The Senate Hearings about Conservation Easement problems discussed a little in previous posts have released the results of its investigation of The Nature Conservancy. Jon and Pat have given the subject more coverage than I have and Pat has a long post about it.

The report paints a picture of an organization that's gotten so big, and so successful, it lost sight of why it was formed in the first place. . .

But TNC isn't the only reason the Senate began investigating. It has become clear that some people have been abusing the law that allows tax deductions for conservation easements. . .

Though TNC, and undoubtedly many others, have abused the system in myriad ways, supporters are concerned that policy makers will react too strongly.

Easements are effective because they allow land to stay in private hands, and give the trusts more bang for their buck. Far fewer acres would be conserved, and smaller trusts simply wouldn't have the money to even exist. Fewer landowners would be willing to donate their property. More land would go to development.

Pat is a strong advocate for Land Trusts and takes the opportunity to lobby for them.

So why should anyone else in the environmental community care?

First, land trusts work: They've conserved over 9 million acres of privately held land, 5 million of those through easements. Most importantly, they enjoy broad political support. You won't find many organizations that do as much environmental good that are supported by conservatives and liberals alike.

Bottom line, trusts work. And if it hadn't been for an intensive lobbying campaign by the LTA and other conservation leaders, and a deep reservoir of goodwill, trusts faced at the very least the loss of their most effective tool. At the worst, it would have meant the end of many trusts.

This is what has been called the "bucks and acres" defense, a flawed view from the conservation perspective since it isn't clear just what "conserved" means in this context. Contrary to what is implied by the recent hearings, Land Trusts in general and TNC in particular have been criticized for a long time for a variety of crimes. Bucks and Acres pseudo-conservation is one of the things they've been dinged for. That was an issue posted about going on two years ago in Mouse-based Monitoring.

An article from the magazine Conservation In Practice, a publication of the Society for Conservation Biology, examines a sensitive subject: are the efforts of conservation organizations so lavishly funded by concerned donors effective? Are they actually doing conservation? No one knows and conservation organizations have no ways to find out. The standard requirements of every other sort of organization - from businesses to governments - for measuring, monitoring and auditing were entirely alien to conservation organizations. The only measurements they used were the magnitude of their budgets and the area of land that had somehow been 'saved' either by purchase or regulation; bucks and acres. They had no useful methods to measure whether they had actually done any good and their reporting consisted of little more than ill informed subjective responses to multiple choice questions - check the box that best applies: poor, fair, good.

Large organizations like TNC are active world wide and have had some harsh criticism for their behavior abroad. A few months ago an article in World Watch Magazine, A Challenge to Conservationists, took them to task for their behavior.

This is white collar crime, or perhaps we should call it green collar, but we can understand the recent Senate Hearings by analogy to instances where organized crime rings were prosecuted for tax evasion or fraud because it was too hard to make a case about their true crimes. That's too strong a comparison but the form of the analogy is apt because the real failing of Land Trusts, especially the very large orgs, is that the claims of million of acres conserved is bunk. Conservation is never a done deal, land is never "saved". The initial costs of buying or otherwise acquiring rights is the least of the effort and expense required to actually do conservation. The TNC has explicitly shed some properties for this reason. They don't have the ability to do conservation well and the operational expenses prevented them from making further acquisitions.

When Pat says: "Bottom line, trusts work" I have to take exception. On balance they don't. That doesn't mean that there are no cases where things have come out well, but they are the exception rather than the rule. This is no surprise. When you examine the system in detail, with knowledge of what true conservation requires, it is obvious that there is no way the system can work. It takes way more money and expertise than they can bring to bear. The best that can be said is that some development has been thwarted for now, though some has also been enabled. This isn't conservation and there is no certainty that the lands will not be developed later.

What can be said in defense of Trusts is that we have no replacement and they are better than nothing. What we should be doing is a deep rethink of the system to address the root causes of problems rather than relying on tax hustles for superficial relief. This issue won't go away and every round of hearings will be increasingly outraged as more and more people twig to the fact that we have been duped.

This isn't easy stuff. Conservation is hard! Twiddling the tax code and shuffling bucks around won't do it. The funny part is that it's so similar to the problems of development. Parts of the world desperately need development and the bucks and promises approach doesn't work there either. Pouring money into development aid doesn't often result in development. There's a useful lesson in this. It is no accident that neither conservation nor development can be achieved without a lot of smart and hard work no matter how much money is spent of how hard we wish. When we consider how bad a job governments do with public lands, in some cases utterly destroying that which they sought to preserve, it becomes even clearer that the simplistic approaches of orgs like TNC haven't a chance of working in the long term. The best they can do is delay some immediate threats, but in the process create even deeper problems that build over time.

Let's not simply dig in our heels trying to save land trusts and then call it done. Land trusts are at best a stop-gap approach that may ease immediate pressure while better long term approaches are developed. That is what has happened so far. It's been like pulling teeth to get supposed environmentalists to even look at the problems much less develop plans for better approaches. If there is serious pain due to these hearings some good may come of it as more people finally grasp that there is still much work to do.

Also see Conservation That Works.