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From Governing’s
COVER STORY/LAND CONSERVATION Green Pieces States and localities are working with conservation groups to link existing preserves and the privately owned land between them.
Florida conservationists feared the worst when a real estate development firm entered into a contract to buy the 91,000-acre Babcock Ranch. They saw urban development spreading like a blob over an unspoiled area of cypress swamps and pinewoods, home to the endangered Florida panther and a host of other plant and animal species. But then the developer, Kitson and Partners, LLC, offered a deal. If Florida had the money, the developer would sell nearly 74,000 acres. Florida had the money — and then some. Back in 1999, the legislature had passed Florida Forever, a $3 billion, 10-year land acquisition program financed by bond issues. Florida Forever, which bills itself as “the largest land-buying initiative in the nation,” clinched the deal for $310 million, plus an additional $40 million from Lee County. The signing ceremony this June marked one of the largest land preservation purchases in state history. Governor Jeb Bush hailed the “massive endeavor” as a huge step toward establishing a southwest Florida conservation corridor stretching from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico. Significantly, the federal government contributed no money toward the acquisition. These days, that’s usually the case. Congress is keeping Washington’s flagship land acquisition program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, on a short leash. Although the fund is authorized to spend $900 million per year, actual congressional appropriations have averaged only $100 million per year for the past decade. For fiscal years 1996 through 1999, Congress appropriated nothing at all. 
The bottom line is clear: If environmentally sensitive land is to be saved and urban sprawl limited, the states are going to have to take the lead. And they are doing just that. While Washington has been haggling over millions, states and localities have been spending billions. From 1994 to 2005, the states approved $12.1 billion in conservation spending and localities nearly $19 billion, according to the Trust for Public Land. (The totals reflect both large projects and small ones, such as urban parks and bike paths.) They, not Washington, have become the driving force in land preservation. ”States have kind of taken things into our own hands,” sums up Bridgett Luther, director of California’s Department of Conservation. Her boss, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, made the same point in blunter terms when he recently discussed a broad range of environmental issues. “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment,” he told Newsweek magazine. “We have to create our own leadership.” This state and local activism is coinciding with a fundamental shift in conservation thinking. An emerging school of thought, often referred to as “ecoregionalism,” is increasingly influencing preservation projects across the nation. Ecoregionalism has conservationists thinking big. The most spectacular example is Y2Y, which stands for “Yellowstone to Yukon.” Y2Y envisions nothing less than a “wildlife corridor” nearly 2,000 miles long. It would start in west-central Wyoming and end just below the Arctic Circle, preserving a whole ecosystem, still largely intact, across the backbone of North America. Audubon magazine has called the idea “North America’s environmental equivalent of the Great Wall of China.” Y2Y is more than a pipe dream — it is generating serious discussions among government officials in both the United States and Canada — but still far short of realization. Actually completing it, or even part of it, might well take decades. But Y2Y illustrates the central principle of ecoregionalism: Simply establishing isolated parks and refuges, even huge ones such as Yellowstone National Park, won’t preserve biological diversity in the long run. Somehow, conservationists must find a way to stitch together existing parks and preserves with the privately owned connective tissue between them. This means relying less on the traditional and sometimes controversial tool of outright acquisition. Conservationists can’t possibly afford to buy all that connective tissue and political realities wouldn’t allow it in any event. Thus, ecoregionalism relies more on such tools as easements and voluntary agreements with landowners. Identifying key