Wilderness Getting a Boost From Donors’ Bequests

Norman MacDonald was a railroad buff who designed locomotives in a 30-year career with General Motors Corp.

He was an adventurer who loved to camp and ski, a world traveler who once rode a BMW motorcycle across Europe, a handy fellow who built his own house and taught himself to play the organ.

But nowadays the Mukilteo, Wash., man may be best known for what happened after his death.

He arranged to hand over nearly his entire estate--$1.5 million--to the Washington National Park Fund, a nonprofit Seattle group that buys and preserves land in the state for national parks.

Parks became MacDonald’s passion a few years ago, when he read a newspaper account of how a beach in Olympic National Park might be mined for gold--a mineral-rights case still in negotiation.

“From his house he could look out and see the Olympics,” said Rick Wagner, realty officer for the National Park Service in Seattle. “He really did want this to be his legacy.”

MacDonald, who died in July at age 73, was not alone. A small but growing number of Americans are using their estates to help protect open land, and preservation groups are reaping hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result.

The shift occurs as polls and ballot referendums show Americans are growing weary of urban sprawl and want to do more to protect the nation’s last vestiges of wilderness.

Here’s a sampling of the recent bounty:

* James I. Mason, 84, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture anthropologist from Beaverton, Ore., bequeathed the Nature Conservancy in Oregon $1.2 million when he died last October.

Mason, who lived modestly and was an avid collector of vintage televisions and radios, gave no indication to group officials that such a large donation was coming. His bequest was one of the largest ever for Oregon’s conservancy chapter, which buys private land to protect it as natural habitat.

“I just about fell off my chair,” said Jana Setzler, its director of planned giving.

* Marianne Ott, 73, a retired schoolteacher in Gresham, Ore., plans a five-figure donation to the conservancy upon her death. A lifelong hiker and tender of a 7,000-square-foot vegetable garden, Ott said she hopes to stem the tide of land development.

“I have seen this wonderful farmland being destroyed and forest land being eaten up,” she said. “I am really glad I am as old as I am, because I have seen a better world in many ways.”

MacDonald’s donation to the National Park Fund was the organization’s biggest, and its first bequest. But five other people, one with an estate worth more than $1 million, have arranged significant legacies.

“It is a trend we will see increase,” said Jen Benn, executive director of the fund.

Environmentalists aren’t alone. Charities in general--from cancer-fighting groups to those that care for the poor--hope to benefit during the vast generational transfer of wealth expected in coming years as baby boomers lose their parents.

Bequests to conserve open land are particularly attractive among the outdoorsy set. Many who arrange such gifts speak of a lifetime of hiking, camping and other wilderness pleasures.

“They have a strong connection to a place, and then those places are going away,” Setzler said. “It runs deep with people.”

Federal funding for land acquisition has lagged well behind the needs for more than a decade, despite a recent one-time boost from $149 million in 1997 to $969 million last year.

Funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund--the money federal agencies use to buy land--is $328.5 million this year. National Park Service officials say Congress in recent years has funded just one-tenth of the agency’s requests for land-acquisition funding.

The National Park Trust, a Washington, D.C., group that buys private land and then donates it to government agencies, said in an August report that 110,000 acres of privately owned property in and adjacent to 20 national parks are at risk of sale for commercial purposes.

Congress’ failure to fund land acquisition has placed more demand on private resources, preservationists say.

“If people don’t start giving money for all levels of parks, we will basically see the existing inventory of parks be the inventory of the future,” said Paul Pritchard, the group’s executive director.

And the current inventory isn’t enough, because use of parks is growing, he added.

Still, bequests make up fewer than 10% of annual donations at the National Park Trust, Pritchard said.

“I wish it were a trend, but I haven’t seen it,” he added. “It’s probably one of the most underutilized tools.”

At the Trust For Public Land, a San Francisco-based group that buys private land and then holds it for purchase by government agencies, bequests make up fewer than 5% of its donations, said Jennie Gerard, a senior vice president at the group.

Many people simply haven’t thought of bequests as a good way to donate, the groups say, so they’re using brochures, seminars and advertisements to get the word out.

The groups expect bequests to grow in coming years.

Meanwhile, for those who donate with a specific purpose in mind, land-preservation groups try to follow through on the wishes of the deceased.

National Park Trust accepted a $50,000 bequest a decade ago from a man who wanted to buy land for panther habitat in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.

But draft regulations from the National Park Service would allow off-road vehicles on the donated land, potentially harming the habitat.

Pritchard said he is considering a lawsuit against the agency to protect the land donor’s original intent.