Preserving Open Space for the Ages

As land trusts win broad support, they grapple with new challenges

Non-profit organizations dedicated to preserving land have emerged from the placid backwaters

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of the conservation movement to become its fastest-growing element.

Such groups — which acquire land from private owners or secure legal restrictions on how it can be used — have protected nearly five million acres of farms, ranches, wetlands, forests, and other open space. About a million Americans are members or supporters of such land trusts, which number about 1,200 across the country — up from fewer than 200 in 1970 — and more than 50,000 Americans are active volunteers.

But as land trusts are becoming key players in many communities’ struggles to preserve open space from development, they face several critical challenges.

Some observers worry that too many groups protect property in a haphazard fashion, paying too little attention to how their acquisitions will fit into the larger landscape over long periods of time. And some groups are seen as too eager to accept any deal proposed by landowners eager to get big tax and other financial benefits — even if those deals result in costly transactions that provide insufficient environmental safeguards.

What’s more, some of the smaller organizations appear to lack the resources they will need to manage their properties and enforce their trust agreements in perpetuity. A shakeout seems likely, as weaker groups decide to merge with stronger ones.

“Land trusts are easy to start — there are no licensing requirements — but they vary tremendously in their level of capacity,” notes Peter Bahouth, executive director of the Turner Foundation, in Atlanta. “Some people would suggest that their explosive growth has been a little too explosive.”

Despite those concerns, land trusts have strengths that have enabled them to carve out a solid niche in the conservation movement. For one thing, they are welcomed as partners by groups across the political spectrum, including government agencies, businesses, landowners, hunting and fishing groups, and other conservation organizations. By keeping their focus narrow and by placing a strong emphasis on private-property rights, most have been able to work with a broader range of constituencies than have more obstreperous environmental-advocacy groups.

“We find more people getting tired of the shootouts of yesterday who want to work together with us,” says John F. Turner, president of the Conservation Fund, in Arlington, Va., a national group that helps protect an average of 500 acres a day. “It’s really indicative of Americans’ concern about the livability of their communities.”

The most prominent players in land conservation are groups like the American Farmland Trust, the Nature Conservancy, and the Trust for Public Land. But much of the action occurs in local communities, where citizens are voluntarily selling or giving away the right to develop their own small plots — while often getting tax benefits in exchange. And as real estate passes from one generation to the next as part of the current massive intergenerational wealth transfer, many more such deals will occur.

Land trusts are no panacea. Large forests and wilderness tracts, say many environmentalists, are best protected when owned by the government, which has the resources to buy and monitor vast acreage and which is under less pressure to extract maximum economic value from the land. But conservation easements — which bar owners from subdividing or developing their property — are good tools for protecting buffer areas surrounding such preserves, as well as smaller parcels of scenic or environmental importance.

“For those of us who care about wildlife protection and open space, if we’re going to be successful, we have to work with private landowners, who own the majority of our wetlands, critical watersheds, and endangered-species habitat,” says Mr. Turner.

Such efforts have become more urgent as America’s robust economy and expanding population have increased development pressure nationwide. Some experts caution that the land-trust movement must become much more visible, collaborative, and effective if it is to achieve more than merely marginal success.

Many local trusts are small, fragile operations, dependent on volunteer help and whatever donations they can scrape together. Such organizations, some observers say, must begin to view their work in the context of what is happening across their state and region. They may need to hire staff members, offer a wider range of land-preservation tools, or even merge with one another to increase their influence — and to have any hope of operating forever, as they are committed to do.

Most land trusts focus broadly on preserving open space for its agricultural, environmental, historic, recreational, or scenic value, but all differ slightly in their goals and emphases. Some may even conflict: Ducks Unlimited preserves wetlands primarily for use by waterfowl hunters, for example, whereas the Wildlife Land Trust creates wildlife sanctuaries where hunting and fishing are banned.

Although land trusts are being used to preserve everything from caves to urban gardens to Civil War battlefields, most groups focus at least in part on saving wildlife habitat. But a new emphasis on preserving land for use by farmers, ranchers, and loggers is bringing powerful allies to the land-conservation movement.

