White Pond, Concord, MA
Each morning I walk out my side door and amble a few hundred feet to a kiosk that marks the start of public trails. The land is conserved by the Town of Concord, Massachusetts and provides access to White Pond, proximal to Walden Pond and also frequented by Henry David Thoreau. It is a frequent reminder of the good fortune I’ve had all my life to connect with and care for special pieces of land.
But I am one of the lucky ones. And for each person like myself who has had a special connection to the land, there exists many more in this country who are not so concerned with the protection of land. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a useful tool and reminder. Without the fulfillment of more basic needs such as safety, food, and life’s day-to-day necessities, its not surprising that our friends and neighbors may not be attune to the benefits of conserved land.
That is in part why I took a position as New England Program Assistant with the Land Trust Alliance in partial fulfillment of my Master’s degree at Bard Center for Environmental Policy (CEP). At the risk of sounding too “meta,” I believe that a return to the land can help alleviate some of our societal woes.
The Land Trust Alliance is a national conservation organization whose mission is to save the places people love by strengthening land conservation throughout America (emphasis added). Conserved lands offer society and the environment lasting benefits.
- Added time spent in nature has been shown to increase well-being and creativity.
- Keeping farms in production can provide healthy, locally grown food to families.
- Conserved forests mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration.
- Legally and permanently protected land creates defense against overdevelopment, reducing the impact of stormwater runoff, pollution, and the urban heat island effect.
With over 1,100 member land trusts, the Alliance—as it’s frequently called—has several functions. The Alliance works with Congress on legislation that supports landowners who choose conservation over development. It also serves as a learning institution for conservation professionals who actively work to conserve our farms, forests, parks, and trails. The Alliance also works directly with land trusts to increase their capacity through trainings and technical assistance to ensure that conserved land stays protected forever.
Bringing People Together
My main role as the New England Program Assistant is to support the diversity of functions the Alliance provides to roughly 300 member land trusts in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Just recently, my work brought me back to my home state of Connecticut. Land trusts from the Hartford area convened to hear from fellow land trust staff and board members from around New England about community conservation.
July 28 – Discussing community conservation strategies with board members of the Bolton Land Trust
In a nutshell, community conservation is an approach to land conservation that starts with people. It is about matching the needs of the community with the strength and expertise of conservation professionals. At its core, community conservation connects people with land and to each other. The result is a strengthened community and a more engaged, relevant, and effective land trust.
Community conservation also expands the benefits of conserved lands to segments of the population whom have been historically left out. Vikki Reski spoke at the retreat on behalf of Wintonbury Land Trust, an all-volunteer land trust, about a recent project.
Lisa Lane Farm is a 10-acre urban farm near downtown Hartford in Bloomfield, CT. The farm invites a diverse cross-section of the community to reap the benefits of this conserved piece of land. Nearby residents can enjoy the produce grown on site, access trails around the property, or participate in a High School, agriculture training program. Wintonbury hopes the farm will be a catalyst in local food and agriculture for the near neighborhood as well as the Town.
“At the celebration day we had so many unexpected attendees come,” said Reski. “There were so many new faces and people Wintonbury would not have been able to reach otherwise.”
Wintonbury Land Trust leading a hike on conservation land in Bloomfield, CT with downtown Hartford in the background. Credit: Paula Jones
Examples of community conservation like this one exist across the country. Another area of my work with the Alliance is to research and compile these examples that will illustrate the diversity of ways that conserving land can benefit the broader community. It may seem rather straight forward to some to see how conserved lands supports the air, water, and food we live on, but others still may not have reason to care when they are not personally connected to that land.
Connecting the Dots
The opportunity to touch on so many important issues is what I find most intriguing about helping promote community conservation. Community conservation challenges land trusts to think of new ways that conserved land can connect with more people in the community.
- Would a community garden here help alleviate food deserts?
- Could a trail on conserved lands next to a school help engage new generations of environmentally minded citizens?
- Can doctor-prescribed walks through conservation land improve mental and physical health?
- Would conserving tribal heritage sites help protect cultural traditions?
- Can offering more ways to engage with land trusts increase membership, volunteerism, fundraising, and support for conservation?
Spoiler Alert: I find the answer to these questions to be, more often then not, “yes.”
Through the lens of community conservation I realize now more than ever how land conservation sits at the nexus of so many policies. Water quality, renewable energy siting, resource extraction, agriculture, and property rights are but a few of the policies that can make their mark on conservation. For example, while in Oaxaca, Mexico with Bard CEP last January, we were often thinking of who has had a seat at the negotiation table and who has not. Community conservation asks the same with respect to protecting parks, forests, farms, and scenic places.
