Third in a series of columns on the origins of North Carolina’s natural heritage program and the statewide network of private land trusts conservancies. Read more.

Twenty years ago, in June 2000, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted a legislative goal that then-Gov. James Hunt Jr. had first set forth as his executive goal the year before, declaring that 1 million more acres in North Carolina should be permanently protected as parks, forests, natural areas, farmlands, streamside natural buffers, and other urban and community “open space” reserves before the end of 2010.

The goal was to increase the scale of protected lands in North Carolina to a total of 3.8 million acres in permanently conserved lands, equating to about 11% of the state’s total land area.

By the end of the year 2020, North Carolina finally attained that original goal to have 3.8 million acres of protected land, 10 years “late.” Good, but why so slow? The short answer is because of reduced public funding for land conservation by the state legislature and its termination of the state’s tax credits to private landowners willing to conserve their land.

Approximately 86.5% of protected lands in North Carolina is in public ownership, owned and managed by national, state or local governmental agencies. The rest of the protected land is held in ownerships either by private landowners who voluntarily entered into conservation easement management agreements or are owned by nonprofit conservation organizations including The Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society and the statewide network of land trust conservancies.

The Division of Land and Water Stewardship in the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources tracks the progress of land conservation in North Carolina. Its land conservation 2010 status report observed that the importance for protecting natural areas and rural landscapes continues to grow as science and the public recognize the critical values of ecosystem services, clean water, clean air, locally produced food, environmental buffers against climate changes, the links between human and environmental health, and the interconnections between environmental and economic vitality. Those observations remain true today. North Carolina’s population continues to grow along with greater land development pressures and conversion.

People are increasingly visiting and using public parks and greenways and valuing protected green spaces. Practically every year, our parks in North Carolina experience another 10% increase in public use and visitations. Practically every local public referendum for increasing funding for parks and land conservation passes by large margins. For example and in demonstration of that overwhelming public support for land conservation, Wake County voters overwhelmingly voted in November 2019 by nearly a 70% margin in favor of greater public funding ($120 million) for more county parks, nature preserves, greenways and protected rural “open space” lands.

North Carolina should be striving to increase the scale of protecting our premiere natural heritage land assets, rural landscapes, and vital environmental resources.

The mission for land and environmental conservation is not accomplished. With all the pressures of population growth, continued conversion of private farmlands and forests to intensive development, demands and impacts on limited water supplies, consequences of a changing climate, diminished food production, and greater public needs for more outdoor recreational opportunities and environmental health security, North Carolina should be striving to increase the scale of protecting our premiere natural heritage land assets, rural landscapes and vital environmental resources.

We would be smart to expand our strategies to embrace more incentives and public education, as well as higher investments of state and local public funds to achieve a greater scale and scope of land conservation and protection across our state and in all our communities. We should expand efforts to educate and engage more private landowners in natural resources conservation management and enhancement agreements, providing them greater levels of financial incentives and technical assistance.

President Biden has recommitted the USA’s engagement with efforts by the world’s community of nations to reduce the dire consequences of climate change. One important element of that ambitious international strategy is to assure conservation and preservation of at least 30% of the Earth’s land areas and waters by 2030. That “30 x 30” goal will translate down from the international, to national, to state levels. Of course, Western states possess much larger amounts of protected natural and rural landscapes, particularly where much of the land in those states remain in public ownership.

To contribute to attaining a substantial increase in the scale of natural and rural land resources protection, North Carolina needs to expand its land conservation efforts and funding.

At present, only 11% of North Carolina’s total land area is considered protected for its natural and environmental resources. To contribute to attaining a substantial increase in the scale of natural and rural land resources protection, North Carolina needs to expand its land conservation efforts and funding.

In demonstration of that need, the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust recently completed its $35.8 million capital campaign that expanded its conservation of high-priority natural areas in the coastal region and helps finance its growing land conservation stewardship responsibilities. The tasks and needs for protecting other important natural land resources are far from completed.

Let’s enlarge our vision to protect more natural areas and essential water bodies and to assure the conservation of more forests and farmlands in private ownerships. Let’s aspire and invest to protect and conserve our premiere natural heritage, rural landscapes, and water resources.

Second in a series of columns on the origins of North Carolina’s natural heritage program and the statewide network of private land trusts conservancies. Read Part 1.

