The Role of Land Trusts and Conservation Easements in Environmental Protection in Vermont: A Case Study of the Vermont Nature Conservancy and the Vermont Land Trust

In the last twenty years, conservation easements, legal agreements between landowners and land trusts that seek to protect private lands and limit development, have become an increasingly popular conservation tool of the land trust movement. While the majority of recent studies have attempted to assess the extent to which conservation easements can play a role in environmental protection and biodiversity conservation, they have predominantly overlooked other contributions of easements, most importantly the ability of easements to preserve cultural landscapes and protect agricultural lands economically important to local communities. Looking to Vermont as a case study, this paper looks at the role easements are playing in protecting biodiversity in the state, and also highlights the use of easements in conserving working landscapes, such as farms and timber forests. The Vermont Land Trust (VLT) and the Vermont Nature Conservancy (VNC), the state’s two largest land trust organizations, are examined in order to understand how easements tie into land acquisition strategies, as well as the extent to which they are used to protect biodiversity.