A topiary garden. A dairy farm. A meandering river flanked by floodplain wetlands. Hundreds of thousands of acres of managed forest stitching together Maine’s North Woods. An iconic sledding hill. A town forest laced with public trails. Bogs, fens, lakeside cliffs, and habitat for lynx, wood turtles, and Indiana bats. Conservation easements protect all these special, important places. In fact, easements protect more than 4.3 million acres of land in New England and New York – nearly 6 percent of the total land area. Close to 500 land trusts in those states hold and steward thousands of easements. A drive, flight, or hike across our region would look and feel very different if not for this dry, formal, often complicated piece of paperwork filed away in town or county offices.
Conservation easements are permanent legal documents – a type of deed – restricting use of land for natural resource values. An easement creates a legal bond between the landowner and the easement holder. Federal, state, and local governmental bodies, as well as nonprofit land trusts, can hold conservation easements, and the permutations can get complex. Land trusts can hold easements on publicly owned land, government bodies can hold easements on private land, nonprofits and government agencies can co-hold easements together, and funding to obtain and steward these can come from private donations or government funds. Federal Forest Legacy funds, for example, have purchased large working forest easements on private land.
Easement holders maintain a relationship with the land and its landowners into perpetuity as they monitor and steward the easement. Land trusts range from small community groups to larger regional or national conservation organizations such as the New England Forestry Foundation and The Nature Conservancy. They must meet certain qualifications, determined by each state, to hold easements. Many land trusts also hold accreditation from the Land Trust Alliance, a national organization representing land trusts. Easements run with the parcel of land forever, even as owners change. Ideally, each easement balances restrictions to meet the desires and knowledge of the present moment with flexibility to provide future sustainable options for land use. In short, the ideal easement is timeless.
Conservation organizations in our region first designed easements in the 1960s and 1970s, as states passed laws to allow them. Easements (called conservation restrictions in Massachusetts) helped meet a moment of large-scale land turnover and development pressure as long-held parcels of all types came onto the open market, and conservationists and communities sought to maintain undeveloped areas for a multitude of reasons. Easements protect land throughout the United States, and are particularly important in the East, where more land is in private ownership and divided into smaller parcels than in the western part of the country.
Early conservation easements often reflected people’s concern for protecting views and open space. One of the first conservation restrictions in Massachusetts, established in 1972 by The Trustees of Reservations, aimed to retain “in perpetuity…[the] natural, scenic and open condition” of around 10 acres in Sherborn. And Darby Bradley, former president of Vermont Land Trust, described a 1980 effort involving dozens of citizens who donated time and money to save the “scenic southern gateway to the village of South Woodstock” from imminent purchase by a developer.
Easements Evolve and Diversify
As the conservation movement matured, so did easements. Communities refined the outcomes they want to see, and land trusts refined easements to help achieve those objectives. (For more on how easements are structured, see the sidebar “The Anatomy of Conservation Easements” on page 59) Most easements primarily restrict development, but the reasons why development is a concern have shifted over time, along with the recognition that not all development is created equal. Houses sprouting in a formerly open meadow can elicit strong motivations for conservation in people who connect deeply with a local scenic gem. But development also threatens local farm and forest economies, fragments forests, disrupts wildlife movement and ecological processes, and can result in wetland, waterway, and floodplain degradation. Conservationists have created more nuanced easements to address these challenges.
Land trusts started applying easement protections to working lands – managed forest and farmland – in the 1980s. In Maine, faced with the imminent turnover of millions of acres as paper companies sold their holdings, the Forest Society of Maine (FSM) formed (as an offshoot of the Society for Protection of New Hampshire Forests, which was established in 1901) and developed a large forest easement to protect these vast tracts of working woodland. Karin Tilberg, retired president of FSM, describes easements as a cost-effective tool to protect the globally significant, “least fragmented forest east of the Mississippi.” This arrangement has been effective in New England, where many landowners want to continue to own and manage their land – and continue to allow public access there – but not develop the land.
“Easements have been a recipe for success in Maine, especially in the big North Woods,” writes Tilberg in her book Loving the North Woods: 25 Years of Historic Conservation in Maine. “The tool is well suited to undeveloped forestland, especially when there are relatively few landowners, the land is primarily managed for forest products, there is not a large political appetite for large public land purchases, and there are few sellers of large tracts of forestland for public acquisition.” Easements, she continues, “inoculate [these lands] against future subdivision and development.”
FSM easements now protect nearly one million acres of working forestland in Maine, and easements held by Vermont Land Trust (VLT), Society for Protection of New Hampshire Forests, New England Forestry Foundation, and others have protected large working forest tracts in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York that were similarly vulnerable. Public funds, notably federal Forest Legacy Program and Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars, support these easement acquisitions across the region because of their public benefits – they support a strong forest economy and allow for ongoing public access.
