Background
In addition to owning and managing preserves, Natural Lands Trust preserves land by working with private land owners to establish and enforce conservation easements. A conservation easement is a voluntary but legally binding agreement that permanently limits a property’s use. To date, NLT holds easements on nearly 20,000 acres on nearly 900 properties, most of which are located in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Natural Lands Trust also provides a range of consulting services to Pennsylvania municipalities (152 municipalities in 26 counties, to date). These services include redrafting a township’s zoning ordinances to incorporate open space, thereby using development to save land.
Natural Lands Trust has been accredited by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an independent program of the Land Trust Alliance, which endorses a land trust’s ability to “operate in an ethical, legal, and technically sound manner and ensure the long-term protection of land in the public interest.”
To date, Natural Lands Trust has saved more than 100,000 acres of land in its nearly 60-year history. This is equal to about half the total acreage of Pennsylvania's state park system.
Read more about this topic: Natural Lands Trust
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