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Orange County Headwaters

Just as there is no grandchild who is not talented, clever, beautiful, and charming, the land that each of us calls home is never ordinary. 

After Mary and I bought our land nearly 20 years ago, I gave up hiking and climbing mountains – something I’d done since I was a child – because I now had these fascinating woods of my own to explore. When I’m hit by the impulse to stretch my legs, the dog and I just head out the door and up the hill. If I could change anything about our land, it would be to add some terrain that is, shall we say, flat – so that every step out the door isn’t the start of an aerobic workout. But our hundred or so acres is home, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything – probably the same way you feel about your land.

We live on the edge of a largely undeveloped stretch of land. Lightly settled today, this area had more people coaxing a living from it in 1850. Those subsistence farmers have left their mark in stone walls and cellar holes and in an arrangement of forest stands that give clues to which pasture or cropland was abandoned to forest when. And occasionally, a woods rambler will be startled to find not only a cellar hole but homestead lilacs and hop vines that have somehow survived while the house and barn didn’t.

While the terrain meant the land wasn’t easily enough farmed to keep the second or third generation here, the soils are remarkably productive, and the forests grow beautiful hardwoods, particularly sugar maples. This provides a livelihood for the foresters managing the woods and the loggers and truckers who get the logs to market.

Wanting to ensure the long-term viability of our part of this landscape, we looked into donating the development rights to the Vermont Land Trust (VLT). We did so hoping that our grandchildren would end up owning a place that was still both wild and productive, and whose value could lie at least partly in the quality of the timber that I’d tended. We wanted the land to remain unbroken, which we could ensure by entering into a conservation easement whereby we would donate the development rights.

When we talked to the land trust, we quickly learned something that stunned us: making that donation, which seemed to me quite a magnanimous act, would cost us money, a lot of money. After catching my breath enough to listen, I understood that the costs were absolutely legitimate. The land trust’s staff time and legal costs need to be covered. We would need to hire our own lawyer and, if we wanted to use the donation as a tax deduction, arrange for an appraisal. In addition, the trust commits to making sure that the owners of the land – not just us but all those who will follow – abide by the terms of the agreement, that we build only in the allotted excluded area, and that we manage it according to an ongoing management plan. This monitoring goes on in perpetuity, and the land trust is obligated to be sure it always has the capacity to do that. We were told that the stewardship endowment might be covered by a private foundation, but the other expenses would be up to us and could total $5,000 or so.

Not having that kind of money to spare, we abandoned the idea.

But about that time, Ben Machin, a forester who’d grown up in Washington, the next town over, was hearing from other landowners, including his parents, of their interest in conserving their land. Ben and others began exploring the idea of pooling these parcels to see if owners with relatively small holdings would be attractive to a land trust in aggregate.

Their explorations became Orange County Headwaters (OCH), and under the direction of Ben and Virginia Barlow (yes, Northern Woodlands’ co-editor), the project ultimately solved our dilemma. It turns out there were dozens of other landowners in the headwaters of the White, Waits, and Winooski rivers who were willing to donate their development rights, but not if they had to pay for it to happen.

Our land wasn’t a large enough piece for a land trust to make special arrangements for, but when coupled with 30 other landowners, it was part of an intriguing package. Two land trusts – VLT and the Upper Valley Land Trust – embraced the concept and worked with the Freeman Foundation, a champion of land conservation in Vermont, to cover the costs of the stewardship endowment and much of their internal costs. Further, the group effort was innovative enough that it attracted other foundation support that made it possible for OCH to hire Ben and Ginny as part-time staff. This was crucial, because if it were entirely a volunteer effort, it wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. In each of these transactions, there’s a lot of legwork involved, but by having Ben and Ginny doing it (they already knew many of the landowners as neighbors or forestry clients), the land trusts’ costs were lessened. For the individual landowners, all the costs were covered, except for the appraisal. And even there, the group effort helped because it allowed us to retain a single appraiser to work with the entire group, which made his work easier and allowed him to charge a lower rate.

What it means to my family is that the bulk of the land remains as working forestland and habitat for wildlife, and any future development on our land would have to be in the five acres adjacent to our house and barn, which is excluded from the terms of the easement. I feel great knowing that after we’re gone, the land will continue to be managed for wildlife and good timber. And I’m happy to report that the easement doesn’t change the way we manage the forest: three months after closing the deal, we had a timber sale in our white pine stand.