North Carolina’s network of private, nonprofit land conservation organizations, known as land trusts or conservancies, has collectively protected nearly half-a-million acres in hundreds of locations across the state.

These land trusts are essential partners with public agencies dedicated to natural resource conservation and environmental protection. Fifteen of these local land trusts are operated by professional staff and each have annual operating budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many North Carolinians are members and financial supporters of their local land trusts, which in combination have a presence throughout the state. Many of the natural areas that have been protected by land conservation trusts are accessible and popular for public visits and enjoyment.

Additionally, land trusts have arranged conservation easement management agreements with hundreds of landowners across the state. Those easement agreements permanently assure those properties will not be intensively developed in the future and the natural resources will be carefully managed and stewarded.

Few are aware that most land trusts in North Carolina are less than 30 years old. Most were established in the short time period between 1983 to 1995.

By the early 1980s, the state’s young North Carolina Natural Heritage Program had identified and documented hundreds of natural areas as refuges of some of the state’s most imperiled biodiversity and ecological treasures.

The Nature Conservancy, having established its operations in North Carolina, pledged to focus its efforts on protecting a few dozen natural areas possessing ecological attributes of national or international significance. But as a conservationist and director of the Natural Heritage Program, I was concerned for the hundreds of other important natural areas and threatened species habitat locations in North Carolina.

Those places might not rank as having national or global ecological uniqueness and importance, but certainly their preservation was crucial to saving the diverse natural heritage assets of our state and our local communities. What would become of them? If not The Nature Conservancy, who else could and would take actions to protect those many other places?

Few local land trust organizations existed in North Carolina before the 1980s.

The local Eno River Preservation Association, formed in 1966 by visionary Margaret Nygard and her allies, focused on establishing a linear state park along that river in Durham and Orange counties.

The Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, formed in 1974 by another visionary Stan Murray with his other Appalachian Trail hiking club friends, originally focused on protecting the magnificent and ecologically-rich Roan Mountain Massif and the visual corridor of its ridgetop Appalachian Trail on the North Carolina-Tennessee state boundary.

Local, community-focused land conservation groups were scattered in a few localities, like those in Highlands, North Carolina, in the high Southern Appalachian Mountains, and also on Figure Eight Island on the Atlantic Coast.

Additionally, there had long been a history of individual visionary conservationists who had championed and organized their friends into supporting groups of advocates for the state to establish a good number of the early state parks in North Carolina such as for Hanging Rock, Pilot Mountain, Morrow Mountain, Jockeys Ridge, the New River and other parks. But while those were stellar conservation success stories, their geographic range was small and not nearly enough for what was desperately needed.

Promoting land trusts

In 1979 I authored a guidebook, “How to Form a Conservation Foundation” i.e., a land trust. At that time, North Carolina prohibited the use of the word Trust in the corporate name of any organization other than for banking and financial management institutions, this restriction was later repealed.

Those guidelines explained the benefits for forming a local or regionally focused land conservation organization, how to qualify for exemptions from federal and state income taxes, and gaining local property tax-exempt status for a public-interest charity, along with step-by-step instructions for formulating and incorporating the entity, template articles of incorporation and bylaws, and a directory to helpful references and resources.

I enrolled myself in 1982 as a charter individual member of the new national Land Trust Exchange, later renamed Land Trust Alliance. That coalition was initially formed as a means of information exchange and promotion for the relatively few local and regional land conservation organizations operating in scattered locations around the country. Most of those concentrated in the New England states, in the more populous Great Lakes coastal region, near affluent resort communities in the Northern Rocky Mountains, and on the Pacific West Coast.

In 1983, I was a member of the task force assembled by the Triangle regional council of (local) governments that designed the Triangle Land Conservancy as a regional land trust. I was inspired to form and incorporate the North Carolina Natural Heritage Foundation, or NHF, in 1984.

I envisioned that NHF could serve as a fiscal agent for the state’s Natural Heritage Program by securing needed private contributions, grants and local government contracts to help finance countywide or regional natural heritage/natural areas inventories and to finance publication of public educational guidebooks. Also, I imagined this foundation could be a vehicle to promote the establishment of other local and regional land conservancies across North Carolina.

The North Carolina State General Assembly in 1983 enacted legislation making North Carolina the first state in the nation to grant state income tax credits — dollar-for-dollar income tax reduction credits — to private landowners who donated properties or permanent conservation easements on their properties with certified natural resource assets to a qualified public agency or private land conservancy. Over time the maximum amounts of those conservation tax credits were elevated.

