Since its inception, RFF has been guided by the principle that any comprehensive conservation strategy must address the human component for widespread adoption of conservation values. As such, RFF recognizes private landowners as stewards of the land, and caretakers of our future natural resources. 61% of our nation’s landscape (71% of the continental U.S.) is in private ownership, yet the overwhelming majority of our public and philanthropic financial resources are focused in public land conservation, ignoring the largest segment of the market needing conservation assistance, tutelage and freedom to innovate.

RFF is celebrating a decade of forging an innovative path to conservation and stewardship: delivering information directly to private landowners through the internet.  Check out our "Top 10" list »

• The development of web-based projects designed to serve the conservation objectives of the private landowner community across the United States.
• Community-based conservation and education projects in the Southern tier of Africa through the Wilderness Safaris Wildlife Trust.
• The purchase of high seas and interceptory Atlantic salmon fisheries through the Atlantic Salmon Fund.
• Community-based education, conservation, and improvement programs on Bequia, St. Vincent through Moonhole Friends Foundation

Click to learn about RFF's ...

History

Philosophy

My name is Amos S. Eno and I am President of the Resources First Foundation (hereafter RFF), which I established in 2000. RFF sponsors what we call PLN (www.privatelandownernetwork.com), and CTC (www.conservationtaxcenter.org), and a host of satellite websites, the latest of which is (www.savearanch.org). All our websites are designed to empower private landowners and to stimulate private sector conservation and stewardship initiatives and solutions for environmental problems. I have worked in conservation for over 35 years, and my career path, which might be more appropriately dubbed the “careening” path of a total maverick, has taught me a number of valuable lessons. My background and the evolution of my thinking, as I have fumbled toward the elusive ecstasy of environmental solutions, underpin everything we are doing with PLN and our growing portfolio of satellite websites. I graduated from college in 1972 with a history degree, minor in art and two years specializing in the political evolution of African American leaders. That might seem an unlikely springboard for a career in conservation, but it did get me to fall off the diving board into the frothy bath of national environmental policy. You see my immersion into black politics taught me that advocacy without equal portions of strategic economic empowerment, and responsible political engagement (as Ed Brooke in MA, and Leonard S. Coleman in NJ) is a popped balloon.  This is a lesson (ASE lesson #1) the environmental movement has yet to learn. I grew up as an inveterate birdwatcher, thanks to my Dad. My first Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide dates to 1958. When I was sent off to summer camp I memorized the silhouettes and can still identify most perching birds driving at 85 mph, and could recognize all the birds resident in the northeast. During my school years my Dad was on the national board of the National Audubon Society when Elvis Stahr was President and I occasionally got to accompany him to board meetings and associated field trips. These early forays and school vacation trips to birding areas surrounding our home in Princeton, NJ (Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Brigantine NWR, Cape May, Cork Screw Swamp FL, Olympic NP, WA), constituted my introduction to critters winged and otherwise and to conservation issues. After college, I had no idea what to do and the embarrassment of graduating cum laude, but getting mid 500s on my law and business boards did not make the prospect of graduate school a bed of roses.  So on a serendipitous door opening I signed on as a biological intern for Chitwan Park, Nepal and later work in East Africa.  The Chitwan sits in Nepal’s terai, or lowlands and I worked under UNDP’s Frank Poppleton assisting on bird surveys, tiger and Indian rhino research. The interplay between the park and surrounding people residing on the protected area’s periphery was a source of constant friction, and provided my first glimpse of the inequities of creating protected wildlife sanctuaries without integrating the surrounding humanscape as part of the conservation equation.  Before departing Nepal, I did the first proposed conservation plan for Lang Tang valley now a national park bordering Tibet.  Thence I peregrinated to East Africa where I was introduced to David Western (WCS) who pioneered policies to involve, somewhat belatedly, local people, in this case Maasai (see his book IN THE DUST OF KILIMANJARO), in both the management and as fiscal recipients of tourist revenue in national parks such as Kenya’s Amboseli NP.  Western demonstrated that the colonial and post colonial policy of gazetting protected wildlife sanctuaries and national parks on the backs of local residents, even if they were “just pastoralists”, was doomed in the long run if local people were not integrated from the ground up in the design , management and enforcement of protected areas (ASE lesson #2). By year end it was time to find a real job so I headed to Washington, feeling a little like Davey Crockett come up out of the back woods. Another fortuitous door opening and to my surprise, I landed a job in the Secretary’s office, Department of Interior with Assistant Secretary Nat Reed who oversaw the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service and the then Bureau of Outdoor Recreation which Jim Watt later buried.  At that time Rog Morton was Secretary (the only easterner to hold the job) and he assembled a leadership team (John Whittaker, Royston Hughes, Jim Lyons, Nat Reed, Jack Horton) that has never been equaled since. Working at Interior in the early 70s with Russ Train and Bill Ruckelshaus also in wings of the Administration, was akin to being with Dean Acheson at State post WWII; you were “PRESENT AT CREATION’ in terms of the development of national environmental policies. It was an era of legislative and policy ferment: passage of the Endangered Species Act (1973), removal of 1080, steel shot, PCBs and the establishment of more parks and wildlife refuges than heretofore, and laying the groundwork for all the Alaskan conservation lands (passed under Pres. Carter). However the most important lessons I learned were at the knees of a career bureaucrat in the Secretary’s office named Cleo Layton (hired by Harold Ickes in 1934).  Cleo taught me that a bureaucracy, like an army moves on its stomach, so to effectively control an agency you have to manage the budget and personnel shrewdly (ASE lesson #3), which, sadly has never occurred at Interior post the Morton team’s tenure. With the change in administrations, I left Washington for graduate school to get a rudimentary education in wildlife management, natural resources and public policy.  I landed at Cornell for a master’s program and got an eye opening exposure to academia. Oh My!! Our courses involved reading Aldo Leopold, of course, and all sorts of antiquated wildlife management tomes which were about as far removed from the realities of current day environmental policy formation and legislative combat that I had experienced in DC, as Davey Crockett’s Alamo. I did two years course work in 9 months, ran my first two marathons- to satisfy a bet and for sanity from academes- and skedaddled. By this time environmental seminars, TV enviro documentaries and National Geographic Specials portraying wildlife biologists (a la Jane Goodall) and their pet critters were getting under my skin, because I was gaining the sense that conservation was more dependent on the people who lived in a given landscape than the biology of the specific animals under perennial study.  I decided to go see for myself and took out a loan and charted a trip around the world.  I started in East Africa and looked in on David Western again, then looked at the elephant/ivory protagonists Ian Parker and Douglas Hamilton, darted leopards with Patrick Hamilton and thumbed my way by car, aircraft and train through Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi , South Africa, Namibia.  Most of what I saw confirmed my emergent thoughts that the current emphasis on wildlife biology to dictate the parameters of natural resource conservation was misplaced. In 1977 in South Africa I met Russel Friedman, then with the Vulture Study Group (who I later brought to the states to assist the California Condor Recovery Program), who later founded Wilderness Safaris (the best eco-tourism company in the world) and the Wilderness Safaris Wildlife Trust which is the recipient of today’s RFF Africa grants.  My solo carpet ride took me through the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong/Macao, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, and Trinidad when 10 months of dysentery and malaria finally sent me home to medicinal rehab.  Looking back on the year, conservation seemed somehow disjunctive everywhere I looked, but at the time I couldn’t put my finger on a macro world view that encapsulated the disjointedness I had witnessed.  The closest I came was writing a long article for AUDUBON that scaldingly criticized most of the patron saints of conservation then holding forth in east Africa, which not surprisingly Audubon declined to publish.  This was the first of many run-ins I had with the environmental movement’s 11th Commandment (Thou shall not criticize your fellow enviros). The same affliction is periodically ascribed to republicans, of course, by peers of that political affinity. On my return stateside some yet unexplained yearning/necessity led me, lemming–like, to seek a job in the bowels of the federal wildlife bureaucracy at the Department of Interior.  