state programs should spend a good portion of their time being a service organization to chapters. I know that’s not a shared view. But if you don’t believe in the chapters you end up trying to replicate or bypass them, a wasteful effort.

How has your role on the Audubon California Board related to your role on the California Coastal Commission?

I don’t think a Coastal Commission hearing goes by when we don’t have a Snowy Plover or heron issue on the agenda. Understanding birds and their relationship to habitat have helped me on understand whether things that we’re declaring environmentally sensitive are important or not. For example, the proposed Orange County Toll Road was the penultimate hearing in the 35-year history of the Coastal Commission; 4,000 members of the public attended the hearing. And one of the key issues  for me was bird habitat. One of the findings was that the Toll Road’s impact on birds was incompatible with the Coastal Act. So I think my Audubon education – as much as I’ll tell you I don’t know anything about birds – actually was quite helpful.

So what conservation issues are compelling to you right now?

Close to home, there is a massive 12,000 home development proposed fill former bay wetlands in Redwood City on the San Francisco Bay.  It’s ironic that in the 1960s Bay Area citizens decided that filling in the San Francisco Bay with new development was something that we realized was destructive and a poor legacy for our children. We realized then that the salt marshes are part of the ecosystem of the bay and that we should spend our time trying to restore them, not paving them over. The developer is hoping that we’ve forgot what we’ve learned.  They claim that they are industrial salt flats - marketing spin of a sophisticated real estate developer from Arizona that hopes to make a ton of money by turning us into “Phoenix by the Bay.”  I understand their desire to build, but 12,000 houses don’t belong in the bay; snowy plovers, pelicans, curlews, do.

You seem to be getting more and more involved in environmental issues.

California will soon have 50 million people, which means the pressure for development is relentless. Someone once said that, “Habitat is never permanently protected. The battles just get refought.” I didn’t believe that until I had actually seen it. It’s a constant battle.  And it’s true for all endangered habitat.  But one of the great things about California is that we were wise or lucky enough to set up organizations – both in government and outside of it – to stop the excesses. I’m glad that Audubon is doing its part. And I’ll continue to do my part.