Development also poses a threat to working farms. In Vermont, development pressure on agricultural land and concern about the loss of local farm economies helped spur the development of farm easements in the 1980s. These easements specifically aim to conserve agricultural and forestry uses, including timber harvest and sugaring, and include descriptions of soil productivity, the designation of farm complexes where more intensive development can occur, and a right for the land trust to buy the land if sale outside the family is contemplated (this has been used to prevent farmland from becoming estate property). Farmers who conserve their land sell the development rights, and many use that income to invest in farm operations and infrastructure. VLT now holds more than 1,000 farm easements.
In the mid-1980s, land conservationists in Vermont worked with state government officials to create the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, in part to establish a clear and predictable funding path for farm conservation projects. The Vermont legislature now approves funding for the Board on an annual basis. “While it was possible to raise money to conserve farms in wealthy communities…or where a wealthy individual was willing to donate a conservation easement as a charitable contribution,” Darby Bradley wrote in 2022, “this path was not available in agricultural communities where most neighbors were farmers and where farmers’ most important financial asset was their farm.” Public funding underlays the public value of keeping farms as farms and keeping them affordable for succeeding generations, even as agricultural practices shift – for example, from conventional dairy to diversified vegetable or organic beef.
From the earliest days of conservation easements, some organizations, including the Northeast Wilderness Trust, have established preservation-focused, “no-touch” and “forever wild” easements to prevent or restrict most uses on ecologically sensitive areas. Some easements focus specifically on ecological restoration. Federal Wetland Reserve Enhancement (WRE) easements, for example, conserve wetlands that were historically drained and converted to farmland. These easements retire agricultural use of the land and are essentially no-touch for the private landowner, but partners, including federal agency scientists and local contractors, collaborate to restore wetland features and functions there, incorporating mitigation actions such as plugging ditches, excavating wetland depressions, and planting trees. Farm and forest easements may also include special protections for ecologically sensitive areas on those parcels.
Easements can also protect specific natural processes, such as river movement. For generations, people have tried to control rivers through armoring – lining riverbanks with rock or other hard material – and straightening them. Now, scientists understand that this forces water into narrower areas where it gathers speed and power, and armoring cuts off access to the floodplains that slow and spread water during floods. In the early 2000s, river ecologist Mike Kline and his colleagues at the newly formed state agency, Vermont Rivers Program, developed a river corridor easement that allows rivers space to move without restriction in a defined area.
Kline describes Vermont as “a narrow valley state where we’ve settled along our rivers,” and said floods can be extremely damaging in a landscape of confined valleys, confined river channels, and dense human settlements. Before river corridor easements, he and other river scientists tried to restore rivers physically by excavating flood benches, planting trees, and conducting other on-the-ground activities that were meant to slow and spread floodwaters. These efforts, however, are expensive and limited.
“Our restoration efforts were just a tiny drop in the bucket,” Kline said. “All this other encroachment was happening in our streams and next to our streams that was far exceeding our ability to restore.” Easement protection is one way to protect many more miles of river in cooperation with private landowners, and to restore rivers to a more natural state. Landowners agree not to armor the riverbanks, knowing they might lose land as the river moves over time, and to maintain forest along the banks. Rivers can more easily enter their floodplains, which store floodwater and catch sediment and debris, and better absorb the impacts of big floods. The state of Vermont pays landowners – typically farmers – to give up these channel management rights, with the idea that the payment could help them adapt their farm operation out of the river corridor.
How Easements Stay Alive
In the years since the start of the modern conservation movement, easements have been tested as land transfers to different owners, legal challenges emerge and political climates shift, land trusts mature as organizations, and the land itself acquires new meaning for the residents and communities that depend on it. External drivers such as climate change and its local manifestations – including devastating floods, species migrations in a fragmented landscape, and shifts in economic markets – raise new questions for easement stewards and highlight both successes and challenges of permanent conservation. These decades of learning and experience have helped land trusts understand what makes these perpetual documents weather change.
Clarity of Purpose
As a permanent legal document, the easement is hard, or impossible, to amend or extinguish. To make it less so would limit the strength of an easement as a conservation tool and damage the trust of those who financially support conservation. Yet easements that are rigid or overly specific in the wrong ways can limit good work by future landowners and stewards and be inflexible to cultural and natural evolution; they can end up restricting activities that all parties may agree are beneficial, or require costly legal defense if an easement violation occurs. Easement practitioners must walk a fine line, and the right line, between adaptability and rigidity. This line is clarity of purpose.
Easements achieve clarity through aligning their purposes section with restricted and permitted uses. Although easements classically restrict development, VLT’s modern farm easements, for example, acknowledge that farmworkers need places to live for farms to be successful, so they permit certain types of farm labor housing. For FSM, the aim is to keep forests as forests and to maintain public access to them. This purpose is clearly stated in its easements and is broad enough that, paired consistently with the restrictions, a wide range of activities can occur on a conserved parcel and still achieve its conservation goals. Jake Metzler, vice president of stewardship and conservation at FSM, notes that in Maine, landowners of large acreage understand that conserving timberland is a business decision, and the easements that result are typically clear and functional to both landowner and land trust.
