23 minute read

The Nature Conservancy Business Information, Profile, and History

4245 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 100
Arlington, Virginia 22203-1606
U.S.A.

Company Perspectives:

"Nature's real estate agent." That's The Nature Conservancy. Among environmental organizations, we fill a unique niche: preserving habitats and species by buying the lands and waters they need to survive.

History of The Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is the star performer among environmental groups, in size, growth, effectiveness, and stature among government agencies and private donors. On average, 1,000 acres a day are added to its system of nature preserves, the world's largest. When TNC cannot buy desired property, it sometimes attains conservation easements restricting use of the land in return for tax benefits.

TNC traditionally has maintained a low profile, preferring to let its partners reap the media attention. It began pressing, however, for more publicity in this earth-friendly age, garnering numerous product sponsorship deals as its membership approached one million. Author Peter Drucker singled out the management skills of the group, whose MBAs and lawyers injected a powerful dose of high finance into a field better known for grass roots activism.

Origins

The Ecological Society of America, a scientific group, was founded around 1900. In 1917 it formed a study group, the Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions, that would split from the Society in 1946 to become The Ecologist's Union.

One of this group's members, engineer Dick Pough, learned of the Nature Conservancy of the British government while traveling to England. In 1951 The Ecologist's Union adopted the name The Nature Conservancy, although Pough envisioned private rather than state support for the group. Donations from Pough's wealthy connections--such as $100,000 from Reader's Digest cofounder Mrs. DeWitt Wallace--put TNC in business.

TNC bought its first 60-acre property, Mianus Gorge, in 1955, sparing it from the development that surely would have spread from nearby New York City. Other small preserves followed, and the group found itself in competition with the venerable Audubon Society, also soliciting property donations.

This year marked the beginning of TNC's Land Preservation Fund, which acted as a rotating credit account. From an initial $7,500 donated by the Old Dominion Foundation the fund blossomed to more than $100 million by 1990. Mining heiress Katharine Ordway donated more than $53 million.

TNC bought the entire island of St. Vincent off of Florida's gulf coast for $1 million in 1969. It became a 13,000-acre national wildlife refuge. The 40,000-acre Virginia Coast Reserve was even more ambitious. The Virginia Coast Reserve was first begun in 1969 to protect nesting shore birds in particular from a developer who wanted to continue the development in overcrowded Virginia Beach to the barrier islands. After TNC began making acquisitions, however, politicians scrapped plans for bridges connecting the islands to the mainland.

The Corporate 1970s

By the 1970s the character of the organization had shifted from that of a scientist's group to something more akin to that of a property management company. TNC had about 50 employees, including Pat Noonan, a determined MBA who served as director of operations.

The group began to court corporations, the scourge of many environmentalists, for land donations. Union Camp Corporation donated 50,000 acres of the Dismal Swamp, a gift worth $12.6 million and believed to be the largest corporate donation at the time.

The Nature Conservancy employed a novel strategy in acquiring 35,000 acres of Mississippi swampland in 1973. When some of the shareholders of the Pascagoula Lumber Company vetoed a purchase offer of $15 million, it bought a controlling interest in the company. In 1976 TNC sold the land to the state of Mississippi for use as a state park. Mississippi, with its sportsmen-oriented approach to conservation, gave TNC a foothold in the Southeast.

In the case of Shelter Island, TNC bought all of a New York realty company's holdings, including property in Manhattan and Miami, to attain some Long Island osprey habitat. After the excess was resold, the land for Mashomack Preserve cost $5 million. Within 20 years, the osprey population had doubled.

Pat Noonan became president of TNC in 1974. At the insistence of its board of directors, TNC had developed a long-range plan. The United States was divided into regions, which would start the next level of organization: self-funding programs in each state.

Dr. Robert Jenkins, TNC's chief scientist, proposed a rescue mission for TNC: "The preservation of biotic diversity." He often alluded to Noah's Ark. TNC attempted to preserve specific species at risk by controlling specific habitats. The first of 50 State Natural Heritage Programs was established in South Carolina in 1974. After receiving initial support from TNC in identifying species at risk, the programs reverted to state funding.

An international program also was started. It eventually grew to include dozens of preserves in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as projects centered in Canada, Palau, and Indonesia.

In 1978 TNC spent $2.8 million on its largest purchase at the time, buying nine-tenths of Santa Cruz, an isolated island off California whose rare native plant species had been severely threatened by feral pigs and 30,000 sheep, which TNC would have to eradicate. Fortunately, an ecologically savvy New England heiress supplied a quarter of the $4 million required to complete the project.

