Lynn Lozier has been with The Nature Conservancy for 50 years, in an expansive and inspiring career that includes working as a land steward, ecologist, project manager and program director. Today, Lynn manages the oversight and monitoring of TNC California’s 175 conservation easements and 50 properties. Through her long tenure, she has been part of TNC’s evolution from its roots as a land trust to its current role as a global conservation innovator.
As she looks back on her half-century career, Lynn shared some reflections on how TNC has transformed over the years, from pioneering landscape-scale protection to landmark conservation victories like the recovery of the Santa Cruz Island Fox. It is the willingness to embrace new ideas, even when the road ahead is unclear, that has made the organization what it is today.
How it all began…
“My first connection with TNC was working with a partner, as a volunteer caretaker of its Fairfield Osborn Preserve on the slopes of Sonoma Mountain,” says Lynn. “There we designed and built a trail system and created an herbarium and plant list. When the donors of the property visited, they shared their love of the place and wanted children to also experience it. They suggested that to TNC and offered to fund it. So, I became an employee, and together with Larry Serpa, developed an experiential environmental education program, taking out groups of children to explore the land. We trained volunteers and college students as docents and grouped kids by their energy and focus levels: The “Red” group would barrel up the steep hill to see the wood ducks on the pond, while the “Blue” group might travel less than a mile the whole day, going deep to explore whatever engaged them, even a single group of organisms, like ants or grasses. This program continues today, and it is something I am extremely grateful for having made happen because it gives kids the opportunity and skills to connect and explore on their own. After fifty years, it is incredible to see people who first visited as ten-year-olds return as adult escorts for their grandchild’s fifth grade class!”
Lynn described TNC's first steps into landscape-scale conservation in California.
“In the early 1980s, TNC California had just completed our first capital campaign, the first capital campaign for land conservation ever. We used the vision of saving what was uniquely California to raise $15 million in private philanthropy. Both the approach and the amount were unheard of at that time! Our state’s amazing biodiversity was the driver behind the power of that vision. We secured eleven properties that we had identified as the best examples of natural communities found only in California but not protected anywhere else in the state. But then we did what all conservation organizations were doing and put a fence around it.”
How and when did that practice change?
“This was an especially exciting time to be in conservation because TNC was evolving alongside a new scientific field: conservation biology. This whole new discipline was tightly tied to what conservationists needed to do to keep species from going extinct. And working larger and keeping habitats connected were what we needed to do. So, we realized that it was not enough to just put up a fence. Our preserves needed to be a whole lot larger—and connected. This was the beginning of landscape-scale conservation.”
For me, this is the most exciting thing about TNC: our willingness to rise to the occasion of new learning and step into the unknown. We have brought along a lot of others who care about the same things, but to do it we depend upon donors who trust our science and are willing to take a chance.
How did partnership enter the equation?
“We started working with owners and managers of the land in places that we cared about around our properties. We learned a lot from them because—guess what—they knew a thing or two about their land. We found ways to connect but also big gaps, like along the Sacramento River, where there simply was not enough riparian woodland left to piece together into a viable protected area. And that is when the concept of restoration entered the conversation. A few years later, we were working with farmers to convert marginal orchard lands into lush streamside woodland and contributing to the economy by hiring field crews to replant native species.”
When you are in the trenches, you cannot know you will be successful. You just have to move forward with the best information you can get.
Lynn reflects on her part in saving the Santa Cruz Island fox from extinction.
“In my career, the toughest decision I ever made was to move Santa Cruz Island foxes into captive breeding. They were disappearing and our efforts to remove newly arrived golden eagles that were preying on them just were not moving fast enough. Where there had been nearly 1,500 of these tiny foxes early in the 1990s on the 90 square mile island, by 2000 we could locate barely a hundred of them! As director of TNC’s Santa Cruz Island Preserve, it was my call. Working with the National Park Service and others, we went ahead and captured 75 island foxes, moving them into the “protective custody” of captive breeding. They are such beautiful and sensitive animals, so it was hard to see them in captivity, but they were resilient and the foxes we captured became the basis of today’s healthy wild population. When you are in the trenches, you cannot know you will be successful. You just have to move forward with the best information you can get.”
TNC is really good at paying attention to what is going on, working to come up with solutions to challenges, and building the partnerships and capacity needed to affect important change.
How do we know our work is lasting?
“That was the question California leadership asked me in 2001 when TNC turned 50 years old. My pursuit of an answer led me to discover that we lacked systems and processes to track and manage our extensive conservation easement holdings. I discovered that we had five conservation easements here in California that no one currently on the staff had ever been to. We had no idea how they were doing!
It was a time that is hard to imagine now. Email was new and I had not even heard of 'the cloud.' But it was clear we needed a central way to access content like recorded conservation easements and baseline documents, and a way to assign, capture and act on monitoring. I worked with colleagues to build the first such system, initially called ConservationTrack, using Microsoft’s Sharepoint, which had just been released. It provided a way to ensure that our interests were checked regularly and that landowner relationships were maintained. We developed a monitoring template, a set of steps to follow and a way to capture and store the information and photographs centrally. This when most field folks were still on dial-up connections!
A few years later, when TNC nationally went to draft its very first official guidance for conservation easements, the work we had done and tested in California found its way into our central Policies and Procedures. Nevertheless, it took me another three years to get our Legal department to accept monitoring reports completed online. That was the first time in TNC history that such a record was approved as a substitute for a 'wet signature!' I never expected to pioneer the use of technology, but we innovated because we had a pressing conservation need and it was what the situation demanded.”
I love being in an environment where you are encouraged and enabled to find and build solutions to really important conservation challenges. It is an important part of what has kept me with TNC all these years.
How do you think about tackling one of today’s greatest challenges: climate change?
“Like any conservation challenge, you address it on a lot of fronts. I am proud of the fact that TNC worked with state senator Fran Pavley to write the first climate legislation on the planet here in California. And we pioneered science-driven georegional planning to inform the location of the solar power facilities needed to avoid the most sensitive desert habitats and enable actions to go forward quickly. There is our costal resilience work, managing forest for carbon health, water policy and habitat connectivity. Addressing climate change has aspects in everything we do.
When it comes to this issue, we have an entire world of stakeholders.”
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