This incentive was a valuable means for land trusts to stimulate and induce sympathetic private landowners to willingly accept permanent easements or even to donate their properties for permanent conservation. Regardless of the success of this nationally renowned incentive that helped permanently protect 262,000 acres of North Carolina’s important environmental resources and natural areas — with an estimated foregone development value exceeding $1.6 billion — the North Carolina General Assembly’s controlling majority in 2013 terminated the program.

I authored and the Natural Heritage Program published the first edition in 1987 of the “Land Conservation Options for Natural Heritage Protection” guidebook for owners of natural areas and rural lands. The Natural Heritage Program also produced a revised edition of my original 1976 Conservation Easement guidelines for landowners, which would continue to be revised and republished over the subsequent decades.

In 1987 the state General Assembly established the North Carolina Natural Heritage Trust Fund, administered by a board of trustees appointed by the Governor, Senate President, and Speaker of the House, to award grants to state agencies to purchase natural areas and parklands.

The fund was financed by a substantial share of the State’s excise tax on land property sales and from fees on personalized vehicle license plates and their annual renewal fees. The Natural Heritage Fund provided vital financing, matched by other private funds, that produced land acquisitions and expansion of a robust network of state parks, nature preserves, wildlife management areas, state forests, coastal nature reserves over the near 22 lifespan of this important program.

Reactionary political forces gained control of the State General Assembly, which in the early 2010s terminated the Natural Heritage Fund, killed the State’s national-model Land Conservation Tax Credit program, and substantially reduced funding for the Natural Heritage Program and for most of the rest of the state’s land conservation and environmental protection programs.

Laying the groundwork

While managing the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, I organized a series of how-to instructional workshops for people interested in establishing local land trusts. Beginning in the spring of 1989 and over the next several years, the North Carolina Natural Heritage Foundation organized a series of training workshops for beginning land trusts. These assemblies of individuals involved in starting or conceiving new land trusts served to bond together a fraternity of originators of young land trusts with a sense of common purpose and shared alliance.

In the spring of 1991, I was summarily fired by administrators of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, or NCDENR, ostensibly for protesting violations of natural heritage areas conservation agreements by the US Forest Service, ending my 15-year tenure as manager of the State’s Natural Heritage Program. I won my lawsuit against the state for “wrongful dismissal” but by then had moved on in my pursuits. NCDENR is now the state Department of Environmental Quality.

The silver-lining to this episode in my life was that I was provided opportunity and incentive to reinvent myself and to reorganize and reorient the existing North Carolina Natural Heritage Foundation. With concurrence of its board of directors, I was hired in 1991 as the North Carolina Natural Heritage Foundation’s first executive director. We immediately amended our articles of incorporation and renamed the organization to become the Conservation Trust for North Carolina in early 1992.

The Conservation Trust initiated a series of meetings and instructional seminars for what by group consensus was called the North Carolina Land Trusts Network. Actively participating in these foundational dialogues in 1991-92 were representatives from a dozen young local land trusts. This informal network of regional and locally focused land conservancies reached concurrence in 1993 to form the North Carolina Land Trusts Council, which was coordinated by the Conservation Trust.

With grants received from Fred Stanback, the Blumenthal family foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, we were ready to grow the Conservation Trust to being the statewide incubator and service center for what we envisioned would become a statewide network of strong, professionally staffed private land trusts. That vision came true.

I assisted Camilla Herlevich in the 1991-93 time period in organizing and establishing the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust, with both of us serving on the boards of directors of our respective organizations. Camilla retired at the end of 2020 with merited accolades for her career as founding director of that successful land trust, which has protected over 80,000 acres in North Carolina’s coastal region.

The Conservation Trust for North Carolina, or CTNC, served as the umbrella information clearinghouse and exchange, and assistance-providing service center for North Carolina’s land trusts. On behalf of that community of land trusts, CTNC moved forward to help educate the North Carolina public and decisionmakers about the growth of the land trust movement.

We explained that land trusts represented and fulfilled the concerns of people across the state who realize they could save important community green, open spaces and natural areas, valued streamways and greenways, wildlife habitats, historic and culturally treasured rural landscapes, public water supply watersheds, urban gardens and waterfronts, hiking and walking and biking trails, scenic vistas, and other important outdoor recreational areas.