tracts and protecting them, in turn, means working with state and local governments on an expanded scale. THE BIG PICTURE Ecoregionalism didn’t just emerge full-blown, overnight. It has slowly grown out of the on-the-ground experiences of conservationists grappling with the basic problem of how to protect threatened species and open spaces in an era of urban sprawl. Two decades ago, for example, freshly hired by the Nature Conservancy, Jora Young was assigned to manage a small preserve the organization had acquired on Big Darby Creek, near Columbus, Ohio. It was 50 acres in size and at its heart was a gravelly shoal harboring the rare Ohio Pigtoe mussel, along with 14 other mussel cousins. Young looked the place over and had what she calls an “Oh, my gosh” moment. She murmured to herself, “This isn’t going to work.” Upstream from those unsuspecting mussels was a whole watershed, 560 square miles in size. With every downpour, pesticides and fertilizers washed into the creek. There were farming and gravel mining — “all going on above our little 50 acres.” Her recommendation to the Conservancy: Protect the whole watershed. The initial reaction was consternation. But today, the Conservancy is trying to do just that. It hasn’t used land acquisition as its primary tool, although the preserve has gradually expanded to 2,000 acres. Instead, it has worked with landowners and local governments. Earlier this summer, the Conservancy and 10 local jurisdictions unveiled the Big Darby Accord. It emphasizes open-space conservation, particularly along stream corridors, storm-water management and the restoration of natural stream flows. The accord is now in the public comment stage. The Conservancy hopes it will serve as a model for local governments elsewhere. The ecoregionalism principles that the Conservancy applied to one fairly small creek in Ohio are increasingly showing up in state and local projects, considerably larger and considerably more expensive, around the nation. Instead of the traditional preservation model of saving spectacular but isolated tracts — a mountain here, a waterfall there — these projects are preserving whole landscapes and sometimes entire watersheds. CONTIGUOUS TRACTS In the process, conservationists have rediscovered ranches. Ranchers were once portrayed as villains in environmental literature, people who overgrazed the land and muddied the streams. But then conservationists had a collective “Oh, my gosh” moment. They realized that, for better or for worse, ranches have kept vast, contiguous tracts of land in one piece. Now, as economic conditions change, some big ranches are going up for sale. Other ranchers would like to keep their land in the family but don’t know how to afford it, given rising taxes and tempting offers from developers. Conservationists realized that they themselves could buy these ranches or development rights to them — if, like Florida, they had the money. Last year, a ranch and the money came together on a stunning one-of-a-kind property in California. It was the Hearst Ranch, once the home of legendary publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, the man whose outsized life inspired the movie “Citizen Kane.” But conservation of the 128-square-mile ranch, gateway to the Big Sur and overlooking the Pacific, didn’t come easy. For the past quarter-century, citizen groups had been fighting off development proposals by the owner, the Hearst Corp. At one point, the corporation hauled out an 1852 subdivision map to bolster its argument for developing 279 separate parcels. The state said no. Then, like Florida’s Kitson and Partners, the corporation offered California a deal. It would sell development rights to most of the ranch if, in turn, the state and local governments permitted development of a small part. This led to six years of multi-party negotiations involving, among others, the corporation, the state, the American Land Conservancy, the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments, the California Coastal Commission and the California Transportation Commission. Finally, in February 2004, there was agreement on a price of $80 million, plus $15 million in state tax credits. California, like Florida, had the money. In 2000, voters had approved Proposition 12, a $2.1 billion parkland bond issue, by a resounding 63 to 37 percent. Two years later, they approved Proposition 40, a $2.6 billion parkland measure, and Proposition 50, a $3.4 billion water-quality measure containing some land-acquisition funds.
