YUCAIPA, Calif. -- From expanses of cactus in California to bird sanctuaries in Illinois and tiny flower gardens in Pennsylvania, a new breed of landowner is amassing acreage, with nary a bulldozer or architect in sight.
The idea is to prevent pavement and preserve open space, and it's all built on trust. Actually, lots of trusts.Land trusts and conservancies in the United States -- now 1,213 of them actively buying land and brokering "conservation easements" from private owners -- have preserved 5 million acres, more than twice the amount of just 10 years ago, according to the Washington-based Land Trust Alliance. If the holdings were merged, they would exceed the square mileage of New Jersey.
And that doesn't include an additional 10 million acres preserved by the "nationals," organizations that have long specialized in wildlife or farmland protection.
"You've got to celebrate," said Martha Nudel, spokeswoman for the Land Trust Alliance. "I think the common thread is wanting to save the historical, the natural, the cultural resources of the community, and common to those endeavors is land. It's the single resource that, once developed, you can't bring back."
The largest public-private conservation deal in U.S. history was announced last week -- the purchase of more than 296,000 acres scattered across the forested northern tier of New York state, Vermont and New Hampshire.
The Conservation Fund, based in Arlington, Va., will pay the Champion International paper company $76.2 million, besting at least 10 other bidders, including developers, foreign investors, timber funds and Wall Street investment partnerships.
One-third of the land, encompassing vital river corridors, will be sold to the state and federal governments for permanent preserves. The rest will be sold to private owners with deed restrictions allowing recreational access and only environmentally sensitive logging.
Across the country, the largest land preservation deal in California history was initiated this month by the Wildlands Conservancy, based in the foothills 80 miles east of Los Angeles.
Supported mostly by wealthy, anonymous donors, the conservancy offered $52 million for 430,000 acres parceled out checkerboard-fashion in and around Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve.
Catellus Development Corp., a descendant of the Southern Pacific Railroad, owns most of the land and recently posted it for sale and development. The conservation deal is still in preliminary stages and needs federal approval as well as $36 million in "leveraged" money from the national Land and Water Conservation Fund.
If it goes through, the conservancy would donate 742 square miles to the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
Inhabited mostly by coyotes, hawks, eagles and the endangered desert tortoise, the parcels are land that people haven't wanted until now, said Dave McIlnay, branch chief of lands for the BLM in California. "That's why in those areas we still have good quality wilderness," he said.
The Wildlands Conservancy is hoping to break its own record. About two years ago, the group put together California's largest privately owned nature sanctuary, the 87,000-acre Wind Wolves Preserve 80 miles north of Los Angeles.
But little deals are often as crucial as big deals, Nudel said.
Tom Hutchinson of Godfrey, Ill., a little town across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, last June gave 42 acres to local conservancies, who turned them over to the birds. Hutchinson's donation was linked to an existing nature preserve to create a 388-acre sanctuary in one of the Midwest's prime roosting areas for bald eagles.
Some trusts create habitat for people rather than animals.
The Neighborhood Gardens Association in Philadelphia owns 20 communal flower and vegetable gardens and holds long-term leases on two others on inner-city vacant lots. Total acreage: 8.
Rather than watch trash pile up where businesses or row houses are demolished, residents band together to grow food or flowers, said Claire Power, executive director of the 12-year-old association.
The group doesn't try to create gardens, she said. It waits for gardeners to get organized and ask for help. The gardeners must sign agreements to keep the lots under cultivation and cleaned up in the winter months. Many gardeners donate their crops to the poor, Power said, and communal gardening creates a sense of neighborhood where it's often in short supply.
City people "want the same quality of life as the guy in the suburbs who's got a quarter-acre," Power said. "Row homes do not provide green space."
In California, Wildlands Conservancy executive director David Myers envisions a network of preserves that will allow wildlife to roam hundreds of miles among national parks and existing preserves.
In the end, though, people will be big winners, too, he said. The Wildlands Conservancy now buses about 30,000 city schoolchildren to its nature preserves each year.
"They get up here and they don't have a vocabulary for what they see," Myers told a visitor at his headquarters. "They see a stream and ask you if they can play in the gutter."
People seek solitude for inspiration, and if California's biggest land deal works, Myers said: "Hopefully we'll get a little more bang for our buck than just saving the desert tortoise. Hopefully we'll get some poets and philosophers and writers out of it, too. Not to diminish the desert tortoise, of course."