Rally

Flying into Portland you are immediately struck with the sense of beauty, the river, forest and mountains are all clearly visible. From the airport lobby you have a striking view of Mt. Hood's magnificent peak and from the hotel I could see Mt. St. Helens and visualize what it looked like a few decades ago before the big blast! The hotel is right next to the clean and efficient public transportation system, which can take you anywhere in the city for a reasonable price. I had a little time to explore, so I went to Powell's City of Books Store, the largest Independent bookstore I’ve ever visited! 

Of course, being a city, Portland also has its fair share of homeless people and traffic jams, which are a reminder that there are still many good causes to work for, even here in Portland.

The reason I’m here is to help stop our land from being lost to development. As a report from the American Farmland Report states–"More than 31 million acres of U.S. agricultural land have been irrevocably lost to urban expansion since 1982 and an additional 175 acres of farm and ranchland are lost every hour to make way for housing and other industries.(American Farmland Trust, 2018")

After checking into my hotel, I headed to the conference center for the the Land Trust Alliance annual conference. Being the first time I'd traveled out of state since before Covid, I was astonished by the amount of people who were attending this event. Over 2,000 people from land trusts all over the United States had packed into a sizable conference room.

This is probably the golden age of the land trust movement. There are more people, organizations and money available to conserve land than ever before. There is also an astounding amount of bipartisanship consensus when it comes to land conservation. In one of the workshops offered they discussed recent polling data that showed even a majority of both major political parties support land conservation.

"Land trusts have already conserved 61 million acres of private land across the nation — more than all of the national parks combined. Help us conserve another 60 million acres by the end of the decade." (Land Trust Alliance 2023)

Now, the trick for our local, very small Mother Lode Land Trust, is how to navigate the bureaucracy and direct that money toward our tiny but critical corner of the world. Luckily, there were workshops to help with just that, especially in learning to understand the federal funding process. With the most recent Farm Bill being negotiated there is a good chance we could have 60 billion available nationwide for conservation. So hopefully our experience at this conference will help us funnel that money to our home turf.

The conference had so many workshops that I couldn't attend them all, let alone write about all of them. It was like trying to drink from a fire hose. The three day event was broken up into multiple tracts which each held multiple options. Here is just the list of the broad subjects; Addressing Climate Change, Managing Easements, Communicating Successfully, Conserving Working Lands, Doing Deals, Federal Funding, Managing Your Organization, Stewardship and Securing Support.

I or another of my colleagues will write a follow-up blog about some of the more interesting and educational events attended. But overall, I left Portland feeling hopeful about humanity and the wild world. If we can find some common ground and take action to save land, then maybe we can solve even bigger problems like the climate crisis.