I migrated to the Office of Endangered Species (OES), because the Chief of OES was John Spinks, a former compatriot from the office of Assistant Secretary Nat Reed.  Endangered species management was in its infancy in those days (1978-1981), finding its sea legs programmatically within the parent agency (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, hereafter FWS) and in terms of both listing and attempting to recover its progeny species.  My first assignments involved putting the lessons and contacts of my international travels to good use as both leopards (as common as house cats throughout Africa), and large kangaroos (red and gray-with millions thriving in the outback) were proposed as endangered species by environmental protagonists.  After a year of pushing paper we forewent listing and I was given the biggest animal basket case in existence, barely: the California condor.  In those days most of our critical endangered species basket cases were given last rites by FWS Research center at Patuxent, Maryland which ministered bedside remedies less than successfully to these terminal wildlife cases, including whooping cranes, peregrine falcons and California condors.   Early on I learned, in part through the good offices of George W. Archibald (see The Crane Foundation) that Patuxent did not have a monopoly on restorative strategies, and truth be known, was more apt to be an impediment to recovery, and that the private sector offered more salutary capabilities.  In fact, as the next two decades were to prove irrefutably, the private sector proved vastly superior in bringing recovery to the three species named above (ASE lesson #4). With the California condor we put together a partnership with the National Audubon Society (John Ogden lead scientist) for the field recovery program and with the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos, and later the Peregrine Fund for captive breeding and release programs and we brought Russel Friedman’s Vulture Study Group from Africa to advise field handling techniques.  Suffice it to say that after a lot of bumps in the road (i.e. condor kills) we have condors again soaring the azure skies above the Tehachapi Mountains and elsewhere in California and elsewhere in the Southwest today. By 1981 a new gunslinger came to Washington town, as Jim Watt became President Reagan’s first appointed Secretary of Interior. It did not take a genius at that point to determine that the Office of Endangered Species was not going to be the most favored office workplace in Interior’s hallowed, and soon to be hollowed, halls. I knew Watt well as he was a bureau director under my boss Nat Reed, so I did not fancy working at Interior through his watch. With that prospect I moved to the Washington office of the National Audubon Society (1981-86) to try to resurrect a wildlife and natural resource office proficiency worthy of the name. I shouldn’t have bothered, but then again for some reason I seemed to consistently align my career paths to pushing rocks uphill. Audubon went from one of the preeminent conservation organizations under the competent, politically and fiscally shrewd leadership of Elvis Stahr to a successive pair of environmental demagogues who succeeded in torpedoing the finest nature magazine in America (AUDUBON), shrinking one of the healthiest philanthropic endowments to a pittance, and committing repeated acts of managerial and political seppuku.  Most importantly, the successors undermined Audubon’s brand and leadership position by giving its traditional program focus-birds, wildlife and natural resource conservation- short shrift, as they expanded Audubon’s focus to attacking nuclear power, advocating agricultural reform, population control, and pollution control. By this time it was clear that the environmental movement was fracturing into many niche markets with Darwinian precision. This proliferation of niche markets were defined by subject (American Rivers), species (Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Ducks or Quail or Turkey Unlimited), or geographic region (Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Yellowstone Coalition). Having a well defined niche became the key to success of many environmental NGOs competing for money and attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace.  Meanwhile the big shots such as Audubon foundered.  At Audubon I embarked on an almost two decade crusade to make federal natural resource programs more effective, successful and market friendly.  The first step in this stairway -that as you shall see did not get me to any heavenly plateau of accomplishment- was to launch a serial book publishing effort, the AUDUBON WILDLIFE REPORTS. These 1000 page tomes sought to elucidate the major federal agency (US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Marine Fisheries Service) natural resource programs and species and habitat responsibilities.  Part of this endeavor harked back to my Cornell experience wherein there was no current or sophisticated literature on contemporary government natural resource programs, and part of it was a re-branding exercise for Audubon. My next three efforts bore more fruit in the long run: the first was to get the Department of Interior to create the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC) to oversee grizzly recovery. At the time the grizz was drowning in excessive mortality and a tub of state/ federal bureaucratic squabbles. You see the bear unfortunately inhabited the mostly mountain terrain in 4 states (WA, ID, MT, WY), and the jurisdictions of 4 federal agencies (FWS, NPS, USFS, BLM) which were more intent on marking territory and peeing on each others legs than setting the grizz on a path to recovery.  The IGBC was a creation of whole cloth, and by God within the first year it started to work effectively, and today and for most of the past decade grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem have surpassed all the population parameters established for them, their ranges have expanded quite significantly, and they can be said to have substantially recovered in part of the northern Rockies (ASE lesson #5: cooperation can even be made to work at level of state/federal interaction). Audubon also set up a reward program to staunch grizzly shootings and successfully assisted law enforcement programs.   Fast forward to the summer of August 2005, at the White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation Secretary of Interior Gail Norton headlined a movie on successful cooperative efforts that highlighted the success stories of both California condor and Grizzly recovery.  Good ‘nuff, but the sad part was that in the audience of 3000 plus people in attendance, there was virtually no one who could say why these two programs worked effectively or how to replicate them.  So much for institutional memory and progress in the next millennium. The second effort has nothing to do with private land, but is the essence of creating something sustainable from whole cloth within the beltway: the establishment of the National Wildlife Forensic Lab in Ashland, Oregon.  By the mid 1980s virtually all FWS wildlife prosecutions domestically and involving international trade in animals were subject to easy court challenge based on the government’s inability to prove evidence or substantiate the identity of wildlife products. Part of this story is recounted in former FWS Special Agent Terry Grosz’s book DEFENDING OUR WILDLIFE HERITAGE, chapter 7: “Ashes to Ashland”, which chronicles our role in out-maneuvering five years of bureaucratic impedimenta.  Terry never had insight to the larger aspects of the story, securing multiple years of Congressional funding to construct and operate the lab, and getting the Reagan administration politicos at Interior and Justice on board.   Today the lab is a best in the world facility that combines expertise right out of Ian Fleming’s character Professor Q and all his James Bondian gadgets, and analysis capabilities surpassing the best of the FBI.  The story on Congressional funding is a tale for another telling, but my patron saints were Congressman Silvio Conte, and Sid Yates of the House Appropriations Committee. Earmarks are out of fashion today, but during the 80s and 90s many new conservation programs were created from scratch by taking a worthy concept or prototype and mainlining funding through Appropriation bills even with executive branch opposition (ASE lesson #6). My final effort while at Audubon, inadvertently provided my exit strategy a year in the future unbeknownst to me, involved the drafting of legislation to create the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF).  This occurred in 1984 in a spontaneous end of Congressional session effort inspiringly led by Jeff Curtiss of House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, Martha Pope from Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, myself, Bob Davison of National Wildlife Federation and Michael Bean of Environmental Defense. Over a six pack or two (provided by Jeff) one afternoon we drafted a law to create the foundation as an instrument to bring private sector resources to assist the mission of FWS and related federal natural resource agencies. The bill was quickly passed, and a year later a board appointed by the Secretary of Interior and an Executive Director hired.  Even before taking the job the new E/D came to me for advice on how to set up and run the foundation. I remember asking him if he “was willing to take risks?” Chip was rather risk averse (actually he took a huge risk in hiring me), but I wasn’t and that summer during a month long trip back to Africa with my wife I decided on exiting Audubon come hell or high water.  On my return I attended a board of Director’s meeting and told President Berle off in front of the full board and went out the door, literally.  Pink slip followed.  