About The Private Landowner Network

Private Landowner Network: The Internet destination for conservation information, resources and contacts.

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Private Landowner Network (PLN), brought to you by the Resources First Foundation, provides a simple and effective means for landowners to connect with qualified, often local, professionals to navigate the complex ins and outs of real estate transactions, tax and estate planning, and regional land conservation activities. The PLN resource database contains local land trusts, nonprofit conservation organizations, and other folks out there who are in the business to help you fulfill your conservation objectives. We continue to research and add federal and state funding and technical assistance programs, we do the hard work of understanding the programs and provide simple easy to understand program summaries and easy to find eligibility requirements and links to application forms.

One might ask, why we are so focused on private lands? After thirty years of involvement with government agencies and environmental organizations, project director, Amos Eno’s thinking evolved. Having worked for decades at the federal level Amos was still a card-carrying member of top down federal preeminence for conservation. However serious doubts were setting in as evidenced by the burgeoning expense and inefficiency of federal management and the beginnings of deep fissures of resentment among western landowners. Simultaneously the compounding trend of our National Parks were becoming magnets of unseemly and ecologically devastating peripheral development nationwide. During the 1980s, something new emerged across our western landscape: -local community based collaboratives. These incipient initiatives were initially unnamed and unrecognized, except by the few involved in underwriting these efforts.

By the late 1980s, the glimmerings of an alternative to traditional top down federal level conservation were emerging. The promise of local partnership initiatives from Maine to California and the wisdom of reaching out to private land owners was beginning.

In 1989 as Executive Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Amos awarded the foundation’s largest grant to Andrew Sansom’s Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to inaugurate a program for private landowner stewardship. Convinced that Texas, which is 98% private land, was the place to inaugurate programs that put private landowners front and center into the conservation equation. In the 1990s Amos initiated a comparable stream of grants in Maine, which is 97% privately owned, often in cooperation with the Fish and Wildlife’s Gulf of Maine Coastal Program office, which pioneered the use of GIS maps as platforms for local partnerships.

Amos made private land grants the paramount grant funding portfolio of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Why? Because today private individuals own, protect, steward and work on over 61% of the land in the lower 48 states. Fifty percent of the United States, 907 million acres, is cropland, pastureland, and rangeland owned and managed by farmers, ranchers, and their families. Land use Graph These 4.7 million landowners manage and protect most of our significant ecological resources:

over 70 percent of our wetlands and
over 75 percent of our endangered species habitats.

Private lands provide the buffers around our public conservation parcels and they offer not only the best chance to save what remains in terms of critical natural resource habitats, but also the opportunity to reclaim some of what we have degraded through restoration and enhancement. Further, private landowners represent the largest intellectual bank of stewardship intelligence in the country.

The concept for creating the Private Landowner Network, stems from the combination of fifty years of environmental education, the existence of a strong regulatory framework, and the initiative of empowered landowners leading many individuals and communities to seek the high ground of conservation.

The successful inculcation of environmental principals into our collective national and individual psyches is one thing that is routinely overlooked. Today, most of us are far more environmentally sensitive than we were 50 years ago. We need the tools at our disposal and the freedom to act and initiate environmental stewardship. PLN provides the necessary information, partnership tools and associations, preferred provider expertise, funding sources (public and private), and the linkages necessary to enable private landowners and community assemblages to do conservation on their own terms.

Affiliated Sites:
Conservation Tax Center Cooperative Conservation America Maine Conservation Center Houston Intra-Met California Conservation Center Mississippi Conservation Center Arkansas Conservation Center Resources First Foundation
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