Private land conservation booms in US

"Sprawl is breathing down our necks in the communities in which we live," he says. "We need these community land trusts with urgency."

Funding from government agencies for land acquisition has dropped significantly in recent years. But state and local bond issues in which the public votes to fund land purchases has been booming.

The public is voting solidly to increase taxes in order to preserve land, Wentworth notes. In 2006 alone, 133 ballot initiatives nationwide from California to Georgia, New Jersey, Texas, and North Carolina raised $6.7 billion in public funding for land conservation.

Residents of Austin, Texas voted in November to spend more than $50 million to buy open space, says George Cofer, executive director of the Hill Country Conservancy, a land trust. Much of that will go to preserve land critical to recharging local aquifers the city depends on for drinking water.

Indeed, much of the impact has occurred in the western US, which saw an 89 percent jump in land preservation from 2.7 million acres in 2000 to 5.2 million acres in 2005 – the nation's biggest.

Taxes are a key issue driving the phenomenon. With property values soaring, taxes on ranch land near Austin has soared for family ranchers. That has left some with the option of selling land to pay taxes – or lowering taxes by permanently setting the land aside from development.

"One rancher who put 5,700 [acres] in conservation recently told me, 'you saved not just my ranch, but my family,' " Mr. Cofer recounts.

In other parts of the West, ranchers face the prospect of selling family land just to pay estate taxes. But a growing number are choosing land-trust easements that diminish the land's value, but also chop estate taxes.

The Wyoming Stockgrowers Agricultural Land Trust, for instance, only got going around 2000, but now has more than 20 ranches and 50,000 acres in easements. Another 20,000-acre ranch will soon be added.

"Probably the biggest thing we've got now is wealthy people coming in and buying intact ranches and some building tract houses," says Ogden Driskill, whose 10,000 acre ranch surrounds two-thirds of majestic Devil's Tower National Monument.

He desperately wants to keep the view around it uncluttered. So he's pitching fellow ranchers easements to fend off the trend toward chopping up ranches into 40-acre pieces with houses.

Fortunately for him, western land trusts could see a banner year in 2007. That's thanks to a tax break for farmers and ranchers that preserves their land approved in August 2006.

"Many ranchers can't afford to do a conservation easement without tax incentives," he says. "It's one of the few ways to keep working ranches intact and in the family."

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