Thriving Under Reagan in the 1980s

Pat Noonan stepped down as president in 1980 but continued to serve as a consultant, as TNC required all the creativity it could muster. During the Reagan years, money for public programs of all kinds was scarce and Secretary of the Interior James Watt halted federal land acquisition. Nevertheless, TNC was able to persuade the state of Mississippi to support the launch of the Rivers of the Deep South program, which began with a massive $15 million grant from a private foundation.

By 1984 TNC had invested $25 million in the Virginia Coast Reserve, now expanded to include deepwater frontage along the eastern shore of the Virginia mainland. Since TNC could not sell the land to the federal government as a wildlife refuge during the Reagan administration, it was financed by an innovative charitable lead trust, which allowed the tax-free distribution of a foundation's real estate investment.

In 1984 TNC turned over to the federal government the 118,000 acres of North Carolina coastland that would become the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Red wolves would be first reintroduced into the wild here. The same year, the largest privately held preserve, the 67,000-acre Panther Ranch, was given to TNC by the Harte family of Texas. Most of it became part of the Big Bend National Park straddling the Rio Grande. The year 1984 also marked the establishment of Coachella Valley Preserve, which helped keep 13,000 acres of expensive Palm Springs real estate habitable for creatures like the fringe-toed lizard.

While other environmental groups such as Greenpeace (which eschews any corporate support) made headlines by chasing whaling ships and blocking logging roads, TNC's less confrontational approach attracted a broad base of supporters. By 1985 membership stood at 300,000.

TNC began a unique program, surveying 25 million acres of Department of Defense property, in 1988. Another new partner was Ducks Unlimited, which it joined in buying $3.5 million of California farmland to be reverted to waterfowl habitat.

TNC began an extensive survey of 14,000 North American plant species and added an even more impressive purchase than the Santa Cruz property: nearly all of the Animas Mountain range in New Mexico--321,703 acres of diverse wildlife habitat formerly owned by the Gray Land and Cattle Company. Negotiations for the acquisition had begun in 1982. The Big Bend development protected marshland on a similar scale in the eastern United States. Big Bend soon was resold to the state of Florida.

In 1989 The Nature Company, a Berkeley, California catalog merchandiser, entered a partnership with TNC whereby it processed new memberships and donated a portion of its product sales. Income at the time was $168 million and in 1990 membership reached 600,000 as the last of 50 state chapters was added. With assets worth $620 million, TNC managed 1.5 million of the more than 5.5 million acres it had protected.

TNC promoted the concept of "greenways"--linear belts of wilderness connecting wildlife sanctuaries. Its philosophy grew to rely less upon acquisitions, preferring to convince existing owners to take care not to harm wildlife by using pesticides, and so forth.

TNC sometimes appeared the bane of property developers, resentful at being told how to use their land and at the millions spent to preserve unappealing species such as crocodiles and rats. In addition, land acquired by the Conservancy no longer generated property taxes for local communities.

TNC also faced charges of threatening reluctant property owners. Further, an audit questioned prices federal agencies paid for TNC properties from 1986 to 1991. Subsequent reviews factoring in donations and other losses concluded, however, that TNC actually lost money on the deals.

The Green 1990s

Realizing the importance of accounting for people themselves in populated landscapes, TNC began acquiring new properties around its Virginia Coast Reserve to be resold with permanent restrictions to encourage certain uses, specifically, farming rather than coastal property development. TNC created the for-profit Virginia Eastern Shore Sustainable Development Corporation to manage the project, which included job creation among its objectives.

TNC extended its approach of compromise and cooperation to big business. Corporate giving accounted for $2 million, or 16 percent, of TNC income in 1991. By the mid-1990s, 500 companies, such as Miller Brewing Company, Canon USA, Honda of America, Procter & Gamble, and Warner-Lambert, supported TNC with donations, some of them through cause-related marketing. This arrangement allowed the corporate partners to use the TNC name and logo in promotions. TNC also introduced its own credit card.

In 1992 TNC helped broker a compromise between the Walt Disney Company, which wanted to expand its Orlando theme park, and the state of Florida, which wanted to protect adjacent wetlands. Disney agreed to restore 8,500 acres of wilderness in central Florida and was allowed to proceed with its development. TNC also worked out an agreement with Georgia-Pacific concerning timber harvesting on certain property. Each party held one vote to decide whether particular parts of the area should be harvested.

