Across America, and especially in New Jersey, communities are grappling with accelerating development and sprawl that eats up millions of acres a year. In the Garden State alone, thousands of acres are gobbled up each year — at an average of 50 acres a day.

Yet, thousands of quiet success stories lie behind New Jersey’s land trusts that are working to successfully conserve farmland, forests, coastal land and scenic vistas. Here an acre, there an acre, land trusts are measuring up and making a big difference. By buying land outright or working out private, voluntary agreements that limit future development, land trusts in New Jersey alone, are preserving hundreds of thousands of acres.

On a national scale, these nonprofit groups are protecting more land than ever before — close to a million new acres each year, according to a census just released by The Land Trust Alliance, a national association representing land trusts.

Yet, land trusts do much more than just save land — they protect the lifestyles and livelihoods of communities. This can mean saving the family farm, setting up a community garden, preserving a pristine forest, or protecting a delicate shoreline. In many ways, land trusts represent the best of community spirit in America, bringing people together to protect some piece of land that, for them, helps define what makes their community unique.

In New Jersey, land trusts make our lives better by protecting special places in our communities — like the Pine Barrens and the Highlands — before they are gone forever. Many land trusts start as grassroots organizations that work solely through voluntary private transactions, often fulfilling a landowner’s wish to keep their land as it is for their children and future generations. In fact, New Jersey Conservation Foundation (NJCF) — now one of New Jersey’s largest statewide organizations — was founded in the 1960s by a small group of citizens who organized to fight a plan by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to build the region’s fourth major airport in the middle of the Great Swamp near Morristown. The battle lasted 4 1/2 years, but the residents succeeded in preserving their treasured wetlands. They bought the land and turned it over to the federal government to become the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge — the first federally designated wilderness area east of the Mississippi. Despite this progress and many other victories that New Jersey has celebrated in the last 50 years, the current rate of development means we have precious few years left to protect our most cherished landscapes. Land trusts may be our last best hope, particularly now that deficits threaten to severely limit the ability of the federal government to conserve new lands. Land trusts truly are the vanguard of land conservation — and all it encompasses — in the 21st century.

For more information, visit the Land Trust Alliance Web site www.lta.org or call (202) 638-4725. I hope you’ll contact me at (888) 526-3723 or info@njconservation.org. Visit the NJCF’s Web site at www.njconservation.org for more information about conserving New Jersey’s precious land and natural resources.

Michelle Byers

executive director

New Jersey Conservation Foundation

Far Hills