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27 COMMON GROUND VOL. 13 NO. 1 JANUARY -MARCH 2002 ED • America's Network of Parks and Open Space is published quarterly as a service to the conservation community by The Conservation Fund Patrick F. Noonan Chairman Lawrence A. Selzer President Mike McQueen Editor Jack Lynn Editorial Consultant Meg West Art Director For address corrections and information, contact: April Berry Circulation Manager The Conservation Fund 1800 N. Kent St., Suite 1120 Arlington, VA 22209 703/525 -6300 COMMON GROUND routinely grants permission for reprints. Address editorial correspondence and reprint queries to: COMMON GROUND 940 Stillwater Lane Earlysville, VA 22936 434/973 -7324 coground l aol.com COMMON GROUND is available on the World Wide Web at http: //www.conservationfund.org Printed on recycled paper. We need new, smarter approaches to land conservation to leverage funding and address the accelerating rate at which land is being developed. In the 1970s, when I began work in con- servation, we protected individual parcels of land. Today, we protect networks of open space. Still, too many land conservation ef- forts are haphazard and reactive in nature. Successful land conservation must be: • more proactive and less reactive, • more systematic and less haphazard, • multifunctional, not single purpose, • large scale, not small scale, and • better integrated with other efforts to manage growth and development. The key to accomplishing this is "green infrastructure," a framework that provides a strategic approach to land conservation. Just as growing communities need to upgrade and expand their built infrastructure (roads, sewers, utilities, etc.), so too they need to upgrade and expand their green infrastruc- ture —the network of open space, wood- lands, wildlife habitat, parks and other natural areas that sustains clean air, water, and natural resources and enriches our qual- ity of life. Green infrastructure repositions open space protection from a community amenity to a community necessity. Green infrastructure can help reduce opposition to development. When citizens think all land is up for grabs, they oppose development everywhere. But when people have some assurance that special places will be saved, they become more amenable to ac- commodating new development. When I started in conservation, many of us were winging it. We hadn't been educated or trained for what we were doing. There was little science and even less thinking about economic development. There were few opportunities for professional develop- ment. By almost every measure, the work of conservation is becoming more complex. Conservationists need to understand mar- keting, business planning, real estate and tax law, as well as ecology and geographic information systems. We need to build the capacity of our movement by embracing the concepts of training, education and lifelong learning. We also need to educate the public about the benefits derived from green infra- structure. And, we need to attract the best and brightest to our field. The final chal- lenge is people. We must broaden our movement to include more of the young and people of color. Our work is fundamentally about people —our children and theirs. Now is the time for a more strategic and comprehensive approach to land conserva- tion. The opportunity is before us to create a national system of parks and open space community by community. Our nation's 3.2 million miles of rivers and streams provide a natural framework for America's green in- frastructure design and —when linked with working landscapes, farms and forests con- served by conservation easements— repre- sent a new era of smart conservation. The new measure for smart conserva- tion is "acre for acre." For each acre we develop, we protect an acre. We have the opportunity to create — community by com- munity and state by state —a national sys- tem of parks and open space that will stretch from "sea to shining sea." — Patrick F. Noonan The aitthor is chairman of the board of directors of The Conservation Ftind. - _ t 1r_ r' r v ° — . O e 0 -ate 'c 0 c 0 a � = L N cS O