New scientific information is also changing the way some land trusts that focus on wildlife do business. Biologists are learning that many species require large unbroken tracts of forest or other habitat to survive: A patchwork of smaller pieces is not sufficient. Some organizations therefore have adopted a more strategic approach to land conservation — actively seeking particular parcels to put under their protection, rather than settling for the scattershot protection that results by simply waiting for interested landowners to approach them with a proposal.

The Trustees of Reservations, for example, which at 108 is the nation’s oldest land trust, announced last month a 10-year campaign to help secure the protection of 200,000 acres in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has a strong tradition of land conservation, but there has not been a guiding vision of conservation since the 1930s, when the state acquired much of its public land, says Wesley Ward, conservation director for the Trustees. As in many states, much of the protection has been piecemeal, leaving open space in fragments.

A key element of the Trustees’ new campaign, Mr. Ward says, is “to try to make these scattered parcels of green cohere into a network of accessible open space” rather than become marooned as isolated islands of greenery in a sea of asphalt. “The emergency is that sprawl in the eastern 40 per cent of the state is making it increasingly difficult to connect open spaces into that network.”

The encroachment of suburbia into rural areas is what galvanized many communities to establish land trusts.

“Boom times in real estate in the 1980s saw a huge increase in the number of land trusts being formed by citizens’ groups all over the place,” recalls Jay Espy, president of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. “It’s a very grassroots movement, which is good,” says Mr. Espy, who also serves as chairman of the Land Trust Alliance, which promotes that movement. But having secured conservation easements on parcels of land, he adds, small organizations are realizing that they need to become more robust and stable to perform their job of permanently monitoring the agreements they have signed.

For some local groups, the answer has been to join forces. The Snohomish Land Conservancy decided last year, for example, to merge with the Land Conservancy of Seattle and King County. The Snohomish group, which had been run by its volunteer board, thereby gained a professional staff, while the Seattle group extended its organizational capacity.

“As we’ve gotten to be a larger organization, that means we can be more proactive” in approaching the owners of particularly important parcels, says Carol Koppelman, deputy director of the combined organization, now called the Land Conservancy.

The group expects to merge with a third group, the Tahoma Land Conservancy, by the end of the year, she says. “Both of the organizations we’ve approached do not have staffs, and find that that’s a very limiting factor,” she says. “There’s only so much that board members with full-time jobs can do. A staff makes it possible to do so much more.”

A staff can make it easier, for example, to monitor land protected by conservation easements, which is becoming an increasingly important function as trusts do more and more deals. And the recent push to save “working landscapes” — those that permit such economic activities as farming, logging, and ranching — can make such supervision particularly critical, to insure that specified environmental safeguards are observed.

The support of farmers, loggers, and ranchers strengthens the conservation movement, say many observers, even though the motivation in such cases may have more to do with preserving traditional livelihoods and securing financial incentives than with protecting the environment.

In Colorado, for example, ranchers who have little sympathy with some environmental concerns are doing deals with a land trust tailored to their needs. The trust is the brainchild of rancher Jay Fetcher, who grew alarmed in the early 1990s as property values around Steamboat Springs climbed above $7,000 an acre. His family’s 2,700-acre farm in nearby Clark, which his father owns, runs 300 beef cattle — which earn an economic return of only a couple hundred dollars an acre.

If their ranch were to be assessed as developable land, says Mr. Fetcher, “estate taxes would eat us up at those values.”

Five years ago, the Fetchers donated to the American Farmland Trust an easement on 1,300 acres, which lowered their appraised value from $2.1-million to $1.2-million and insured that the spread would never be subdivided into housing lots.

“It’s really important to us to keep this land the way it is,” Mr. Fetcher says. “What feels good is that the ranch is always protected. The money part is secondary, though it’s important for estate and income-tax purposes.”

The Fetchers informed their neighbors about their plans, and out of those discussions was born a plan to guide the future disposition of some 10,000 acres controlled by the Fetchers and five other owners. “We didn’t want to do this by ourselves, and be the only green lawn left in Clark,” Mr. Fetcher says.

