The Geography of Hope

America’s lands and waters have played a crucial role in our history and our prosperity. But today these natural riches face dire threats -- unfortunately, of our own making. Take just one example: the rapid pace of land consumed by suburban sprawl and poorly planned development is sacrificing the green space near where people live, making our communities less livable. We are losing 6,000 acres to development each day, suggests one estimate -- that’s two million acres lost each year.

This loss of natural lands is cause for concern for some highly practical reasons. Healthy natural ecosystems -- whether on wild lands or on productive farms, forests, and ranches -- sustain human health and economic well-being. Forests and grasslands give us clean air, abundant water and places for people to hike, hunt and fish. Wetlands provide flood control and resist coastal erosion from storms. Bees, birds, and a host of insects pollinate crops and flowers, essential to agriculture. Expansive forestlands sequester carbon, regulate the cycle of rainfall, and stabilize the climate. Try to imagine a world without any of them. Our dependence on such “ecosystem services,” and the tangible value they provide to humans is only now becoming fully appreciated.

Conservationists have not been idle in the face of these habitat losses. Conservation groups, many state and local governments, and committed private landowners have taken action. The nation’s 1,700 land trusts and other private groups, for example, have together conserved 37 million acres. Collectively, these efforts are leading to the creation of what the writer Wallace Stegner has phrased “the geography of hope.”

Despite this admirable and even extraordinary work, all agree that current efforts are insufficient to address the magnitude of threats to our natural lands and open spaces. What’s at stake is clear. We urgently need a dramatic increase in investment in land conservation nationwide, coupled with more targeted and strategic conservation to put those resources to the best possible use. 

Investing wisely requires that we have a sound understanding of what is threatening our remaining natural habitats and open spaces and what issues the land protection community will be called upon to confront. The nature of these issues changes over time, and as a result, so must our understanding. Consider, for instance, the increasing recognition of the role that climate change will play in our long-term land protection efforts. The rapid growth of the biofuels industry is another emerging issue that may have a huge impact on land protection needs. Production of biofuels has the potential to greatly affect what are now viewed as agriculturally "marginal" lands, even though these lands may be of considerable importance as wildlife habitat.

Perhaps most importantly, we must also must ask what will success look like? And what will it take, in land, dollars, and social capital to get there? A tremendous amount of work is going on across the conservation community designed address the question of how much conservation lands is needed and where should these lands be located. This includes The Nature Conservancy’s pioneering work on ecoregional planning (whose early guidelines, not coincidentally, was termed “Designing a Geography of Hope”) to efforts carried out in every state through the creation of State Wildlife Action Plans. Indeed, strategic conservation planning is now being carried out at local, regional, and national scales. LandScope America will serve as a platform for sharing the vision and detailing the priorities that emerge through efforts from across the conservation community.