Bioregional Conservation Means Taking Habitat

Jamison E. Colburn, Western New England College, School of Law

Abstract

Conservation’s richest innovation in decades has been the conservation easement and, by most accounts, it is still growing in both prevalence and scale. Private actors have used this device to innovate around the gridlock of the public sphere, achieving broad scales with limited capital. But this turn toward private ordering to protect nature has begun revealing some of the possibilities it will foreclose over the long term. With the demand for homes and second homes in rural and “exurban” environments soaring, the price of landscape scale conservation keeps rising, even as more of what is owned is already facing grave and growing risks from, among other factors, climate change. Furthermore, because of the scarcity of capital and the internal structure of nonprofits capable of operating at such scales, it is increasingly unlikely that they will continue purchasing in the U.S. when global biodiversity faces the risks it does abroad. My claim is that the necessity of condemning conservation easements from those who would subdivide and develop large ownerships must prevail over the political complications and costs of doing so, at least if local communities hope to preserve the biodiversity in their own backyard.