Stewarding Relationships
Easement compliance, and thus successful permanent conservation, depends on human relationships beyond the legal easement document. Those relationships – between landowner, land managers, and the land trust – grow through stewardship and become especially important when land changes hands and a new owner may have to contend with highly specific goals of an easement placed by somebody else. Different land trusts manage this stewardship in various ways.
FSM stewardship staff meet annually with all their conserved landowners – typically owners of very large forestlands that can run to the hundreds of thousands of acres – to go over management plans in detail, helping all parties stay aware of activities, such as timber harvests or new logging access roads, happening on the land and any easement implications.
For Sally Naser, the conservation restriction stewardship director at The Trustees of Reservations, getting people excited about their land is an important step on the path to conservation success. Naser is also a wildlife photographer and has installed wildlife trail cameras on conserved land, providing some insight into the creatures that live there. Seeing photos and videos of bobcats, bears, moose, and other charismatic wildlife on their property, Naser said, has helped turn successor landowners – those who come to own land that already has an easement in place – into conservation believers. She imagines these landowners think, I see a picture of a moose in my grandfather’s pond, and that’s why land conservation matters, because if it had become five houses, the moose wouldn’t be there. Through moments like these, landowners build relationships with their land as well as with land trust stewards. The easement simply provides the backdrop to these very real connections.
Living Documents
Farm and forest easements exist in the context of a working landscape, so they must stay alive in partnership with the people working the landscape. While the easement itself is static, it often pairs with a “living document” such as a forest management plan that can be more dynamic and flexible to reflect changing conditions. Management plans can respond to new science or learnings both specific and general. For example, they can address things that weren’t present when the easement was established, such as invasive species or forest diseases, or reflect changing knowledge of how to best manage for a particular desired condition, including old forest. Some FSM easements refer landowners and stewards to a dynamic “Multi Resource Management Plan” (MRMP) that addresses how landowners should manage around ecologically significant features such as uncommon species, riparian areas, and wetlands. The MRMP can be updated as science evolves. These living documents are critical to helping easements stay current and flexible.
Learning from the Past
Over time, easement practitioners have uncovered some pitfalls that come from requiring actions of future landowners and stewards that are difficult to meet. Early river corridor easements, for example, unintentionally limited the maintenance of farm ditches, which are important elements of farm infrastructure, and farmers and land trust stewards alike have struggled to figure out practical solutions. Some older easements outline highly specific management, such as requiring the maintenance of moss on a stone wall, which can be impractical or inefficient to pursue. “Ideally, easements are drafted with enough specificity to prohibit the types of activities that could harm the conservation values of the property but with enough flexibility to account for a society that is constantly changing,” writes Tilberg in her book. Today’s land trusts and landowners strive to collaborate in both practical and imaginative ways, to cocreate the legal tool that helps them keep protecting the lands they care about into the future.
The Anatomy of Conservation Easements
No two conservation easements are alike, but most include standard sections providing legal weight and guiding stewardship interpretation. Some early easements in our region were as short as a couple of pages, but easements today can run more than 30 pages long.
The Preamble names the landowners (Grantors) and the land trust or other entity that will hold the easement (Grantee), lists the qualifications of the land trust that allow it to hold the easement, lists the funding source for conservation, defines “the Protected Property” and broadly describes its location and size, and sometimes names features of the property that contributed to its conservation (for example, its location in a wildlife corridor).
The Purposes section broadly defines the reasons for conserving the land and outlines the main values and objectives. If future questions arise, stewards will look to the purposes to provide the broadest level of guidance for stewardship decisions. Purposes may include language such as “to protect in perpetuity the agricultural use and future viability of the Protected Property” (from a VLT easement) or “to perpetuate the Protected Property as a sustainable working forest through the long-term professional management and maintenance of the productive forest resources in accordance with generally accepted sustainability standards, and in consideration of the contribution that forest products make to the economy and communities of Oxford County and the State of Maine” (from a FSM easement).
The Attributes section defines specific qualities of the land being conserved. Attributes can include feet of frontage on streams or rivers, acreage of prime agricultural soils, types and acreages of wetlands or uncommon natural communities, or documented habitat for rare species, among other features.
The Restricted and Permitted Uses sections detail what is allowed and not allowed on the land, and they can be extensive. Some topics addressed in these sections include subdivision, structures, roads and trails, public access, on-farm businesses, mining, public access, special protections for ecologically sensitive areas such as wetlands, and use of lands by Indigenous tribes.
The Grantees’ Rights and Obligations detail the rights and responsibilities of the land trust, which can include accessing the property for monitoring, meeting regularly with landowners, or approving forest management plans.
In the Enforcement of Violations section, an easement details processes for resolving conflicts when there are easement violations, beginning with the stewardship relationship. Land trusts usually attempt to do this through the stewardship relationship rather than legal means, although some legal challenges regarding easements end up in court.
Easements often include references to external documents that can change, such as forest management plans that get updated every 10 years. These documents provide dynamic flexibility to meet the science and knowledge of the future as it unfolds.