Changing planes at the airport on my way home I got a call from Chip saying come to work for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Over the next decade and a half (1986-1999) NFWF became the platform for building a host of innovative conservation programs and the alchemist for bringing private landowners and private sector corporations into innovative conservation efforts at unprecedented levels. We began by creating two new pathways through the woods to borrow Robert Frosts’ metaphor of roads not taken before in Washington. First, we took a huge planning tome from Interior’s bureaucracy called the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP- my apologies but everything in government has acronyms) and turned it into an actionable agenda with funding.  Since the 1950s waterfowl populations across the continental US had been plummeting.  For a decade prior to 1986, U.S. and Canadian counterparts had been incubating an aggressive plan to conserve wetland habitat which was finally approved by Secretary of Interior Hodel and his Canadian counterpart, and in due course, as predictable in bureaucracy, the plan found itself consigned to a shelf for lack of funding and initiative.  NFWF took on the plan’s implementation as its first multi-year project and brought in lead corporate funders (Dow Chemical), designed the pathway for US grants to fund wetland habitats in Canada (where most ducks breed), brought on state agency partners under the lead of Gary Myers of Tennessee and James Timmerman of South Carolina.  We brought in The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited as the first of a broadening array of national funding partners and created the concept of “joint ventures” for pooling funds for designated geographic targets for conservation funding.  Many of the original grants involved working cooperatively with private landowners on wetland protection (ASE lesson #7) in agricultural areas.   After several years of funding projects through the foundation we took our prototypes to Congress and passed the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA, 1989) which institutionalized our grant making through the FWS into an annual program that has grown past $50 million per annum. Second, in 1991, with our federal partners the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, we launched a new program called Bring Back the Natives (BBN) to restore fisheries and riparian habitats across the western U.S.  In western states the Forest Service tends to own the mountain country, BLM the lower elevations, and critically private landowners own most of the rivers, streams and riparian areas.  Throughout the late 70s and 80s I had watched with increasing distaste as a number of environmental organizations such as NRDC waged a concerted legal battle against ranchers grazing on public lands.  The increased costs of litigation and political pressures forced many ranchers out of business and meanwhile the mountain valleys became condominiumized by ski resorts, ranchettes and multi season developments.  We proved with our BBN grants that ranchers were willing to voluntarily restore riparian areas and stream banks (ASE lesson #8).   Our first grants were on the Mary’s River north of Winnemucca, NV, high cowboy country, and the restoration projects worked like a charm. Cut-throat trout returned and thrived, in 3 years breeding birds increased 300% (on San Pedro river AZ), and 4 legged wildlife benefited enormously.  Watching the success of these projects helped me to turn the corner from watching eastern enviro groups sue ranchers and in process impregnate our prettiest western valleys with development, to developing a broader suite of programs and projects to work with private landowners.  In 1992 we made the then largest challenge grant in NFWF history to fund Texas Parks and Wildlife Departments’ statewide Private Lands Enhancement Program.  Texas is 97% privately owned so our rationale was to make Texas an incubator for innovative private land conservation projects.  By 1994 we had a portfolio of wetlands and “private lands” grants.  In 1995 we made another private lands grant to Texas Parks and Wildlife, and in 1996 gave our Chuck Yeager award to their director, Andrew Sansom, and Chair, Perry Bass.  In the early 90s we also started seeding grants to two initiatives for the high plains and Rocky Mountain land owners: Seeking Common Ground to facilitate coordination and partnership projects between ranchers and big game organizations (such as Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation). This umbrella grant supported compatible grazing and wildlife management projects and was kicked off with Nevada Cattleman.  Pulling Together was another umbrella grant program which supported rangeland projects designed to control invasive plants and noxious weeds (like yellow star thistle). In 1996 I underwent a full scale Paulian conversion on the road to Damascus.  I remember the specific moment in time.  I was stuck in the Chicago airport awaiting a connection to fly to San Antonio to receive a national award from the Nature Conservancy.   I’m not sure what triggered the onset of revising my mental view 180 degrees, perhaps it was the cumulative impact of two decades tilting at federal natural resource agency windmills with Sancho Panza like intensity, perhaps it was looking out the window at 30,000 feet at the developing metroplexes of the west and the Aspenization of so many once fertile mountain valleys.  As I boarded the flight I felt the overwhelming sensation that we, and by that I meant an all embracing conservation “we-ness” to include federal and state agencies, and national and local conservation groups, were losing the frontlines to development across the country sea to shining sea and were not responding to the calls of the marketplace (ASE lesson #9).   By the time I returned to my office I was determined to reorient NFWF to making private land grants not just a priority but the priority portfolio.  Fortunately, I was blessed with a foundation Chair, Maggie Bryant, who was not only a most extraordinary woman, but also shared my thinking and determination to focus on private land conservation.  Maggie pioneered using conservation easements to preserve open space and agricultural land around Middleburg, VA and north of Vicksburg, MS.  Over the next several years we made grants to create Agricultural Land Trusts in California and Colorado, we supported the Malpai Borderlands Group in AZ/NM with a succession of grants, we underwrote publications (Beyond the Rangeland Conflict by Dan Dagget) and supported Holistic Resource Management among many other grants. By the end of 1999 the foundation had made over 430 grants totaling $85 million (with a “m” for money) for private land projects.  In the fall of 1999 at our board meeting we made private land conservation the number one grant priority at NFWF, but then I was out the door. In 2000 at the beginning of the New Year I incorporated the Resources First Foundation (RFF) to “provide conservation education tools and solutions to promote conservation and restoration activities for fish, wildlife and other natural resources primarily on privately owned lands across the United States and in Southern Africa. Today in the U.S. approximately 61% of the nation’s landscape and therefore the vast majority of our nations’ habitat for fish and wildlife resources, reside on privately owned lands. The vast majority of our public and philanthropic financial resources are focused on public land conservation, ignoring the largest segment of the market needing conservation assistance and tutelage.” From 2000-2005, when I wasn’t working on building conservation internet sites, I worked for the New England Forestry Foundation to successfully complete the two largest conservation easements in the United States in the back woods of Maine.  Maine, like Texas, is 97% privately owned and I have utilized the state as an incubator for innovative private land conservation projects.  The 762,000 acre Pingree Project and the 342,000 acre Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership project, both designed by Keith Ross, fit the bill.  Downeast was the inaugural project for Wal-Mart’s Acres For America program launched in April ’05. The combined acreage for these two projects in Maine is more than 1.1 million acres, and the lands remain in private ownership and productive forestry. In January 2000 I was asked to speak to the Section of Taxation and Real Estate at the Annual Conference of the American Bar Association. My presentation stated unequivocally: “There are two central questions before the American people as we begin a new century and a new millennium. First, looking backward with an eye towards historical experience and fairly obvious failure: What is the role of the federal government in conservation and the perpetuation of our natural resource capital? For a century, we have experienced an expansive accumulation of rights, power, and capital bestowed upon federal agencies, and secondarily to state agencies. Simultaneously private landowners and corporations have been subjected to an accumulation of regulatory burdens and infringements, often disenfranchising landowners and providing disincentives for innovative conservation initiatives. Basically, from Teddy Roosevelt to Earthday to Al Gore, every major environment initiative environment initiative has been about empowering federal and state governments at the expense of private landowners. This equation is upside-down, patently ineffective, and the cause of great polarization and anguish in our society. Meanwhile during the past thirty years the private sector- from individual and family landowners to the largest private and public corporations- have absorbed a conservation ethic, that has been inculcated over time with increasing and compounded intensity- to the point that today a majority of people wish to do right by conservation; wish to assume a mantel of responsibility and commensurate potential for action, which heretofore has been reserved solely to the federal government and anointed environmental organizations. Conservation for the past century has been dominated