As part of OCH, similar agreements will take place on parcels totaling 4,800 acres. The entire budget – expenses of the land trusts and OCH combined – to make this project happen will be less than $600,000. That investment is making it possible for landowners to voluntarily donate development rights estimated to be worth more than $2.5 million.

Also within the project area and helping to make it more attractive to funders are 700 acres of public land (a state forest and a state wildlife management area) and 900 acres that landowners had already conserved before the birth of OCH. In addition, two large privately owned parcels, comprising approximately 2,100 acres, are under consideration for federal funding through the Forest Legacy Program for purchase of their development rights. The larger parcel (1,500 acres) has received preliminary funding. So in total, as many as 8,500 acres will be conserved – that’s more than 13 square miles, about 28 percent of the 30,000 acre project area.

So far, more than half of the 31 parcels have been conserved, with the others at various stages of the process. Through word of mouth, additional landowners, both within and outside the project area, have expressed interest in participating. So it’s spawning additional conservation beyond the original scope, which means the partners in the project will probably need to consider expanding the project area.

Because I’ve been involved with OCH from its early days (I’m on its board of directors), I can report on the project in detail. But this is by no means the only example of group efforts going on in the Northeast.

A few watersheds to the west of us, for example, is a largely unsettled area known locally as Chateauguay-No Town, which takes its name from old settlements at the intersection of four towns that once belonged to none of them. Hikers on the Appalachian Trail (AT) pass right through the project area in which 20 landowners have conserved a total of about 7,000 acres through easement donations and bargain sales of development rights. The conserved land is matched by similar acreage held by the state in the multiple sites of the Les Newell Wildlife Management Area, along with the AT corridor. Combined, it means that 25 percent of this remote area will be managed as productive forestland and wildlife habitat.

The most ambitious group effort is a new project underway in western Massachusetts conceived in conjunction with the recent Harvard Forest report, Wildlands and Woodlands, which recommended conserving an additional 1.5 million acres of Massachusetts land. Project leaders recognize that accomplishing the conservation of such a large number of acres entails working collectively – the 1.5 million acres will need to accumulate in smallish increments owned by many landowners dotted across the landscape.

The Massachusetts Aggregation Pilot Project is being spearheaded by Keith Ross, a consultant for the New England Natural Resources Council (NENRC). In conjunction with 12 land trusts, they have identified 127 landowners, whose holdings total nearly 20,400 acres. The parcels are in various clumps west of Quabbin Reservoir, and the owners have expressed interest in selling their development rights in a bargain sale at 75 percent of their appraised value.

The scale of the Aggregation Project is larger than OCH, but the principles are the same. Appraisals have been bundled to reduce costs, local land trusts are working collaboratively, and the project will be funded as a whole rather than one parcel at a time. Even though they’ve not yet conserved a single acre, word has spread and additional landowners are expressing interest in being involved.

The time is ripe for this new model of conservation. At a time when most of the large parcels that are going to be conserved have already been conserved, the task of ensuring the continued viability of large blocks of undeveloped forests is becoming one of aggregating smaller pieces. To do so requires committed local people, working with their neighbors.

No matter how well any of these projects go, they might only pale in comparison with the 30-year effort that has been going on in Stoddard, New Hampshire. There, sparked by the 1978 gift of 3,400 acres to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, the town has conserved nearly two-thirds of its land. The cornerstone of this effort is an 11,000-acre parcel known as the Andorra Forest, owned by the Faulkner family. In an extraordinary act of largesse, the family in 1990 donated the development rights to the entire piece, which it had been piecing together since the 1920s. Twenty-four other parcels in Stoddard have been conserved, only two of which have required public funding. The rest have been outright donations of land or of the development rights.

If we are going to have wild lands a hundred years from now, it won’t be simply because land has been purchased by the government. It will be because individual landowners who love their land make arrangements to keep it wild. I don’t want to underestimate the leverage provided by the presence of public land in these various project areas – it serves as both an anchor and an enticement. Likewise, funding from federal, state, and local coffers is not only welcome but often crucial. But at the end of it all, it will be the generosity of thousands of landowners, bolstered by philanthropic investments, that keeps this forest intact.

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