Vermont Land Trust - Ethical Responsibilities of Land Trusts

The Ethical Responsibilities of Land Trusts
Appeared in VLT's Winter 2004 newsletter
by Darby Bradley, President

In October I had the opportunity to talk on the subject of “ethics” to the national Land Trust Alliance Rally in Sacramento. My ideas were not new: they were the product of 26 years in the land conservation field; numerous conversations with landowners and communities; collaborations with farmers, foresters, affordable housing advocates, and other land trusts; VLT Board conversations about promoting a land ethic; Gil Livingston’s work with the Black Family Land Trust; and more. The land trust movement has come a long way since the mid-1970s. This excerpt suggests where it needs to go.

Let me pose the following question: Looking at the big picture, to whom is the land trust’s primary ethical responsibility? To the landowner? To the taxpayer? To the land?

Let me suggest that a land trust’s primary responsibility is to the community-at-large, and that because of this, we are obligated to think about the needs of that community that go far beyond land conservation. I use the word “community” as Aldo Leopold did. It encompasses not only the human community, but also all of the other fauna and flora that depend upon the Earth’s ecological systems to sustain life. It includes land not as real estate but, as Leopold wrote, “a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.” “Community” includes people of different social and economic classes, people of different ages, and people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It includes the unborn generations of the future.

It is no longer ethical, in my view, to say that the job of a land trust is to conserve land, and that meeting all the other needs of the community is somebody else’s job. We must consider the bigger picture and the context within which we do our work. Back in the early days of the Land Trust Alliance, we could get away with thinking just about conserving land. The subject was so new to everybody, and for the most part our early efforts were so modest, that it didn’t really matter much what the context was.

But we are no longer minor actors on the fringes of the land use stage. The land trust community has been incredibly successful, and with that success has come new responsibilities. In Vermont, the Vermont Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, and other conservation organizations have protected eight percent of the state's entire land base. In some farm communities, we have protected more than 25 percent of the land base, and that could be 50 percent in ten years. We have an obligation to help think about where housing should go, where economic development should occur, and what else communities need to remain healthy and diverse. We also have an obligation to involve the community in our decisions about what land to conserve and for what purpose. We need to figure out effective ways to involve the public in these decisions. This is not a matter that should be left just to the landowner and the land trust. We might think of conservation as one tool for fighting sprawl. However, if we conserve land in the places best suited for growth, we are promoting sprawl, not limiting it.

I also don’t feel it is ethical to say that one type of use will always have a “higher” value than another type of use, that wilderness represents a higher conservation value than a working forest, or that agriculture has a higher value than housing. For me, it depends upon the context and the needs of the larger community, including the natural community. Clearly, we need all types of land, from urban areas to wilderness, and we need them in the right places. And we must see them as linked. It has been pointed out many times that we cannot save the wilderness unless we save the city. If our urban centers are attractive and economically vital, it will take some of the pressure off our rural areas.

As a society, we have an ethical obligation to reduce our consumption of the world’s resources and to try to meet a reasonable portion of our needs from our own resources. This is where land trusts come in. If the Vermont Land Trust tried to conserve all of Vermont’s farms without considering how and where the state will meet its need for affordable housing and economic development, we would shirk our ethical responsibilities to the larger community. If we conserve all of our forestland as wilderness, we would shift our demand for wood products to other parts of the world, which may be less suited ecologically to meeting them. As Peter Forbes recently pointed out to me, referring to a Christian and Buddhist metaphor, it is sometimes easy to confuse the boat and the shore. The “boat” is the tool we use for land conservation (options, easements, creative financing, etc.). The “shore” is a more just and healthy community. “When we think that our tools are the end-game,” Peter said, “we forget the shore, and we forget the ethical and big-picture reasons for our existence.”

In thinking about the shore, we must find ways to ensure that our work benefits everybody in the community. I have been attending the Land Trust Alliance Rally since 1985, but in that time the color of the faces here has changed very little. My ears are still ringing with the words of Charles Jordan, spoken during his keynote address at the Portland Rally three years ago. “What people don’t value, they won’t preserve,” Charles said.* The face of America is changing. If we don’t find ways to work with other ethnic and racial groups, if we don’t reach out to assist people who are less advantaged economically, they won’t value what we’ve accomplished, and what we’ve accomplished won’t endure. Some organizations, like the Trust for Public Land, have been exemplary in this area. Others, like the Black Family Land Trust, are just getting started with the help of the land trust community, but much more needs to be done.

I am not suggesting that land trusts must become affordable housing and economic development specialists. These fields require their own expertise and skills, which we may not possess. However, what we can do is look for opportunities to assist other organizations in accomplishing their goals, such as making land available for housing in a suitable area.

I admit that if we view our work within the context of the needs of the larger community—if we keep our focus on the “shore,” as Peter Forbes would say—the questions we must ask ourselves become much more complex, and the answers become much more difficult to reach. But that is the consequence of our success. We must consider the full implications of our actions and keep the big picture always in mind, or we will be falling short of our ethical responsibilities to the community.

*Charles Jordan was VLT’s annual meeting keynote speaker on July 17, 2004.