by the federal government. Today most federal agencies (NPS, FWS, BLM, USDA-FS) are struggling to afford and manage their existing infrastructures. Many conservation lands, including the “jewels of the realm,” our National Parks, have become islands surrounded by seas of second home and commercial development. Our National Wildlife Refuges in isolate, surrounded by developed lands, are incapable of preserving their trust species. Believe it not, for almost any environmentally sensitive category designed today, at the dawn of the new millennium; endangered species, forests, wetlands, riparian corridors, over 70 percent of these vital natural resource categories remain in the hands of private landowners, and are sustained by the invested capital of private landowners. And demographics are pushing against your tax attorney doors. For example, 2.5 million individual forest owners were 65 years and older in 1994 and hold 92.6 million acres- 25% of all privately held forest lands in the U.S. Another 2 million owners were estimated to be 55-64 years old, controlling an additional 54 million acres. So what does this mean for Real Estate attorneys? Simply it means you are on the verge of what the Internet techies call a disruptive technology, a whole new industry. Conservation of the past century has been dominated by federal government fee title acquisition and fee acquisition by surrogate environmental organizations. Conservation in this century will be dominated by the private sector and private landowners and the principal mechanism will be the conservation easement. Easements will be the principal and the most important tool in the conservation tool box this century.” WHY? Here we are back to why have we built PLN and CTC and our growing portfolio of landowner assistance web-based tools. My speech continues to provide the compelling reasons why we should focus on private landowners: “First, because domestic discretionary spending is declining at 10% per annum, so federal funding for acquisition programs is declining (still true in 2007).  Even if a new or permanent funding source is legislated (not likely), it is still not equal to the momentousness of the task at hand. Second, while we have a proud tradition of public agencies saving and protecting rare, endangered, ecologically diverse and historic or archeologically significant lands, at bottom, public lands are jurisdictional islands.  Without reaching beyond property lines-which fish and wildlife and even plants ignore-public agencies cannot adequately protect land, air, water and the critters that depend on this real estate. The future of our nation’s biodiversity rests firmly on the shoulders of farmers, ranchers and private landowners, their estate and trust planning, and their ability to retain ownership. Third, government cannot keep up with the loss of open spaces.  Americans doubled the development of existing farmland, forests and other open spaces during the 1990s. Between ‘82 and ‘92 the development rate was 1.4million acres/year.  Between 1992-1997, 16 million acres of land were converted to development-at a rate of 3.2 million acres per year (leading loss states: California, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Washington). Keeping farm and ranch land productive is the only economically viable avenue to avoid sensitive land fragmentation, development and sprawl.  Look at Colorado’s high mountain valleys-what was beautiful ranchland in the 1970s is today chock a block housing and condos.  Contra Costa County, California, has one ranch remaining. Farmers and ranchers today can not afford to pass their landed estate to their children, without tax planning and conservation easements to reduce escalating values of development driven land prices. As the number of farms and ranches dwindle, we are losing many of our most knowledgeable, practical land managers and stewards.  There are only 4.7 million land owners of any size and they husband 70% of our nations’ wetlands and 75% of our endangered species habitats.” That in a nutshell pretty well describes why we built PLN and our associated websites. In early 2000 we did a business plan for a commercial website to be called: Don’t Tread On Me.com, but for the life of me I could not figure how to commercialize the site without creating yet another barrier to entry for landowners who were already traumatized by government bureaucrats at all levels and environmentalists swarming at the door.  So we went the non-profit route through RFF and built PLN as our core domestic product.  Besides this was 2000/2001 when dot-coms were crashing all around us.  It still was and is a disruptive concept.  During the same time frame The Nature Conservancy was inking its “Conservation by Design” business strategy building conservation based on ecological inventories and bio-centric drivers.  I have always had trouble with this approach because ultimately it is people, landowners, not critter presence and biologists, who are going to determine the future of any given landscape.  A recent TV ad (by Dow Chemical Co.) captures the future of conservation in my minds eye.  It is: “Hu, the human element, is the element of change.”   So PLN is designed to serve and support and work with people, the folks who own and live on their lands.  It is that simple. The question of how you solve a problem with such a dispersed market as millions of landowners across 50 states, each of whom is individualistic, idiosyncratic, fiercely independent and each with unique problems and goals is solved by the internet. The internet allows us to post service providers, government programs for assistance, attorneys and tax advisors, and a slough of consultants. Many people have tried to address this suite of problems but most programs address single landowners on a case by case basis, and most purveyors use a cookie cutter conservation approach. Addressing landowners on a case by case basis is the equivalent to cutting a 5 acre lawn one blade of grass at a time. It does not take you to scale to address the full dimension of the problem nor does it provide the full menu of solutions offered in the marketplace. The internet allows us to address these multiple issues for a diverse landowner market and bring solutions to scale for the first time, and allowing landowners to retain the right to choose their service providers and programs for support at will. This is the transcript of the speech I gave at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Public Lands Council meeting on February 26, 2009. The point of the exercise today is to develop a public relations strategy and campaign that promotes/restores ranchers to their rightful position in frontier/western iconography as our premier rural stewards of the American west. That’s a tall order……. In today’s metropolitan/suburban value dominated society, ranchers are generally perceived as the BLACK hats, ecological villains, landscape abusers.  As you all know, this is a result of 40 plus years of verbal, written, and financial assaults from the non ranching community.  So the challenge is: How do you turn today’s proverbial Black Hats into resuscitated White Hats, and resurrect the public image of SHANE, BONANZA, The LONE Ranger, and create a positive apotheosis of ranchers as emblematic stewards and tenders of the garden of our American west. To give you perspective and some hope for transforming this public relations dynamic, I’m going to quickly sketch my personal journey from young eastern, Ivy League enviro to today’s rather ardent promoter of ranch conservation in the west. My first exposure to ranches in the west was during my sophomore year of college when I experienced a Holy Grail vision: driving from central New Jersey in late January, to present myself on the doorstep of a lovely lass attending Denver, Univ. During the entire 30 hour drive it never occurred to me that she might not be pleased to see me-alas, she was otherwise encumbered.  So for 10 more days, I drove to Crested Butte, Vail, Gunnison, through all the mountain holes of central and southern Colorado. This was 1969, before condos and most of the ski resorts. I came back in the summer of 1970, got the same screen door from the blonde, and got to see those same mountain valleys, and holes in July with mountain bluebirds, western tanagers, cows in the pastures and hay getting stacked on beautiful ranches. It left an enduring image, unlike the lady of youthful pursuit. After college I spent four years working for the Sec. of Interior during the early 1970s which presented two conflicting experiences: first, I was assigned to get the cows out of a number of National Wildlife Refuges: Malheur in eastern OR, Bosque Del Apache in central NM (remember Denzel Ferguson Sacred Cows at the Public Trough?) Second, I got to know Jack O Horton of Saddlestring, WY, A/S overseeing BLM and father of FLPMA who gave me the first hint that ranchers weren’t all that bad. During the 1980s I was in the thick of grizzly and wolf conservation efforts. The best I can say is that I listened to the perspectives of ranchers. By the late 1980s and early 90s as Executive Director of NFWF, I underwent a Paulian conversion of sorts, sponsored not by religion, perhaps by too great an infusion of tequila, but most likely by the sudden weight of common sense sitting roundly upon my chest. You see all through the late 70s and 80s I watched my former Interior boss, who was on the board of NRDC, engage in a persistent legal campaign suing ranchers over grazing fees and other purported land-use abuses. And in every telling, I kept thinking of those Colorado and Wyoming valleys, which meantime had become studded with ski resorts and condos and second homes, as ranchers were driven from their business. And, I thought what is harder on the landscape? That old barn and pasture, a few overgrazed meadows and hard packed riparian areas or the resulting fragmentation of the habitat from the multi-faceted pressures of development. Of course, we needed someone like