By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway

Washington Post Staff Writers

The Washington Post

Washington, D.C.

http://www.WashingtonPost.com

To submit a Letter to the Editor: letters@washpost.com

Mike Kahn, a Florida business consultant and former golf pro, advises celebrities and sports stars how they can save millions in taxes: Buy a golf course and prohibit building on the fairways.

"People who do it generally keep it quiet," he explained in an interview. "It sounds like a money grab."

It is all possible, Kahn explains, through a common environmentalist's tool called a "conservation easement."

Easements are permanent deed restrictions that limit some types of intrusive development -- such as dense subdivisions or strip mines -- while often permitting limited construction. Landowners "donate" the easements to a nonprofit land trust or a government agency that, in effect, certifies that the restrictions are meaningful and provide some public benefit, such as preserving open space or protecting wildlife. That allows the donor to seek federal income tax deductions for the reduction in the land's market value.

By taking such steps to limit construction, the owners of vacation resorts, country manors and dude ranches can seek big write-offs, too. Pennsylvania developer Kenneth C. Hellings says he restricted building on "unusable" portions of his new subdivision and took "a shocker" of a tax deduction.

Luxury-home builders in North Carolina paid $10 million for a tract in the mountains, developed a third of the land, then claimed a $20 million deduction.

Such tax bonanzas have become a little-noticed byproduct of the maturing environmental movement, which increasingly entwines preservation of land with preservation of wealth.

Without question [?], conservation easements have done much good. Conservationists credit them with making preservation the fastest-growing arm of the environmental movement, fueling a boom in land conservation and helping to protect [control] more than 6 million acres nationwide.

Easements have helped safeguard fragile ecosystems, critical watersheds, land bordering national parks and some of the nation's most stunning vistas.

"There is an enormous amount of good that has been done," said Rand Wentworth, president of the Washington-based Land Trust Alliance. "Ninety-nine percent of these transactions are good, solid conservation."

But as easements have proliferated, so have problems and abuses.

The Senate Finance Committee earlier this year opened a wide-ranging inquiry into easement practices at the Nature Conservancy, the world's largest environmental group.

The committee's investigation followed a Washington Post series that revealed the Conservancy had repeatedly bought scenic properties, added development restrictions, then resold the land at reduced prices to Conservancy trustees and supporters.

The buyers, some of whom retained the right to build houses on the land, in turn gave the Conservancy cash donations that supplied them with hefty tax write-offs.

After the series, the Conservancy board banned such sales.

Now conservationists are wrestling with other ethical concerns about easements.

Stephen J. Small, a leading easement consultant and former IRS attorney, warned that "some things are starting to get out of hand" in an address delivered at a conservationists' gathering earlier this year in Sacramento.

"We are getting calls from people who are totally misinformed about conservation easements and the potential tax benefits," Small said.

"Lawyers and accountants and promoters and investors are giving them bad information, telling them they can do this or that and claim a big deduction, and there aren't enough people out there telling them they can't." [Note: The land trusts themselves never give bad information to potential donors and/or their heirs?]

Conservation easements have been around for decades but only gained prominence after 1976, when Congress made them tax-deductible.

Today, easements are held by a host of government agencies, national environmental groups such as the Conservancy and about 1,260 local land trusts -- nonprofit corporations devoted to conservation.

Those trusts often operate behind closed doors as they decide which tracts to protect -- and therefore which landowners get the tax breaks. The trusts also decide how much building can be done.

The benefits often go to the wealthy, and routinely to board members and staff at the land trusts.

And although the development restrictions are publicly described as lasting "in perpetuity," conservationists privately fret over whether this is true, partly because easements continue to face court challenges.

Enforcement is also a problem. Surveys of land trusts around the nation, often conducted by the land trusts themselves, show that hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of easements have been violated or altered at the request of landowners. Many of the owners have already pocketed the tax savings generated by the easement.

