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Conservation Easements & Land Purchases offer long-term protection for especially valuable open space, natural areas, and farmland. Land trusts from across the country have been active in accomplishing this. Strategically located easements and conservation land purchases can help keep development away from important natural areas, and help preserve high quality farmland. They can also help structure a region's pattern of growth and development.
The Spring 1999 issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal features Joel Russell's article, "Land Trusts & Planning Commissions: Forging Strategic Alliances" (read excerpts; article can be ordered & downloaded online). The article is supplemented by a series of sidebars taking a look at land trusts from across the country.
The largest land protection organization in the U.S. is The Nature Conservancy. Other national organizations that focus on land conservation (including the use of easements and land purchase) include the American Farmland Trust; The Conservation Fund; and The Trust for Public Land. The national umbrella organization for land trusts is the Land Trust Alliance which has a useful web site.
Land conservation can also be used as a way to structure urban growth. Greenways, parks, and other open space can help focus where growth will occur -- one important means of changing from a sprawling pattern of development. The Trust for Public Lands has information on its "Greenprint for Growth" program, an interesting approach to using land conservation as a growth management tool.
This harkens back to the ideas of Patrick Geddes and Benton MacKaye, leaders of the regional planning movement, who early in the 20th century saw regional planning as a way of channeling metropolitan growth. As MacKaye described in 1928 in The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning:
"The flow of metropolitanism we have compared loosely with the flow of waters -- but we must now be more precise: we must compare it with the flow of flood waters. ... [Assume] a circular area of twenty-mile radius, containing a central metropolis of 40,000 population and a number of small villages in even distribution. Four main highways extend outward from the central town -- north, south, east, and west. Side roads cross the main roads at regular intervals. The periphery of the locality consists of a range of hills and low mountains, from which four ridges extend in toward the central town ...
If left alone, the metropolitan deluge will flow out along the main highways (and the side highways) ... distributing the population in a series of continuous strings, which together would make a metropolitan cobweb of the locality. In this way the area with its several villages would become engulfed by the metropolitan flood. What are the barriers and footholds supplied by nature in this locality for narrowing and checking the full workings of this cataclysm? What topographic features are there, and what common public ground, which could be developed as a series of 'embankments'?
The outstanding topographic feature consists of the range of hills and mountains encircling the locality, together with the four ridges reaching toward the central city. This could be reserved as a common public ground, serving the double purpose of a public forest and a public playground. It might be called a 'wilderness area.' It would form a linear area, or belt, around and through the locality. ... This series of open areas and ways would form a distinct realm: it would be a primeval realm (or near-primeval) -- the opposite realm from the metropolitan. ... A system of open ways of this design would form a series of breaks in the metropolitan deluge: it would divide -- or tend to divide -- the flood waters of metropolitanism into separate 'basins' and thereby tend to avert their complete and total confluence."
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