Ahead of me during this internship and a head of the land trust community as a whole, lays the challenge of responsibly siting renewable energy projects. Renewable energy developers and land trusts alike have a mutual interest in ensuring wind and solar farms do not exacerbate the effects of land-use change or marginalizing segments of our community. I hope to apply my higher environmental policy education to crafting a more equitable solution for a better, cleaner, and more inclusive future. The first step will be engaging land trusts in renewable energy issues and making sure they have a seat at the table.
Collin, what an interesting post. I am happy to know that your internship is so dynamic and that you work with the land trust cuts across a set of critical policy issues, from human health to conservation and open space and to thinking of how to engage community actors in the process of land use and decision making about conservation priorities. Based on our work together at Bard CEP, we often saw in the field and in the literature that a critical component of sustainability is based on engaging and sustaining participation. Great work and I look forward to discussing it with you. Monique
Dear Monique,
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! This internship has brought up a lot of lessons across our Environmental Policy I & II courses. Engaging and sustaining participation is one such theme that is constant in the land conservation field. Engaging land trusts in community conservation can be at times just as challenging as engaging the general public in conserving land to begin with. Community conservation is a concept with ties to so many policy issues that therein lies the challenge–a paradigm shift away from a traditional land-for-land’s sake argument–and the solution–engagement with a land trust’s mission on a much deeper level and from new sources.
Dear Collin:
What an interesting post about the fascinating work you’re engaged in! I’d like to echo Monique’s sentiments about the breadth and dynamism of your work. Well done!
Two themes struck me as I read your post: the importance of (formal and informal) property rights and that of developing and honing citizen values (as opposed to merely consumer values). As you point out, your experience in Oaxaca brought such issues to the fore, but they are no less important in the developed world.
I hope your thesis will touch on these. Fortunately, there is a large literature on both these issues, and I look forward to seeing how your capstone shapes up.
G.
Dear Gautam,
Thanks for your comment! Citizen values may be an important piece of the puzzle for my thesis. Because land trusts need to be responsive to their missions of perpetuity, changing values surrounding land-use can be worrisome to the land trust model. One place to observe this in real-time is surrounding the valuation of solar energy production that could pit environmentalists against one another. I would love to look into some of this literature and would welcome any suggestions you have!
Thanks,
Collin
I’m glad you’re bringing such a wide a deep perspective to the field of conservation. While it sometimes seems that the interesting issues are national and international in scale, there’s something powerful and fascinating in working deeply in a small area.
I’ve spent my whole adult life in local politics, and because of the development pressures my community faced, much of that time was spent managing land use issues and all that entails: charrettes, land use dispute mediation, writing master plans and zoning codes, endless planning studies, etc. At their root they always rely on community engagement, and those who can steer that process well are in short supply.
There’s an art to handling land use, of course, and from what you wrote I think you have exactly the right frame of mind to master it.
Dear Jason,
I think you are absolutely right about the balancing act that takes place at the community level. While we are often all focused on the State, National, or International debate there is often a vacuum of participation on local issues. That is why I find the Land Trust Alliance so fascinating. They are in a unique position to be mobile along the layer cake of policy venues.
I hope we can chat more about this when next we see each other.
Cheers,
Collin
Hi Collin,
It’s great to see that your internship has been so active across such a wide range of issues; it’s making me excited to start looking for an internship of my own. Particularly heartening is the level of community engagement that you seem to have cultivated. Being able to tie peoples passions and needs together in a real way sounds very exciting and fulfilling!
Somewhat paradoxically, your work on the small-scale actually got me thinking big-picture while I was reading. Do you think that community-based approaches to agenda setting are underrated as a wide-scale model for sustainability? Or do you think the double-edged nature of community valuation, as you mentioned in your reply to Gautam, limit their possible scope?
I look forward to keeping up with you work as your internship progresses, it sounds like there will be a lot of good work to cover.
Thanks,
Joe
Dear Joe,
Thanks for your comment and your thoughtful questions! Hold on to that excitement for the internship search and let it take you where your heart and mind tells you to go!
Your question regarding community-based appraoches to agenda setting is a very valid one. The Land Trust Alliance typically acts at the Federal (1st) and State (2nd) levels while trying to provide the best set of information and tools for the land trusts themselves to be advocates for local agendas. Here in the Northeast, where the density of land trusts is highest, it is especially difficult to bring such a diverse set of community values into a cohesive message to take to a policy-maker. It’s something we are always thinking about and working on!
Best wishes,
Collin