Introduction to Community Conservation
For the National Board of Directors
Of the Land Trust Alliance
February 7, 2013
Washington, DC
I’m honored to begin your board’s deliberations by trying my best to paint a picture of
community conservation and what we have learned. Doing this work on behalf of the
Alliance, and being here with you for this board meeting, means a great deal to me. My
family and I farm a conserved farm. Many of the things that we value most in our lives
came to us because of a land trust. Thank you.
Imagine this if you can:
Imagine there’s a land trust that does all the traditional conservation you’re familiar with,
but also owns and operates a 400 acre working farm, which feeds –year round—700
families, takes food stamps for 1/3 of those families, and is responsible for growing the
land trust membership by 300% over the last decade.
Imagine there’s a land trust that gets 25% of its 1.2 million dollar operating budget from a
group of hospitals who believe that its recreational trails and public programming are
medicine for their patients.
Imagine there’s a land trust with such a strong public vision for the use of their land that
it’s designated by the public school as the lead community partner in helping to educate
that community’s young and old.
Imagine there’s a land trust in a city that operates 30 community gardens, a neighborhood
park, and 50 units of equity-capped housing and is part-owner of a food hub that
distributes 200 tons of organic produce from the suburbs to families and restaurants in the
core city.
Imagine there’s a land trust that has created something new …a cultural easement over
some of their land to a native American tribe who will have legal rights for the first time to
a place that has, as long as the grass has grown, had great spiritual and cultural value to
them.
Imagine there’s a land trust that gets why some in their community think they are elitist,
and in response sells portions of their conserved timberlands to cooperatives of lowincome people who needed the firewood and the benefits of land ownership.
Peter Forbes
peter@wholecommunities.org
www.wholecommunities.org
Imagine, one day in the future, there might be a consortium of land trusts that pool their
money and their smarts to conserve 20,000 acres while simultaneously co-creating with
the community a “rural recovery plan” to endow a local school, do job training, and create a
small-business loan fund.
Imagine, one day, there’s a land trust from one of the poorest states in the union that could
have earned so much respect, and so many members, that it stewarded a fifth of the state
and was involved in all the public conversations about economy and culture.
You don’t have to imagine any of this, right? All of that is real. Everything I’ve described is
already happening.
We think there are about 50 innovator land trusts, including some of the most successful
land trusts in the nation, and about 150 more land trusts of all sizes and ages trying to
following them, doing their own version of community conservation because they know
how it makes conservation more successful and they see how they are personally growing
from what the work asks of them. This is land trusts becoming larger public citizens.
They see what they are doing not as something new or radical, but the natural progression
of land conservation.
Let’s talk about that for a second. What you and the land trust movement have
accomplished is extraordinary.
You have protected Natural lands, historic lands, urban lands, majestic lands, cultural lands,
tribal lands, working lands, places of great importance to people and to nature.
And you exported the idea: there are 110,000 protected areas across the world.
You have helped to create a nation, and now that nation is asking something new of you.
It’s called community conservation, which is the natural progression of a successful
movement that has come to understand it, shares a destiny with the community in which it
works. Both land conservation and community can be strengthened when they are brought
together.
By focusing conservation on sustaining livelihoods, on increasing public health, on
strengthening food systems, and on how we educate our children, conservation becomes
culture and culture becomes more rooted in the land. The outcomes of this work are more
resilient, healthier communities more closely connected to the land, and a conservation
movement that transcends its privileged roots to be in service to more Americans.
Peter Forbes
peter@wholecommunities.org
www.wholecommunities.org
So, as you are listening, you are hearing that community conservation is about becoming
something different.
You folks are great achievers, and everyone honors that. You set big goals and you
accomplish them. Community conservation is definitely about doing big things, but it’s also
about allowing you to become something new. Here are the elements of that:
It’s about matching transactional strength with relational strength
It’s about communicating why you do conservation not just how you do
conservation.
It’s about listening first to hear what people need, and then finding the sweet spot
where their need and your goals overlap.
It’s about connecting people to the land for their livelihoods, their food, their health,
their education. It’s about doing projects with big meaning, not just big acres.
This work is ultimately about leadership and innovation. It is bold leadership to undertake
this study because it asks how do land trusts need to innovate in the next 30 years the way
they did in the past 30 years?
The NAACP, The American Lung Association, and IBM are all doing very different things
today in service to their missions than they were 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, IBM was
producing selectrix typewriters by the hundreds of thousands, but not so much today.