Rick Knight to do the science and prove that all of our intuitions on this score were right. Meanwhile I could see that public land acquisition by federal agencies was sinking under the weight of their own bureaucratic constipation caused by an over stimulated appetite for acquisition. So in the early 90s, as E/D of NFWF, I started experimenting with promoting conservation with private land owners, ranchers EVEN. We gave one of our biggest early grants to create the “Private Lands “program for Texas Parks and Wildlife. We started a joint program with private ranchers and FS/BLM to restore riparian areas in the west. The program was called, “Bring Back The Natives”- natives in this case referring to fish. The first grants were on the Mary’s river (1991) up by Winnemucca, NV. We did the San Pedro in AZ and rivers across CA, OR, WY, MT, UT and CO. In every case within two or three years substantial progress was made in restoring the riparian zones with the assistance of ranchers. We gave a lead grant to support the Malpai Group (NM, AZ) that also included years of sustaining grants; we gave a lead grant to Colorado Cattleman’s Ag LT, ditto California Rangeland Trust, grants to Sonoran Institute, Sustainable Northwest, Quivira Coalition. Along the way I met some wonderful people: Bill MacDonald, the Warner Glenns and other Malpai board members, Elizabeth Paris, later chief clerk of Senate Finance, and Pat and Sharon O’Toole of Ladder Ranch. In 2000, I went out on my own, set up the Resources First foundation (RFF) with the intent of developing private sector solutions for conservation, and in 2001 we started building the Private Landowner Network (PLN) a website designed to put actionable conservation information and resources into the hands of rural Americans. After years of plugging away on PLN we were approached by the folks responsible for putting on the 2005 White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation (WHCCC). They had a vision for collecting and displaying cooperative conservation success stories from across the nation. Using the power of the Internet to spread the word of the successes of these cooperative conservation efforts, the message of the conference was established and reinforced. RFF built an online tool for people to enter and review their stories and put them online; people could search for stories or find them by region. We feverously worked throughout the summer building the site, collecting stories, reviewing and managing the wealth of information we collected.  By the time the conference rolled around in late August we had collected, reviewed and put on line close to 900 stories on Cooperative Conservation America (CCA). But we were not done there, we then had to work to get these stories into the compendium document for the conference Faces and Places of Cooperative Conservation. This concept is the driving force for my vision of a successful public relations strategy for the ranching community, to which I will return. As a result of our success with the WHCCC we were approached by the former chief of USDA’s NRCS to help them rebuild their online agricultural energy estimating tools. Over the course of a year we helped them build four tools and as a result we were recognized by former Secretary Johanns with a USDA national honor award in October 2006. In 2006 after Pres Bush signed the Pension Act providing capital gains reductions for conservation easements, we recognized the value of helping landowners realize the benefits of incorporating conservation into their tax and estate planning strategy. To do this we built the Conservation Tax Center (CTC) and populated it with a library of informative articles on conservation based tax and estate planning and included a searchable database of experienced tax attorneys and estate planners … a one stop shop for landowners tax needs. Why this focus on the internet? I have been drawn to the internet by my determination to find a delivery service for land owners across the country that cuts out all the bureaucracies and middlemen and empowers individuals with intelligent information. I was encouraged when I read Thomas Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. He has become a bit of a liberal ideologue celebrity since then, but his early works were insightful. He sees the internet as an effective means of leveling the playing field, of bottom up empowerment. Friedman said  “activists have to learn how to use globalization to their advantage. . . by mobilizing global consumers through the internet.  I call this the “network solution for human (rancher) rights.  It is bottom-up regulation… you empower the bottom, instead of waiting for the top by shaping a coalition that produces better governance. . .”  This is support for a bottom up empowerment approach. Friedman goes on to reinforce this concept by using the old Chinese proverb that still rings true today …‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.”  With PLN we are putting fishing poles in the hands of landowners across the country. He writes in The World is Flat about how the internet is providing equal access and influence nationally to anybody who wants to participate by stating his rule #3… “And the big shall act small. . . One way that big companies learn to flourish in the flat world is by learning to act really small by enabling their customers to act really big. . . They do it by making their business into a buffet.  (They) create a platform that allows individual customers to serve themselves in their own way, at their own pace, in their own time, according to their own tastes.”  That is our vision for how PLN, CTC, CCA and all RFF websites are working.  We have created on-line buffets.   There are many great success stories on the internet.  We all know about Google.  I know it is a stretch here, but I want to get you thinking about the prevailing concepts of their early days. In the book The Google Story author David Vise comments on Google’s belief “ in word of mouth… build something and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it. Google had an idealistic mission: to make all of the world’s information freely accessible and useful” On the Internet you need a clean and clear look …  “Google’s clean, pristine look attracted computer-users hunting for information.”   Another great success of the internet is recounted in Adam Cohen’s book The Perfect Store, about the beginnings of eBay and the visionary who created it Pierre Omidyar.  eBay has essentially removed the middleman, leveled the playing field, and made it possible for anybody with an internet connection to get out there and run with the big boys.  eBay saw that if they connected individuals to other individuals to other individuals… the playing field would be level… Omidyar built eBay to be … “ not just a shopping site, but a community.  Omidyar allowed users to communicate directly among themselves to solve each other’s problems.” Omidyar believed in empowering individuals which led him to create a site that linked people in a network and “give them a sort of social empowerment.”   There are no boundaries on the internet and Omidyar built this concept in to the foundation of Network Connectivity on eBay. “The ability to network geographically dispersed people was one of the greatest strength of the internet.” Omidyar strongly believed in the power of the people and their innate desire to do the right thing, from this he incorporated a sense of community into eBay …“eBay had always been different: it was a grassroots community, built on word of mouth and sustained by people’s feeling of belonging to something special.” The last book I’ll reference here is something that Omidyar characterized as a compelling and important book. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish And The Spider, is about the new model of business created by the internet.  They identify one thing that is so important to a successful business, trust. Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist is quoted … “a culture of trust that works out really well. . . There is a sense of trust on the site.  The website allows users to interact with each other directly without anybody telling anybody else what they can or cannot do.” I don’t know how many of you here are into blogging, I’m sure most of you have heard the term.  Blogging as powered by the internet is built on the principle of decentralization “put people into an open system and they’ll automatically want to contribute.” If you have any questions on internet use let’s take a look at some hard numbers people are reporting on the use of the internet today: The total global Internet audience surpassed 1 billion visitors in December 2008, Almost 73% of the US population uses the internet - that is just over 220 million people. An estimated 9.5 billion searches were conducted in January 2009 alone.  That is a 27% increase from January of last year. 55% of American homes have a high speed internet connection. And these users are more likely to turn to the internet first when they want to answer a question- and it is increasingly likely a search engine will be used to find the answer. Everybody is catching on … the biggest increase in internet use since 2005 is in the 70-75 year old age group, 45% of that age group is currently online – up 20% from 2005. Lastly research has found that overall visits to the popular content sharing sites are up by 686% since 2005, and currently account for 12% of overall web traffic in the US. This brings us to the opportunity of developing an effective strategy of how to create a persuasive presence in public relations that enables you to penetrate not only the western media, but nationwide metropolitan markets, the conservation market, the state-federal market, and provide a platform to scale the true-life stories of highly individualistic and idiosyncratic ranchers as prototypal pioneers in conservation. We need to take the message of successful rancher stewardship (to replace the 4 hoofed locust stereotype purveyed by the enviro community), to the multi-media marketplace as a winning formula. Ranching needs an organizationally unaffiliated, public relations platform to tout the ecological, biological, and conservation benefits of working ranches as stewards of the western landscape.  