range tnc 1/03 · tions of american wealth and power, the nature conservancy had teetered just...

SPRING 2003 • RANGE MAGAZINE • TNC 1

“NATURE’S LANDLORD”

THE STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY

Unless we as a peo-ple are willing toaccept the contin-

ued loss of not only pri-vate property andindividual rights, but oflarge portions of ournational culture and cus-toms as well, The NatureConservancy must bebrought to heel. Rightnow, it is a well-fed andgenerally admired beastleading us in a wild runthat is as destructive in its seemingly friendly character as it is in its seldom-seenattacks. This is no errant clumsy puppy we can finally calm. It is a runaway predatorthat will turn on us in defense of its territory. The Nature Conservancy is the wolf weraised ourselves, the grizzly we fed from the table. The monster we made with indif-ference. If it is left to go on growing, it will be the master and we the obedient slaves.

A RANGE PUBLICATION ■ WRITTEN BY TIM FINDLEY ■ © 2003 RANGE MAGAZINE

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2 TNC • RANGE MAGAZINE • SPRING 2003

Unless we as a people are willing toaccept the continued loss of not onlyprivate property and individual

rights, but of large portions of our nationalculture and customs as well, TheNature Conservancy must bebrought to heel.

Right now, it is a well-fed andgenerally admired beast leading usin a wild run that is as destructivein its seemingly friendly characteras it is in its seldom-seen attacks.This is no errant clumsy puppy wecan finally calm. It is a runawaypredator that will turn on us indefense of its territory.

The Nature Conservancy is thewolf we raised ourselves, the grizzlywe fed from the table. The monsterwe made with indifference. If it isleft to go on growing, it will be themaster and we the obedient slaves.

Americans who presume toknow the subject from nationalpress accounts and even from theirpersonal experience with our 10thlargest nonprofit organization willbe outraged by such a suggestion.To them, TNC’s aims and accom-plishments are as obvious in themillions of square miles of forestsand wetlands “saved” by TNC asthey are in the simple stunningbeauty of a single butterfly thatmight not otherwise exist. Whatev-er small abuses may have occurred,well-meaning Americans willargue, those are nothing in comparison towhat TNC has preserved for future genera-tions.

Yet it is just those future generations weshould be concerned about in bringing someaccountability to a small group of people withgrossly exaggerated power and authority overfundamental elements of a free society.

It is not just the land they own now, or theexorbitant non-taxable wealth they control. Itis their intention to make use of such accu-mulated power in deciding the future for therest of us that should long ago have sent a

chilling alarm through this nation.They have set an agenda in America and

the world, and they have defined the terms.To even question “them” has become evi-

dence that you oppose the balance of natureon the planet.“They,”The Nature Conservan-cy especially, presume to hold all the answersto the environment as much as brown shirtsand Bolsheviks once presumed to hold thetruth to ultimate social order.

No member of TNC, none of its manyhonorable trustees and boards of governorswould acknowledge that as a sensible com-parison of their intentions and ideologies. Nonationally recognized member of the Ameri-can media would accept that TNC is some-how ultimately a threat to free speech.

Most of us in America, if we know any-thing of TNC at all, have been inculcated tobelieve that the purpose of The Nature Con-servancy is not only a noble cause on behalfof the environment, but one which has risenfrom the grass-roots desires and ideals of thepeople themselves.

But TNC is a runaway dog, allowed toroam by our indifference to federal govern-ment responsibilities that fail our “public”lands, and expected even to forage for itself inranges where it can hunt and cause fear. We,the people, have absolved our responsibility

and our obligation in at leastkeeping track of our own petprojects.

The Nature Conservancyis not an element of the “left.”If anything, the structure ofits governing board wouldsuggest the power of the“right” in conservative direc-tion. It isn’t a matter of ulti-mate surrender to someUnited Nation’s agenda orsecret Communist plot.

It is simply and obviouslya matter of confronting per-haps the boldest grab forarbitrary power in history. Itcan only be restrained with astatement from the peoplethat they will not be subjectedby such tyranny, however dis-guised it may be, howevermuch it may be somethingthey set loose.

Reexamine TNC’s tax-exempt status and eliminateat least part of it. Audit theholdings of the TNC andprosecute profiteers. Halt theillegal collusion between fed-eral agencies and the TNC, atleast until open hearings canbe conducted.

The national media must get off its lazyass and tell the truth. Stop accepting everyprogram and land grab of The Nature Con-servancy as a “progressive” step on behalf of“future generations.” Treat the people, partic-ularly the people in stressed rural areas, withthe same respect afforded the well-funded“shills” of TNC. Do the job that the FourthEstate is meant to do in a free society and stopselling out to such obvious propaganda asTNC produces.

Can we expect that much in bringing thisbeast to heel? ■

It is not just the land theyown now, or the exorbitantnon-taxable wealth they

control. It is their intentionto make use of such

accumulated power indeciding the future for therest of us that should longago have sent a chilling

alarm through this nation.

BRINGING THEBEAST TO HEELFUTURE GENERATIONS SHOULD BE CONCERNED

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George Fell sat all alone at the cornerof a long polished table in the Wash-ington D.C. library of the American

Nature Study Society. This was the last officeleft open to him, and his work spilled outfrom a heavy leather briefcase. It scatteredacross the table. A hundred separate regionswere depicted there. Places where naturealone still strongly held dominance. Fell wasdetermined to save those places, whatever ittook, and part of those files held a guide-book on how he might do it—financialrecords of corporations glutted withwartime profits, federal documents on land

acquisitions, and data on tax shelters forcharitable trusts.

Many, but not all of his friends in theEcologists Union had deserted him, rejectingwhat they saw as his crass mixture of politicalpressure with scholastic science. Fell waslargely alone, living on the wages of his wife, amedical technician, but he had a plan.

It was 1951. Most of American society,including even the scientific communitygiven new respect since the end of the war,was preoccupied with the gorging opportuni-ties of victory and peace. Korea was trouble-some, but the real message was in expanding

wealth and unimaginable advances in publictechnology. George Fell clanged a different,unharmonious tone, suggesting pause in aperiod of development, study over pragmaticsuccess, and most of all a step from the towersof scientific academia into the slipperyground of political pressure and subtle extor-tion as the means to an end.

If even he could have imagined it then,what Fell was about to create could havecome from a story line in “The TwilightZone.” Less than a half century later, it wouldbe by far the most powerful environmentalorganization in history, capable of manipulat-ing governments, including that of the UnitedStates; endowed with assets amounting tonearly $3 billion, and exempt from taxes. Itwould be directly in control of some 90 mil-lion acres worldwide, with more than 12 mil-lion acres, an area the size of Switzerland, inthe United States alone. Its private data bankcontained unsurpassed information on the

THE BEGINNINGIN LESS THAN HALF A CENTURY, TNC WOULD CONTROL90 MILLION ACRES WORLDWIDE

Stillwater Marshes near Fallon, Nevada, on the Pacific Flyway and the reason The Nature Conservancy rode into town to “save the birds.” What they did is attainwater rights that left behind lifeless farms unable to support even weeds.


dispersal of plant and animal species in all 50states and at least one third of the rest of theworld. And yet, even with its tentacles reach-ing into the most influential elements ofinternational power, it remained secretive,virtually untouchable by legal oversight, itsmotives and its methods only vaguely under-stood as somehow being associated with sci-ence. The green shade of “The TwilightZone,”or perhaps something more sinister.

As it happened, 1951 was the year SteveMcCormick was born. In February 2001, ahalf century after Fell began forming hiscadre at that library table, McCormick stoodin the richly appointed Arlington, Virginia,headquarters of The Nature Conservancyand accepted the godfatherly introductionfrom Anthony P. (Tony) Grassi, the venerable,but seldom-seen chairman of the board ofgovernors of TNC. McCormick, Grassi sug-gested, was “born for the job” as chief execu-tive officer of the richest environmentalorganization on earth and the 10th best-funded nonprofit organization in the UnitedStates, just behind Stanford and HarvardUniversities, and well ahead of U.S. CatholicCharities.

“It’s not enough,”said McCormick.Firmly set as it was, deep in the founda-

tions of American wealth and power, TheNature Conservancy had teetered just slightlyat its highest point when John Sawhill unex-pectedly died in 2000 after serving for its 10most successful years as TNC’s chief execu-tive. Little power struggles had troubled theorganization before, all the way back to Fell’stime when others began to catch on to thepracticality of his scheme to sustain the orga-nization by using donated funds to buyselected properties, and then sell or tradethose properties to the government.

But by the time the eclectic and slightlyeccentric-seeming McCormick stood at theprecipice of power so long held by old-schoolties, the awesome opportunities before himreached deeper and wider into the sources ofreal wealth in America and the world thananyone could have imagined. Philanthropicfoundations based on almost obscene accu-mulations of mogul wealth from energy,technology, and industrial development stillheld billions of dollars necessary to be trans-ferred, some say “laundered,” through chari-ties for tax purposes.

As the founders of TNC discovered in the’50s, the really “big” money from such chari-table foundations as Pew Charitable Trust(Sun Oil), Rockefeller Foundation, CharlesStewart Mott Foundation (GM, sugar, bank-

By the time the eclectic andslightly eccentric-seeming

Steve McCormick stood at theprecipice of power so longheld by old-school ties, the

awesome opportunities before him reached deeper

and wider into the sources ofreal wealth in America andthe world than anyone could

have imagined.

