Conservancy News

Reflecting Back and Looking Toward the Future

2011 has been an eventful year for the Conservancy. You have probably noticed the symbol of accreditation by the national Land Trust Alliance on your recent issues of the Highlands Journal. Pursuing accreditation was a resource and time intensive process, but it was time well worth the effort. Accreditation is formal recognition that we operate in compliance with the highest standards for financial management, protection of our conservation easements, recordkeeping, and all other aspects of achieving our conservation mission. 

This year we added two important new staff positions. We welcome Jake Hendee, who has a Master’s degree in forestry, as our Pennsylvania Land Protection Coordinator, and Virginia Kennedy, who is completing her Ph.D. in English and American Indian Studies at Cornell, as Outreach and Development Coordinator. You will be seeing the fruits of Jake’s and Virginia’s work soon in more acres protected, in a redesigned web site, new educational and outreach materials, and invigorated outreach to the broader community to invest more and more people in the Conservancy’s mission.

In 2012, we will relocate our Sullivan County office from the Sullivan County Government Center, where we have been sharing space, to a building located on a beautiful farm property on which we hold a conservation easement. This will put us closer to the center of our New York activities and create amazing opportunities for educational and community outreach. Keep an eye out for some of our big plans for the new office location, like breaking ground for our new community garden and a host of exciting on-site nature walks and forestry and gardening workshops.

The Conservancy continues to be engaged in strong partnerships with other regional organizations, both public and private, that share our conservation goals. To give just couple of examples: Shop Local, Save Land, in its third successful year, is an initiative connecting consumers to local farm and forest products and educational information in order to support working lands and protect scenic rural character, cultural heritage, and quality of life. The Common Waters Fund, a partnership of public and non-profit organizations, helps forest landowners in the Upper Delaware River region improve the management of their private forest lands in order to support the development of sustainable communities and working landscapes in the watershed. Women and Their Woods educational programs, developed in partnership with organizations like the USDA Forest Service, PA DCNR, and Penn State University, teach the growing demographic of women forest landowners how to properly steward their lands and how to mentor other women landowners in their communities. These partnerships and others in which the Conservancy participates foster dedication to the conservation of the Upper Delaware River region’s natural heritage and sustainable local economies.

We have also faced some critical challenges over the past several years. Perhaps the most daunting is the advent of Marcellus Shale drilling for natural gas, which is taking place in central Pennsylvania now and moving steadily in our direction, and which will be coming soon to New York. Other land trusts have responded to the threats posed by gas drilling by adopting policies that countenance gas drilling on their preserved lands while offering platitudes about holding gas companies to high environmental standards. The Conservancy has taken a different approach. We have recently adopted a set of guiding principles to inform our land protection efforts that make clear we do not favor gas drilling. We will consider allowing a gas extraction exception only under extraordinary circumstances and to protect lands of exceptional value. These guidelines have resulted from the dedicated work of a group of volunteers who grappled with this issue for over a year. Our response is not perfect; ‘perfect’ is a difficult standard to attain with a challenge as contentious and potentially harmful to our lands, waters and quality of life as gas drilling. But we believe that our response is more rigorous and more realistic than the approaches adopted by many other land trusts and environmental advocacy organizations.

Our other main challenge is developing and maintaining a vibrant board and a corps of willing volunteers to help us carry on our important land protection work. We have been here for seventeen years, and in that time have protected over 13,000 acres of land. Our directors, including our founder Barbara Yeaman, who still serves as a director, work without compensation other than the satisfaction that comes from protecting the lands of the four rural counties we serve. At times this service is time-consuming and occasionally difficult, but it is always rewarding and invaluable. We are looking for volunteers to serve on our committees (Land Protection, Finance, Personnel, Governance, and Outreach and Development), or to serve as directors.  

We are especially interested in having more participation in New York, where we face special challenges with the advent of Marcellus Shale drilling. We view this as both a threat and an opportunity to expand our outreach to New Yorkers who are concerned that the rural character of their communities is threatened by gas drilling and by inappropriate development. If you are interested in serving as a volunteer or director, please get in touch with us in our Hawley or Sullivan County office.  

And even if you are not ready to make a commitment to joining us in a formal capacity, please consider this an invitation to speak to any of us generally about our land protection work and all the other things we do to augment that work, to join us for one of our events, or to just drop us a line or stop by. You will find us a congenial, committed and welcoming. We look forward to seeing you or meeting you as move into 2012, inspired and dedicated to our mission to protect the lands, waters, and quality of life in the Upper Delaware River region.

Greg Belcamino

Board President