A Reconciliation of Land & “Forever”
A Reconciliation of Land & “Forever”
A breezy morning here at Kingston forced me to sit down and think through a question that revealed itself so clearly just this week.
When we consider a conservation easement, what are we actually protecting?
In conservation, the answer is usually implied. We remove the highest and best use of the land—typically development—and in doing so, we say the land is protected. That’s the framework.
But this past week, working through an easement with a client, something didn’t sit right. When we stripped everything back—the legal structure, the tax side, the mechanics of the easement itself—the reality was pretty simple: The farm was worth about the same with the easement as it was without it.
So, it raised the question again, more directly this time:
What are we protecting?
If development pressure is already limited—whether by zoning, regulation, or just the realities of the market—then removing that “highest and best use” doesn’t really change the trajectory of the land.
And if that’s the case, then the premise we rely on starts to feel incomplete.
Not wrong. Just incomplete.
I’ve come to think about the answer in two ways.
The first is philosophical. We aren’t protecting a specific use. We aren’t protecting a moment in time. We’re protecting the land’s ability to carry forward. Call it “Forever,” even though we all know that’s not something we can define cleanly.
The point isn’t permanence in a rigid sense. The point is preserving the underlying systems— freshwater wetlands, maritime forests, upland grass lands, salt marshes, all of them matter, but so does the structure of the place—so that whatever comes next, the land still has the capacity to respond.
If those systems stay intact, the land has a future. Once they’re gone, getting them back is a long road to restoration—and sometimes not possible. The second part of the answer is more complicated, and it has to do with how conservation is actually practiced. In the interest of scale and efficiency, the process has been simplified. We focus heavily on development rights—what can and cannot be done—because it’s measurable and it fits neatly into a framework. But the land and our legal or land use laws themselves don’t operate this way.
We don’t spend enough time asking:
- Why is this land actually at risk?
- What characteristics here matter most?
- What are we trying to preserve beyond just limiting use?
- How are we measuring success? Is it simply acres protected?
Even if those answers are subjective, they should still be part of the process.
None of that takes away from the work being done. There are a lot of people doing meaningful work in conservation every day. But it does suggest that the next step isn’t just doing more of it the same way we do today. It’s doing it with a clearer understanding of what matters and a framework requiring more robust metrics and goalposts which reflect the actual outcomes we seek in conservation both short and long term. For landowners, a conservation easement isn’t a default decision. It’s a permanent one.
Before moving forward, it’s worth slowing down and asking:
- Is development pressure actually real here, or assumed?
- Does this restriction meaningfully change the future of the property?
- What about this land is worth protecting—and is that actually what’s being protected?
- Are we preserving something, or just limiting options?
Those answers will look different on every property. They should.
After nearly 30 years working on land and land use, one thing has become pretty clear: The success of conservation isn’t going to be measured by how many acres we put into easement. It’s going to come down to whether we understood what needed to be protected in the first place.
Because in the end, this isn’t about locking land into a fixed idea. It’s about making sure the land can carry forward—whatever that ends up looking like.
That, to me, is the closest thing we get to “Forever.”