We attempted to impress the public that, while national groups including The Nature Conservancy were doing important environmental protection work, North Carolina’s home-grown land trusts who focused at the “grassroots” local level merited their support to save the natural areas, green spaces, and rural landscapes most valued and beneficial to their local communities.

The 10 years from 1984 to 1995 saw the births and burgeoning growth of private land trusts across North Carolina. The most active land trusts have been the following:

• Blue Ridge Conservancy, a merger of two land trusts High Country Land Conservancy and Blue Ridge Rural Land Trust, established 1995, blueridgeconservancy.org.
• Catawba Land Conservancy established 1991, catawbalands.org.
• Conserving Carolina, a merger of two land trusts – Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, established 1994 and Piedmont Land Conservancy, established 1990, conservingcarolina.org.
• Conservation Trust for North Carolina, established 1984 and reorganized 1992, ctnc.org.
• Eno River Preservation Association, established  1966, enoriver.org.
• Foothills Conservancy of North Carolina, established 1995, foothillsconservancy.org.
• Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust, 1883 derivation, reorganized 1992, hicashlt.org.
• Mainspring Conservation Trust, established 1999 as Nikwasi Land Trust and later named Little Tennessee Land Trust mainspringconserves.org.
• New River Conservancy, established 1974, newriverconservancy.org.
• NC Coastal Land Trust, established 1992, coastallandtrust.org.
• Piedmont Land Conservancy, established 1990, piedmontland.org.
• Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, established 1974, appalachian.org.
• Tar River Conservancy, established 1983, tarriver.org.
• Three Rivers Land Trust, a merger of Land Trust for Central NC, established 1995, and Sandhills Area Land Trust, established 1991, threeriverslandtrust.org.
• Triangle Land Conservancy, established 1983, triangleland.org.

I had the privilege of directing and growing the Conservation Trust for North Carolina for 12 years. During my tenure as its director, the Conservation Trust established and administered programs assisting and advancing the network of private land trusts, including the following:

• Annual assemblies of North Carolina’s land trusts and their allies with ongoing training, seminars, dialogues, information exchange and strengthened collaboration.
• Grant funding to land trusts for protection of streams and clean water, enabled by successive grants to CTNC from the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund and from other private sources.
• Grant funding to land trusts for farmland conservation from the North Carolina Farmland Preservation Program, for which CTNC secured original funding from the state General Assembly and was contracted by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to administer in its initial years of operation.
• Direct financial assistance to local land trusts for their organizational development, public outreach, landowner education, land conservation planning, demonstration projects and long-range planning.
• Revolving loan program to land trusts assisting them with initial protection projects transactional costs and to match public funds for land and easement acquisitions.
• A statewide public awareness campaign to build recognition of all land trusts.
• Advocacy and lobbying for more public funding and conducive public policies for land conservation, including the state’s environmental trust funds, the state’s income tax credits to donors of land for conservation, and the One Million Acres Land Protection Land Protection goal.

I was succeeded as CTNC’s executive director in 2002 by Reid Wilson, who went on later to be appointed by Governor Roy Cooper in his first term as deputy director of the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and has been elevated to secretary of that department in the Governor’s second term.

North Carolina’s land trusts have led the way in saving many of our state’s extraordinary environmental assets and natural heritage. I subscribe to the concept, as environmental historian William Cronon well-articulated, “Land trusts are in the business not just of conserving lands, but of conserving the human values those lands embody…. We protect natural areas and open space because they stand for some of our most dearly held values.”

Every one of North Carolina’s land trust has its own creation story and account of its land conservation and community engagement successes. The success stories of each of our state’s land conservation trusts merit to be widely known and recognized.

Next in the series: North Carolina’s million acres protection goal finally achieved by end of 2020.

First in a series of columns on the origins of North Carolina’s natural heritage program and the statewide network of private land trusts conservancies.

While there is presently justified cause for feeling pessimistic about the future of our world’s natural and environmental health, we should retain a sense of hope and purpose in continuing efforts to protect nature and defend our environment.

Looking back on the battles fought and successes achieved over the past 50 years of the good fight for environmental protection since the great public awakening of the original Earth Day in 1970, we should recognize how far we have come and how much has been achieved. The war is yet to be won. We have lost battles and suffered setbacks, but we are not about to retreat. There are compelling motivations for us to renew and rededicate our efforts to fight on to protect our world’s natural environment and our state’s natural heritage.

