Nature Conservancy Buys Up Land to Ward Off Development : Preservation: Conservationists with success in law and business bring money to the cause and fuel ambitious acquisitions.

When the Nature Conservancy bought 502 square miles of New Mexico--90% of a mountain range and a more diverse population of mammals than any national park in the United States--it was hailed as a milestone.

It certainly was. But the purchase in late January was also the culmination of an explosion of conservation efforts in the last 10 years.

A new breed of conservationists is buying up big chunks of the American landscape, stamping the land inviolate to the bulldozer’s blade.

How much money the conservancy paid for the Gray Ranch in New Mexico, astride the Continental Divide, wasn’t made public. But it was probably in the neighborhood of $18 million, a sum that would have sounded improbable to a conservationist’s ears a decade ago.

What it brought under the conservancy’s protection was almost all the Animas Mountain range; some 100 plant and animal species listed as endangered, threatened or rare; 13 pre-Columbian archeological digs and hundreds of others as yet unexplored; herds of Chihuahuan pronghorn antelope; seven different habitat types from desert grassland to chaparral and coniferous forest; and endangered bits of nature from the white-eared hummingbird to the night blooming cereus.

The conservancy acted when it discovered the ranch owners wanted to sell and there was the threat the land might be broken up and developed.

Conservancy President John C. Sawhill, announcing the buy, said: “Few intact natural systems of this caliber exist in the world today. The . . . effort also represents the future trend for the Nature Conservancy and its partners. To truly ensure our natural world for future generations, we are developing creative ways to safeguard much larger landscapes.”

A few years ago, such an effort would have been only a dream, but conservationists are becoming sophisticated advocates--scientists, business graduates, experts in law and real estate.

Inch by precious inch they are preserving farmland, wilderness and open spaces against development, more effectively than ever before.

The Nature Conservancy is a sort of symbol for individuals and other land trusts. Before the New Mexico deal, it was taking an average of 1,000 acres a day out of commercial play.

Says Mike Dennis, general counsel of the conservancy: “For every scientist we have around here, we probably have an MBA, a tax lawyer and a real estate attorney.”

Environmentalists have sharpened their skills in the private sector, recycling many of the same dollars each time to buy new land. They have discovered revolving funds, a war fund that doesn’t have to stay invested. They can plunk down several million dollars until, by prior arrangement, a government agency can repay them, assuming custodial care of the property.

Or they can buy a piece of property, deprive it of the potential for commercial development, and resell the land for a somewhat lesser cost to what they think is an appropriate buyer.

Who is that buyer? A farmer who will farm without being tempted by high developer prices, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which wants to protect the land, or a trust that is able to preserve the land as open space, a vista, a place apart.

In any case, the conservationists send the resale dollars back into their revolving funds to be used again.

None of these organizations or individuals could succeed without local support. When a developer wanted to take a 147-acre scenic hay meadow in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to put in 70 to 80 houses, the local land trust negotiated an option on the land priced at $1.5 million.

The county came up with one-third and the land trust raised the rest from private donations.

Says Jean Hocker, director of the Land Trust Alliance, an umbrella organization in Washington for hundreds of local land trusts: “The community heard about it and came to the rescue.” The deal took three months. Speed is important.

There are more than 800 local land trusts established in states, counties and communities--almost half of them formed in the past 10 years. They protect about 2 million acres and they own 300,000. Some of them have million-dollar budgets.

Sometimes conservationists act in concert.

The McQuerry Ranch, 3,500 acres at the foot of the 11,000-foot peaks of Nevada’s Ruby Mountains, was in financial trouble, the family in danger of losing the land they had farmed for generations.

A third of the ranch is a unique desert wetland area around Franklin Lake, the kind of terrain that attracts resort development. It is also a nesting area for migratory birds.

The American Farmland Trust suggested to the Nature Conservancy that the best way to preserve the land was to enhance the way in which the farm was operated by the family.