We need to tap into the power of the internet to bring this message to the public at large with no boundaries and no attached bias to promote Ranchland Conservation.   The way I see this working is to create a centrally located web-based compendium of rancher conservation success stories that will promote ranching with rancher developed and reviewed conservation successes. The website will stand on its own and be designed from the bottom up where ranchers will provide the content, the success stories, and most importantly the voices of conservation and stewardship.  We need to keep the site design clean, simple, easy to read and navigate, and in keeping with Friedman’s rule#3, we will provide a buffet of real, true-life experiences by featuring successful projects executed and written up by the folks who are actually out there on the ground doing the work and living this traditional American way of life.  Since this compilation of stories, experiences, and projects will be created by real ranchers, you and the entire ranching community will be able to trust the information, and through this network of connectivity folks can reach out and connect with the individual sources of information to validate and ascertain its authenticity.  As in The Perfect Store, this site will be an online community of conservation minded working ranchers which will elevate the message to a national level using the internet as the platform.  This web-based community will empower the ranching community and depict it as a community of innovators and the traditional stewards of the most important landscapes west of the 100th Meridian. The bottom lands and creeks and valleys of the west, as depicted in our slide, are the vital arteries leading to the corporal heart of the west, they provide the water, wetlands, and riparian areas that all the fish and wildlife depend on. Your lands are the lifeblood of this region, and in the near future will become more ecologically and financially valuable as carbon sequestration and ecosystem service financing become a reality. I present to you my concept for success … Ranchbook. Ranchbook will not be a social networking site, but more like Cooperative Conservation America. It will include: A web-based tool to receive and review success stories A search engine for visitors to find stories state, zip code, ranch, or keywords Stories & ranches will be plotted on a clickable map CSU Center for Collaborative Conservation/ Center for Grazing Ranchland Management will create an archive library, archive rancher success stories; CSU Warner will use interns to monitor and maintain the story submissions Each submission will require 3 testimonials from among following (FWS partners for Wildlife, USDA-FS, BLM, NRCS state office, NPS, CD or SWCD, State F&G, Land Trust, or local ENGO (Audubon, TU, ED etc.) The stories will become grist for weekly or biweekly blogs by two bloggers: Joan Chevalier, who has been writing Ted Roosevelt speeches for a decade and Sharon O’Toole of Ladder ranch who can depict the down on the ranch, community-based perspective of contemporary ranchers. The blogs become grist for news feeds highlighting: the Top Ten, or semiannual top rancher stories and small win vignettes to feed to news media NCBA/PLC presents awards annually honoring ranch Stewards/heroes at annual conference in conjunction with Sec USDA/DOI and members of Congress Distribute this online 24/7, 365 days a year and take it to scale based on sheer wealth of content and quality and the incremental impact of blogs and multi-media market absorption. The compounding content will generate an increasing multiplicity of PR opportunities, and media coverage. A product and services directory to Ranchbook to help ranchers connect with service providers and product manufacturers. This provides ties to business community and Chambers of Commerce Provide communication connector / bulletin board for ranchers to communicate with each other and help others learn how to be successful. Ranchbook will be linked to PLN and CTC so our entire network of ever-expanding programs, services, and information sources will be inextricably linked to the site for ranchers who want to replicate the actions and projects of their peers and progenitors can readily adopt and act on their own. Ranchbook will be consistent with, and the embodiment of, the visions and business execution of the great internet company success stories, as well as our own experience in successfully building our product line of conservation minded internet resources. PRIVATE LANDS IN THE WEST A review of the current ranch-land conservation-scape For the past ten years, I have been trying to convince environmental funders, federal and state officials and conservation leaders of the importance of focusing their energies and wallets on private lands as the largest and most strategic market niche for conservation investments in the Twenty-First century. The Resources First Foundation (RFF) has built a succession of internet websites targeting the market of private landowners including: the Private Landowner Network (PLN www.privatelandownernetwork.org), the Conservation Tax Center (CTC www.conservationtaxcenter.org), and the Maine State Conservation Center (www.stateconservation.org/maine). Our sites have received over 20 million hits in the last several years and are currently averaging over 100,000 visitors per month, so obviously our focus is attracting a significant response from viewers interested in this arena. Sometimes as I try to articulate our vision and my personal frustration , particularly with most environmental funders who continue investments in the public lands and Twentieth century infrastructure sector in the West, I stumble upon new sources of information that serve to validate our prospectus for private land investment. Last week we found a small treasure trove of well reasoned arguments in a paper that not only substantiates our basic vision and perspective, but catalogues a number of compelling factual arguments in our favor. The article was published in the Journal of Rangeland Ecology and Management 61(2) March 2008 by two academics, Mark Brunson of Utah State University and Lynn Huntsinger of University California-Berkeley. Their synthesis paper is entitled: Ranching as a Conservation Strategy: Can Old Ranchers Save the New West? This paper is well researched and contains relevant empirical data to substantiate the points of view presented. Today private lands in the west and particularly ranch lands are disproportionately important given the current demographics of landowners, the global climate and fire conditions impacting western landscapes, and the predominant position of private lands in riparian areas and in control of western water rights. Private lands in the west are like blood veins in the corporeal landscape of the West. They also retain the highest biodiversity index because of their low elevation and water access, and they provide critical buffers around and adjacent to federal public lands. I have quoted the salient points contained in Brunson and Huntsinger’s paper extensively to highlight these points and have added my own comments for emphasis and perspective. Much of what Brunson and Huntsinger have written about is contained in RFF literature and proposals, but their extensive documentation, which we have included, and conclusions serve as a veritable trampoline for our cause and recommended conservation investment strategy. With the caveat that what follows is obviously self serving to RFF’s perspective, I think it is important to review this paper and emphasize the research and its conclusions, because they provide the “particular connection” that is either overlooked or not understood by most conservation funders allocating investments to the West, particularly those investing in public landscape protection. We are convinced that from the standpoint of strategic investments for conservation in the West, a targeted focus on private land offers a compelling return on investment. The authors point out in the paper’s introduction “The western United States … is undergoing rapid population growth fueled largely by in-migration from other regions…Saving ranches has become a focus of not only rural traditionalists and livestock producers, but also of conservationists, who prefer ranching as a land use over exurban subdivisions, and who see private lands conservation as a needed alternative to underfunded and controversial public acquisition.” The authors go to explain the vision of their paper addressing the ranchers/ranch’s role in western land conservation. “Conservation through private ownership is a complex process. To succeed practitioners must understand the synergies of people, environment, and institutions that are needed to accomplish conservation, recognizing that some forces such as global climate and economic change occur at scales…” These are critical points and RFF’s websites, particularly PLN, CTC, and Save a Ranch are designed to addresses the full spectrum of complex needs of private land owners in the west, and they provide the opportunity to operate at full scale, locally, regionally, nationally, and on a global basis of readily accessible information and connectivity. ON RANCH CONVERSION: The driving force of development in the west stems from where people live in the region. As the authors put forward “The west is the most urban US region, with more than three-fourths of Westerners living in metropolitan areas”. They cite research reporting that the rural west is at a great risk of land use conversion. “The extent of population-driven land-use change is greater in the rural West than in urban areas because of the dispersed nature of exurban