Private Land Conservation

Historical development

The Nature Conservancy grew in 1951 out of a committee of ecologists who wanted to buy threatened natural areas. Its first purchase, the Mianus River Gorge in New York, came in 1955. Over the following decades it bought and protected millions of acres. Local land trusts multiplied across the United States, coordinated from 1982 by the Land Trust Alliance.

From 1976, conservation easements received favourable treatment under federal tax law. By the 2020s private land trusts protected more than sixty million acres in the United States alone. The model spread around the world, from private reserves in South Africa and Latin America to Doug and Kris Tompkins’s purchase of huge areas of Patagonia, much of which they later donated to create national parks in Chile and Argentina.

Principal claims

• The most secure protection for habitat is ownership, or a legal restriction on its use that lasts forever.
• Much of the world’s important habitat is on private land and can only be protected with its owners’ cooperation.
• Voluntary deals and philanthropy can achieve conservation faster and with less conflict than regulation.
• Science should guide where the money goes, toward the places that protect the most biodiversity.
• Conservation can work with business and landowners instead of against them.

Policy implications

The approach supports tax incentives for easements and gifts of land, public money to match private purchases, payments to landowners for habitat, and partnerships between conservation groups, agencies and companies. It is wary of anything that would turn owners against conservation, such as strict regulation of private land.

Internal disagreements

Practitioners disagree about how closely to work with corporations, a question sharpened by The Nature Conservancy’s dealings with oil and gas companies. They differ on whether easements are a lasting solution or a short-term fix, and on whether the model should extend to working land such as ranches and forests or concentrate on strict reserves.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics argue that easements give wealthy donors large tax deductions for land they would never have developed, and a Washington Post investigation in 2003 exposed cases of self-dealing at The Nature Conservancy. Others note that private conservation follows the money, protecting what donors care about more than what most needs protecting, and that it can concentrate control of land in a few large organisations or rich individuals.

Supporters point to the sheer amount of land it has protected, often where public agencies could not act.

Relationships to other traditions

Private land conservation shares preservationism’s aim of protecting wild places, but pursues it through property instead of public parks. It uses the market tools of market environmentalism and the cooperation with landowners of conservation conservatism. It often works alongside the legal strategies of reform environmentalism.