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5 C H O O S I N G L A N D T O S AV E Most land trusts consider themselves conservation organizations, but often the conservation is almost accidental. They save real estate and in doing so they save ecosystems and organisms, but many acquire land almost without a plan, and their stewardship often is either nonexistent or aimed mostly at improving public access. Saving land of modest ecological importance is better than saving no land at all, but every land trust has practical limitations. Time, energy, and money spent putting together a deal on land of little value except as open space are time, energy, and money unavailable to invest in finding and protecting land of ecological significance. Giving priority to land of high conservation value makes more sense. For localities having no remaining sites with intact, functioning communities of native species, a land trust will be still be doing good by saving open space, even alien-dominated conifer plantations and fields. Such sites provide ecosystem services, such as producing oxygen and sequestering carbon. They give the residents of the region something to look at besides condos and concrete and provide opportunities for restoration of areas that may in time approach natural vegetation. Any given land trust may see farmland or trails or historic sites or scenery as important aspects of its mission. Well and good; but the cause of conservation will be better served—for the Earth and for the people—if, within those parameters, conservation in the ecological sense is kept in mind. Farmland trusts, for example, should endeavor to write their conservation easements so that the woods, streams, and marshes are given definite, permanent protection. They may want to reconsider the policy of “Keep it farmland at any price,” if the price is more damage to the Earth by chemicals or overstocking or a variety of other practices condoned by agricultural agencies. Conservation used to be defined as the wise use of resources. Sometimes “for human benefit” was added, sometimes not, but it was always implied. We weren’t conserving forests, birds, and seashores. We were conserving “resources”; that is to say, the supplies of what humans need to live and do business. Few conservationists today would be satisfied with that definition. Aldo Leopold changed the way we look at the world.1 Leopold’s insight was that humans are one element in the vast functioning, evolving biologicalgeological system that forms the Earth—the biosphere, as ecologists refer to it. It’s in our biological nature to think that the human species is the most important component of the system. Probably any other species, if we could read their minds, would believe the same thing. Great auks perhaps would have said, “Great auks rule!” But we killed them and have thoroughly subdued other creatures, so bragging rights belong to us alone. The best conservation is stewardship of the biosphere and its component interacting systems: the air and water, the woods and fields, the mountains, dunes, and swales. If we take care to maintain the natural systems in good order, then we are doing our best for people—in the long run, possibly not for this quarter’s balance sheet. At the same time, we’re doing our best for the other species with which we share the planet. The old-time view of redwoods and ruffed grouse as commodities had noticeably run out of gas by the 1960s. By the 1980s it had been widely displaced by conservation biology, an approach that makes use of Leopold’s insights and modern ecology and that focuses on ecological systems. I say, “displaced,” but, of course, the old ideas of “wise use” and commodification still hold sway among some old-timers in forestry and natural resources agencies and in a considerable fraction of the lay public.2 Biological Diversity Conservation biology looks to provide the principles and tools for preserving biological diversity. Preserving biological diversity, or biodiversity, means trying to keep species from going extinct, but more than just species may be endangered. Diversity can be lost at every level of the ecological hierarchy . Ecosystems and landscapes can be endangered at levels above the species . Genes can be endangered at a level below the species.3 When the last site occupied by a prairie plant community is lost from a county in Ohio, that’s a loss of diversity, even if every species still exists somewhere in the county...

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