EDITORIAL: The Nature Conservancy puts its money where its principles are

Progressive greens have long used lawyers and the courts to gum up development, preferring to co-opt the power of the state to achieve their ends. Witness the yearslong effort in Las Vegas to pressure Clark County commissioners to prevent a private landowner from building homes on Blue Diamond Hill overlooking Red Rock.

But one mainstream environmental group prefers a refreshingly different approach.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that “a sprawling stretch of undeveloped Santa Barbara County coastline” has been purchased for $165 million by the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit group based in Arlington, Va., that puts its money where its principles are. The transaction was the result of a generous donation from a wealthy couple who had long sought to preserve the landscape.

“It’s ridiculously beautiful out there,” Mike Sweeney, the Nature Conservancy’s California director, told the Times. “It’s not a big property, just an exquisitely placed property.”

The area comprises about 24,000 acres near Point Conception on the California coast west-northwest of Santa Barbara. A New England investment company previously owned the property, the Times reports.

This type of “non-confrontational” environmentalism is the trademark of the Nature Conservancy across the country, including in Nevada. Last month, the group paid $205,000 for 72 acres near Beatty in an effort to preserve land that sustains the Amargosa toad and the Oasis Valley speckled dace. The group now owns more than 700 acres near the town about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In August, the Nature Conservancy purchased a “conservation easement” to prevent development on 2,800 acres of land on the Smith Creek Ranch in Churchill and Lander counties in central Nevada. The intent, the group noted in a press release, is to conserve “the land for sustainable agriculture production” while allowing the “sage grouse and other sagebrush-dependent wildlife to survive.”

All these deals are based on a simple principle. Rather than flout the concept of private property by hijacking government to restrict a landowner’s options through judicial or regulatory fiat, the Nature Conservancy relies on consensual transactions and generous donors to acquire sensitive real estate to help realize its environmental agenda.

It’s a blueprint that respects both property rights and the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause while also allowing the Nature Conservancy to advance its conservation mission. Would that other green groups followed suit.