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
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)