California Leads U.S. in Preserving Land

The acreage exceeds that of Rhode Island, and nearly that of Delaware. All of it is located in California and protected as open space by local environmental groups that have figured out a foolproof way to conserve land: They bought it.

A once-a-decade report released Tuesday by the Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C., calculates that 132 local and regional conservation groups in California have preserved more land than any of their peers across the nation. They have protected 1.25 million acres, either by purchasing it or by paying owners to forfeit their development rights.

Nationwide, these small and medium-sized environmental groups cumulatively had protected nearly 6.4 million acres through 2000. That’s more than a threefold increase over the 1.9 million acres that had been protected by these groups as of 1990.

The survey logged another milestone: For the first time since 1891, when the first nonprofit land trust was founded in the United States, land has become permanently protected in all 50 states.

“People like to see scenery and know that land is not [headed toward] endless cookie-cutter sprawl,” said Jean Hocker, president of the Land Trust Alliance. “That’s what is fueling the enormous growth of this movement.”

The survey of 1,263 local and regional land trusts did not factor in the acreage preserved by the biggest national conservation groups, such as The Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land or the Audubon Society. If their efforts were included, the protected acreage would have been substantially more.

The Trust for Public Land, for instance, has conserved about 400,000 acres in California over the years, said Reed Holderman, director of the group’s California operations.

Much of the land purchased by these conservationists ultimately is turned over to state, local or federal agencies to become parks or wilderness areas. Some remains in the hands of conservation groups, often held as protected open space and wildlife habitat.

The most striking change in recent years is the increase in “conservation easements,” which protect farmland and grazing pastures from bulldozers.

In exchange for money--sometimes a lot--farm and ranch owners agree to give up their rights to develop the land and record these promises as a conservation easement. That way, they get paid and get to keep the land, too.

At the same time, the survey showed that a growing number of landowners are donating their land, or agreeing to conservation easements in exchange for tax benefits. Sometimes such donations are made for personal reasons, such as the satisfaction of knowing that the family ranch will not be carved up into housing tracks.

Hocker said the march of development and the loss of greenbelts, open space and wilderness areas have huge impacts on human beings as well as wildlife.

“The people who join land trusts are people who want to do something about it instead of just complaining about it,” she said.

Growth spurts in land trusts have occurred on the edges of big cities, such as around the Los Angeles basin, in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the foothills of the Sierra.

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Weiss reported from Los Angeles, Shogren from Washington, D.C.