Can people who strongly support conservation efforts find common ground with personal property rights advocates? A legal scholar who has studied the issue thinks the answer is yes.

Jonathan Wood, the vice president of law and policy at the Property and Environment Research Center, is encouraged by some of the Biden administration’s actions on respecting private property while trying to move forward on its goals to conserve and protect land.

Wood has built a legal career with a focus on environmental and property rights law. Known for his litigation experience in both federal and state courts, he has played key roles in pivotal cases concerning environmental laws. His expertise also extends to economic policy, an area in which he holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.

“To the administration’s credit, it commits itself to ‘honor private property rights’ and to support voluntary stewardship on private lands. Holding the government to that commitment is essential, of course,” Wood said. “But it’s an extremely positive sign that it has explicitly recognized that conservation should not come at the expense of private property rights.

“To ensure respect for property rights, conservation should be voluntary and encouraged through positive incentives. The Property and Environment Research Center, for instance, has been working with ranchers in Montana's Paradise Valley to conserve working lands and increase tolerance of wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” he said. “We view conservation as something you do with people, not to them. Therefore, rather than asking these ranchers to bear the cost of our conservation goals, we’re taking on those costs ourselves.”

According to The White House's website, the 30x30 initiative is a national conservation goal that aims to protect 30% of the country's lands and waters by 2030. It aligns with the America the Beautiful initiative’s principles, a broader project based on conservation efforts.

According to Federal Newswire, the 30x30 initiative launched by the Biden administration has sparked debates and controversies about what exactly it will entail, and how the land is going to be used. Additionally, balancing the acquisition of new lands while addressing the considerable maintenance backlog of current federal infrastructure, estimated at $19.38 billion, forms a critical part of these discussions.

Wood said there is a path forward that benefits both conservation supporters and private-property advocates.

“If the America the Beautiful initiative is implemented through private-led and voluntary arrangements like this, it is far more likely to be successful,” he said. “If, however, it’s implemented through top-down land designations and punitive regulation, private landowners may rightly perceive themselves as regulatory targets rather than conservation partners. Where the government’s actions are inconsistent with the values articulated in the America the Beautiful document, they should be called out for that.

“I mentioned above that there are sharp disagreements among 30x30 advocates about what counts as conserved land,” Wood said. “So far, the Biden administration has indicated that it considers healthy working lands, including farms and ranches, as conserved lands. That makes sense. Without the ability to operate a profitable farm or ranch, these lands would be subdivided and developed in many areas, reducing open space and wildlife habitat.”

The America the Beautiful Initiative shouldn’t, if properly implemented, affect farmers’ rights to use their land because their participation should be voluntary, he said.

“For decades, many farmers have participated in voluntary conservation programs under the Farm Bill or entered into conservation easements,” Wood said. “Those will presumably expand under the initiative. Private landowners are key conservationists. They own and protect 75% of the nation’s wetlands, 80% of its grasslands, and habitat for two-thirds of the species listed under the Endangered Species Act.”

He said the goal should be to reward landowners for these conservation benefits and encourage them to do more of it.

“If we instead make conservation a liability by strictly regulating wetlands, grasslands, and rare species, we discourage it,” Wood said. “Studies have shown, for instance, that private landowners preemptively destroy habitat where they perceive that as necessary to avoid federal Endangered Species Act regulations and the burdens they impose.”

Currently, conservation easements last in perpetuity; however, a new approach has been introduced where a sunset clause limits the duration of federal easements on private property to 30 years. This approach seems to be an aid for landowners in that it prioritizes the landowners’ rights for future generations if that is the best option, he noted.

“Permanent easements aren’t right for everyone. So PERC has supported shorter-term and more flexible arrangements, such as wildlife ‘occupancy agreements’ and ‘conservation leases,’” Wood said. “That said, taking options off the table by barring particular types of easements could undermine both property rights and conservation.”

As an example, he said if a conservation group and a farmer were negotiating over three options, there might be an unintended and undesirable outcome. If the options were selling the land to a conservation group and removing it from farming, creating a conservation easement that would allow farming to continue with measures to protect the environment, or agreeing to a payment to avoid some negative environmental impact for a short period of time, the end result could leave everyone dissatisfied, Wood said.

“If the short duration of number three means that conservation groups won’t pay much for it, taking number two off the table might push landowners into number one, even if that’s not the outcome they’d prefer if given the choice,” he said.