Utah Open Lands Conservation Association is a non-profit land trust conservation association in the United States.
It is chartered to preserve and protect open space in order to maintain Utah’s natural heritage and quality of life for present and future generations. This is achieved by assisting private landowners, government agencies and communities in the voluntary preservation of the agricultural, scenic, recreational, historic and wildlife values of open land.
Utah Open Lands started in Summit County and expanded to be a statewide land trust in 1995.
Utah Open Lands' works with landowners who want to preserve their land for conservation purposes. Their primary conservation tool is the conservation easement, which is a permanent, legally binding contract that restricts development to protect the special features of the property. Land ownership often remains unchanged when the land is protected by a conservation easement, meaning that the landowner retains title to the land and can continue to live on the land, use it, sell it, and or pass it on to the next generation. The Farm and Ranch Protection Act made available estate and income tax benefits for landowners who protect their land with conservation easements; these tax incentives are available through the end of 2009. The donation of a conservation easement may be considered a charitable contribution.
Utah Open Lands has effectively conserved over 50,000 acres (200 km2) of critical open land in Utah.
Famous quotes containing the words open, lands, conservation and/or association:
“A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.”
—Alexander Cockburn (b. 1941)
“By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of space—out of time.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.”
—Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)