To make similar transactions easier for other ranch families, Mr. Fetcher and a few others formed the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust in 1995. The trust now has easements protecting about 26,500 acres — and expects that figure to double by the end of the year.

“Some folks saw the need for these kinds of conservation tools to be made available to more traditional landowners,” recalls Lynne Sherrod, the trust’s executive director. Only a few groups promoted land trusts in Colorado then, she says, and “the fear was that the traditional landowner would find them a little too ‘green.’ ”

Mr. Fetcher notes that trust agreements drafted by some conservation groups specify when cattle can have the run of a meadow, or how short the grass can be grazed, in an effort to minimize any environmental damage. “That would not work with ranchers,” he says. “If this was to be useful to them, there had to be a more user-friendly land trust available.”

Although preserving working ranches is his organization’s primary purpose, the environment benefits too, Mr. Fetcher says. “If you keep the rancher on the land, so he’s not forced to sell or subdivide it, the wildlife will continue to be there,” he says.

Mr. Fetcher hopes the trust will help stem the decline in ranching in Colorado, where more than a quarter-million acres have been taken out of production annually since 1972.

Across the West, the picture is much the same. “The issue here is farm and ranch land,” notes Wendy Ninteman, executive director of the Five Valleys Land Trust, in Missoula, Mont. “Big chunks of land that have been in the family for generations are now facing huge estate-tax problems,” as wealthy newcomers bid up the price of real estate. Yet many of the families that own the big spreads are poor in cash, though rich in land — and therefore need compensation more than tax breaks, she says.

“A [donated] conservation easement is a good tool for people with big incomes,” she says, “but it doesn’t solve the problem for those with smaller incomes,” who need cash rather than a tax break.

Land trusts in Montana are therefore trying to increase state financing for a program in which the state buys conservation easements from farmers and ranchers. They also welcome proposals announced this year by the Clinton Administration that would help communities set aside land for open space and would provide tax-free bonds to help with purchases.

Because most Montana landowners are 55 or older, “an unprecedented amount of land will be changing hands here in the next decade,” Ms. Ninteman says. “There’s no way these kids who grew up on the ranch can pay the estate taxes when both of their parents are gone.”

She adds: “I can’t think of an issue that’s more important to this state.”

Because land trusts have become such influential players in the conservation movement, they are attracting new attention even from grant makers who previously chose to support environmental policy or advocacy efforts instead.

In recent years, more grant makers have supported land protection, either by helping to buy specific parcels or by financing the work of the Land Trust Alliance and other organizations working to improve work in the field. Their efforts now supplement those of the handful of grant makers that have been supporting land-conservation activists for years.

“These are the people who go out and get the land,” says Peter Howell, environment director of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. “National conservation groups team up with them because they bring their local knowledge and connections, which make up for any lack in transactional capacity.”

“When you put your money into land protection, that difference is on the ground forever,” notes Jean Hocker, president of the Land Trust Alliance. “I sense that more foundations are taking a look at what their role might be.”

Land trusts are important not just for the work they do but for giving many citizens their first exposure to conservation concerns, some grant makers observe.

“Land conservation is one of the ways people start to get involved in a broader set of systemic issues,” says Hooper Brooks, who directs environmental grant making at the Surdna Foundation, in New York, which has supported the Land Trust Alliance. What’s more, he adds, land trusts can win support from political conservatives and others who distrust governmental solutions to environmental problems. “Saving private land in a way that doesn’t have to involve the government puts them in a place where they have huge potential,” says Mr. Brooks.

More land trusts need to create a vision of the future if they hope to achieve more than a fragmentary, limited success, say some experts.

“We cannot successfully fight a war with American culture and win,” says Peter Forbes, who, after running the New England operations of the Trust for Public Land for about a decade, has taken two years off to study ways to broaden the conservation movement by relating it more closely to popular concerns.

“Even if we had all the money available to buy land, we could not effectively compete with America’s consumer culture,” he says.

“We ought to be doing land projects that espouse values, that help people see that there’s another way of living on the planet,” he declares. “We can’t just be technicians. Our work has to change the way people live their lives, or there’s no point in us doing it.”