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ing), General Motors, The Ford Foundation,and dozens of others had seldom, if ever,gone directly to poor people. It went to workfor secondary providers such as research bythe Cancer Society or relief by the RedCross—recipient groups that could showaltruistic results without really altering theoverbalance of power between the wealthyand the poor. The Nature Conservancy pro-vided a perfectly useful new purpose, notonly “saving” stretches of nature, but thentransferring the land to the government for“public” purposes that would not challengethe resource holdings behind the foundationsthemselves. The government might “manage”these new public lands, but the real power of“old money” accumulated in a period ofexploitation would remain in their controlwithout new competition.

For TNC, the method established a con-tinuously revolving source of funds—donations-to-government, purchase-to-donations—that only grew larger as those inthe organization realized new ways to refineFell’s concept under the shelter of its tax-exempt status acquired in 1950.

Soon, the governing board of TNC wasformed of bankers, investors, and foundationheads themselves. It was disguised somewhatwith the creation of boards of trustees set upin eight regions with chapters in every state,and run with the figurehead presence of“trustee members” from government and themedia, including Attorney General JanetReno, Retired General H. Norman Schwarz-kopf, and media leviathan Gerald Levin ofTime Warner, Inc., among many otherprominent names.

Particularly in the 1990s as policies of theClinton administration and the greens’“BabeRuth”Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt clearedthe way, The Nature Conservancy couldreport astonishing growth in its own non-taxable assets. But those millions leading intobillions hardly told the story. By then, TheNature Conservancy could tap into almostlimitless funds virtually at will. Money was farless important than power.

“We’ve raised a lot of money,” saidMcCormick.“Well, that, in itself, is not a mea-sure of success. We’ve been growing a lot.That is not a measure of success.”

While he was president of New York Uni-versity between 1975 and 1979, The New YorkTimes credited John Sawhill with creating a“miracle of higher education” in turningaround the struggling academic and financialcondition of the nation’s largest private uni-versity. If that had been a single “miracle” of

higher education in the ’70s, Sawhill musthave found beatitude from his increase ofTNC assets by more thanfive times in the 1990s.

Sawhill was a straight-laced egghead with an eyefor opportunity, an acade-mic with degrees in eco-nomics but a careerinterest in energy, servingin cabinet-level jobs in thefederal energy offices ofPresidents Carter, Nixonand Ford. He was a world-wide consultant on energyresources with a particularinterest in nuclear devel-opment when he took power over TNC, bythen already managed by potent corporateheads familiar to Sawhill’s exclusive IvyLeague clubs. With his experience and his

influence, he was hardly more than a tweakaway from fine-tuning the nonprofit organi-

zation into a uniquely pow-erful international shadowgovernment, unaccount-able to any electorate—notto the people of the UnitedStates, and not even to itsown one-million-plusmembership.

At perhaps the peak ofits public recognition in1996, Sawhill and TNCtook over much of NewYork City’s Central Park fora private party celebrating“the world’s last great

places” and honoring Ted Turner, their onlyreal competitor in ownership of U.S. land, asthe organization’s “Big Fish.” The honorarychairs and masters of ceremonies for the

Source: GuideStar financial website, Nature Conservancy, Inc. Financial Data Information,December 9, 2002. (Editor’s Note: TNC’s asset total is a million bucks off.)

TNC sold to theUnited States a

parcel of proper-ty donated to thenonprofit. Cashreturn to TNC,

after expenses,was estimated at

$877,000.


exclusive $750-a-plate event included PeterJennings, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, PaulaZahn, Charlie Rose, Mike Wallace andCharles Osgood—in short, the celebritycream of national media. It was an awesomedisplay not so much of the lands accumulatedin the cause of conservation as it was of theinfluence clearly held in the name of TheNature Conservancy.

To underscore the obvious bias, CBScommentator Andy Rooney, another “hon-orary chair” of the party, snarled at a youngand skeptical RANGE reporter covering theevent. “The Conservancy obviously doesgood work. You need to study journalism.”

Its membership doesn’t elect the board ofgovernors of The Nature Conservancy, andSawhill really didn’t need to convince any-body of the group’s good works with his elab-orate party. By then, Sawhill also held posts inthe Clinton administration as an advisor onthe Council for Sustainable Development andthe Council on Environmental Quality. Hewasn’t really looking for new members withthin wallets and big ideals. His successor,Steven McCormick, would make it known hedoesn’t even want them.

“Frankly, most politicians don’t pay anyattention [to TNC membership] because 1.2million people are not that many,”McCormick told The Sacramento Bee. Hewouldn’t waste more effort on mailingstrolling for 25-buck members, but wouldinstead fish in the deep water with personalappeals to the real high rollers in Americanbusiness.“It’s just a greater return,”he said.

■■ ■■ ■■

Fell, those 50 years ago, was somewhat limitedin his vision by the places he admired most in

the eastern United States. The EcologistsUnion had expanded scientific thinking intothe interrelationship of species, but there wasstill a romantic strain of nature-loving Thore-au in the heart of their concept. Not yet, noteven after Fell succeeded in winning his firstbig contribution from Virginia’s Old Domin-ion Foundation to buy New York’s 700-acreMianus River Gorge had TNC taken on itsown cynical description of itself as “nature’slandlord.”

But McCormick, “born for the job,” inSan Francisco, did little else but hone his skillsfor that concept. After earning an unusualdegree from Berkeley in agricultural econom-ics, he went to work for the San Francisco-based California chapter of TNC almostimmediately after graduating from law schoolin 1976, and by 1984 was TNC’s executivedirector for California.

Sawhill and his predecessor in the nation-al office, Patrick Noonan, were building anempire of ideal illusion, expanding acquisi-tions and loading its revenue base with hugecontributions beginning with $25 millionfrom the Richard King Mellon Foundation(Mellon National Bank) in 1983 that was upto then the largest such grant ever made forconservation purposes. In 1988, NationalGeographic Magazine devoted a major featureto the organization, and seated National Geoexecutives among TNC’s figurehead trustees.New inroads were made in Latin Americaunder TNC’s “Parks in Peril” program, offer-ing ready cash along with neglected land andresource surveys to flimsy national govern-ments.

But McCormick by then had his own fishof sorts to fry in California where TNC faced

the good-intentions competition of the olderand more established Sierra Club as well asdozens of other eagerly rising environmentalgroups. He could see the inevitable swing tothe West of the movement, and quickly rec-ognized the useful tactic of shifting from themere acquisition of parcels of land to what hecalled “Conservation by Design,” spreadingboth financial and political control over evenlarger areas in a patient game of propertychess that provided “open space” in the rightplaces and brought the California chapteralone $300 million in private donations thatmade it easily the most powerful environ-mental organization contending in the greatprize of the Golden State. With some helpfrom Sawhill, McCormick began promotinghis “design” as a new strategy for TNC’s inter-national operations.

As mysterious and shaded from view aswas the national operation of TNC,McCormick’s work from the West Coast waseven less publicly visible or understood. Thenational organization had relied on the “oldmoney” of the Mellons and the Fords.McCormick found he could delve into newerplayers, some of them obvious from the hightech industry such as Hewlett Packard, butothers aswirl in subsidiaries and fronts andlimited corporations that lead to blind alleysin global finance. Almost instinctively, he rec-ognized the politicians most vulnerable tomatching their careers with TNC ambitions.

“Steve recognizes that lasting conserva-tion success will ultimately depend on vibrantpartnerships among all sectors of society,”said a TNC press release. “He championsinnovation and experimentation, and doesnot shy away from the sort of bold land dealsthat come with big price tags—and thepotential for big results.”

Still, when Sawhill died without naming asuccessor, McCormick did not immediatelystep into his place. Sawhill died in May 2000,of complications from diabetes. That samemonth, McCormick resigned his post as headof the California chapter to become a partnerin the Resources Law Group, LLP. That orga-nization described itself as “specializing inrepresenting public and private clients in thedevelopment of strategies to conserve naturalresources and providing consultation towealthy individuals on venture philanthropyfor land conservation.” McCormick seemedto be striking out on his own. Something inthe enigmatic structure of “nature’s real estateagency”had trembled.

Only 3,000 people are on the TNC pay-roll. Most of them probably wouldn’t know,

The governing board of TNC was formed of bankers, investors and foundation heads themselves. It wasdisguised somewhat with the creation of boards of trustees set up in eight regions with chapters in everystate and run with figurehead presence of “trustee members” from government and the media, includingretired General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (left) and media leviathan Gerald Levin of Time Warner, Inc.


and those who did probably wouldn’t say, butsomething was uncertain in the process ofchoosing Sawhill’s successor. “It’s really atakeover of an existing organization withgreat integrity,” former TNC Western Region-al Director Huey Johnson told The Sacramen-to Bee. “[McCormick] has made TNC a toolof government and companies with ques-tionable environmental records.”

Others, however, would say with at leastequal alarm that it is the other way around.Building on Sawhill’s fund-raising success,McCormick evidently has intentions of mak-ing the government and major corporationstools of The Nature Conservancy.

“Our mission speaks to preserving bio-logical diversity, not creating nature pre-serves,” McCormick said in complaint of thebudget demands on TNC’s own preserves,and in 50-year contrast to Fell’s now modest-seeming hopes. “Land acquisition alone willnot enable us to work at the scale we have towork at.”