When in June 1976, 45 years ago, I was hired by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to initiate the formation of North Carolina’s Natural Heritage Program, I had little image of how far our state would progress and how many milestones would be achieved in efforts to preserve our premiere and threatened land, biota and environmental assets.

I was selected to start the program as I completed my graduate degree in regional planning at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and concluded my research on alternative ways to conserve natural areas and rural lands in North Carolina. TNC took a chance on employing a student of environmental planning and public policy to head this new program, on my pledge to hire a staff team composed of some of the best, young conservation biologists in the state, which I did.

These were enlightened times in America’s awakening to the dimensions of environmental losses and threats, and the necessity to defend and protect our natural environment. The national leadership of The Nature Conservancy had adopted a new strategic plan returning it to is originating roots when first formed in the 1950s by the union of ecological scientists, whereby TNC would restructure its land conservation priorities to be guided by science and would strive to protect the “best of the last” as refuges of America’s most threatened species and ecosystems.

TNC’s brilliant and mercurial science program director, Dr. Bob Jenkins, envisioned that TNC could persuade all states to establish programs that would amass and maintain inventories of habitat locations of all rare and threatened species of animals and plants and go on to define and prioritize each states’ most important remaining natural areas. TNC’s strategy was first to initiate natural heritage programs and next to establish its field offices in all states. TNC would thereby focus its land-protection efforts primarily upon the priorities identified and recommended by the states’ natural heritage programs.

By the 1970s, many of North Carolina’s premiere natural areas were in jeopardy of destruction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that half of North Carolina’s former wetlands had been drained, filled and eliminated.

By the 1970s, many of North Carolina’s premiere natural areas were in jeopardy of destruction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that half of North Carolina’s former wetlands had been drained, filled and eliminated. Its longleaf pine forests that once dominated millions of acres of our state’s coastal plain region had been reduced to only a tiny fraction of its original expanse. Its piedmont native grasslands and savannas were nearly all eliminated. And, likewise, many other natural ecosystems had been destroyed, damaged or diminished. Hundreds of native plants and animal species – equating to a tenth of the whole diversity of vascular plant species and nearly one-fifth of the animal species in our state – were in jeopardy of elimination.

The 1970s were when the nation finally awakened to the perils of environmental degradation, with a flurry of national legislation and presidential executive orders intended to reduce unfettered pollution of our waters and air, to evaluate environmental impacts of proposed land development projects, to form the federal Environmental Protection Agency, to save endangered species, and to become wiser and more careful stewards of our public lands and natural resources.

North Carolinians had overwhelmingly passed by popular referendum a state constitutional amendment declaring it a basic responsibility for the state to act in defense of its natural environment. The North Carolina General Assembly responded with enactment of water and air pollution-control legislation, the Coastal Area Management Act – although the companion Mountain Area Management legislation failed to pass – and other environmental protection actions.

North Carolina’s state leadership in the mid-1970s was receptive to TNC’s concept and contracted with TNC to establish and operate the new North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, to be turn-keyed over to become a state agency program within several years. In North Carolina, this was the time of a progressive Republican, Gov. James Holshouser, and his lead agency executives, Jim Harrington and Dr. Art Cooper of the then-Department of Environment, Natural Resources and Community Development, were expanding the system of state parks and natural areas, establishing the state’s marine resource centers and aquaria, and implementing the new Coastal Area Management Act that included defining coastal areas of environmental concern and a new system of protected coastal reserves.

We in North Carolina pioneered in inventing a methodology for rating and prioritizing the rarity and vulnerability of individual imperiled species and their habitats, which was soon adopted nationwide by The Nature Conservancy and by other states’ natural heritage programs.

I had the opportunity and honor to build and, for its first 15 years, to direct the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program. Our mission was to identify and prioritize those places most important to save and retain the premiere ecological resources of North Carolina. This was the first comprehensive, methodical approach and attempt to inventory the state’s biological diversity and natural assets.

After hiring a fine team of conservation biologists, we set forth to assemble and maintain a statewide database on the locations and relative health and status of populations of the state’s most imperiled and rarest species and its natural ecosystems, which we called “natural communities.” Our charge was to take stock of our state’s remaining natural areas and native species habitats and then devise strategies to protect and sustain the most outstanding components of our natural heritage.

