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landowners—and make financial sense for everyone. Landowners get a bucolic property, can build a small house and reap valuable tax benefits. Conservationists ensure the land will never turn into a mall or condo development. Businesses and investors involved in funding the preservation or land transfer make money. It would make Al Gore proud—a green investment.

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find an innovative solution, creating public-private partnerships to save land. “We wanted a program to get someone who’s motivated to conserve land but also wants somewhere to live and the tax advantage,” says Story Clark, who worked with the Jackson Hole Land Trust and now has her own firm, Conservation Consulting. “We needed to get those people … and in Jackson Hole we had very little access to public

WHAT’S AN ENVIRONMENTAL money [for saving land].”

GROUP TO DO? Shawn Smith, founder of Earth Asset Until recently, conservationists had only Partnership, a Vermont-based real estate a limited arsenal of strategies for saving planning firm specializing in conservation, land. “Ten years ago, most lands were notes, “What these tax benefits do is they donated, and that land was largely a gift,” bring in high-net-worth individuals who … says David Harper of Land in Common, are doing it as much because it makes ina land consulting busi- vestment sense. Dollars ness in Pennsylvania. and cents drive it.”

But as the price of land Here’s how these increases, fewer Amer- public-private partner-icans are willing to just ships work. In some donate their property, cases, landowners because they would be like the Ungers keep losing more money on their land and work the transaction. with a nonprofit to At the same time, obtain a conserva-over the past five years federal funding tion easement. The easement normally for land preservation initiatives, like the promises that there will be no large-scale national Land and Water Conservation development on the land, though it allows Fund, has not kept pace—the White residents to build a home and some other House rarely has fully funded the Land structures. The nonprofit monitors the and Water Conservation program. James land to make sure it is not developed. The Levitt, author of From Walden to Wall landowners receive a federal tax break, es- Street: Frontiers of Conservation Finance, tate tax breaks and, in states like Colorado estimates that the gap between money and Virginia, a state tax credit. needed nationwide to preserve land and In other cases, like an initiative called the amount available could be as high as the conservation buyer program, the orig- $7.7 billion in the coming years. inal landowners decide to sell the prop-

One of the biggest
land sales in recent
Vermont history came
with conservation
restrictions.

Also, increasing development has erty. A nonprofit then purchases these eaten into wild lands, particularly in the properties under severe environmental Northeast, mid-Atlantic and popular parts strain, applies conservation restrictions of the West. (Every year, according to the and sells them back to wealthy buyers, Land Trust Alliance, an umbrella orga- who promise to maintain the restrictions. nization of preservation groups, the U.S. Many of these properties, like tracts in loses some 2 million acres of open space.) the Arcadia Brook Forest in Vermont Many Americans, not just hard-core envi- or Peace Wildlife Sanctuary in Missouri, ronmentalists, want to find parcels where both owned by the Nature Conservancy, they can escape suburban sprawl. “There are so unique that they can attract great is a sense of that urgency, that we are gen- interest from buyers. erally losing land quickly,” says Jim Wyerman, director of communications and development at the Washington-based Land Trust Alliance.

In Jackson Hole, Wyo., the Jackson

Hole Land Trust was one of the first to

IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ‘EM The Jackson Hole model has spread quickly. In recent years, major nonprofits like the Nature Conservancy and local conservation groups like the Montana