Law Commons^™

Bioregional Conservation Means Taking Habitat, Jamison E. Colburn

Jamison E. Colburn

Conservation’s richest innovation in decades has been the conservation easement and, by most accounts, it is still growing in both prevalence and scale. Private actors have used this device to innovate around the gridlock of the public sphere, achieving broad scales with limited capital. But this turn toward private ordering to protect nature has begun revealing some of the possibilities it will foreclose over the long term. With the demand for homes and second homes in rural and “exurban” environments soaring, the price of landscape scale conservation keeps rising, even as more of what is owned is already facing grave …