The photograph of blue oak woodland at the Howard Ranch copyright © 2003 Richard Brewer

On the order of one hundred workshops were scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, covering many aspects of land trust operations. For any given attendee, though, this wealth is illusory. Generally, about 20 workshops were running concurrently within each of the five sessions (three on Saturday and two on Sunday). About the best any one person could do was get to five workshops out of the one hundred being offered.

I liked the workshop "How Long is Forever?" put on by Jason Kibbey, Director of the rather new organization Defence of Place (DOP) , and Huey Johnson, the founder of DOP (and of the Trust for Public Land about 30 years earlier). DOP is dedicated to making sure that organizations and agencies that promise protection in perpetuity live up to that promise. (Examples of broken promises are given in chapter 4 of Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America.)

The workshop "Creating Collective Easement Defense Programs" was informative. Six persons from different states described incipient or perhaps pre-incipient efforts toward communalized countermeasures to threats to easements. My conclusion from the presentations was that the most a local land trust can expect in the next several years is advice. The one exception may be for cases that look like they might be of great precedential importance, and from all appearances any help on these is likely to be cobbled together on an ad hoc basis. My other conclusion was that every land trust ought to regard any conservation easement they take or currently hold that lacks an adequate legal defense endowment as an unfunded liability requiring immediate corrective action. (These matters are discussed in chapters 6 [pp 130-138], 7, and 8 of Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America.)

Most attendees got to hear several plenary speakers, all of whom had important things to say. At the first plenary session, David Mas Masumoto, an organic peach grower, provided by his example the best case made at the Rally for saving farmland .

Steven McCormick, President of The Nature Conservancy, spoke Saturday morning at the Crest Theatre, a great old-time movie house a couple of blocks west of the Convention Center. As you enter the lobby, you walk under a beam with the legend "When you pass through this portal you leave all cares behind." McCormick was charming and articulate. He admitted that the Washington Post series of last May made some legitimate points, suggested that the land trust movement is "at the end of the startup phase," and then indicated six topics that the land trust movement and TNC need to focus on. The last of the six--fidelity to TNC's and other land trusts' status as public trusts--seemed to be the topic most nearly responsive to the questions raised in the Washington Post articles.

The subject of ethical practice, partly but not entirely in reaction to the Post articles, was probably the dominant theme of the conference. Second was perhaps the special vulnerability imparted to organizations by holding conservation easements. A third theme, I thought, was a push toward a humanistic view of conservation. Present as long ago as the Baltimore Rally, this theme was exemplified this year by a small book Coming to Land, published by the Trust for Public Land and included in everybody's registration packet

To me, the most inspiring plenary speaker was Ron Sims, Kings County (WA) Executive. He talked of the evolution of his understanding that saving land was important to his urban constituency, but his speech isn't easily summarized. Among his accomplishments has been his steadfast championing of the East Lake Sammamish Trail (a rail-trail battle described in chapter 13 of Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America).

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