We in North Carolina pioneered in inventing a methodology for rating and prioritizing the rarity and vulnerability of individual imperiled species and their habitats, which was soon adopted nationwide by The Nature Conservancy and by other states’ natural heritage programs. We also pioneered as one of the first states to define and identify our extraordinary range of natural communities and ecosystems. We quickly devised and launched a program of education and voluntary conservation agreements that informed landowners about the significance and conservation management needs of natural areas in their ownership.

The Natural Heritage Program is now part of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Department and in the Division of Land and Water Stewardship. The North Carolina Natural Heritage Program has amassed a database on more than 30,918 locations of imperiled or rare species and exemplary natural communities. Its database is used more than 3,000 times annually for land use and development decisions, conservation planning and research projects, and its database website is consulted over 22,000 times each year.

In 1979, we created the state’s registry of protected natural areas, first through state administrative rule, and undertook a systematic effort to educate landowners and negotiate voluntary conservation management agreements with both public agencies and private owners of exceptionally important natural areas. Already by 1990, over 280 natural areas had been registered as voluntarily protected by their owners, ranging from numerous individual and corporate property owners to the U.S. Forest Service, Army, Air Force and Marine Corps, those including dozens of natural areas defined for conservation management in Croatan National Forest, Fort Bragg, Dare Bombing Range and Camp Lejeune.

The Natural Heritage Program and its registry of natural areas were formalized in 1985 with enactment of the North Carolina Nature Preserves Act, which passed the General Assembly only one vote short of unanimous concurrence by both legislative chambers. That law also created the state’s system of dedicated nature preserves — essentially with the state holding permanent conservation easement use restrictions and management agreements with the public and private owners of important natural areas. Each dedicated nature preserve entails a permanent conservation management agreement with the landowner, and each is approved by the governor and Council of State. Any alteration to a nature preserve agreement requires approval by the governor and Council of State.

Today, the number of recorded site occurrences of rare and threatened species tracked by the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program exceeds 30,000, and nearly 2,500 natural areas are rated as possessing ecological assets of high significance. By the fall of 2020, 184 areas embracing more than 440,000 acres have been formally dedicated into the state’s system of nature preserves. Another 355 areas covering a total of more than 743,000 acres, including national park lands, are currently enrolled on the state’s natural areas registry with voluntary landowner conservation agreements.

While too many of our state’s ecological treasures have been lost or remain in peril, many of our extraordinary natural areas have been protected and sanctuaries have been reserved for many of our most threatened species. Since the formation of the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program in 1976, more than 1.5 million acres have been protected and conserved statewide.

The Nature Conservancy committed its efforts to protect a few dozen of our state’s most important natural areas – a goal that it has nearly achieved. But who would and could protect the many hundreds of other places that contain and sustain our state’s many ecological assets and natural heritage treasures? That challenge became my own personal mission … and the story of the growth of North Carolina’s statewide network of private land conservancies, known generally as land trusts, was launched.

While still at the helm of the state’s Natural Heritage Program, I founded in 1984 the private, nonprofit North Carolina Natural Heritage Foundation, which advocated for and provided training assistance to local groups and dedicated instigators to form what would eventually become the statewide network of private land trusts. I authored or coauthored first editions of guidebooks for how to organize private land trusts and explaining land conservation options and sources of assistance for landowners.

In spring 1991, after heading the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program for 15 years, I earned my badge of courage by being fired by state agency heads for too passionately defending environmental resources and being too “green.” Newspaper editorials across the state protested my termination, and I eventually won my lawsuit for wrongful dismissal, but by then a good friend had been hired to move to North Carolina and direct the program for its next 18 years.

Immediately after my exit from state employment in 1991, I became the executive director of the Conservation Trust for North Carolina, which was redesigned from the former Natural Heritage Foundation. CTNC first served as the incubator and then as the service center for North Carolina’s community of regional and local land trusts. The several dozen private land trusts working collaboratively across our state have collectively protected many hundreds of natural areas and more than half a million acres as treasures of North Carolina’s natural heritage. More of their inspiring stories deserve to be told and merit greater public awareness and honor.

Much has been accomplished but much more needs to be done to safeguard, steward and defend North Carolina’s still imperiled natural environment and natural heritage.

Next in the series: The origins and growth of land trusts in North Carolina.