Walk any beach on either coast until youfind a fence that prevents even the militaryfrom disturbing a potential nesting site of thethreatened plover. There you will find TheNature Conservancy. Visit western farmingregions in Nevada and California especiallywhere family farms are under relentless pres-sure to become “willing sellers” of their waterrights, and you will see some of McCormick’swork. Observe the heavy machinery andimplications to agriculture from new U.S.Corps of Engineers projects to re-channelwestern streams and rivers and you will findthat the federal agency is being directed underan agreement with The Nature Conservancy.Find the charming nature trail securing theboundaries of the richest suburbs on the WestCoast and it will likely have been built withhelp from TNC. Examine even the most radi-cal environmental approach to shift thehuman population of the West into con-trolled core settlements bordering a vast “cor-ridor” of wilderness from the Yucatan to theYukon, and know that the plan presented by

Reed Noss and David Foreman was fundedby The Nature Conservancy.

Anywhere TNC might be caught in amedia spotlight, it ducks into the trees, but itis almost always the unseen “Bigfoot” behindevery outrage in the battle over “public” landand private rights.

McCormick stepped into his $275,000-a-year job and made a tour of his empire,spread largely south into growing dominanceover rainforests and wild savannahs, butreaching beyond those particularly usefullandscapes into Africa and Asia, even intoChina. Governments had warmed to TNCand its data bank as potentates and dictatorsnow bowed to McCormick.

In Peru, a deal was cut to absolve about$14 million of that nation’s debt to the UnitedStates in return for control by TNC, Conser-vation International, and the World WildlifeFund over 27.5 million acres of rainforest—aPeruvian “place” the size of Virginia. Few in

the public of the United States, fewer still inPeru, knew anything of the deal costing thethree U.S. environmental groups a cool pock-et-pool of cash amounting to $1.1 million.The land reportedly contains great biologicalassets, including pink river dolphins and giantwater lilies. It also holds vast resources in hard-wood timber, oil, gas and fruit, which may beproduced only under the supervision of TNCand the other environmentalist overseers.

No wonder McCormick was no longerimpressed by TNC’s accumulation of little“great places” in the U.S. that still went on at arate of one new purchase every day.

“Currently,” McCormick scoffed, “80 per-cent of our resources go to a geography, prin-cipally the United States, that constitutes lessthan 20 percent of the world’s biodiversity.”Time has come, he said, to expand TNC’salready astonishing international influence.Change the term “biodiversity” to “resources,”and you will hear echoes of the mogul money

“What I find interestingis that somebody thinksthat $15,000 is goingto make any differenceto anybody at CBS or forthat matter to TheNature Conservancy. Itseems a pretty paltrysum to me,” said CBS

“Sunday Morning” host Charles Osgood(who’s served as an emcee for TNC fund-raisers) in response to questions aboutthe network’s contributions and relation-ship with TNC. Former CBS News Presi-dent Howard Stringer is a TNC Trustee.

To underscore the obvious bias [in the media],CBS commentator Andy Rooney, an “honorary

chair” of TNC’s “The World’s Last Great Places”party in New York, snarled at a young and

skeptical RANGE reporter covering the event: “The Conservancy obviously does good work.

You need to study journalism.”


at the heart of what is expanding as theworld’s largest real-estate cartel—or some-thing more sinister. It would not have sold asa “Twilight Zone”script.

Even where TNC itself is not directly atthe controls, the replications in land trustsand conservation schemes almost alwaysowe their origins to imitating TNC withoutdirectly threatening it. That includes theUnited Nations-linked Conservation Unionand Conservation International (CI) run byPeter Seligmann, who was a director ofTNC until 1987 when he formed his mirrororganization now covering 30 countrieswith assets in excess of $300 million. Thisyear, CI launched a campaign of its own,lightly challenging TNC and McCormickwith the celebrity leadership of actor Harri-

son Ford. Whatever the remaining integrityof the environmental movement may beworth, TNC has so far taken little notice ofone more mere movie star as worthy of itsattention.

So skilled and so experienced is TheNature Conservancy at the methods of dis-guising revenues in subsidiaries and limitedpartnerships, nonprofit fronts and federalgrants, that perhaps no one really knows thetrue extent of its financial power. Few, howev-er, would dare challenge it.

On its 50th anniversary, President GeorgeW. Bush wrote a congratulatory note to TNCsaying, “The Nature Conservancy’s accom-plishments over the last five decades areremarkable.”

Even he did not dare say frightening. ■

In February 2003, General Motors put up amatching grant totalingnearly half a million dollars to purchase more ofthe 30,000-acre Paranareserve in southern Brazil.The reserve was estab-

lished by a $10 million grant from GM toThe Nature Conservancy in 2000. Utiliz-ing its dominant Earth Foundation databank, TNC has vast regions and scores ofindigenous economies under its controland management. Here are a few exam-ples: a million-and-a-half acres along theborder of Panama and Columbia; at least148,000 acres in Brazil; 260,000 acresin Belize (a fourth of that nation’s totalland area) TNC says is now protected fromconversion to agriculture; a half-million-acre-portion of Guatemala comprising thelargest “cloud forest” in Central Americaand requiring the relocation of indigenouspeople to a new farm managed by TNC.

WATERRIGHTS &WRONGSGRAHAM CHISHOLM’S JOB WASTO LISTEN FOR THE FRAILTY

Unless there is some other compellingreason, most local newspaperswouldn’t report the way the man

we’ll call Joe died, especially not in the smallfamily-conscious region of rural Nevadawhere he had spent his entire life and wheremost who knew him already understood howit happened anyway.

It had begun a fairly nice morning up onwhat they call the bench overlooking Lahon-tan Valley to the east. Joe might have had rea-son to celebrate. Only the day before he hadsigned the last papers turning over his landand its water rights to the power companyunder the “willing seller”program to conservethe water of the Truckee River. It was a fairdeal, giving Joe enough money to go wherev-er he wanted, to retire somewhere and forgetabout it all if he wanted. He walked out ontohis back porch and stood watching for a whileas the sun warmed the alfalfa fields stretchingdown the long slope. Then he shot himself.

You couldn’t blame Graham Chisholm orThe Nature Conservancy for it, althoughironically it was just this sort of sudden familytragedy that would have drawn Graham’sattention only four or five years earlier whenhe first arrived in the Lahontan Valley offeringneighborly help and understanding in all theconfused stress imposed by a new federal “set-tlement”on use of the Truckee.

Chisholm wasn’t much different thandozens of other Nature Conservancy opera-tives spread out all over the nation as JohnSawhill began his confident drive on the“great places” still not in TNC’s hands. Theywere all young and well-educated, but chosenmore for their “activist” ambitions and senseof political charm than for any particular sci-entific knowledge about the environment orendangered species.

Their job was to seek out the weaknessesin private barriers to restoring what TNC sawas vast ecological landscapes shaped backtogether in some cases one parcel at a time. Itrequired them to become close to the peopleand their communities—to join their clubs

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and volunteer in social programs, and to lis-ten, always listen, for their frailty.

Already, TNC had stumbled over its ownambition at least twice close enough toprompt federal attention. In Indiana, theoperatives had taken advantage of a oncenationally prominent neurologist then suffer-ing in his last days with Alzheimer’s disease.Helpful TNC operatives convinced him tochange his will, leaving his entire estate and95-acre farm to the nonprofit organization.The family was forced into court to win backthe property in a trial exposing the cult-likedeceit of “nature’s landlord.”Another case pit-ted an elderly woman against her step-chil-dren in a grab at a Colorado ranch. Stillanother drew national attention in 1993when the Illinois state director of TNC,Albert Pyott, so coveted property near theCypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge thathe tried to intimidate the owner with a lettersaying, “If your land is not acquired throughvoluntary negotiation, we will recommend itsacquisition through condemnation.”

Everywhere land could be put in questionby new priorities of the Clinton administra-tion especially, there was The Nature Conser-vancy. It had become America’s 10th-largestnonprofit charity without so much as a taxdollar’s accountability to the people of theUnited States.

“We do work closely with the U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service,” said TNC’s William Weeksin 1991. “We buy these properties when theyneed to be bought, so that at some point wecan become willing sellers [to the govern-ment]. This helps the government get aroundthe problem of local opposition.”

Although no one in the Lahontan Valleyknew it then, that was almost precisely Gra-ham Chisholm’s job description as he nur-tured his own way into influence in theLahontan Valley, site of the nation’s first west-ern reclamation project in 1906, the placeTeddy Roosevelt meant when he said hewould “make the desert bloom.”

■■ ■■ ■■

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) held his ownpeculiar ambitions in land and power acqui-sition. Helped with advice from his closefriend, Bruce Babbitt, Reid was already adeptat swapping land in his own state in exchangefor little gems of “great places” like the VirginRiver northeast of Las Vegas. Reid was proudof the deal he brokered to “save” several milesof the river shores in trade for a spread ofBLM land near the small town of Mesquiteon the Arizona border. The site is now amini-Vegas with casinos and hotels and golf

“We buy these properties when theyneed to be bought, so that at some point

we can become willing seller [to the government],” said TNC’s William Weeks.“This helps the government get around

the problem of local opposition.” Although no one in the Lahontan Valley

knew it then, that was almost preciselyGraham Chisholm’s job description.

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courses at the gateway of traffic into Nevadafrom Arizona. The shores of the Virgin Riverare safe for coyotes and rattlesnakes.

In the late ’80s, Reid set out to accomplishthe big political prize that eluded his prede-cessors in Nevada and even the attempts ofPresident Ronald Reagan in bringing somesettlement to the long dispute between Cali-fornia and Nevada over water splitting itscourse down the eastern and western flanksof the Sierra out of Lake Tahoe itself.

Settlement between the states was a rela-tively simple matter compared to solving therubrics of promises made by the federal gov-ernment 70 years earlier in diverting part ofthe flow of the Truckee away from land-locked Pyramid Lake into the two-river sys-tem of agricultural irrigation established bythe landmark Reclamation Act. Reid wouldlater rant in public hearings that the Lahon-tan farmers had “walked out” on his negotia-tions, but a congressional study concludedthat the farmers had been “scapegoated” fromthe beginning by the deal Reid quietly set upbetween Sierra Pacific Power Company, the

Pyramid Lake Tribe, and federal land man-agers to pick apart the water rights of thefarmers. “They never had a chance,” thereport concluded.

Even then, there was no mention of thepart played from the beginning by TNC,which had its eye on the great swamp-likesink of the Carson River at the eastern end ofthe valley where it simply vanished into thedesert. These wetlands, protected first by thefarmers themselves in the 1950s as a duckhunting region, needed to be restored by atleast 25,000 acres, TNC concluded in declar-ing them another “great place.”

Reid’s Settlement Act passed by only a sin-gle vote as the last piece of legislationapproved in the 101st Congress. Within days,there were already lawsuits and regulatorydemands challenging the rights of Lahontanfarmers to irrigation supplies.

Maybe it was just country courtesy, ormaybe it was because local people thought hewas an expert on the environment whowould help them find a new solution; maybeit was because some were just afraid of

offending him, but Graham Chisholm slideasily into the kind of respect afforded a visit-ing dignitary in a respectful small town. Hewas at the meetings of the Irrigation Districtand the County Commission; he volunteeredhis time with the Ag Center’s committee test-ing local wells in the drought. He was there atthe melon festival and the county fair, andcheerfully took his turn as the target in thedunking chair. And when the time came thatsome of the most concerned citizens beganorganizing a new group to defend local waterrights, Graham was among the foundingcommittee. It was always Graham, never “Mr.Chisholm” or “The Nature Conservancy rep-resentative.” It was, by his preference, always,“Graham,” the shyly informed college boy inhis neatly pressed blue work shirt and fadedjeans or chinos. Right down to what seemedalmost a uniform requirement, GrahamChisholm carried out the handbook of TNC“partnership” creation. He knew everybody,shared meals with many of them, played withtheir kids, listened to their jokes and paidattention to their problems.

TNC finds it easier to collect big bucks for glamorous and exotic toucans than simple sparrows (inset). What is objectionable and dangerous about TNCis the arrogance with which they presume to decide what will be destroyed and what will be saved.


He impressed some, perhaps, and maybescared some others with his description of thenumber of species visiting the wetlands fromthe western flyway and the conjecture of sci-entists that still undiscovered cures to diseasemight be found among the plant life. But thatwas the generalized TNC hype on all wet-lands. Chisholm could bring a botanist tospeak at a meeting on short notice, but hehimself was no expert. His graduate thesis inpolitical science at the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley, had been written on the forma-tion of the radical Green Party in Germany.

Lawsuits and stringent new federalrestrictions were taking their toll on the val-ley. If it was to survive as a viable agriculturalcommunity, local leaders agreed there wouldhave to be sacrifices. They were in the depthof a killing seven-year drought that on itsown was prompting many to sell just to sur-vive. Under those pressures, there were nowilling buyers beyond the government. Inorder to save what water they could, farmersagreed that other marginal lands would haveto be given up in hopes of reaching somecompromise. The president of the IrrigationDistrict himself became one of the first will-ing sellers. After him, the elder leader of thevalley’s most long-standing family sold hisland. Then another, and another whose chil-dren saw a better future in the money.

There was never enough, nor would therelikely ever be enough in federal wetlandsfunds to purchase what TNC had imposed asthe goal of Reid’s law. That was another rea-son Graham was there. Virtually none of themarginal lands sold for “appraised value” hadany direct relationship to the actual wetlands.What was really purchased was the waterrights that would be drained away, leavingghost farms and pale, lifeless fields of laser-leveled ground unable even to support thegrowth of weeds.

The tragedy of one older and well-knownfamily was in the bitter failure of a son’s mar-riage. Only in 1990 had he completed con-struction on land his father gave him of thesprawling split-level home with its largewarm windows posing a view out to the Still-water Mountains and the wild refuge of thesink. It had been meant for a long new futurebut it ended too soon in broken hearts, andGraham was there with his sympathy.

Senator Harry Reid’s success at landswaps to help make possible the astonishingsprawl of America’s fastest-growing city, LasVegas, was accomplished in large part withfinancial backing of the Arizona corporationthat had built Bugsy Siegel’s first hotel, the

“Frankly, most politicians don’t pay anyattention because 1.2 million people arenot that many,” TNC Chairman SteveMcCormick told The Sacramento Bee.He wouldn’t waste more effort on mailings trolling for 25-buck members,but would instead fish in the deep waterwith personal appeals to the real highrollers in American business. “It’s just agreater return,” he said.

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EXCERPT FROM TNC LETTER SENT RECENTLY TO RANGE PUBLISHER, C. J. HADLEY

“Dear Investor:

Please let me quickly explain why I am forwarding the enclosed Nature

Conservancy Notepad.

You see, I want to introduce you to a certain bug-eyed bird who’s ogling you

with undisguised bad temper. He has a point. He’s a native American sandhill

crane and you may be sitting on top of one of his nesting sites.

From his point of view every time our human species has drained, plowed or

built a city on a marsh, since 1492 or so—there went the neighborhood. It’s

enough to make you both edgy.

So give us $10 for his nest egg, and we’ll see that a nice, soggy spot—just the

kind he and his mate need to fashion a nest and put an egg in—is reserved for

the two of them, undisturbed, for keeps. Only $10.... Then the crane can relax

and so can you. A bit.

How will we reserve that incubator with your $10? With good ethics and

sound business:

We’ll just BUY the nesting ground....”

Donna Cherel, Vice President of Membership, TNC


Flamingo. Questioned for possible mob con-nections by federal authorities in the 1960s,Del Webb Corporation was by then out of thecasino business, but it was still the southwest’sbiggest builder of retirement communitiesand it counted among its former consultantsBruce Babbitt.

If there were not enough federal wetlandsfunds to accomplish the aim in the LahontanValley, there was the desire of Del Webb formore land around Las Vegas, and just in casethey needed to “get around the problem oflocal opposition” there was The Nature Con-servancy to serve as the clean idealist handlerof the deal.

At the end of 1995, Chisholm announcedthat TNC, with the partnership of Del Webb,had purchased “an old farmhouse” andadjoining property they intended to convertas a “visitor center” for the Stillwater Wet-lands. It was actually the empty five-year-oldmansion of a broken-hearted young formerfarmer. Despite Chisholm’s promises, it hasnever been used as a “visitor center.”

Well on the other side of the valley, butstill with water rights in the system, 75-year-old Georgie Sicking said, “I had no choicereally. They bought everything around me,including the irrigation ditch.” It was anunusual expression of defeat for the gritty

self-reliant Sicking, a renowned cowboy poet,and perhaps the valley’s most beloved charac-ter. “I’ll be honest; I’m just tired of fightingwith ’em,”she said.“I feel like running. I neverfelt that way before.” Graham graciouslycalled her the night after she signed the DelWebb papers to ask if she was sure she gotenough for the deal.

The county was at last growing tired ofGraham and the TNC as well, especiallyafter TNC falsely claimed in its annualreport that the city of Fallon had been a$1,000 contributor to their campaign. That,TNC explained, was the cost of a poster theyhad produced to show what the restoredwetlands should look like, and copies of theposter went to the city.

Only finally, when uncovered federal doc-uments revealed that Chisholm had been apaid consultant to the U.S. Fish & WildlifeService under a “memorandum of under-standing” reached before Reid’s “negotia-tions” were finalized did the good-guyGraham at last fade from the scene in theLahontan Valley.

He too had bigger fish to fry. His boss,Steve McCormick, was about to take over asCEO of The Nature Conservancy. He wantedGraham to take over his job as head of TNC’swealthiest chapter in California. ■

Graham Chisholm wasn’t muchdifferent than dozens of other

Nature Conservancy operativesspread out all over the nation

as John Sawhill began his confident drive on the “greatplaces” still not in TNC hands.They were all young and well-educated, but chosen more fortheir “activist” ambitions andsense of political charm than

for any particular scientific knowledge about the environ-

ment or endangered species. “It was a choice,” Chisholm

said. “There was us, or therewas the lawyers.”

POLITICSIT MAY BE TAINTED,“BUT T’AINT ENOUGH”

Tip O’Neill made it the most commoncliché of the American system in the20th century: “All politics is local.”

O’Neill was perhaps the last great giant ofDemocrat leadership that could trace itspower truly to the hearts of common people.

Even contending with the overwhelmingissues of the cold war, civil rights strugglesand Viet Nam, the Speaker of the House ofRepresentatives always advised that peoplecared first about whether their neighborhoodstreet was paved.

Democrat politicians used the phrase, butstrayed far from understanding it in theirhungry plundering for greater campaign con-tributions beginning in the late 1970s. It wastin-plate-and-button worthless by the timeDemocrats rose back to real power under theintegrity of such men as Bill Clinton andBruce Babbitt.

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As witnessed from campaign stopsamong logging families in the Northwest fol-lowed by indifference to them in office, thecause of the common man, particularly in theWest, was no more than a flimsy façade. Itwas like a Hollywood town disguising themachinery that would tear it down as soon asthe shot, or the election, was complete.

Given the unbelievable multimillions ofdollars necessary to win a national publicoffice, and sometimes even a local election, itmight be said that The Nature Conservancycontinues to buy up America at a bargain—$30 million here, another $10 million there,hundreds of thousands spread over morespots amounting to a chunk of property big-ger than most states, it went on as if sanc-tioned by the Clinton administration.

Seldom, if ever, could the money betraced to the politicians. By then, in the 1990s,TNC didn’t need to buy national candidates.It already owned them.

There is a sense of guilt in the Americanpsyche, made even more apparent by the dis-parity of wealth in the world since the end ofWorld War II. Common American traditionran against unearned wealth and historicsocial abuses. There was a sense of guilt aboutour own achievements at the price of slaveryand, as television brought a greater sense to it,at the price of what some portrayed as the lastof Eden itself. Morally, intuitively, Americansheld themselves responsible for the fate of theplanet.

In 1973, The Nature Conservancyreceived a gift of 49,000 acres in Virginia’sDismal Swamp from the international paperand box-producing Union Camp Company.One reporter, sounding advanced for thetime, questioned whether such a gift from aresource-exploiting corporation might be“tainted.” Replied Patrick Noonan,“It may betainted, but ’taint enough.”

The wheels in motion by that time werebeing turned at TNC by its vice presidentfor science, Robert E. Jenkins. Jenkins, withbetter scientific credentials than most ofTNC’s leadership, launched a bold and dar-ing program that could prove to be the rich-est field of all for TNC. He proposed toproduce a biological inventory of the entireUnited States, cataloging the existence ofspecies and locations of natural communi-ties in all 50 states under the TNC front ofThe National Heritage Network (nowNature Serve). Offered a database compiledwithout cost to the national budget, the U.S.government readily conceded to Jenkins’method as the standard for determining

In Nevada, where 85 percent of thestate’s land mass is already owned by thefederal government, voters ralliedagainst threats of"urbanization" parti-cularly in the Las Vegasarea and passed a$200 million bondissue to protect "publicland."

Strapped for revenueslike other westernstates, Nevada cannowhere near matchthe aim of acquiringmore land, most ofwhich is well beyond the still-sprawlingVegas and Clark County region.

The measure was quietly sponsored byThe Nature Conservancy, which has itseye on numerous rural areas in NorthernNevada as possible trades to allowgrowth in the urbanized southern edge of the state.

Georgie Sicking’s ranch (shown attop of page) is now dust and weeds.TNC made her an offer she couldn’trefuse—survival.

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biodiversity on the continent.The Nature Conservancy need never have

looked back. Noonan was right. What hadbeen “’taint enough” was from then on plentymore. Federal land and scientific authoritiesdidn’t question TNC’s findings and data.Congressional hearings hardly bothered tocheck the credentials of TNC representativessent to testify on environmental issues.

One could, at an extreme, argue that itamounted to a coup capturing vital elementsof the government’s Interior policy. At thevery least, it set in motion the powerful effectsof the Endangered Species Act, regarded bysome as the most powerful law in the nation.And perhaps most importantly, it establisheda basis of political influence that was verynearly outright extortion. Who would darequestion TNC? No wonder major U.S.resource corporations sought their way on toTNC boards. It wasn’t just guilt from pastabuses. It was self-defense.

So too did national candidates not seekcampaign help from TNC as much as theyscrambled to be sure their campaign was onTNC’s side.

To underscore this seeming mandate ofnational opinion, TNC reminded the politicalleadership of TNC’s own one-million-plusmembership and produced polls paid for byTNC shill companies showing 85 percent ofAmericans who considered themselves “envi-ronmentalists.” The national media easilybought into the idea, and were supplied withgorgeous files of photos, films, and videos

providing indisputable proof of the necessityto “save” the planet’s fragile beauty. It was likeshowing a picture of an abandoned puppy,and it required no checking of sources.

The political credibility afforded TNC’sindirect influence over U.S. Interior policywas not even a good measure of the enormityof its growing power. Financed in part byprofits from lands sold to the governmentitself and able to call at will on funds fromfoundations and limited corporations almosteager to cover their own cash under an oakleaf logo, TNC rather quickly became therichest environmental organization on earth.

It was no longer merely the 10thlargest nonprofit organization in theUnited States. By the middle of the’90s it was recognized by what seemeda new term to most Americans—anNGO, or Non-Government Organiza-tion. If that meant nothing to farmersand ranchers and rural dwellers begin-ning to see themselves as anachro-nisms in the surge of public opinionthat TNC represented, it carried agreat deal more weight in the “globalconsciousness” arising particularlyafter the end of the cold war.

Multinational conferences spon-sored by the United Nations or othercoalitions of international interestsbegan meeting in places like Rio deJaneiro, Brazil, or Kyoto, Japan, orJohannesburg, South Africa, to dis-cuss the overwhelming issues con-

fronting the planet—global warming,poverty, disease and overpopulation. TheUnited States, in its own national interests,provided little more than ceremonial dele-gates with official power to the conferences.But the conferences stressed supposed globalawareness ahead of national interests. Non-Government Organizations were far morecompatible in finding solutions. Amongthem, clearly the most powerful, was TheNature Conservancy.

In effect, TNC was thus serving as ashadow government of the United States ininternational forums discussing population

“I knew the founders of this organization [TNC] on a first-name basis, and theywould be turning over in theirgraves. It would take just onedumb move to destroy theintegrity accumulated over 50years by this organization.”

—FORMER NATURE CONSERVANCY MANAGER HUEY JOHNSON

ON STEVE MCCORMICK’S “DURABLE CONSERVATION” STRATEGY

Tip O’Neill advised that people care first about their ownneighborhoods. TNC begins there...


control, energy distributionand basic human rights. Noone from TNC was officiallydelegated to represent theUnited States. There was noofficial oversight on theiractions. Whatever they did wasunaccountable to any repre-sentative body of the Americangovernment. Yet now, whenthey spoke, it was with interna-tional authority that extendedJenkins’ data bank on biodiver-sity over at least a third of theplanet.

Almost incredibly, there stillexists a Communist Party of theUnited States, which in its mostrecent diatribes attacks oldAmerican monopolies likeDuPont and General Motors asbeing “the black hand of deathto the environment.”In the June2002 newsletter of CPUSA,National Secretary John Bactellrants against such capitalistabuse, then notes in one para-graph about beloved Cuba that,“The Nature Conservancy isworking in conjunction withthe Chinese government onvarious projects to preserveregions of rich biodiversity.”

You could say that a smallgroup of people holding powerover natural resources, agricultural produc-tion, and even free speech amounts to com-munism, but it can just as easily amount tofascism. It does not total up to freedom.

TNC, however, is well aware of Americancustom that “all politics is local.” That is whyit patiently sells its position from “the grassroots” up, working to convince even thepeople it may victimize that they can act forthe good of us all. “Partnership” is TNC’sfavored method of control. Only when thatwon’t produce results quickly enough orlargely enough would TNC resort to riskingexposure of itself by blatant campaign con-tributions.

After passage in March 2002 in Californiaof a $2.6 billion bond measure for state parks,questions were raised about the largest singledonor to that initiative campaign and anothertwo years earlier which provided another $2.1billion in state park funds. Both measureswere sponsored by The Nature Conservancy.Their $1-million benefactor for campaignfunds was identified first only as “Rosebud”

and in the latest campaign as “Wild Rose,”butboth came evidently from the same mysteri-ous source.

Who was Rosebud? Defying state law,California TNC Director Graham Chisholmrefused to say. “We have a very clear relation-ship of trust with our donors who wish toremain anonymous,” said the veteran ofNevada’s Lahontan Valley “settlement.” “Thatis fundamental to how we operate.”

Both donations traced back to blind alleysof Limited Liability Corporations (LLC)based in Seattle. They financed victories forthe two largest park bonds in California his-tory with implications over millions of acres.Curiously coincidental perhaps is the fact thatRosebud is the last word spoken by the dyingcharacter of William Randolf Hearst in OrsonWells classic film “Citizen Kane.”

As it happens, the Hearst Corporation iscurrently involved in a land-buyout cam-paign that could cost taxpayers $100 mil-lion. A chief consultant to the HearstCorporation is former U.S. Interior Secre-tary Bruce Babbitt. ■

In effect, TNC wasserving as a shadowgovernment of theUnited States in international forumsdiscussing populationcontrol, energy distri-bution and basichuman rights. No onefrom TNC was officially delegated torepresent the UnitedStates. There was noofficial oversight on their actions. Whateverthey did was unaccountable to any representa-tive body of the American government. Yet now, when they spoke, it was with international authority that extended Jenkins’data bank on biodiversity over at least a third of the planet.

THEBOARDPROBABLY THE MOST POWERFULREAL ESTATE CARTEL THE WORLD HASSEEN OUTSIDE OF EMPIRES

The biggest mistake to be made in tryingto understand The Nature Conservan-cy is to think of it as a passionate group

of young scientists and scholastics rescuingimperiled landscapes and habitats at virtuallythe last minute with the help of dollars anddimes from schoolchildren and their liberalparents. It’s the error most commonly con-veyed by the national media, but that may notbe by mistake.

The Nature Conservancy is run by a 39-member self-nominating board of gover-nors who represent some of the wealthiestand most powerful corporations in the Unit-ed States. Only four of the members present

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obvious scientific credentials. The majorityare presidents, vice presidents, chairmen,and chief operating officers of such mightyinternational business interests as ConAgra,Cisco Systems, Georgia-Pacific, GoldmanSachs, General Motors, Discovery Commu-nications, Cargill and General Mills, Ameri-can Electric Power Company, NASDAQ, theOrvis Company and DuPont. Harvard,Stanford, Rockefeller and Columbia Univer-sities all have representative executives onthe board.

Together, they represent what is mostprobably the most powerful real estate cartelthe world has ever seen outside the establish-ment of national empires. It is estimated thatThe Nature Conservancy continues toexpand its holdings by at least one new acqui-sition every day. It could, for example, be con-

veyed in the manner of weekly newsreels dur-ing World War II showing the expansion ofmilitary occupation in bleeding globs of coloracross a map of the world. To imagine thatsuch absorption of land and property isaccomplished with donations and dues ofeven TNC’s one-million-plus members isabsurd. Even studies by the United StatesInternal Revenue Service have concluded thatsuch contributions are miniscule in compari-son to what the Conservancy accumulatesfrom its own investments, grants (includingsome from the government), and profits fromthe sales of its lands—usually back to the gov-ernment.

The organization reports a total incomefrom fiscal year 2000 of nearly $787 million,but that seems almost modest in comparisonto its total assets of over $2.8 billion—an

amount exceeding the gross national productof some countries where it operates. And yet,The Nature Conservancy holds a tax-exemptstatus identical to a neighborhood libraryassociation.

The Chairman of the Board of Gover-nors, Anthony (Tony) P. Grassi is listed byTNC as president of the board of trustees ofthe New Canaan County, Conn., CountrySchool. That’s his retirement job. He wasformerly chief financial and executive offi-cer of First Boston, Inc., and head of FirstBoston’s investment banking and manage-ment committee, one of the most powerfulinvestment groups in the world. Such bigbanks are found in more than one casethese days at the dead end of tracing fundsto TNC from their currently favoritesources of Limited Liability Partnerships(LLP), a legal device making it more diffi-cult to track the transfer of large amounts ofmoney.

The Conservancy’s Chief Executive Offi-cer, Steve McCormick, made only a vague buthighly grateful reference to one such group,Farallon Capital Management, a Limited Lia-bility Corporation (LLC), in crediting themwith the most help in this year’s $31 millionpurchase of the Baca Ranch in Colorado. Far-allon leadership and organization traces backto First Boston and Goldman Sachs, bothwith convenient places among TNC’s boardof governors.

Still, though they can’t take much creditfor it, average donors and members of TNCcan easily believe from the richly pho-tographed publications produced by theorganization that they are part of a noble aimto save nature. They don’t even know howmuch TNC really controls or how potentiallythreatening their holdings may be. Since1988, for example, TNC has held responsibili-ty given the group by the government formanagement of 25 million acres of militaryproperty in the United States. Since 1961, ithas expanded on an agreement with the U.S.Bureau of Land Management covering stan-dards on the nation’s “public” lands. And in2001, TNC was granted responsibility fordirecting the U.S. Corps of Engineers in shift-ing the channels of American rivers andstreams.

The 12 million acres TNC acknowledgesit owns in the United States is not half thetruth of what it controls.

The first mistake is always in believingthat it is an altruistic, nature-loving organiza-tion without a profiteer in its midst. Howcould there be? ■

Less than a half-century later, TNC wouldbe the most powerful environmentalorganization in history, capable of

manipulating governments, including thatof the United States; endowed with assets

amounting to nearly $3 billion, andexempt from taxes. It would be directly

in control of some 90 million acresworldwide, with more than 12 million

acres, an area the size of Switzerland, inthe United States alone.

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Thanks to The Nature Conservancy and Nevada Senator Harry Reid,formerly productive farms like this in Fallon, Nevada no longer have water.


The Mianus River Gorge between NewYork and Connecticut remains a richlyalluring place, laced with delicate shad-

ows from eastern hemlock and ferns, softseeming in its power. A place where fables stillcould easily be born.

Such gentle dreams are not so easily putin motion on the Texas City Prairie Reservewhere petroleum pumps go on dipping theirbeaks and rocking back in rhythm like taste-less toys on the rim of rolling pasture that ishome to half of the last 40 Attwater’s prairiechickens known to exist on earth.

Concept to cocktail joke, that is the realityin the properties “saved” and preserved byThe Nature Conservancy.

Perhaps the greatest secret held in theenigma of “nature’s landlord” is that it is notreally an environmental organization at all. Itis a land acquisition scheme, complex andhighly elusive, but dedicated in foremost to itsown enrichment of wealth and power. And,as time has revealed, the ambition of theorganization is not really for land, but for theultimate management of human behavior.

For its 50 years of acting on behalf ofwhat TNC itself proclaims to be “the lastgreat places,” the organization cannot legiti-mately claim to have scientifically “saved”anything that was facing certain extinction. Itcan, however, claim in multimillions of acresan amount of land it has excluded from useby all human beings except those who meetTNC approval and can pay the price. It haspreserved “nature” with all-time arrogance inthe name of the Conservancy itself.

George Fell’s first benefactors at thebeginning of TNC were associated with thestaid and very wealthy Old Dominion Col-lege in Virginia. It was not unnatural in thosetimes that their interest in “conservation”might focus on so near a parochial cause asthe string of islands off the coast of their ownstate.

Along Virginia’s eastern shore, runningfrom Chesapeake Bay into the Atlantic is astring of 18 barrier islands blessed with a richand generally unspoiled diversity of shore lifeand habitat. These beaches, reachable only byboat, and the offshore waters once served asthe economic resource for some 45,000 peo-

LANDAS TNC “SAVES” LAND WITH YOURMONEY, COMMUNITIES PERISH

Along Virginia’s eastern shore is a stringof 18 barrier islands blessed with a richand unspoiled diversity of shore life andhabitat. TNC “saved” the place fromimplied development but it was an economic disaster. Millions were lost infailed investments. Local poverty grewworse. But TNC hardly felt it. By then,“nature’s landlord” owned 14 of the 18islands, each served with opulent showplaces built for rich clients, all unaffordable to the original residents ofthe eastern shore....

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ple living on Virginia’s shores and dependentfor their livelihood on seafood and vegetableprocessing plants. It was what might be calledtoday a “sustainable” system of food produc-tion and ecology. But in the 1970s a companyknown as the Smith Island DevelopmentCorporation threatened to build a bridgefrom the mainland connecting to all theislands.

The Nature Conservancy’s bright youngman of that time, Patrick Noonan, stepped inwith what would become characteristic TNCzeal to “save” such a last great place from theimplied development. First to be “rescued” inthe nonprofit group’s series of purchases wasthe island and shallow water income base offthe eastern shore, now supposedly protectedfrom human intrusion or development.Onshore, poverty deepened, particularlyamong largely minority labor put out of workwhen processing plants dependent on thenearby waters shut down. To replace them,there began appearing opulent new homesand duck clubs “compatible” with natureunder terms of the Virginia Coast Reserve, thefront established by The Nature Conservancy.

In fact, even though locals knew about VCRand resisted the growing power of the non-profit, they were unaware that other parcelspurchased by the supposedly independentOffshore Islands Inc. and then “donated” toTNC were also part of the scheme. OffshoreIslands Inc. only later admitted it was a shillcompany for TNC itself.

Twenty years into an economic disaster oftheir own making, TNC, now headed bySawhill, vowed to fix it with an infusion of$2.25 million into the eastern-shore economyfor “compatible” development of new busi-ness in tourism, craft shops and small realestate under direction of the Virginia EasternShore Corporation, another TNC front.

It was an utter and undisguisable failure.Doing it “TNC’s way” simply didn’t work.Millions were lost in failed investments. Localpoverty only grew worse. But TNC hardly feltit. By then, “nature’s landlord” owned 14 ofthe 18 islands, each served with opulentshowplaces built for rich clients, all unafford-able to the people of the eastern shore.

“All of us will end up being servants tothese Goddamned rich people,” one bitter

resident told a reporter. By then, Patrick Noo-nan himself owned 14 parcels on the easternshore.

In his book “Trashing the Economy,”researcher and writer Ron Arnold reports thatno records can be found to establish that theSmith Island Development Corporation,which supposedly prompted TNC’s action byits bridge-building plan, ever really existed.

It is not really difficult to uncover outra-geous contradictions and sad lies among theholdings of The Nature Conservancy. Giventhe rate at which they acquire property, itmight be surprising not to stumble over abus-es. Yet the Conservancy remains untouchedby any serious federal challenge to its status.Defectors from the organization wonder athow it has not become even more reckless inits ruthless grab of what it wants.

The poster child of TNC’s “partnership”approach to preservation has been the MalpaiBorderlands Group on the Arizona/NewMexico line and the Gray Ranch in NewMexico, where TNC wove one of its mostcomplex webs out from a nest of some360,000 acres “saved” from proposed devel-opment by Ted Turner himself. Outmaneu-vering Turner, TNC spun their purchase intoan unlimited reach over more than a millionacres of public and private land captured inthe complexities of more façades of organiza-tions and tricky lines of no escape into theultimate control of what Sawhill called,“models of ecosystem conservation.”

It was a place already being eyed by ReedNoss and David Foreman as a “sky island”parcel of what seemed an impossible fantasyplot to remake most of the West into wilder-ness. Local ranchers, as parochial-minded andnaively trusting of the government as any,would catch on only slowly, if at all.

Only now does Judy Keeler make bettersense of what vaguely disturbed her thatAugust day in 1990 when she and her hus-band came across a pickup parked inside thefences on their deeded land. The vehiclebelonged to the U.S. Bureau of Land Manage-ment, but stuck over the federal emblem wasthe green leaf logo of The Nature Conservan-cy. The two BLM employees said they wereconducting a survey of flora and fauna forTNC.

“We didn’t even know what to ask,” saidKeeler. “We found out later they were doingthe same thing on other adjoining ranches.”

The survey would clearly be linked to anattempt to establish an Area of Critical Envi-ronmental Concern (ACEC) allowing evenmore federal authority over the region based


on threatened or endangered species or habi-tats. Largely unknown to ranchers and prop-erty owners, the federal government hadalready ceded much of its own responsibilityin making such judgments to the land-pro-viding TNC under a so-called “cost-share”agreement relying heavily on the nonprofit’sown data bank.

Within the next 10 years, U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service’s long-held desire to establishan “Animas Wildlife Refuge” in the regionwould converge with TNC’s own semisecretplan for an “International Peace Park”designed as a model of management by“nature’s landlord.” Another nonprofitformed for the purpose, the Animas Founda-tion, now controls more than half the originalGray Ranch, but is used primarily as a grassbank open to other ranchers to “rest” theirown allotments.

There are some 25 other ranchers in theMalpai Borderlands Group formed in 1993for mutual fire protection. Now they arebound to federal restrictions calling for themto take their cattle off grazing allotments fortwo years or more in order to allow con-trolled burns. If the ranchers make use of thegrass bank, they are expected to pay it off byagreement to long-term conservation ease-ments on their own property. Only a handfulhave accepted that deal so far, but pressureremains. The Nature Conservancy is in nohurry. Later more than sooner, perhaps, TNCwill have it all. Meanwhile, Malpai is touted asa model of cooperation between government,environment and private interests, doing itthe TNC way. Some say it resembles oldChicago.

Judy Keeler continues to ranch indepen-dently almost in the center of the one-mil-lion-acre Malpai region. She attendsmeetings, but her questions go unanswered.

“TNC didn’t come into our area likefriends,” she said.“They came in with the atti-tude that they knew it all and were going to‘educate’ us local ignoramuses on how tomanage our ranches.”

Especially since Bruce Babbitt tookpower over the Department of Interiorin 1992, ranches falling into the handsof The Nature Conservancy haveseemed like overripe fruit droppingfrom a shaken tree. Though it sendsmany of the properties into its revolv-ing fund with the government, TNCcould probably challenge even mightySimplot in grazing land it has availablefor use.

In fact, TNC is directly and competitively

Altruism was partof what promptedMobil Oil Corporation in1995 to give TNCa 21,300-acrefield of low-producing oil andgas reserveswhich also turnedout to be one ofthe last knownbreeding groundsfor the endan-

gered Attwater prairie chicken. Withgift in hand, TNC did not set out tosave the bird. It went to work restor-ing more oil and gas production onMobil’s forgotten fields, sinking newwells, putting pumps back in opera-tion and grazing “ConservationBeef” among the dipping machineryplunging into the earth. TNC hasearned at least $5.5 million in

royalties so farfrom the field andthere is no evidence that any major expen-diture has beenput in to “sav-ing” the prairiechicken.

And in NewHampshire, TNC has acquiredat least a million acres of

timberland. TNC continues to logmost of that land in what it says is“sustainable practice.”

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in the livestock business, advertising its “Con-servation Beef” as the alternative to produc-tion on what remaining ranches it has notalready offered to buy, or trade, or convincethe owners to donate for vague, but funereallyrewarding public use.

“Beef with a mission,” advertises TNC.“To save the best of the West for future gener-ations.” In a “Dear Friend” letter TNC Execu-tive Vice President W. William Weeks says,“The Nature Conservancy has worked withwestern ranch families for four years to helpbring you Conservation Beef—a unique wayto help preserve key landscapes in the greatAmerican West.We’re proud of the results.

“We need only one more partner to makethis project work: you.... Your purchase [of

Conservation Beef] will help save great west-ern landscapes for future generations.”

Weeks, the author of TNC’s “Beyond theArk” book on policy and strategy, is a fieldmarshal for TNC boss Steven McCormick indeal making in all directions. This includesnew support for TNC by General Motors,Inc. in exchange for vague research on “cli-mate change,” and the agreement signed in2001 between the Conservancy and the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers for managing U.S.water resources in “partnerships” with localinterests orchestrated by The Nature Conser-vancy.

America, as TNC likes to promote it, hasbeen made “environmentally conscious” bythe Conservancy’s selfless presence. Such

altruism was part of what prompted MobilOil Corporation in 1995 to give TNC a 2,300-acre field of low-producing oil and gasreserves which also turned out to be one ofthe last known breeding grounds for theendangered Attwater prairie chicken.

All around the site near Houston the evi-dent success of “big oil” hunches in steam-ris-ing refineries and pipelines close to thecollateral development of homes and officesthat probably squeezed out most of theprairie chicken’s habitat in the first place.

But with the gift in hand, TNC did not setout to save the bird. It went to work restoringmore oil and gas production on Mobil’s for-gotten field—sinking new wells, puttingpumps back in operation and grazing “Con-servation Beef” among the dipping machin-ery plunging into the earth.

“We believe the opportunity we have inTexas City to raise significant sums of moneyfor conservation is one we cannot pass up,provided we can do this drilling withoutharming the prairie chickens and their habi-tat, and we are convinced,” said Texas TNCspokesperson Niki McDaniel.

The nation’s “10th largest charity” hasearned at least $5.5 million in oil and gas roy-alties so far from the field. There is no evi-dence that any major expenditure has beenput in to “saving”the prairie chicken.

Beneath the Gray Ranch at the center ofTNC’s much-heralded Malpai Group, by theway, is what some geologists consider to be arich field of minerals, gas and oil. The rightsto it were donated to TNC by Tenneco Corp.in the 1990s.

In New England, a political distance apartfrom the “forest wars” of the Pacific North-west, The Nature Conservancy has acquiredat least a million acres of timberland in Maineand New Hampshire put under secondarystress by the environmental campaign in theWest. The Nature Conservancy continues tolog most of that land in what it says is “sus-tainable practice.”

The spin-off of TNC, Conservation Inter-national, has proudly announced that tropicalforests it has acquired in Latin America willcontinue to produce coffee under exclusiveagreements with Starbucks which will uselow-impact harvesting methods and passalong the added expense to consumers.

Big game hunting, fishing expeditions,ecotourism and private real estate includingfarms are all available at the right price from“Nature’s Landlord.” What protects nature isthat “common”people can’t afford any of it. ■

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When The Nature Conservancy protects rain forests from human intrusion or development, it can haveadverse effects on the indigenous people.


There are fewthings that infu-riate American

landowners more thanenvironmental espi-onage—the covert col-lection of environ-mental data on privateproperty without thelandowner’s knowledge or consent. Usuallyfocusing on biodiversity and water quality, thepractice was virtually unknown until the1970s. Since then, it has exploded with thesupport of state and federal agencies, environ-mental activists and the land trusts. Especiallyone land trust.

The Conservancy The Nature Conservancy is the richest envi-ronmental organization in the world. In 2001,it had almost $3 billion in total assets, incomeof over $730 million, and annual expenses ofover $400 million. That money is used forone overriding purpose: to get land. Some-times called “nature’sreal estate agent,” TNCgets land through gifts,exchanges, conserva-tion easements, man-agement agreements,debt-for-nature swapsand outright purchase.

Created in 1951,TNC bought its firstpiece of land in upstateNew York in 1955. By1996 it operated theworld’s largest privatesystem of nature sanc-tuaries, with over 1,500preserves in the UnitedStates alone. Thisexplosive growth couldnever have occurredwithout a unique bio-diversity data systemknown as the NaturalHeritage Network,developed by TNC inthe 1970s to meet itsland acquisition needsand “provide a broaderpublic service.”The Network

In 1974, the TNC sci-ence division begandeveloping a sophisti-cated, decentralizedbiodiversity data sys-tem that could operate

as a unified network. The system, createdfrom scratch, would manage continuallyupdated inventories of biological informa-tion using a standardized data collectionmethodology and electronic data manage-ment system. The first Heritage Programdata center was installed in South Carolina in1974. By 1994 it was operational in nearly300 facilities worldwide, including all 50states, and known simply as “the Network.”

As the Network matured, the originalemphasis on reserve selection and designbroadened to include support for land-useplanning, environmental-impact assessment

and endangered-species management.By 1996 the Networkwas described as “themost comprehensiveand frequently consult-ed source of informa-tion on biodiversity inthe world,” and was

responding to 70,000 information requests ayear. These came from federal, state and localnatural resource agencies, corporations, envi-ronmental organizations, researchers, acade-mics, consultants and individuals.

Collaboration Network development didn’t come cheap,and the cost wasn’t footed entirely by TheNature Conservancy. The system was nur-tured in the early years by grants from theusual suspects—the Mellon, Hewlett andMacArthur foundations, and the Pew Chari-table Trusts. These grants “successfully lever-aged hundreds of millions of dollars in

public funding, whichhelped expand the Net-work across the entirecountry.”

The federal governmentplayed a major role in thisgrowth, with critical sup-port provided by BLM,the Forest Service, Envi-ronmental ProtectionAgency and other federalagencies interested inusing the system. Of spe-cial note was U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service supportthrough its secretive LandAcquisition Priority Sys-tem, and support from theNational Biological Infor-mation Infrastructure(NBII). NBII, the federalprogram that today man-ages data on the nation’sbiological resources, saysthat it collaborates closelywith TNC to “help pro-vide increased, integratedaccess to selected datafrom TNC’s central data-bases, including their richgeospatial data sets.”

System Standardization

All Network data centersuse a common TNCmethodology for system-

THE NETWORKBIG BROTHER, ENVIRONMENTAL ESPIONAGE AND THE NATURE CONSERVANCY. BY JEFF GOODSON

Walk any beach on either coast until you find a fencethat prevents even the military from disturbing apotential nesting sight of the threatened plover.

There you will find The Nature Conservancy. Visit western farming regions in Nevada and

California especially where family farms are underrelentless pressure to become “willing sellers” of their

water rights, and you will see some of McCormick’swork. Observe the heavy machinery and implications

to agriculture from new U.S. Corps of Engineersprojects to re-channel western streams and rivers andyou will find that the federal agency is being directed

under an agreement with The Nature Conservancy.Find the charming nature trail securing the boundaries

of the richest suburbs on the West Coast and it willlikely have been built with help from TNC. Examine

even the most radical environmental approach to shiftthe human population of the West into controlled coresettlements bordering a vast “corridor” of wilderness

from the Yucatan to the Yukon, and know that theplan presented by Reed Noss and David Foreman was

funded by The Nature Conservancy. Anywhere TNCmight be caught in a media spotlight, it ducks into the

trees, but it is almost always the unseen “Bigfoot”behind every outrage in the battle over “public”

land and private rights.


atically collecting, storing and retrieving bio-logical information, for gathering informa-tion on specific tracts of real estate, and forsetting land acquisition priorities. Informa-tion is continually reviewed and updated, andmaintained in each data center. The systemsoftware can cross-reference, correlate andstructure data, and make it quickly availableto users anywhere. New technologies such asgeographic information systems, global posi-tioning systems, evolving remote sensingtechnology, and graphical database softwareare continuously integrated into the Network,maintaining its operational status at state ofthe art. Today, Network scientists everywhere“speak the same vocabulary, evaluate theirwork with the same yardsticks, share theirideas, compare notes, and exchange electron-ic data. There is an enormous sum of theparts.”

Big BrotherOn the ground, the Network is used to devel-op biodiversity inventories, identify criticalareas in need of protection, generate strategicshopping lists, plan site actions, conduct bio-logical and legal monitoring, and track infor-mation on specific real estate tracts andtransactions. As TNC puts it: “How rare?How threatened? We answer those ques-tions...so we can decide which pieces of landto buy.... Once species are identified andranked, the areas that shelter critically threat-

The Network at work in the Davis Mountains, Texas. Using proprietary data on rare plants and animals,The Nature Conservancy zooms in electronically on land they intend to target for acquisition. In the DavisMountains, most property targeted by TNC is working ranchland. TNC biological data from privateproperty may, or may not, have been collected with the landowner’s knowledge and consent.


ened species become the target of Conservan-cy projects.”

The Network focuses on the status andspecific locations of plants, animals and eco-logical communities, and it now containsdetailed information on over 50,000 NorthAmerican species and ecosystems. The sys-tem is designed to deal with local biota inextreme detail, and local data centers special-ize in gathering raw biological data, conduct-ing field inventories, and carrying outbiological assessments. But there is also a cen-tralized version of the Network’s data man-agement system at TNC headquarters inArlington, Virginia. That system containshundreds of thousands of species’ records,and is now by far the most comprehensivebiodiversity database in the world.

Property DataOnce in the system, biodiversity data are inte-grated with local real estate information. Net-workers can examine voluminous anddetailed information about sites of interest,including mappable data on specific landtracts, land transactions and property taxes.Tract information includes data on location,ownership, legal access, outstanding rightsand interests, history, value, management,biological importance and intended use.Transaction files include data on land pur-chases, sales, leases, licenses, managementagreements, easements, mortgages, mortgage

The maps above and below show how a TNC target site is developed. The curved line at the bottom of theupper map lassoes a wide“primary” boundary within which ecological “fragmentation” will be minimized.Dots on the lower map indicate the location of “rare” species of plants (10) and snails (2) although as manyas 29 plants and 17 animals may be included.

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releases and registrations. Tax files includeinformation on legal descriptions, tax types,tax assessments, tax payments, amounts dueand exemptions filed.

OutrageNot surprisingly, the Network infuriateslandowners—especially those with propertythat’s targeted for acquisi-tion. Much of that angerevolved from experiencewith the National ParkService’s National NaturalLandmarks (NNL) pro-gram. NNL set out in 1962to recognize “outstandingexamples of the nation’snatural landscape her-itagem,” but evolved in the1970s into an environ-mental espionage andland-targeting program.Before it went into morato-rium in 1989 in responseto landowner outrage, 587NNLs had been designatednationwide, 3,029 sites hadbeen proposed for designa-tion, and thousands ofadditional sites, many ofthem private, had beencovertly evaluated.

The National Park Ser-vice coordinated the NNL program “closelywith those of other natural area programs,such as [that of] The Nature Conservancy.”Many of the 363 sites evaluated in Texas, forexample, were selected for evaluation pre-cisely because they had already been identi-fied in TNC files. Over 60 percent of allTexas sites were private, and many of themwere evaluated without the landowner’sknowledge or consent. There are literallydozens of comments in the raw programfiles about Texas landowners who may be“unreceptive to contact.”

As NPS admitted in 1990 in the Federal

Register: “(F)rom 1962 forward...someresource identifications, onsite evaluations,nominations, and designations have beendone without appropriate notificationand/or consent of the legal landowners…Full sensitivity to landowner interests,including landowner notification and con-

sent, has not always been demonstrated.”The Texas Fix

When the activities of the Texas Natural Her-itage Program came to light in 1995, just afew years after the NNL moratorium, Texaslandowners came unglued. Two bills werequickly passed and signed into law by then-Governor George W. Bush, requiring theTexas Parks and Wildlife Department(TPWD) to maintain the confidentiality ofinformation collected on private land. One(HB 2012) required TPWD to keep confiden-tial any information pertaining to privateproperty, whether it was collected at the

request of a landowner seeking technicalguidance or collected during the course of aninvestigation incidental to the enforcement ofgame and fish laws.

The second bill (HB 2133) limited theuse of biodiversity information collected onprivate land to “the purposes of scientific

investigations andresearch,” and then only ifauthorized in writing bythe landowner. Today,TPWD may not enterinto the Network anydata collected during alandowner-authorizedinvestigation, and datacannot be reported orcompiled in a way thatidentifies individualparcels of private proper-ty, without writtenlandowner consent.

EpilogueSpawned by The NatureConservancy and nur-tured with U.S. tax dol-lars, the Network hasgrown to jaw-slackeningproportions. By the mid-1990s it was described as“the world’s only opera-tional example of a wide-

spread, multinode confederation of datacenters and scientists engaged in a coordi-nated biodiversity inventory effort usingstandardized information managementmethods and technologies.” Today, the Net-work describes itself as “…a de facto nation-al biological survey in the literal sense.”

And so it is.Landowners across America deserve the

same kind of protection that Texaslandowners enjoy from this kind of envi-ronmental espionage. If ever there were atime for national legislation to protectthem, this is it. ■

Perhaps the greatest secret heldin the enigma of“nature’s landlord”is that it is notreally an environ-mental organiza-

tion at all. It is a land acquisitionscheme, complex and highly elusive,but dedicated in foremost to its ownenrichment of wealth and power.And, as time has revealed, theambition of the organization is notreally for land, but for the ultimatemanagement of human behavior.

“Nature’s Landlord” $3 each; 10 copies or more, $2 each (while supplies last).1-year subscription to award-winning quarterly RANGE magazine, $19.95.

PUBLISHED BY RANGE MAGAZINEP.O. BOX 639, CARSON CITY, NV 89702

775-884-2200 ■ FAX 775-884-2213 ■ www.rangemagazine.comPUBLISHER/EDITOR: C.J. HADLEY ■ ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: BARBARA WIES ■ REPORTER: TIM FINDLEY

DESIGNER/ILLUSTRATOR: JOHN BARDWELL ■ PRODUCTION: BILL CANE, GMAA

@2003 RANGE/Nature’s Landlord

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