TNC reassessed its performance measures--such as acreage protected--after the bog turtle population in Schenob Brook, a Massachusetts acquisition, continued to decline because of uses of the watershed beyond the site's borders. The organization began seeking out much larger areas to preserve, designated Last Great Places, such as the Fish Creek Project organized to save a population of freshwater mussels. In this case, TNC helped subsidize no-till farming technology to reduce the amount of silt in the water. TNC's vision of preserving entire biological systems actually had been pronounced as far back as 1975.

To restore 36,000 acres of tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma bought in 1989, TNC initiated a series of prescribed burns there in 1993. A small herd of bison then was reintroduced onto the restored landscape. Membership reached 766,000 in 1993, revenues were $280 million, and nearly eight million acres had been protected. Assets approached $1 billion.

The number of species found in tropical rain forests ensured TNC's interest in foreign countries. A dozen Conservation Data Centers cataloged this ecological diversity around the globe, and its "Parks in Peril" program assisted national governments in maintaining existing parks. At the end of the century, TNC had operations in more than 20 countries. TNC helped preserve 57 million acres outside the United States, compared to ten million within. In 1996 TNC counted 900,000 members and 1,850 corporate associates.

Related information about Nature

"Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the galactic.

The word "nature" derives from the Latin word natura, or "the course of things, natural character." Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (?????), which originally related to the innate way in which plants and animals grow of their own accord, and to the Greek word for plants generally. The first known use of physis was by Homer in reference to the intrinsic qualities of a plant: ?? Later uses of the word expanded its meaning to the "inherent" or "innate" character of things in general. The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is a more recent development that gained increasingly wide use with the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), for example, is translated "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", and reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature".The etymology of the word "physical" shows its use as a synonym for "natural" in about the mid-15th century:

Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness – This more traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the latter being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human or human-like consciousness or mind.

Earth

Earth (or, "the Earth") is the fifth largest planet in the solar system, third in order of distance from the Sun. It is the largest of its planetary system's terrestrial planets and the only place in the universe known to support life.

The most prominent features of the earth's climate are its two large polar regions, two relatively narrow temperate zones, and a wide equatorial tropical to subtropical region.An excellent summary description of global climate can be found at: Precipitation patterns vary widely according to location, ranging from several meters of water per year to less than a millimeter. The outer surface is divided into several tectonic plates that gradually migrate across the surface over geologic time spans, which at least several times have changed relatively quickly. The interior of the planet remains active, with a thick layer of molten Earth mantle and an iron-filled core that generates a magnetic field. Despite the wide regional variations in climate by latitude and other geographic factors, the long-term average global climate is quite finely regulated, and variations of a degree or two of average global temperature have historically had major effects on the ecological balance, and on the actual geography of the Earth.

Based on the available evidence, scientists have reconstructed detailed information about the planet's past. Condensing water vapor, augmented by ice delivered by comets, produced the oceans. The highly energetic chemistry is believed to have produced a self-replicating molecule around 4 billion years ago.

Continents formed, then broke up and reformed as the surface of Earth reshaped itself over the course of hundreds of millions of years, occasionally combining to form a supercontinent. The continents later recombined to form Pannotia which broke apart about 540 million years ago, then finally Pangaea, which broke apart about 180 million years ago. |pages=pp. 324-333}}

There is significant evidence, still being discussed among scientists, that a severe glacial action during the Neoproterozoic era covered much of the planet in a sheet of ice. This hypothesis has been termed the "Snowball Earth", and it is of particular interest as it precedes the Cambrian explosion in which multicellular life forms began to widely proliferate about 530-540 million years ago.

Since the Cambrian explosion there have been five distinctly identifiable mass extinctions. }} The last mass extinction occurred some 65 million years ago, when a meteorite collision probably triggered the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and other large reptiles, but spared small animals such as mammals, which then resembled shrews. Over the past 65 million years, mammalian life diversified.

Several million years ago, a species of small African ape gained the ability to stand upright. The subsequent advent of human life, and the development of agriculture and further civilization allowed humans to affect the Earth in a relatively short timespan like no other life form had before, affecting both the nature and quantity of other life forms as well as global climate. It consists of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and traces of other gases. The atmospheric pressure declines steadily with altitude, and has a scale height of 8.5 kilometres: the height at which the atmospheric pressure has delined by a factor of e.

The ozone layer of the Earth's atmosphere plays an
important role in depleating the amount of ultraviolet radiation that reaches the surface.