development” (Theobald 2000). They cite examples of actual acres converted. “In Colorado an average 110,000 ha (271,815 acres) of agricultural land was converted to commercial and residential development every year between 1992 and 1997(Maestras et al. 2001.)” Cromartie and Wardwell found that “between 1990-1997, Nonmetropolitan population growth in western states was three times that of the rest of the country”. During the 1990s the amount of land in mid-size Texas farms and ranches (500 to 2,000 acres) declined at a rate of about 250,000 acres per year (Wilkins et al. 2003). Other research in the Yellowstone region from 1990-2001 found that nearly one quarter of the large agricultural lands (ranches of 400 acres or more) changed hands and “only a quarter of these ranches were sold to “traditional” full-time ranchers. Nearly half (46%) went to amenity buyers or part-time ranchers.” Sales in some areas are making it hard for prospective new ranchers to get into the game. Some ranches are selling for large sums; “In January 2007 the largest noncommercial real estate transaction in California history took place when a Los Angeles investment group purchased the 10,000 ha(24,710 ac) Cojo and Jalama ranches for $155 million, about $15,000/ha ($6,300/ac)” (Casselman 2007). “This price is well within the range for ranchland in that area”, reported Michael Fritz, editor of the Farmland Investor Letter, a monthly trade publication. Also reported; “a smaller ranch next door, suitable for vineyard production, sold for $19,000/ac in 2005”. The authors concur that land prices such as these “restrict the entry of new ranchers into the business, and estate taxes squeeze heirs even if they want to continue ranching.” The record and empirical data are clear that private lands are the most subject to development, again because of their lower elevation, access to water and level valley floor landscaping. For all the same reasons these lands are the premier fish and wildlife habitat in the west and provide the connecting corridors to, from, and between publically protected lands. RATIONAL TO PROTECT RANCHES AND PERPETUATE PRIVATE LANDS IN THE WEST: HABITAT: As previously stated private lands of the west are the habitat hot beds, along the valley floors and streambeds. I learned this lesson in 1987 when we gave the first NFWF grant to develop GIS-GAP analysis to Michael Scott in Idaho where 68% of the state is in public ownership, yet all this public land is over 6,000 feet, devoid of much of Idaho’s biodiversity habitat. All the state’s biodiversity resides in riparian areas, like Snake River valley, which is largely controlled by private landowners. The authors found research that reported “habitat for 95% of all federally threatened and endangered flora and fauna is on private land in the U.S. and 262 of those species (19%) survive only on private parcels” (Wilcove et al. 1996). FIRE PROTECTION: The authors cite their own work to make the case for ranching as a way to manage fuel loads, “In addition to the ranch itself acting as a refuge from development, grazing is a useful tool for managing vegetation and habitat… California land management agencies with Mediterranean grasslands and woodlands are using livestock grazing as the least costly, lowest risk,… and most environmentally benign option for reducing buildup of high fuel loads generated by nonnative grasses and for suppressing shrub invasion” (Huntsinger et al.2007a). OPEN SPACE PROTECTION: “A third, closely related value associated with ranches is open-space protection. Seeing the “countryside” within aesthetically pleasing viewsheds is important to many living in urban and exurban areas.” Importantly and rarely factored into conservation agendas, ranches provide this open space asset at no cost to the community it benefits. They buffer public lands from development and high intensity land uses that would clash more severely with wildlife, scenery, recreation, and management practices such as controlled burning. As the authors found in research; “unfortunately, ranches adjacent to public lands are especially attractive for development” (Riebsame et al. 1996). This issue lies at the root of the public / private lands conservation question, and represents the Achilles heel of public land investment strategies. Take for example West Yellowstone, Cody, and Teton Valley in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Today our National Parks are development magnets that attract and are surrounded by Michelin rings of development sealing off the protected land and end up choking both the aesthetics and the biodiversity of the parks themselves. The NPS has never integrated their core areas with a strategy to protect private peripheral lands in a strategy based on open space protection and sustainability. This is NPS’ greatest failure in the Twentieth century. Ironically, in recent years (2005 to present) The Army and Department of Defense have developed and funded a comprehensive program to protect natural resources and landscapes surrounding the principal bases and infrastructure sites across the country. The Army’s program is called Army Compatible Use Buffers (ACUB) and funds are allocated for protection of adjacent farm and forest lands through conservation easements with conservation partner entities public and private. This program demonstrates considerable foresight and initiative as well as financial acumen on the part of the Department of Defense. The Department of Interior should be so bold. FARM SUSTAINABILITY AND PROMOTING ORGANIC AGRICULTURE PRODUCTS: The authors research documents that “ranchers and farmers with conservation easements were more likely to diversify their operations to take advantage of emerging markets” (Gale 2003b). Community supported agriculture is starting to take a hold, “A significant source of support for the farmers that participate in the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) north of San Francisco is value-added markets for local, natural, and organic meat and milk” (MALT 2007). This is one of the reasons RFF added Community Supported Agriculture resources to the Maine State Conservation Center. The Maine State Conservation Center www.stateconservation.org/maine is our first state site and can be viewed as a prototype for future western state sites. RANCHER DEMOGRAPHICS: The authors research revealed facts about the threats ranches face; “As many as 45% of US ranches are being sold each decade … ranchers are an aging population who are land rich and cash poor, and that the purchase or maintenance of a ranch as an economic enterprise is becoming less and less possible.” As is highlighted in all of RFF’s literature, the demographics of ranchers tracks the aging population of private landowners nationwide. Huntsinger et al. (2007b) found that the average age of California ranchers is 59. Peterson and Coppock (2001) reported that 37% of respondents in a survey of Utah livestock producers were aged 66 or older, and that 28% of federal grazing permittees and 51% of ranchers operating solely on private land reported they planned to retire in 5 years. The average age of all U.S. principal farm operators has been more than 50 years of age since at least the 1974 Census of Agriculture and has increased in each census since 1978. In addition, the percentage of principal farm operators 65 or older has risen consistently since 1978 (when it was about 1 in 6) and reached 26.2 percent (more than 1 in 4) in 2002 (2002 Census of Agriculture). And there is a domino effect: “As development proceeds in an area, it also has consequences for the remaining ranches. One California study found that ranchers working in a matrix of subdivided lands and leased pastures were less likely to control yellow starthistle because they assumed weeds on adjacent lands would remain uncontrolled”. Another California study found those ranchers in urbanizing areas were more willing to accept that their ranches would eventually become developed than ranchers in rural areas, recognizing that the pressures and temptations that come with urbanization become irresistible beyond a certain point (Liffman et al. 2000). Fortunately there is an opposite domino effect through critical mass where ranchers team up to protect large contiguous geographic areas. (see the Critical Mass section below). THE “TRUST FACTOR”: It is perhaps the most important and understated driving force in private land conservation, particularly in the West, heir to the Sagebrush rebellion, Wise Use Movement etc. The trust factor is why most land trusts (with the particular exception of the agricultural and cattleman’s land trusts) and environmental organizations are viewed with suspicion and as inappropriate messengers by the private land owning communities throughout the West. The authors present a survey that found a majority of ranchers in two areas of California undergoing rapid exurban development, and reported that “society’s hostility to ranching” was a reason to quit the business (Liffman et al.2000). Public agencies are battling with the trust issue too; “Building trust between ranchers and public agencies, and having a positive outlook about the future of ranching, have been suggested as crucial to reducing tensions between permittees and public agencies” (van Kooten et al. 2006). Some assistance and incentive programs are slow in their adoption by the ranching community because of lack of trust; “A Texas study found landowners to be wary even of market-based conservation incentives if they are novel and there is LESS THAN FULL TRUST of the entity offering the incentive” (Wilmot and Brunson 2005). However, there is a growing appreciation by society of the values ranchers bring: a 2006 survey of Colorado residents found that three-fourths felt agriculture was very important to the quality of life in the state, and even more (83%) said it is very important to maintain land and water in agricultural production. “More than half (57%) agreed that agriculture in Colorado protects the environment, 