Many easements explicitly allow additional development if the land trust approves.

Meanwhile, companies and individuals claiming huge write-offs face little risk of audit.

In the past two fiscal years, an IRS program aimed at identifying inflated deductions taken for easements and other non-cash gifts to charities produced thousands of leads but, because of competing priorities at the agency, did not produce a single audit, according to the General Accounting Office.

"It's complete smoke and mirrors," said John Echeverria, a former general counsel of the National Audubon Society. "Donations of conservation easements generally do not really give any value away."

Echeverria, who now directs the Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute, instead favors preserving land through more time-tested processes, such as restrictive zoning and the issuance of building permits. Easements, he says, have "the potential to undermine the cause of environmental protection itself."

Fearful of damaging the land-trust movement, many conservationists are reluctant to broadcast the flaws in easements.

They ruminate instead on easement shortcomings -- the dry text of academic studies and legal journals.

An April 2000 survey of 18 New England land trusts and easement-holding public agencies, for example, found that 14 acknowledged that they had discovered one or more easement violations. Most said they had agreed to alter restrictions in one or more existing easements. Another study, in 1999, discovered that almost half of the protected tracts examined in the San Francisco area were not regularly monitored to make sure the restrictions were being followed.

"Failure to adequately monitor easements results in the public paying for nonexistent benefits," stated the report, by the Bay Area Open Space Council.

A third study concluded bluntly: "There are serious threats to the use of easements."

Some tax specialists say deductions generated by easement donations increasingly are attracting the attention of affluent families seeking tax shelters.

Small, the conservation lawyer, estimated in a recent land-trust newsletter that a third of his potential clients "think they can get away with something by donating a conservation easement." Some developers argue that land separating homes in subdivisions qualifies for tax breaks; others produce land appraisals that appear wildly exaggerated. Although Small turns such clients away, he believes that an increasing number of abusive deals are quietly being made, sometimes facilitated by nonprofits with questionable credentials -- what are known as "rogue land trusts."

Small reserves particular scorn for developers who donate easements on golf courses, then seek tax breaks for preserving open space. All but a few such easements, he said, are on their face "ridiculous."

He wrote in a recent e-mail to other conservationists, "This is a very, very bad direction the land trust business is going in and we need to stop it."

How It Works

Conservation easements generally work this way:

Landowners amend their deeds to permanently restrict some types of intrusive development -- such as shopping malls or hotels -- while often continuing to allow construction of homes or other limited improvements.

The owner then finds a nonprofit land trust or a government agency willing to take the easement as a gift.

By accepting the gift, the land trust in effect certifies that the restrictions are meaningful and benefit the public.

That allows the donor to seek federal income tax deductions and, in some cases, reductions in federal estate taxes and local property taxes.

In many communities, the land trust becomes the sole entity responsible for monitoring the site and suing if violations are uncovered.

Easement donors can seek tax deductions for any loss of property value caused by the restrictions.

That value is generally established by appraisers hired by the donor.

Propelled by such savings, conservation easements held by the local land trusts have grown more than fivefold nationwide since 1990, to an estimated 12,000 today.

Local land trusts hold easements totaling 2.6 million acres, more than double the land they own outright.

There are no reliable figures on the total value of the conservation tax breaks.

But legislation to expand allowable deductions that passed the Senate this year would sacrifice more than $1 billion in additional tax revenue over the next decade, according to the Senate Finance Committee.

Unlike restrictive zoning, which is customarily established by public bodies working with land-use experts, easement restrictions often are initiated by individual landowners. The deals are made with private nonprofit corporations that may be simply a handful of local residents. Filed at the courthouse as deed amendments, the easements usually go unnoticed.

A recent survey by the Land Trust Alliance, a national trade association for conservation organizations, found that half of all trusts are run entirely by volunteers. Half have annual budgets of less than $27,000. [Note: This 'survey' is like asking foxes to count the inhabitants of the chicken coop...]