Terrestrial weather occurs almost exclusively in the lower part of the atmosphere, and serves as a convective system for redistributing heat. Extremes in weather, such as tornadoes or hurricanes and cyclones, can expend large amounts of energy in their path and produce devastation. Various factors are known to influence the climate, including ocean currents, surface albedo, greenhouse gases, variations in the solar luminosity, and changes to the planet's orbit. Based on historical records, the Earth is known to have undergone drastic climate changes in the past, including ice ages.

The climate of a region is dependent on a number of factors, including the latitude. There are a number of such regions, ranging from the tropical climate at the equator to the polar climate in the northern and southern extremes.

Weather is also influenced by the seasons, which result from the Earth's axis being tilted to its orbital plane. At any given time, regardless of season, the northern and southern hemispheres experience opposite seasons.

Weather is a chaotic system that is readily modified by small changes to the environment, so accurate weather forecasting, is currently limited to only a few days.

Life

The advent of photosynthesis in very basic forms of plant life worldwide allowed the sun's energy to be harvested to create conditions allowing for more complex life. The resultant oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere and gave rise to the ozone layer. The incorporation of smaller cells within larger ones resulted in the development of yet more complex cells called eukaryotes. Cells within colonies became increasingly specialized, resulting in true multicellular organisms.

Although there is no universal agreement on the definition of life, scientists generally accept that the biological manifestation of life is characterized by organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli and reproduction. Properties common to terrestrial organisms (plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea and bacteria) are that they are cellular, carbon-and-water-based with complex organization, having a metabolism, a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. Human-made analogs of life may also be considered to be life.

The biosphere is the part of Earth's outer shell ? From the broadest geophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere (rocks), hydrosphere (water), and atmosphere (air). Currently the entire Earth contains over 75 billion tons (150 trillion pounds or about 6.8 x10¹³ kg) of biomass (life), which lives within various environments within the biosphere.Estimates which include the total amount of dead or inactive plant and animal matter, or "dry biomass", range to 1250 billion tons (about 1100 billion metric tonnes) or more. This does not include estimates of the amount of fossil fuels which were once biotic, but have been converted into their present form by extreme heat and pressure. Over nine-tenths of the total biomass on Earth is plant life, on which animal life depends very heavily for its existence. More than 2 million species of plant and animal life have been identified to date, and estimates of the actual number of existing species range from several million to well over 50 million."Animal." "Amphibian Decline: More Support for Biocomplexity as a Research Paradigm" www.ecohealth.net/pdfs/Vol3/ECH_Editorial_3_1.pdfGEO: Global Environmental Outlook-3 "Decline and loss of species" (Klaus Töpfer, Ed., 2002) ISBN 92-807-2087-2 www.grida.no/geo/geo3/english/221.htm

The distinction between plant and animal life is not sharply drawn, with some categories of life that stand between or across the two. In Linnaeus' system, these became the Kingdoms Vegetabilia (later Plantae) and Animalia. Since then, it has become clear that the Plantae as originally defined included several unrelated groups, and the fungi and several groups of algae were removed to new kingdoms. Bacterial life is sometimes included in flora,webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=florabiology.usgs.gov/s+t/SNT/noframe/zy198.htm#F and some classifications use the term bacterial flora separately from plant flora.

Among the many ways of classifying plants are by regional floras, which, depending on the purpose of study, can also include fossil flora, remnants of plant life from a previous era. Ecosystems are composed of a variety of abiotic and biotic components that function in an interrelated way.Pidwirny, Michael, PhD: FUNDAMENTALS OF PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, 2006, Ch. Within the ecosystem, species are connected and dependent upon one another in the food chain, and exchange energy and matter between themselves as well as with their environment. www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/9d.html,

Every species has limits of tolerance to factors that affect its survival, reproductive success and ability to continue to thrive and interact sustainably with the rest of its environment, which in turn may have effects on these factors for many other species or even on the whole of life.Pidwirny at Ch.9e, esp. www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/9e.html. The concept of an ecosystem is thus an important subject of study, as such study provides information needed to make decisions about how human life may interact in a way that allows the various ecosystems to be sustained for future use rather than used up or otherwise rendered ineffective. A macroecosystem might involve a whole ecoregion, with its drainage basin.Bailey, Robert C. (www.springerlink.com/(3jrhwxyoeslbv155c0kuav45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,2,9;journal,28,222;linkingpublicationresults,1:100370,1) Also published at U.S. Forest Service website (www.fs.fed.us/institute/news_info/Identifying_ecoregion_boundaries.pdf).

