The Nature Conservancy
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The Nature Conservancy is a leading environmental organization working to protect the most ecologically important lands and waters around the world for nature and people.
The mission of The Nature Conservancy is to preserve the plants, animals, and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.
Founded in 1951, The Nature Conservancy works in more than 30 countries, including all fifty United States, with an increasingly global reach. The Conservancy has almost one million members, has protected more than 69,000 square kilometers (17 million acres) in the United States and more than 473,000 square kilometers (117 million acres) internationally. The organization's annual revenue was over $664,000,000 with land assets totalling $3,518,597,577 as of 2005.
The Nature Conservancy rates as the most trusted organization in a 2006 poll and 2005 poll by Harris Interactive. Forbes magazine rated The Nature Conservancy's fundraising efficiency at 88% in its 2005 survey of the largest U.S. charities. The Conservancy receives a four-star rating from Charity Navigator and was named by the organization as "One of the Ten of the Best Charities Everyone's Heard Of."
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[edit] History
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History and Milestones of The Nature Conservancy
1915 The Ecological Society of America is formed. From its beginning, there is some disagreement about its mission: Should it exist only to support ecologists and publish research or should it also pursue an agenda to preserve natural areas?
1917 From the activist wing within the Ecological Society, the Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions, chaired by Victor Shelford, is created.
1926 The Committee publishes The Naturalist's Guide to the Americas, an attempt to catalog all the known patches of relatively undisturbed nature left in North America and in parts of Latin America.
1946 The Committee reforms itself as the Ecologists' Union, resolving to take “direct action” to save threatened natural areas.
1950 The Ecologists' Union changes its name to The Nature Conservancy.
1951 The Nature Conservancy is incorporated as a nonprofit organization in the District of Columbia on October 22.
1954 The Nature Conservancy grants its first official chapter charter in Eastern New York, thereby launching the first in a network of chapters and field offices that grows to cover the entire United States.
1955 Land acquisition, a key protection tool for the Conservancy, begins with a 60-acre purchase along the Mianus River Gorge on the New York/Connecticut border. The Conservancy provides $7,500 to finance the purchase, with the provision that the loan be repaid for use in other conservation efforts. The revolving loan fund that results — the Land Preservation Fund — is still the organization’s foremost conservation tool.
1961 The Nature Conservancy embarks on its first partnership with a public agency, the Bureau of Land Management, to help comanage an important old-growth forest in California.
The Nature Conservancy receives its first donated conservation easement, on 6 acres of Bantam River salt marsh in Connecticut. The easement allows the landowner to retain title to the ecologically valuable property while giving the Conservancy the right to enforce restrictions on certain types of harmful activities.
1965 A gift from the Ford Foundation enables the Nature Conservancy to hire its first full-time, paid president, Tom Richards, a former IBM executive. Richards introduces management techniques from IBM.
1966 The Nature Conservancy purchases Mason Neck, Virginia, as part of a plan to later sell it to the federal government. It is the first such deal of this magnitude with the government — an arrangement that comes to be known as a government co-op. Pat Noonan is president.
1970 Robert E. Jenkins joins the Conservancy as Chief Scientist. He focuses TNC on the central mission of preserving biodiversity and leads the organization ultimately to create and foster, beginning in 1974, a 50-state biological inventory, introducing scientific rigor to land acquisition choices.
1974 The Natural Heritage Network is launched by the Science Division. The network ultimately comes to reside in and be supported by the governments of all 50 states, most of Canada, and a dozen other countries in the New World. The first state is South Carolina, the second Mississippi, the third, a few months later, Oregon. A core methodology is developed over the following decades based on strictly comparable "elements" of biodiversity, assessment of their status, and locating occurrences of those most imperiled. The methodology becomes the national standard and is adopted by numerous partner organizations, university researchers, and agencies of the federal government.
1980 The Nature Conservancy expands and relaunches its International Conservation Program, focused on Latin America, to identify two things: areas in need of protection and conservation organizations in need of technical and financial assistance. William D. Blair is president.
1988 With the purchase of $240,000 in Costa Rican debt, The Nature Conservancy completes its first “debt-for-nature” swap to support conservation in Braulio Carillo National Park. The Conservancy signs a landmark agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense to assist in managing 25 million acres of military land.
