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• A Legacy of Conservation

  There’s so many things to discover out in nature. It is very neat to just watch a new mind develop around that. I don’t know what’s going to be in store for my grandson. You know, it’s kind of scary to look at that line, but I think as long as we have some national forests, national parks, wildlife refuges, as long as those stay intact. If you don’t protect them, what you have right now won’t be there in the future.

  The Nature Conservancy has protected a million acres across Minnesota, North and South Dakota over the last 65 years, which is really exciting. But we don’t own a million acres.

  The Nature Conservancy has a series of preserves, a little over 100,000 acres in Minnesota, North and South Dakota.

  The rest is how we show up in partnership with others, and that’s with private landowners, state and federal governments and other nonprofits to preserve and conserve these places that we care so much about.

  Cascade Creek, which is part of Whitney Preserve, TNC is here to protect it. And what’s so special about that creek, it’s a warm-water system that has four rare plants that are not found anywhere else in the Black Hills. With the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy, we kind of developed a partnership to protect it.

  We protect these lands to preserve the intactness of each of these ecosystems, to stop conversion into row crop agriculture or development in the most important and strategic places. We simply couldn’t do conservation without private landowners. Conservation easements are a critical tool. First of all, they’re voluntary, private landowners want to protect their land, and this is an opportunity for them to voluntarily protect their land, assuring the management practices that they hold dear are going to be held on their land while continuing to work their lands.

  Now, the beauty of this work is that there’s plenty to do. And in South Dakota what’s so inspiring is people are checking their ego at the door and coming together with their own niche and their own contribution to this work.

  It is really exciting to have hit this million-acre milestone in our three-state chapter, but we are not slowing down. We have so much work yet to do. We have strategies to get land and water conservation done on the ground. We need our partners in the public sector. We need our nonprofit partners to work side by side with and we need private landowners and our donors to continue to work with, to achieve even more conservation so that we are leaving an incredible legacy for our children and grandchildren.