The migratory birds and the wetland fit the conservancy’s charter. With $300,000 from its revolving fund, the conservationists bought the ranch and leased it back to the McQuerry family with certain conditions.

The family would have to change certain farming operations. For instance, they would not be permitted to graze the wetland area from fall to the following summer when the birds use the estuary.

When the family was able, they would buy the ranch back, but those covenants would remain.

“If we hadn’t stepped in, certainly the family was going into bankruptcy,” says Ralph Grossi, president of the American Farmland Trust. “They would have lost the farm.”

The farmland trust felt there was a real danger of development to the land and to the natural ecosystem around the lake.

The United States covers some 3.6 million square miles, or 2.3 trillion acres. Of those, 78,000 square miles, or almost 50 million acres, are inland waterways. There are also more than 88,000 miles of tidal shoreline.

Conservationist groups can’t protect it all, nor, they say, should they. Often they seek to cooperate with developers, allowing residential uses, but sequestering other areas. In some cases, developers pay mitigation fees for the damage their developments might cause. Those funds are used to enhance the protected land.

Says the Nature Conservancy’s Dennis: “When you’re talking about an ecosystem, you could be talking about anything from 5,000 acres to 500 square miles.”

So he outlines a compromise, a core that the conservationists want to own and manage. Around that they would establish a larger area where timbering and mining are banned. “Then you may want an additional buffer where development is OK, but it’s got to be limited. You may allow a cluster of homes here on 2- to 5-acre tracts and preserve farmland over there.”

Even individuals are taking a page from their book and designing small local operations to save such properties as a farm in Virginia or 400 acres of rolling countryside in Connecticut. The farm remained a farm, and the Connecticut tract is now home to an organically safe golf course.

In the array of people in the conservation army, there is also an array of purposes.

The Nature Conservancy’s 542,000 members, dedicated to preserving habitats, have financed a $600-million organization that has saved almost 4 million sensitive acres since it was founded in 1953. It has 1,000 employees and probably 10,000 volunteers and covers every state.

Considerably younger (10 years old) and smaller (a staff of 30 nationwide) is the American Farmland Trust, dedicated to saving the nation’s farms and improving farming techniques. Yet, it churns accounts of more than $2 million to get more acres for the buck.

“We are concerned about the debt burden in agriculture,” says the trust’s president, Ralph Grossi. “Many farmers are going out of business and their land isn’t being cared for adequately.”

Organizations from the National Wildlife Federation to the Audubon Society, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Ducks Unlimited, a hunter’s group, often find themselves working in concert.

They all have one thing in common. They can move more quickly than local or state governments can and, using charitable tax benefits, they can bring in a deal cheaper than developers can.

By stripping a piece of land of development rights, it is not only protected regardless of who owns it, but income tax benefits can either bring the owner a sizable tax deduction or provide instant cash for a farmer.

It also reduces the value of the land and hence its tax assessment, which deprives the county or state of some tax revenue. But counties and states usually are willing to forgo taxes on some property to enhance the value of land around it.

Witness New York’s Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who has asked for $1.9 billion to set aside areas of the Empire State for scenic and recreation purposes. California has provided more than $700 million for similar purposes, and Florida has an active land acquisition program.

But the smallest of communities can be stirred to action. Michigan’s west coast is a beautiful blend of dunes, orchards and sandy beaches on Lake Michigan. It is a magnet for those wanting second homes, and unlike the coast of California, which it mimics in miniature, it has no coastal commission to protect it.

Local land trusts, with the help of the Farmland Trust, moved in to buy a 507-acre farm on the Old Mission Peninsula, blocking any further residential development. It will remain an orchard in an area that prides itself as being the “Cherry Capital of the World.”

“It’s unlikely that some crops will be grown in any quantity in the United States 30 to 40 years from now,” says Grossi of the Farmland Trust. “The growing areas that are required, the climate, the soil, the weather, those unique values are essentially the same as those that attract people.”