Some within our land trust movement are already calling community conservation mission
drift, which is like calling personal computing mission drift back in 1984 when IBM was
mostly producing selectrix typewriters.
Community conservation is not mission drift; it is putting that mission into service of new
and larger objectives. Community conservation does require new skills -cultural
skills/partnership skills- but it’s still all about saving land. Great community conservation
is great land conservation. No one wants land trust to stop doing what they do best, but
many want that work to now be in service to larger community goals.
But you know all about innovation. This movement was born out of innovation. I knew
Kingsbury Brown in the early 1980s. He felt like a second class citizen in his Boston
Brahmin law firm because he was interested in this strange, unproven legal tool that didn’t
have great prospects for making money called a conservation easement. He and others
took big risks in investing their time and energy into conservation easements, and thank
god they did. Which has endured in the long-term … Kingsbury’s law firm or conservation
easements? Well, there are now 92,000 conservation easements and Hill and Barlow
disbanded a decade ago. All Things change and the innovators succeed.
Peter Forbes
peter@wholecommunities.org
www.wholecommunities.org
Land Trusts have worked hard for decades to prove out new tools in real estate, in law, and
in public policy. You are innovators!
You protected millions of acres of land, created hundreds of new organizations devoted to
that land, and you have drawn the attention and the financial resources of hundreds of
thousands of people.
You have proven the ability to innovate, and now your public is asking you, for whom have
you done this work? “Let us be part of it. You are not the only ones trying to hold up this
earth. Join us, let us join you. Let’s grow this movement bigger than you ever thought
possible. “
This is the moment we believe is facing the Alliance and the land trust movement.
For the past six months, we listened to dozens and dozens of senior land trust leaders,
potential community allies, and land trusts working hard at the margins of this movement
about what they feel it would take for land trusts and the alliance to rise and meet this
moment.
We’ve made 17 recommendations, some of which are the Alliance’s work and many of
which are every land trusts’ work. You can do all of these recommendations and, of course,
you may choose to do none of them. The nature and quality of this occasion, which may be
one of the most important decisions that land trusts have ever had to make, is that pursuing
this work is a matter of choice and leadership, not money or politics.
15 minutes ago, I began by suggesting that today this nation may be asking something new
of you. What is that really?
I want to speak personally with you about this.
My dad came here from poverty and a city in the Ukraine. He arrived on a ship in New York
harbor with a different name and speaking a different language. … Though he was different
–an immigrant Jew from Eastern Europe --and he definitely experienced racism and
prejudice and marginalization, he instilled in me a love of land. I became a
conservationist. All human beings have a love of land and want to pass that on to their
children.
You are in a profoundly powerful position in that you can decide For Whom.
No matter what you choose, your work will still deeply affect people and communities.
Peter Forbes
peter@wholecommunities.org
www.wholecommunities.org
To embrace and move forward a community conservation agenda will positively transform
many people’s lives and transform conservation too. But it will not be easy; it may be the
most rewarding thing the Alliance has ever tried to do.
You risk moving beyond your competencies, and you risk being judged. But you stand to
gain tremendous respect, experience, trust, a much broader public, and far bigger changes
in our nation’s appreciation of the land and for conservation.
The hardest challenge is that this work will ask you to take responsibility for problems you
personally had nothing to do with.
For example, I doubt anyone in this room has had any personal hand in black family land
loss in the south, or the removal of Native Americans to create our national parks in the
west, or the perpetuation of slavery throughout our nation’s past. But these are real
histories that have defined our country’s relationship with the land. You may not be
connected to those stories, but those who you seek to connect to hold those stories as their
direct experience.
The gap between the stories told by conservationists and those told by others who are also
deeply connected to the land has kept us apart for too long. Love for the land should unite
conservationists with Native Americans, with black farmers, with Hawaiian root growers,
to name just a few. We have not yet shown the capacity to really understand eachothers
stories and that’s the sorrow of the conservation movement and of our nation too.
There is no future for community conservation without our empathy.
So this is big work; I think joyful work. Let us say it’s the work of a mature woman or man
at the height of their career, who is both self-aware of what they don’t know and yet certain
of what is right.
This is the kind of person for whom others stand when they leave a room.
They are strong and wise, humble and graceful. They are fully able to use their power and
privilege in service to others. I believe the Alliance is that person.
Peter Forbes
peter@wholecommunities.org
www.wholecommunities.org