After yet another year of hard bargaining, the land deal was consummated in February 2005. What Californians got was outright ownership of 13 miles of stunning coastline, as well as a conservation easement permanently barring development on most of the 82,000 acres. The state picked up the bulk of the tab, but its transportation commission, in an adroit move, found a way to apply about $23 million in federal transportation money to the purchase pot. What the corporation got, beyond the cash and tax credits, was the right to build a luxury development on a small piece of the ranch. Not everyone was thrilled with the Hearst Ranch deal. Mark Massara, a Sierra Club official, complained that Hearst was “walking away with about $500 million in value” when the development rights it retained were factored in. “And what does the public get? The only thing we get for sure is a coastal trail that won’t even follow the coast that closely.” But former California Congressman Pete McCloskey, a moderate Republican who at the time was barnstorming the country to assail the Bush administration’s environmental record, probably summed up majority opinion. “It’s an incredible deal,” he said. Although such deals have protected hundreds of thousands of acres, they’ve also raised ethical questions. Some critics have accused developers of “environmental terrorism” — tactics analogous, perhaps, to a classic National Lampoon magazine cover, which pictured a dog with a gun to its head. The cover message read: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.” Conservation organizations have taken heat as well. In 2003, a Washington Post series accused the Nature Conservancy of a too-cozy relationship with the corporations who sell or donate land to it. The articles also disclosed that in a few instances the Conservancy had sold back land (albeit with conservation easements attached) to its own trustees or employees. The Conservancy later acknowledged 19 such transactions. “We do not apologize for our partnerships with the corporate world,” the organization said. But it also implemented the recommendations of an independent advisory panel that it ban sales to insiders and review more closely the appraisals of lands donated to it. Such appraisals determine the size of the tax deductions the donors get. SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY California and Florida have large and strong economies and healthy budgets. But the fact is that virtually every state is busily conserving land. A case in point is Michigan — economically troubled, yet still able in early 2005 to help pull off the largest single land-protection project in its history. As in Florida, the catalyst was a development company, the Forestland Group, LLC. Forestland, having purchased huge tracts of land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, offered to sell conservation easements on many of them. The Nature Conservancy began negotiating, and by late November 2003, the talks had reached a critical point. That was when Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm intervened with a round of shuttle diplomacy. On the day before Thanksgiving, she put the Conservancy in one room off the governor’s office and Forestland in another. Then she went back and forth between them, relaying offers and counteroffers. ”It was, ’Would you accept this? Would you accept that?’ ” she recalls with a laugh. After a few hours, the framework of a grand compromise had come together. By early last year, Michigan and the Conservancy could finally announce the purchase of easements on 248,000 acres, a swath of land sprawling across eight counties. The easements permanently prohibit all but minor development, but they do allow continued logging under sustainable forestry practices, thus preserving jobs and keeping the properties on local tax rolls. Capping the deal was the outright purchase of more than 23,000 acres in the watershed of the Big Two-Hearted River, a trout stream, “clear and smoothly fast in the early morning,” celebrated in an early Ernest Hemingway story. The Federal Land and Water Conservation Fund contributed nothing toward the $58 million agreement, although the Agriculture Department’s Forest Legacy program pledged $5.4 million. Private foundations and the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund will pick up the bulk of the cost. COMMUNITY SUPPORT The Florida, California and Michigan projects barely scratch the surface of what’s going on around the country. Maryland, for example, points out that it has protected more land than it has developed for seven of the past 10 years. At the moment, it says, about 20 percent of the state is developed and about 19 percent protected. The state funds its Project Open Space through a real estate transfer tax. In New Jersey, the Green Acres program boasts that it is “keeping the ’Garden’ in the Garden State.” It has been around since 1961, financed by a series of bond issues. In 1999, the state committed itself to an additional decade-long effort that will spend about $1.2 billion. In the West, excluding California, 13 states conserved 1.1 million acres from 1998 through 2002, according to the Trust for Public Land. This is particularly striking because the federal government also owns vast tracts in the West, and some of these states were home to the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1970s that protested that ownership. Ernest Cook, the Trust’s national director of conservation finance and keeper of its LandVote database, says that since 1994 the Trust has helped states and communities draft and pass nearly 300 ballot measures, generating more than $19 billion in conservation funding. Cook thinks the most telling statistic is the consistent support for such measures at the community level. “Two out of three measures will always pass, baseline, but in most years, the percentage has been higher,” he says. And those issues are passing in what might seem to be unlikely places. Last year, voters in rural Routt County, in northwestern Colorado, approved a 20-year, $20.7 million ranchland preservation program. It passed by 18 votes — 59 to 41. In Texas, hardly a hotbed of environmentalism, San Antonio has spent $45 million to buy 7,000 acres in the scenic Hill Country west of the city. Austin, a liberal bastion, has passed $80 million in bonds and bought 20,000 acres in the Hill Country. It may buy more. Both cities are driven by hard practicality. San Antonio gets almost all its drinking water from the Edwards Aquifer, which underlies the Hill County, and Austin gets about 5 percent of its water there. CONNECT THE PLOTS Informing and often inspiring such activity is the concept of ecoregionalism. Merely focusing on endangered species, one by one, isn’t enough to ensure long-term biological diversity. By long term, conservationists mean centuries. Merely buying up isolated tracts won’t work, either. Wildlife migrates in and out of public land, oblivious to political boundaries. If somehow confined and blocked from migrating, isolated populations become inbred and tend to fade away. Ecologists call this “the island effect.” The trouble is, just about every park and wildlife refuge is an island, some of them quite small and vulnerable. That was driven home to the Nature Conservancy a decade ago when it plotted its own hard-won protected areas on a national map. For decades, Conservancy staffers could sum up their preservation strategy with an informal phrase, “the last of the best and the best of the rest.” This resulted in a good number of preserves along the lines of Big Darby Creek — high in quality but small. On the vastness of the map, recalls Nature Conservancy biologist Jonathan Adams, the areas protected by the organization looked like “green measles.”