1989 With funding from the U.S. Congress, The Nature Conservancy launches the Parks in Peril program, designed to protect 50 million acres in Latin America and the Caribbean by helping local nonprofit and governmental organizations provide effective park stewardship. Frank Boren is president.
The Nature Conservancy purchases the 32,000-acre Barnard Ranch in Oklahoma’s Osage Hills and establishes the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. Here, the Conservancy has undertaken its largest restoration effort to date, re-creating a fully functioning tallgrass prairie by reintroducing bison and fire to the ecosystem.
1990 A new office in Koror, Republic of Palau, represents The Nature Conservancy’s first expansion beyond the Western Hemisphere.
1991 The Nature Conservancy launches its Last Great Places: An Alliance for People and the Environment initiative, a multinational, $300 million effort to protect large-scale ecosystems by making people part of the solution. The initiative emphasizes core reserve areas surrounded by buffer zones, where appropriate human uses are encouraged. John Sawhill is president.
1994 The Nature Conservancy opens its first South American office, in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.
1995 The Nature Conservancy adopts Conservation by Design, a cutting-edge ecoregional approach for setting conservation priorities and taking action. Drawing on the lessons learned through the Last Great Places initiative and guided by scientific data from the Natural Heritage Network, the Conservancy begins to employ this framework for identifying the suite of sites that must be protected to conserve the biological diversity of the Western Hemisphere.
1999 The Nature Conservancy's Membership surpasses 1 million.
2000 The Conservancy announces The Campaign for Conservation, an effort to raise $1 billion to preserve 200 Last Great Places and complete a Conservation Blueprint identifying the places that must be conserved to ensure lasting protection of our natural heritage. The Campaign concluded at the end of 2003 after raising a total $1.4 billion.
The Conservancy spins off its 85-center Natural Heritage Network into a new independent organization, the Association for Biodiversity Information (later named NatureServe).
The Conservancy and the Association for Biodiversity Information publish Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United States, the most comprehensive analysis to date of biodiversity in the United States. Precious Heritage warns that 1/3 of the plant and animal species found in the United States are in peril.
2001 Steve McCormick begins as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Nature Conservancy in February.
The Nature Conservancy turns 50. In celebration, 12 renowned photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and William Wegman, capture the rich and complex splendor of some of the “Last Great Places” in the Conservancy’s In Response to Place photography exhibit.
The Nature Conservancy acquires property for Oregon’s Zumwalt Prairie Preserve on the edge of Hells Canyon in Wallowa County. The Nature Conservancy's 42-square-mile preserve includes extensive native bunchgrass prairie habitats and wooded canyons descending to the Imnaha River. Creeks on the preserve harbor spawning grounds for endangered Snake River steelhead and chinook salmon. Zumwalt Prairie is also renowned for its concentrations of breeding hawks and eagles and other wildlife.
2002 The Nature Conservancy signs an agreement in January to purchase about 97,000 acres of one of Colorado's largest and most important natural areas – the Baca Ranch. The acquisition is the first of a complex series of transactions that by 2005 is expected to create the Great Sand Dunes National Park and a new Baca National Wildlife Refuge, as well as add land to the Rio Grande National Forest.
With a commitment of $1.1 million from The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund, the U.S. and Peruvian governments sign an historic agreement in June to protect 10 tropical rainforest areas covering more than 27.5 million acres within the Peruvian Amazon.
2003 Transforming a bankruptcy into a conservation opportunity, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and World Wildlife Fund, partnered with Chilean environmental organizations to protect the rare plants and wildlife on 147,500 acres of biologically rich temperate rainforest in the Valdivian Coastal Range in southern Chile.
The Nature Conservancy and The National Park Service jointly purchased the 116,000-acre Kahuku Ranch in Hawaii for addition to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The purchase increases the size of the 217,000-acre park by fifty percent, and is the largest land conservation transaction in Hawaii’s history.
2004 After more than a decade of work to conserve the 151-square mile Baca Ranch in Colorado, The Nature Conservancy completes the last of a complex set of real estate transactions, clearing the way for the protection of the ranch and the designation of the nation’s newest national park, the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
During a five-week expedition through Indonesia’s karst systems – limestone caves, cliffs and sinkholes – a team of international scientists led by The Nature Conservancy discover several new species, including a “monster” cockroach that is believed to be the largest known species of cockroach in the world.