Such organizations decide which tracts to preserve and who will pocket the tax savings "with no public input whatsoever," Echeverria wrote in a recent analysis. He describes the process as "a gross fraud on the U.S. taxpayer."

Land trusts say easement donations have helped many cash-poor families retain farms and ranches they otherwise might have sold to developers.

But some of the biggest and best-known easements have been linked to major corporations and some of the nation's richest individuals, from Ted Turner and David Letterman to the Rockefellers and DuPonts.

University of Utah law professor Nancy A. McLaughlin, writing in a recent issue of the Idaho Law Review, described the use of tax incentives as "upside-down."

"It provides upper-income donors with disproportionately greater tax savings than middle and lower-income donors," she wrote.

To be sure, McLaughlin and many other environmentalists -- including those pushing for reform -- support easements and say they have done much good. While acknowledging a small but significant number of abuses and legal uncertainties, the proponents say most easements have never been violated. They add that although easements occasionally are amended, the environment rarely has been harmed and that amendments often increase conservation values. Most donors give out of a desire to protect land they cherish, and most ultimately lose money on the transactions, proponents say.

"Most in the land-trust community meet their ethical responsibilities, and well," Vermont Land Trust president Darby Bradley said in an October address to other preservationists meeting in California. Bradley nonetheless called for improvements, saying, "We must do better."

Big-Buck Deductions

There are mounting concerns about the size of the tax deductions that donors claim, based on the assumption that easements lower property values. Some academic researchers believe easements can increase property values by making neighborhoods more exclusive and scenic, with less density.

Real estate ads sometimes tout easements as a selling point.

"Landowners may well be receiving double compensation," according to a recent analysis by Purdue University professor Leigh Raymond and University of California at Berkeley professor Sally K. Fairfax, writing in Natural Resources Journal.

Donors can pocket the tax breaks, then profit as well from the appreciation of their new, trophy-home sites.

The authors described that possibility as "troubling, to say the least, given the involvement of public funds in financing their original transactions."

In the Great Smoky Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, investors two years ago bought 4,400 acres, placed an easement on 3,000 acres and then began developing 350 home sites and an 18-hole golf course on the remaining property. A master plan for the development, called the Balsam Mountain Preserve, shows that the easement area is broken up by the fairways and home sites, which spot the land like mushrooms on a pizza.

Investors paid about $10 million for the land and shared in a tax write-off "in the $20 million range," said James A. Anthony, a partner in the South Carolina development firm of Chaffin/Light Associates. The deduction was based, in part, on an appraiser's assessment of how much the land would have been worth had they filled the acreage with 1,400 homes, Anthony said.

Far from a liability, the easement has become a marketing tool. Sales literature describes the subdivision as "a community within a park" and the undeveloped portions as maintained "for the quiet enjoyment of members."

Anthony said: "It does add value to the remaining land. Kind of like a limited-edition print -- the fewer [acres] you have, the more the value."

Appraisers factored any appreciation into their calculations of the tax benefit due the investors, Anthony said. The firm is considering placing an easement directly on the golf course once it is completed, he added.

Broad data about the reliability of claimed deductions are scarce. But a 1984 IRS study examined 42 deductions for easement donations and determined that all but one appeared inflated, resulting in overvaluations totaling nearly $32 million.

According to a GAO report on the study, "The taxpayers generally overvalued their conservation easement deductions by an average of about 220 percent."

Setting values continues to prove nettlesome.

In the case of Brandon Park, the personal retreat of Wilhelmina duPont Ross, New York state officials and federal officials came to different conclusions.

Visitors to the family estate in the Adirondack Mountains pull up at a gated and guarded entrance. The road then winds through a 27,000-acre private forest dotted with nine ponds and traversed by 10 miles of the St. Regis River. The grounds feature at least 16 homes, cabins and other buildings, linked by more than 60 miles of roads and trails, court records show.

In 1978, Ross gave [?] the Nature Conservancy an easement restricting commercial development on the remote site and requiring that it remain forever a "natural and scenic area." Backed by an appraisal, she claimed that the restrictions slashed the property's market value by 44 percent. That qualified her for a federal income tax break of more than $1 million -- $2.5 million in today's dollars.

Two decades later, during a local property tax dispute, a panel of state judges pointed out that Ross had retained the right to build 10 additional homes, mine gravel pits, drill for oil, cut trees, subdivide the land and expel the public. They pointed out that local governments already heavily regulated development of the estate, meaning that Ross actually had "parted with very little" when she donated her easement.

"Any further development of the land was unlikely, even if the land was not subject to the conservation easement," the court ruled in 1999, rejecting requests to slash her property taxes.

Ross died in 2000. Her lawyer, H. Dean Heberlig, Jr., explained that, unlike New York officials, federal authorities factor in a property's potential future value when establishing tax breaks. The IRS initially challenged the deduction, he said, but ultimately agreed that $1 million "was an appropriate deduction."

The IRS said it could not comment publicly on an individual tax case. A Conservancy spokesman said his group strongly believes easement donors give up "real value."

Secrecy and Conflicts

Preservationists laud the grass-roots nature of the easements: Decision-making devolves into the hands of private groups that know their community best. But that approach also makes the easements difficult to track and police.

Raymond and Fairfax describe conservation easements in general as protecting a patchwork of partially developed tracts, using restrictions largely designed by the landowners to meet their own needs.

"Conserved land thus comes under protection because it is available to a land trust, not necessarily because it is an appropriate parcel to conserve," they wrote in their analysis. "The land owner, rather than the trust, drives the process. Moreover, during negotiations private landowners ... generally define the nature of the protection on the land to suit their own priorities."

Small, who wrote the federal income tax regulations on conservation-easement donations while working for the IRS in the 1980s, says that at the time he and his colleagues expected land trusts to reject abusive transactions and police the process. Regulators thought that charities would turn away easements that allowed too much building or were designed solely to benefit the wealthy, he said.

Today, however, organizations often are responsible for policing restrictions on property owned by their own officers, directors and donors. On an Internet discussion list, land-trust officials from across the country recently spoke out fervently in defense of employees and board members who donate easements to their own nonprofits.

Tom Bailey, executive director of Michigan's Little Traverse Conservancy, wrote on Oct. 9 [2003 that] land trusts should "make every effort" to persuade insiders to donate.

"I certainly hope that a board member's having an easement on their land would not be considered a conflict!" Bailey wrote. "Or a staff member either....

"Certainly when enforcement issues are involved, the board member would be required to abstain from discussion or decisions on the case. But let's not get carried away with this conflict stuff."

The Medina Summit Land Conservancy of Ohio holds easements on four properties owned by its trustees and two more deals with trustees are in the works, said its executive director, Chris Bunch.

The North Branch Land Trust of Trucksville, Pennsylvania, is in charge of enforcing easements on farms owned by its president and its board secretary, who say they received tax deductions exceeding $300,000.

The secretary, Ed Zygmunt, said, "I personally don't see any conflict of interest."

Increase in Problems

Studies funded by land trusts show monitoring and enforcement problems are widespread and growing worse.

The 1999 survey of San Francisco-area easement holders, for example, found that only half of the preserved tracts in the region were regularly monitored by the nonprofit or government agency holding the easement. Many of the existing monitoring programs were inadequate, the survey said. And even that monitoring discovered violations at 14 percent of the sites.

"Problems are more likely to occur with second-generation landowners," added the report, by the Bay Area Open Space Council, a regional group of land trusts and conservation agencies. "Further changes of ownership in the future should be expected to increase the number of violations."

Nearly a third of the organizations surveyed had no list of the easements they held, and some failed to record the original condition of the restricted properties.

"Years may go by without any documentation on the easement," the study said. "Without proper, timely, and consistent monitoring, easements are difficult to defend legally, and violations become practically impossible to remedy."

Many of the nonprofits also could not afford to defend an easement in court if necessary, the report concluded.

One California environmental group, Defense of Place, used data from the study to estimate that easement violations nationwide exceed 2,700. The group's director, Jason Kibbey, warned: "If you just let conservation easements unravel over the next 20 years, the movement is over."

Government agencies, which also hold thousands of easements, have their own problems.

Conservationist Edmund Stiles found that his home of Hopewell Township, N.J., holds more than 400 easements, 103 of them stuffed into a box in the township hall basement.

He visited a few dozen and found that 80 percent of the easements had been violated.

Most were minor, he said, but in one case, a bridge had been built on the protected land.

"Governments don't like enforcing easements," Stiles said. "It's a difficult thing politically."

Hopewell zoning officer Robert Miller said the township has no one to monitor easements, so it depends on residents to report suspected violations. That happens about once a week, he said.

A voluntary survey of New England conservation groups and public agencies by the Land Trust Alliance in 2000 found that a third kept no records on inspections of land protected by easements.

Of 18 organizations participating, 11 admitted to having amended one or more easements already on file at the courthouse.

Many of the easements reviewed during the survey were poorly written, making them difficult or impossible to defend in court, the report said.

An Alliance study in 1999 identified 498 easement violations nationwide, but its report struck a positive stance. It called 383 of the violations "minor."

The 115 "major" violations included 32 cases of surface alteration, 28 of vegetation cutting and 18 of logging.

In 25 cases, "prohibited/unauthorized" structures were built.

The report stressed that 93 percent of easements in the study appeared to have avoided violations.

Statistics show that more than half of all new nonprofits fail in their first decade. Over time, there may be no one to enforce many easements. And even when a land trust survives and has ample financing, it faces murky laws, according to a 1998 survey commissioned by the INNW Fund, a California preservation foundation. Some survey participants noted that easements are still relatively untested, and "not enough time has passed to determine whether they will hold up legally in perpetuity, as intended."

In a broader sense, some lawyers and environmentalists question whether it is wise for today's conservationists to impose their will on the future.

Ecologists may one day determine that farmers do more damage than housing developments, they argue, or decide that conservation efforts would be more effective elsewhere.

University of Virginia professor Julia D. Mahoney, writing last year in the school's law review, described the easements as foolhardy. "We lack the technical competence to make land-use decisions for future generations," Mahoney wrote.

'Unusable Acres'

Hellings, the Philadelphia developer, said he has not spent much time weighing the philosophical implications.

He has been busy building.

A few years ago, Hellings rolled bulldozers onto a historic 450-acre Chester County, Pa., farm and transformed it into an upscale commuters' subdivision, featuring 163 home sites on 100 acres surrounding an 18-hole golf course.

Only after the plan was complete, Hellings said, did his lawyers hit on a way to capitalize on a leftover flood plain and some steep hillsides, a scattered jumble of land that Hellings describes as 131 "unusable acres."

Using guidance from a local land trust, Hellings's lawyers wrote an easement covering a dozen islands of protected land, one as small as six-tenths of an acre.

Then they placed a second easement directly on 220 acres of the golf course, including the fairways, bunkers and putting greens.

The easements were accepted by the Brandywine Conservancy, a well-established Pennsylvania land trust.

A Brandywine spokesman said the easements helped to protect sensitive natural resources, including water quality, and ensured that the golf course would remain "permanent open space, forever."

The easements mandate that the preserved areas "shall not unreasonably interfere with the business operations" and they authorize mowing part of the 131 acres for "temporary overflow parking."

The open space boosts land prices, Hellings said, and has become a valuable sales tool.

Hellings would not say how much his tax break, calculated with the help of an appraiser, totaled. He described the final figure as "a shocker."

"It is nice to have when tax time comes," he said with a smile. "It was a bonus."

That bonus came as a surprise to West Bradford Township Manager Jack Hines Jr., who pointed out that under township ordinances Hellings would have had to dedicate at least 60 percent of his development to open space, anyway.

"I don't know how you could take a tax write-off for that," Hines said. "He shouldn't have gotten anything."

Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17384-2003Dec20.html

More about "Defense of Place" ("...California environmental group"):

Defense of Place 'Goal': "Goal is to create a principle in the minds of Americans that our protected lands will be protected forever. The need comes from an uncomfortable trend to violate preserved landscapes. Universities, churches, Boy Scout groups, and even environmental organizations are increasingly tempted to sell places they accepted with the promise that they would be saved forever. Years after the donors are long dead, land values go up, and the temptation to cash in takes over. We believe protecting these lands and honoring the promises to do that are more valuable than money." http://www.bapd.org/gdeoce-1.html

http://www.saveBAREC.org BAREC - Bay Area Research and Extension Center (notice at this website where/who the donations are to be sent to -- yep, 'Defense of Place')

http://defenseofplace.rri.org/resources/

The Case for Defense of Place

January/February 2004

By Huey D. Johnson

[lawyer in Cosa Mesa, CA]

The Loma Prietan (looks like a newspaper, but is really a chapter of the Sierra Club)

http://www.sierraclub.org/chapters/lomaprieta/index.html

Note the Loma Prietan's editor's email address: loma.prietan.editor@sierraclub.org

Forty years ago, when I became the eighth employee of the young Nature Conservancy, we had to seek gifts of land because the Conservancy didn't have any money for purchases of land. Over a dozen times I looked elderly donors in the eye and promised them that if they would give their beloved parcel of land or sell it at a bargain, The Nature Conservancy would expend every last breath and every last dollar to assure its permanence forever. The donors weren't always elderly. Our first Colorado land parcel came only a day after I talked with a young woman there about the donation of her beloved wild place. She asked me if we would save it after her death and I said yes. The next day she committed suicide on the site.

Which is to say I care deeply about the commitment we make to permanence. It can be wilderness on public lands, wild rivers, parks, or my favorite -- those places given by donors to be saved forever.

I have been watching a terrible growing trend regarding such places in the United States -- that of selling them after enough time has passed so the donor and most passionate advocates have died, the board of the receiving organization has changed several times over, and the land has increased in value. If no one questions such a proposed decision, then a sale is easy money for a new wing on the University law library, a church, or even to buy new computers for an environmental group.

The National Wildlife Federation sold a gift of land a few years ago that was on an island in the Potomac River near the Capital. The donor was still alive in that case and even though he was 90 years old, he fought them in court and out, and at least some of it was preserved in the end. The Federation has changed since then and I doubt would do that now. Nonetheless, when you add enough time to the commitment to honor a preservation pledge, strange things do happen.

Federal Lands are a huge temptation. The New York Times carried a front-page story recently about how the Army Corps of Engineers leases waterfront land for a dollar a year. A political lobbyist had just secured the development rights to one of those parcels. Translated, that means the lobbyist, by forgetting a huge fiscal favor from the Corps, would campaign at budget time to be sure the Corps got its typically extravagant funding for further malevolence on the land.

The Loma Prieta Chapter [of the Sierra Club] knows the story all too well with the recent possibility of flooding in Henry Coe State Park. While the threat from the water district may be reduced for the moment, the tracks for California's high-speed trains may be coming around the corner soon. The track is planned to run through many of the state parks that run the length of California, destroying habitats, wildlife, recreation space and historical sites, even though the law says parks can't be developed. That any development of these spaces is even considered is outrageous. The shocking fact is that over 200 proposals for various development projects in state parks are currently in the works. Of course what is often behind such development is the disgraceful business of political campaign contributions.

The point of this is that only the actions of citizen environmentalists can stop this outrage. Organizations from the level of the Sierra Club to local land trusts to community activist groups have the power to challenge such actions and to defend the land.

I have started an organization to focus on such defense, called Defense of Place. It is a guard dog, a junkyard guard dog, if necessary, and a powerful guide to assist people in preserving sites forever. It is an effective way to inform and organize volunteers to become guards themselves over defenseless properties. One of the tools we're building is an Internet database that will be an exhaustive list of America's preserved places.

We need your help. We need help finding lost places that were meant to be preserved forever, and we need to hear about places that have been saved by successful independent citizen action. Take a look at places you know, places where you live and places you remember -- the open spaces and the wild spaces, places that might have been left with the promise of protection. Contact us at Defense of Place, Fort Mason Center, Pier One, Building D, San Francisco, CA 94123; 415-928-3774; e-mail info@rri.org; or visit our website at http://defenseofplace.rri.org and tell us about them. We'll put your information to good use. We all have an obligation to deliver what has been passed on to us to future generations.

Huey Johnson is the founder of Defense of Place. He was the first Western Regional Director of the Nature Conservancy, the Founder of the Trust for Public Land, the Secretary of Resources for California under Jerry Brown and is currently the President of the Resource Renewal Institute.

http://lomaprieta.sierraclub.org/lp0401_DefenseOfPlace.html

Here's another carefully crafted article that is anything BUT what it seems on first read: http://hdj.rri.org/archives/2002lahills.html

Mr. Johnson's bio: "I was the Western Regional Director of the Nature Conservancy; I later founded and served as President of the Trust for Public Land. I was the California Secretary for Resources from 1978 to 1982. After that, I founded the Resource Renewal Institute. In 2001, I was awarded the United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize. I'm currently heading the Resource Renewal Institute and working on its newest project, Defense of Place." http://hdj.rri.org/bio/index.html The Water Heritage Trust (another of RRI's projects): http://www.rri.org/projects/water.html 

http://www.unep.org/Documents/Default.asp?DocumentID=225&ArticleID=2954

The UN Sasakawa Environment Prize: The UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize is one of the most prestigious environmental awards in the world. The establishment of an international environment prize was recommended at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. This prize, then known as the Pahlavi Prize, was first awarded in 1976. In 1982, the UNEP Governing Council accepted an endowment of US$1 million from the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation to finance the Sasakawa International Environment Prize, which would be administered by UNEP. Now known as the UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize, it is awarded annually to leading environmentalists and recognizes the work of these individuals at the global level. Since its inception, interest in the award has increased significantly as attested by the growing number of nominations. After serious deliberations and in the light of the kind of nominations received over the years, the Selection Committee recommended that all nominations be considered on an annual basis and that the Prize be awarded solely to "individuals who have made outstanding global contributions to the management and protection of the environment". The Prize aims to encourage environmental achievement in any field of the environment. The annual award of $50,000 was increased to $200,000 in 1990, making it one of the world's most valuable environmental prizes. http://www.unep.org/sasakawa2/brief.asp

Notice this 'connect the dots' link: http://www.cmsindia.org/cmsenvisnode/resources/environ_sustainabledevelop.html

Here's a part of the tangled web:

The Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition

http://www.bradleydesign.com/access/images/gate.jpg

Twelve miles east of Marysville, California, along one of the most important ate rivers in the American West, lie the Yuba Goldfields, a source of both great wealth and great controversy. Owned by the public, it is controlled by a giant corporate conglomerate based in Dallas, Texas. Capable of producing great recreational opportunities for all residents and visitors of Northern California, it is virtually closed to all but commercial hunting and fishing that caters to big stars like baseball's Will Clark and country music's Roy Clark.

Valued in excess of $15 billion for its aggregate supplies alone, the Yuba Goldfields provide very little benefit to the county in which they are located: Yuba County, one of the oldest and poorest counties in California.

In November of 1996, the Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition was formed to convince local, state and federal leaders to force the removal of a locked gate across Hammonton County Road, the only road through the public lands in the Yuba Goldfields.

For three years, the Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition has battled with county supervisors, negotiated with the Bureau of Land Management, informed on mining companies which have been stealing public resources and polluting the Yuba River, and developed coalitions of concerned citizens and groups to bring pressure down on the government and Centex Corp. of Dallas, Texas.

In March of 1999, the Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition was recognized in a full page ad in the New York Times by Defense of Place of San Francisco, CA, for its efforts in fighting Centex Corp. in an attempt to improve the economy of Yuba County through resource renewal.

This web site is devoted to the Yuba Goldfields and is an attempt to educate the public about the Access Coalition's efforts. Move your mouse arrow across any of the "gates" on the left to unlock them and enter the Yuba Goldfields, California's most exclusive gated community.

http://www.bradleydesign.com/access/

More about Defense of Place:

In March of 1999, by way of a full page ad in the New York Times, Defense of Place announced that its 1998 Annual Award For Exemplary Protection of Endangered Species and Public Trust went to the Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition.

Defense of Place noted that the under-funded, seemingly outgunned Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition had managed to keep Centex Corp., a Dallas-based conglomerate with annual sales of new homes in excess of $4 billion, from expanding its monopoly operations in the Goldfields and was becoming increasingly more successful in bringing the destruction of the Goldfields and the last remaining spring run of threatened Chinook Salmon to the attention of the public.

What is Defense of Place?

The San Francisco-based Defense of Place exists to create in America an improved sense of commitment to the permanence of landscapes preserved as part of our heritage. Defense of Place exists

Defense of Place believes the Yuba Goldfields is one such place, as its public value and potential revenue stand to benefit Yuba County communities, communities in surrounding counties, and all of California. That's why Defense of Place took steps to promote its vision for restoration of the entire 10,000 acres to the people of Yuba County and the United States.

The Defense of Place Vision

The fight in the Yuba Goldfields presents an opportunity for a remedy in the creation of the Carla Bard Salmon Sanctuary, a vision for recovery and utilization of the entire 10,000 acres for the public and for the endangered Salmon. The plan includes:

1. A 10,000 acre public preserve, with 6,000 acres acquired outright and 4,000 acres acquired by a royalty on the sale of public aggregate.
2. Renaming the area the Carla Bard Salmon Sanctuary, honoring California activist Carla Bard, one of the American West's most dedicated defenders of natural places, and creating a project protect wild salmon.
3. Creating a Trust Fund from royalties generated by the sanctuary to restore the Goldfields, the Yuba River and, eventually, all west coast Salmon habitat.
4. In restoring the Goldfields and creating the Carla Bard Salmon Sanctuary, the project will supply California's urban area with an existing, low-impact source for gravel. The sanctuary will be sculpted by low-impact removal of a thick overburden of gravel. As material is transported by railway, truck or barge to major metropolitan areas, it will enhance other rivers by reducing demand for mining of gravel in other Western watersheds.
5. Gravel from the site would be sculpted to restore and create new Salmon spawning habitat that has been destroyed by the intrusion of dams on California's rivers, which obstruct the natural spawning cycle of salmon and degrade downstream spawning beds. Replenishing sediment pockets for Salmon spawning can be done not only on the Yuba, but other, larger California rivers as well.
6. After a long hiatus, public recreation on public lands will be restored, offering the community a site for fishing, camping and hiking.

Defense of Place can be reached via snail mail at:
Defense of Place
Pier One, Ft. Mason Center
San Francisco, CA 94123

or by phone at: 415-928-3774

http://www.bradleydesign.com/access/defense/index.html

Notice the alignment of 'partners' with Defense of Place: http://www.earthisland.org/takeaction/connections.html (this is NOT a 'local' group; it's a "Think Global, Act Local" tentacle of a global organizational octopus)

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