It was a defining moment. Although known from the beginning for its non-adversarial approach, the Conservancy intensified its use of voluntary agreements and easements that kept the land in private hands. And, working with state and local governments, it began gravitating toward large-scale efforts such as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula project. Today, the Conservancy has helped protect more than 15 million acres in the United States and an additional 102 million globally. Adams elaborates on the voluntary emphasis of eco-regionalism in his new book, “”The Future of the Wild: Conservation for a Crowded World.”” He writes: “Conservation must come to grips with the human communities that surround parks.... Conservation has traditionally overlooked, intentionally or otherwise, the needs and values of those communities. Hence, a protected area becomes a line in the sand and an invitation to conflict.” Viewed in this light, some sweeping eco-regional proposals don’t look quite as pie-in-the-sky. All of them would build on already-established parks and preserves. That said, the proposals are still mighty big — with the potential for mighty controversies. The Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project proposes to link existing parks and refuges from Wyoming to northern New Mexico. The Sky Island Alliance wants to do the same thing in the deserts of New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico. The Northern Appalachians Project envisions the preservation and restoration of a Norway-sized forest stretching from northern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire into the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. The Heart of the West Wildlands Network focuses on the area where Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah meet. POSITIVE MOMENTUM But the biggest of them all is Yellowstone to Yukon. Ten major U.S. and Canadian parks already exist within the envisioned wildlife corridor. Again, the emphasis would be on gradually linking them together over what would be a very long time. Y2Y has already drawn fire from the Forest Alliance, a Canadian timber industry group. The Alliance says Y2Y could cost 80,000 Canadian jobs. As an Alliance official has put it: “It’s amazing to me that U.S.-based environmentalists have the nerve to come up here and propose that half the province [of British Columbia] be locked up.” Nevertheless, Y2Y has come a long way since originating as an idea in 1993. It has the support of some well-known environmental scientists and more than 100 environmental groups. Meanwhile, British Columbia is warming up to land conservation. In February, its provincial government announced a “new vision” for its long and rugged coastline. Years of contentious negotiations between timber companies, environmental groups and native aboriginal peoples had finally culminated in a sweeping agreement. If fully implemented, it will protect 4.4 million acres outright and establish an additional 11.6-acre preserve limited to logging that follows sustainable forestry practices. The area includes part of the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the largest intact temperate rainforests in the world. The areas covered are outside the contemplated boundaries of Y2Y, but the agreement raises hopes of applying the same approach in the Canadian Rockies and northern boreal forest. So it seems a pretty good bet that at least fairly big pieces of Y2Y and other ecoregional proposals are going to happen sooner or later. Voter appetite for land conservation is strong and ecoregional thinking is deepening its roots. The next few decades will witness a race between urban sprawl and large-scale preservation. “If it comes down to simply creating parks and defending them in a hostile environment, we’re going to lose,” Adams cautions in an interview. “Conservationists don’t have the troops.” But they do have an idea, a very big one — and it has momentum. © 2006, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc. |