72% believe farm and ranch animals are treated humanely, and 78% agreed that ranchers with permits to graze on public lands treat the land appropriately. Open space and wildlife habitat protection were found to be as important as food and fiber production as reasons for protecting agricultural land”. (Hull et al. 2006). The Trust factor is why all RFF websites are neutral in political orientation, and why there is no environmental proselytizing or advocacy. Our sites are built as business to business information centers and networks, or in our internal vernacular, C to C as in Connecting people to Conservation. We designed our sites in a fashion that builds a business and market connection between land owners and the conservation based professional, financial, and legal service providers in their communities. ECONOMIC CHALLENGES: When it comes down to money development always wins, but for ranching folks there is more to it than just money. In a study by Torell and Bailey in 2000 the authors found “it has long been a fact that the value of ranch land for development far outstrips the value of land for production. Consumptive and quality-of-life values have been the most important reasons for the purchase and maintenance of ranches for decades”. There are other markets entering into the mix as the authors have come up with some ideas: “The possibility of marketing ‘ecosystem services’ has gained attention as ranchers view activities such as carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat as potential ways to increase income.” Also; “A promising program was initiated in March 2007 by the Chicago Climate Exchange which offers to pay ranchers who store carbon through rangeland rehabilitation or sound range management”. The most popular tool by far is the conservation easement, and it is in use throughout the ranching community; “Voluntary easements that preclude development in perpetuity are acceptable to many ranchers, especially when the easement programs are managed by ranchers’ organizations” (Pritchett et al.2007). This is the reason behind the construction of our SAVE A RANCH site. The goal of the site is to protect working ranches in select geographic areas by raising money to fund easements on working ranches such as the O’Toole’s Ladder Ranch in Wyoming. There are federal and state programs that kick in funding for ranchers who want to use easements to restrict development and promote habitat preservation; “At the state level California and Texas both offer landowner incentive programs that provide payments to landowners implementing habitat management plans that benefit special status species”. There are numerous state and federal programs already listed in RFF’s PLN database, as is every state wildlife action plan and information about the tax deductions available to landowners for conservation in all participating states. TAXES: Taxes are all important to protecting private land. “If ranchers are aging and headed for retirement, the issue of how large properties can be transmitted across generations intact is critical. Johnson (1998) found that INHERITANCE TAXES were considered a PRIMARY BARRIER to ranch transmission in California. The Pinchot Institute and many others have found taxes to be the primary barrier to protecting forestlands across the country as well. The tax provisions enacted in the 2006 Pension act and continued in the 2008 Farm Bill were solely responsible for a ‘gold rush’ on easements in 2007. Conservation organizations were backlogged with easement projects created by interested landowners motivated by these tax provisions. A Texas Attorney reported “Our firm is doing at least three times as many easements this year as in past years. I'm sure that the expanded tax incentives are the main difference.” A report out of a Wyoming land trust; “We have seen close to a tripling of conservation easement numbers completed when compared to previous years. [A] good proportion of this increase has been related to the increase in tax incentives for landowners.” VALUE JUDGMENTS: “One reason why conservation easements have proven so appealing to conservation groups and the public is that they provide some guarantee of a long-term return.” “Many residents of the western United States, including ranchers, tend to be suspicious of government land acquisitions in a region where more than half of the land in many states is managed by federal and state agencies.” CRITICAL MASS: The importance of a critical mass of neighbors gets you to scale. “It may take a community of ranches working together and with public agencies… to maintain ecosystem processes and to conserve habitat and water at an ecologically effective scale. Socially, a “critical mass” of ranches is needed to support the infrastructure, markets, and human relationships that keep a ranch culture and industry alive.” This is what PLN and RFF’s websites offer: an internet network that provides geographic infrastructure, markets and access to all local service providers and market entries, and a web of human relationships to enable ranchers to perpetuate their lifestyle and businesses, keep their land in the family, and afford to pass it on to future generations. As the Malpai experience proves, there is strength in numbers. The Malpai Borderlands Group is organized and led by ranchers who live and work primarily in Southeast Arizona and Southwest New Mexico. It is a collaborative effort that is built around goals shared by neighbors within their community. It was because of this coherent sense of community, that I funded the Malpai Group for six successive years from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and later walked them into the Packard Foundation which also funded them generously. This group originated as a series of informal discussions among ranching neighbors who recognized that a way of life, and a wild landscape that they all loved, was being threatened by spread of development and subdivision from nearby towns. The Malpai Borderlands Group was formally organized as a non-profit organization in 1994. They have protected 75,000 acres of private land through conservation easements, which is protected as natural wildlife habitat and productive ranch land while preventing development. These ranchers, using conservation easements teamed up with neighboring ranches to protect a greater geographic area totaling over one million acres. As Bill McDonald’s daughter wrote: “I believe that the success of Malpai and the proliferation of similar collaborative efforts will provide inspiration for young people across the country to maintain these traditional livelihoods”. Brunson and Huntsinger end their paper with the following paragraph: “Communities of sustainability, new kinds of owners, a rising group of natural resource-oriented ranch managers, and complex mosaics of ownership and obligation: this will indeed be a “new West”, but it seems likely that it cannot be saved by “old ranchers” alone. “New ranchers” must find agencies, neighbors, and publics that share their vision”. THIS IS Exactly WHAT RFF offers- an internet highway to all the above through: www.privatelandownernetwork.org www.conservationtaxcenter.org www.savearanch.org REFERENCES BRUNSON, M. AND HUNTSINGER, L. 2008. Ranching as a Conservation Strategy: Can Old Ranchers Save the New West? Journal of Rangeland Ecology and Management 61(2). CASSELMAN, B. 2007. Nine beachfront miles of Pacific coastline. Wall Street Journal 12 January 2007. Available at: http://www.realestatejournal.com/columnists/private/20070115-private.html. Accessed 5 October, 2007. CROMARTIE, J. B., AND J. M. WARDWELL. 1999. Migrants settling far and wide in the rural West. Rural Development Perspectives 14:2–8. GALE, I. 2003b. West Marin ranchers increasingly diversity. Point Reyes Light 10 April 2003. Available at: http://www.ptreyeslight.com/stories/apr10_03/ag_survey.html. Accessed 5 October 2007 HULL, T., A. BRIGHT, AND G. WALLACE. 2006. Public attitudes about agriculture in Colorado. Denver, CO, USA: Colorado Department of Agriculture. Available at: http://www.ag.state.co.us/mkt/AgInsights/Attitudes%20Toward%20Colorado%20Agriculture%202006%20Final%20Report.pdf. Accessed 5 October 2007. HUNTSINGER, L., J. W. BARTOLOME, AND C. D’ANTONIO. 2007a. Grazing management on California’s Mediterranean grasslands. In: M. R. Stromberg, J. D. Corbin, and C. D’Antonio [EDS.]. California grasslands: ecology and management. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. p. 233–253. LIFFMANN, R. H., L. HUNTSINGER, AND L. C. FORERO. 2000. To ranch or not to ranch: home on the urban range? Journal of Range Management 53:362–370. MAESTAS, J. D., R. L. KNIGHT, AND W. C. GILGERT. 2001. Biodiversity and land-use change in the American Mountain West. Geographical Review 91:509–524. PRITCHETT, L., R. L. KNIGHT, and J. LEE [EDS.]. 2007. Home land: ranching and a West that works. Boulder: CO, USA: Johnson Books. 217p. THEOBALD, D. M. 2000. Fragmentation by inholdings and exurban development. In: R. L. Knight, E. H. Smith, S. W. Buskirk, W. H. Romme, and W. L. Baker [EDS.]. Forest fragmentation in the southern Rocky Mountains. Boulder, CO, USA: University Press of Colorado. p. 155–174. WILCOVE, D., M. BEAN, R. BONNIE, AND M. MCMILLAN. 1996. Rebuilding the ark: toward a more effective endangered species act for private land. Available at: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/483_Rebuilding%20the%20Ark.htm. Accessed 5 October 2007. WILKINS, N., HAYS, A., KUBENKA, D., STEINBACH, D. 2003. Texas Rural Lands; Trends and Conservation Implications for the 21st Century. Available at: http://landinfo.tamu.edu/projects/aft/rldocl.pdf Accessed 19 June 2008. WILMOT, S., AND M. W. BRUNSON. 2005. Conservation attitudes of rural landowners near Fort Hood, Texas: final report to The Nature Conservancy, February. Logan, UT, USA: Utah State University. 56 p.

The Resources First Foundation is governed by a board of directors, who are:

The Resources First Foundation is assisted by a board of advisors, who are: