Conserving what? Conservation easements and environmental justice in the coastal US South

Abstract

Conservation easements, voluntary legal agreements whereby a landowner forfeits some of his or her land development rights in exchange for tax benefits, are an increasingly common strategy for protecting land from development in the United States today. For instance, from 2005 to 2015, private land under conservation easement in the United States increased by 175%, growing to more than 16 million acres held by land trusts, which are collectively endowed with more than $2.2 billion in funding. Recent critical analyses of this trend conceptualize conservation easements as a tool of neoliberal environmental governance, whereby nature is increasingly individuated and conservation is (at least partially) privatized. Conservation easements grew rapidly in the 1980s as the result of a compromise between mainstream environmental organizations and the Reagan administration’s anti-public lands agenda; thus, one interpretation is that they are the pragmatic “roll-out” of conservation efforts from a handcuffed liberal environmental movement. Yet, our historical and qualitative analysis of the politics of conservation easements in the coastal US South suggests that they were actually an elite white class project from the start, rather than a reaction to constraints on public lands protection. Thus, we argue that the environmental justice implications of conservation easements deserve more attention. Our efforts to develop a spatial-statistical assessment of the ways that their ecological benefits are distributed beyond parcel boundaries were limited by the privatization of data on conservation easements. Instead, we assess the distribution of easements themselves across the region, finding limited differences, but ones that we interpret as meaningful, between public and private conservation lands regarding racial composition and incomes of nearby populations. Importantly, this kind of mixed-methods analysis indicates how the exclusive control of data undergirds the exclusive control of land. Most broadly, we argue that Cheryl Harris’s theorization of “whiteness as property” remains an important resource for political ecologists because it helps specify the relationship between race, class, and nature under capitalism.

Leveraging private lands to meet 2030 biodiversity targets in the United States

“…But systematic monitoring of private lands will necessarily raise privacy concerns, potentially dissuading the adoption of agreements in critical areas. Further, private land conservation measures, including conservation easements, may disproportionately benefit high‐income landowners, often limit public access, and are rooted in legacies of racial capitalism and environmental injustice (Van Sant et al, 2020). Mitigating these issues through broader community engagement, locally‐defined monitoring protocols, and increasing public access will be critical to ensuring private land conservation contributes to the equity and access targets of post‐2020 conservation goals.…”

Governance and Conservation Effectiveness in Protected Areas and Indigenous and Locally Managed Areas

“…But often, these conservation actors lack community accountability due to their institutional structure as private organizations. They extend and entrench exclusion-based property rights regimes and suffer from the same resource limitations that governmental institutions face, eroding effectiveness (51).…”

The potential contribution of private lands to U.S. 30x30 conservation

“…Systematic monitoring of private lands will necessarily raise concerns of privacy, potentially dissuading adoption of agreements in key areas. Further, private land conservation measures, including conservation easements, may disproportionately benefit high income landowners, often limit public access, and are rooted in legacies of racial capitalism and environmental injustice (28). Mitigating these issues through broader community engagement, locally-defined monitoring protocols, and increasing public access will be critical to ensuring private land conservation contributes to the equity and access targets of post-2020 conservation goals.…”