2005 The Nature Conservancy, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and other partners announce that the ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to have gone extinct in 1946, had been rediscovered in the Big Woods of Arkansas.
[edit] Approach
The Nature Conservancy takes a scientific approach to conservation, selecting the areas it seeks to preserve based on analysis of what is needed to ensure the preservation of the local plants, animals, and ecosystems. The Nature Conservancy is one of the world's largest environmental organizations as measured by number of members and area protected. It is a nonprofit organization supported primarily by private donations.
The Nature Conservancy works with all sectors of society including businesses, individuals, communities, partner organizations, and government agencies to achieve its goals. The Nature Conservancy is known for working effectively and collaboratively with traditional land owners such as farmers and ranchers, with whom it partners when such a partnership provides an opportunity to advance mutual goals. The Nature Conservancy is in the forefront of private conservation groups implementing prescribed fire to restore and maintain healthy ecosystems and working to address the threats to biodiversity posed by non-native and invasive plants and animals.
The Nature Conservancy has pioneered new land preservation techniques such as the conservation easement and debt for nature swaps. A conservation easement is a way for land owners to ensure that their land remains in its natural state while capitalizing on some of the land's potential development value. Debt for nature swaps are tools used to encourage natural area preservation in third world countries while assisting the country economically as well: in exchange for setting aside land, some of the country's foreign debt is forgiven.
[edit] Featured project sites
The Nature Conservancy's expanding international conservation efforts include work in North America, Central America, and South America, the Pacific Rim, the Caribbean, and Asia. Increasingly, the Conservancy focuses on projects at significant scale, recognizing the threat habitat fragmentation brings to plants and animals. Below are a few examples of such work:
The Nature Conservancy was instrumental in the creation in 2004 of the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. The Conservancy's efforts in China's Yunnan province, one of the most vital centers of plant diversity in the northern temperate hemisphere, serve as a model for locally-based ecotourism with a global impact. The Nature Conservancy and its conservation partner, Pronatura Peninsula Yucatán, are working to halt deforestation on private lands in and around the 1.8 million acre (7,300 km²) Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, along the Mexico-Guatemala border. In November 2004, 370,000 acres (1,500 km²) of threated tropical forest in Calakmul were permanently protected under a historic land deal between the Mexican federal and state government, Pronature Peninsula Yucatán, four local communities and the Conservancy.
The Nature Conservancy's programs in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are working together to build partnerships and enhance the profile of the conservation needs in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem by supporting voluntary, private land conservation of important wildlife habitat. Conservation easements, land acquisition, stewardship agreements, grassbanks, prescribed fires and weed districts are a few of the tools the Conservancy and its partners use to protect this region's natural heritage. The Nature Conservancy's worldwide office is located in Arlington, Virginia.
[edit] Criticisms
Over the years, The Nature Conservacy has faced a number of criticisms. They fall into the following main categories:
- Too close to business. Some environmental groups and activists view "big business" and "environmentalism" as natural antagonists, and find The Nature Conservacy's collaboration with corporations inappropriate. The Conservancy argues that since corporations have such a significant impact on the environment, they must be engaged in finding ways to do business that do not harm the environment. Moreover, they provide significant resources. There is a traditional rule at the Conservancy "It's tainted money, but it taint enough."
- Questionable resale. There have been instances of The Nature Conservancy obtaining land and reselling it at a profit, sometimes to supporters, who have then made use of it in ways not perceived by all as being sufficiently environmentally friendly. The rationale for the resale has been that the profit allows The Nature Conservacy to increase its preservation of more important locations.
[edit] Other information
- The Nature Conservancy has a system for ranking the conservation status of species, and this system is one of two such systems that are in widespread use.
- Roberto Hernández Ramírez former CEO of Banamex is a member of the Board of Directors.
[edit] Bibliography
- Noel Grove, with photographs by Stephen J. Krasemann, Preserving Eden: The Nature Conservancy (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992) ISBN 0-8109-3663-1
- David E. Morine, Good Dirt: Confessions of a Conservationist (Chester, CT: The Globe Pequot Press, 1990) ISBN 0-87106-444-8
