land preservation

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
- Wallace Stegner

A couple of months ago I wrote how the slumping real estate market has proven a boon to land-preservation organizations, allowing us to protect magnificent properties that once seemed well beyond our monetary reach. While the dollar value of an acre of forest or farmland may have dropped across the country, the intangible value of that acre has never been higher — and it’s rising every day.

The landscapes we safeguard remain a constant presence despite life’s uncertainties. And in these extremely turbulent times, we desperately need places where we can retreat, however briefly, from fears about paying college tuition, shrinking retirement accounts and job security. Whether hiking through a 10,000-acre Montana wilderness or sitting in Manhattan’s Central Park, open spaces give us the chance to feel kinship with the wider world. Amid nature’s grandeur, we experience great calm, solace — and, yes, even hope. As Rachel Carson wrote, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” ...

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Recently I took a journey to a place of importance in the history of American and international art and in the geography of my soul.

The occasion was a trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where a dear friend took me to see a superb exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute—one of America’s great small art museums. The main galleries of the Clark are nestled at the foot of Stone Hill, while a recently completed art conservation annex sits on its flank. The bucolic hill itself, part forest, part open farm meadows, with meandering wood roads, provides inspiring views of three mountain ranges—the Berkshires, Taconic, and Green Mountains. Its romantic landscape serves as the backyard and escape for many college students and local residents. My memories span the seasons with skinny-dips in a stream at its base, cross country ski trips and toboggan rides through its snowy fields, and long runs through autumn leaves of fiery yellows and reds. Any trip onto the hill promised to blur the lines between the real and spiritual worlds, to offer escape from the cares of the day and refuge in the beauty of nature’s most discrete and secret realms.

No better venue could be found for the spectacular art exhibition entitled Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly. This show displays and offers insights into a brief but important movement in American art at the turn of the 20th century. A small group of landscape painters, including George Inness and James McNeill Whistler, moved away from hard-edged realism, instead filling their canvases with luminous, hazy depictions that captured the mood or spiritual essence of a place. The exhibition’s title comes from a quote by Whistler, who said “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” ...

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Earlier this summer Rand Wentworth, president of the Land Trust Alliance, noted that the open space protected by land trusts in the United States last year exceeded the acreage lost to development. This statistic may be a result of the growth and increasing effectiveness of land conservation organizations across the country, the slumping real estate market or a combination of the two. In either case, those committed to safeguarding our working farms, habitat for endangered species and places of beauty for parks gave a cheer upon hearing the news.

So what effect is the depressed real estate market having on land preservation? The answer is a mixed bag.

First, the good news: Land-conservation organizations are having banner years acquiring properties once considered beyond their budgets. From Hawaii to Florida, developers are selling off prime land at a loss, preferring to make back a portion of their investments now instead of waiting for the crisis to abate – whenever that may occur. One conservation leader has called this a “green lining” ...

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When a developer announced plans to build nearly 1,000 homes across 2,200 acres of open space in a rural Hudson Valley town, I asked the conservation biologist at Scenic Hudson, the group I head, to conduct an ecological study. He concluded the project would so fragment the site’s fragile ecosystems that many of its amphibian and reptile species would be wiped out. Our work supplemented and supported a massive and effective effort by a local grass-roots organization opposing the oversized project on roughly a dozen other grounds -- traffic, cost of school expansion, visual impacts, among others. Shortly after these findings were made public, the developer announced it was going back to the drawing board. It has promised to make protection of the site’s natural resources the beginning point and focus of revised plans. Time will tell whether these plans achieve this laudable goal.

Scan the Web site of any land preservation organization and you’re likely to see the word “contiguous” before you read too far. It’s not enough that we safeguard America’s fields and forests, mountains and marshlands; it’s crucial these open spaces be connected. In other words, it’s far better to conserve one 100-acre plot than to protect 50 unlinked two-acre parcels.

Why? For one thing ...

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