The following ecosystems are examples of the kinds currently under intensive study:

"continental ecosystems", such as "forest ecosystems", "meadow ecosystems" such as steppes or savannas), or agro-ecosystems,
systems in inland waters, such as lentic ecosystem"s such as lakes or ponds; or lotic ecosystems such as rivers,
oceanic ecosystems.

Another classification can be made by reference to its communities, such as in the case of a human ecosystem. The broadest classification, today under wide study and analysis, and also subject to widespread arguments about its nature and validity, is that of the entire sum of life seen as analogous to a self-sustaining organism, known as the Gaia theory.

Man's relationship

Mankind uses nature through both leisure and economic activities.

Some activities, such as hunting and fishing, are used for both sustenance and leisure, often by different people. the adoption of agriculture was first adopted around the 9th millennium BCE. Ranging from food production to energy, nature influences economic wealth.

Man has also made medicinal use of plants for thousands of years. The term alternative medicine is often attributed to the use of natural plants and extracts for healing purposes.

Manmade threats to nature include pollution, deforestation, and disasters such as oil spills.

Wilderness

Wilderness is generally defined as a natural environment on Earth that has not been directly modified by human activity. Ecologists consider wilderness areas to be an integral part of the planet's self-sustaining natural ecosystem (the biosphere).

The word, "wilderness", derives from the notion of wildness; The word's etymology is from the Old English wildeornes, which in turn derives from wildeor meaning wild beast (wild + deor = beast, deer)."Wilderness", in The Collins English Dictionary (2000) From this point of view, it is the wildness of a place that makes it a wilderness. This way of looking at wilderness includes areas within which natural processes operate without very noticeable human interference.

Looked at through the lens of the visual arts, nature and wildness have been important subjects in various epochs of world history. An early tradition of landscape art occurred in the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

In the Western world the idea of wilderness having intrinsic value emerged in the 1800s, especially in the works of the Romantic movement. British artists John Constable and JMW Turner turned their attention to capturing the beauty of the natural world in their paintings. That nature has been depicted and celebrated by so much art, photography, poetry and other literature shows the strength with which many people associate nature and beauty. Beyond certain basic characteristics that many philosophers agree about to explain what is seen as beautiful, the opinions are virtually endless.For an example of a range of opinions, see www.wilderness.org/Library/Documents/Beauty_Quotes.cfm and Ralph Waldo Emerson's analysis of the subject at www.emersoncentral.com/beauty.htm

Many scientists, who study nature in more specific and organized ways, also share the conviction that nature is beautiful; Quoted in, Flake, Gary William: The Computational Beauty of Nature, 1998.

A common classical idea of beautiful art involves the word mimesis, the imitation of nature.

Matter and energy

Some fields of science see nature as "matter in motion", obeying certain "laws of nature" which science seeks to understand. According to the theory of special relativity, there is no unchangeable distinction between matter and energy, because matter can be converted to energy (see annihilation), and vice versa (see matter creation). The remainder is believed to consist of 23 percent cold dark matter and 73 percent dark energy., using the WMAP dataset The exact nature of these components is still unknown and is currently under intensive investigation by physicists.

The behavior of matter and energy throughout the
observable universe appears to follow well-defined
physical laws.

Nature beyond Earth

Outer space, also simply called space, refers to the relatively empty regions of the universe outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies. Outer space within the solar system is called interplanetary space, which passes over into interstellar space at what is known as the heliopause.

Although outer space is certainly spacious, it is far from empty. Outer space is sparsely filled with several dozen organic molecules discovered to date by microwave spectroscopy, blackbody radiation left over from the big bang and the origin of the universe, and cosmic rays, which include ionized atomic nuclei and various subatomic particles. There is also some gas, plasma and dust, and small meteors. Some of this debris re-enters the atmosphere periodically.

The planet Earth is currently the only known body within the solar system to support life. At present though, most of the water remaining on Mars is frozen.
If life exists at all on Mars, it is most likely to be located underground where liquid water can still exist.

Conditions on the other terrestrial planets, Mercury and Venus, appears to be too harsh to support life as we know it. But it has been conjectured that Europa, the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter, may possess a sub-surface ocean of liquid water and could potentially host life.

Notes and references

Additional topics

Company HistoryNonprofits & Community Organizations

This web site and associated pages are not associated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and has no official or unofficial affiliation with The Nature Conservancy.