Bacon and Conservation

What do Bacon and conservation have in common?  Well, everything, actually.

If you take a look at the latest edition of The Land Report, you find an article about Louis Moore Bacon and his lifelong commitment to preserving some of the most important and pristine lands across the U.S.  Having inherited his conservationist’s conscious from his grandfather, Louis T. Moore, Bacon further developed his passion for the outdoors while at Vermont Middlebury College.  While most students would head home for breaks, he and a favorite professor would spend time hunting and hiking in the nearby Green Mountains.

In 2007, Bacon purchased the 172,000 acre Trinchera Ranch from the Forbes family with the promise that he would continue the ranch’s conservation and environmental legacy.  Providing a home for multiple generations of employees, supporting local schools, and pioneering innovative wildlife and forest management practices, the ranch embodies Bacon’s commitment to the environment and the people around him.  In recent years, he has been negotiating with two major power companies to abandon their plans to run large-scale transmission lines across Trinchera.  While one of the companies has backed out, the other is still holding firm and has yet to agree to a compromise.

In addition to the article on Bacon, this edition of The Land Report has a number of great stories on the deal of the year, the country’s best brokerages, and many more.  Enjoy!

Investing in Your Legacy (Part I)

Photo courtesy of Bo Prieskorn

[This is Part One of a two-part series, originally published on LandThink, investigating the economic potential for investing in the management of land, wildlife, biodiversity, and water resources. Part One covers economic incentives from government programs for establishing conservation practices. Part Two will address private sources of revenue that can be generated from establishing creative and multi-use land use practices and programming.]

On March 1, 1872, Congress signed into law an act that established Yellowstone National Park, the first of 58 protected areas to eventually be designated as national parks. Thus signaled the start of an era in national policy characterized by heavy public investment in conservation and land management.

As of 2010, 138 years later, the Bureau of Land Management held nearly 248 million acres of public land. However, this represents a decrease of two million acres from 2009 and a decrease of 5.5 million acres from 2008. This reduction reflects an effort on the part of public officials who would prefer to see the federal government take a more limited role in conservation efforts while also using the revenue from sales of public lands to pay down the national debt. It also demonstrates a shifting priority away from direct public investment in conservation through outright land purchases and toward providing incentives to individuals and organizations to purchase and manage the land themselves.

While some see this shift as troubling because it means conservation efforts are more haphazard and subject to the varying goals of individual landowners, others see it as an incredibly lucrative opportunity to invest in conservation. Take T. Boone Pickens, for example. Recognizing the economic potential of Texas ranches, he has made a name for himself (and a lot of money) by buying working livestock ranches, improving them with wildlife enhancement programs, and then reselling them. As he recently told The Land Report, “We always made a profit from the ranch sales. But what I really feel good about is knowing that we left the land in better shape than we found it.”