The words “conservation” and “preservation” are synonyms, so it makes sense that they are often used interchangeably. After all, their definitions are nearly identical. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines conservation as the “planned management of a natural resource to prevent exploitation, destruction, or neglect” and preservation as “the activity or process of keeping something valued alive, intact, or free from damage or decay.” For conservationists and preservationists, however, this slight, implicit difference in connotation is significant because, in practice, it indicates a difference in how to carry out protection.
Preservation holds a marginally higher level of protection than conservation does as preservation sets out to completely limit human impact on natural resources and conservation seeks to protect resources from misuse. In other words, conservation allows for a small degree of human use – such as sustainable forestry or limited vehicle access – that does not waste or permanently damage a natural resource but would exclude a preservation classification because it may temporarily harm the wilderness.
At WildLandscapes, we focus the vast majority of our efforts on conserving landscapes for wildlife and people. This is, in part, because, as a strategy for combating the global extinction crisis, for protecting our water quality and quantity, and for climate resilience, conservation is efficient, effective, and sustainable. The same way in that humanity cannot avoid the climate crisis by just planting trees because there is simply not enough room on our planet to draw enough carbon out of the atmosphere, it is not a viable option to forgo protecting landscapes when efforts cannot meet the threshold for preservation.
In Florida, for example, WildLandscapes is working to put a 15,550-acre conservation easement over the Adams Ranch, which is the second highest ranked priority land conservation project in the State of Florida. A conservation easement is a voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and a non-governmental organization or government agency in which a landowner can sell certain rights of their property, or a portion of it, in exchange for accepting specified limitations on how they can use their land to protect its conservation values in perpetuity. With two-thirds of the land in the continental U.S. privately owned and public lands available to be converted to the status of protected areas limited, conservation must include private land. Conservation easements are an adaptive and foundational tool to habitat and biodiversity protection because they not only allow land to stay in private ownership by requiring it be used in a sustainable way, but also ward off mounting development pressures. As the state of Florida is growing at an alarming rate of 1,000 people per day, this sort of multi-use protection is key against habitat loss and fragmentation.
The Adams family has managed their ranch (over 50,000 acres) – consisting of native dry and wet prairies, mesic hardwood hammock, and Lake Marion shore – with sustainable ranching techniques that promote healthy habitat, protect wetlands, and conserve water. The Adams Ranch, which was founded in 1937 is one of the oldest cattle ranches in Florida, and is a leader in environmental stewardship and a model for sustainable ranching. Sustainable ranching involves the management of working land through a mix of modern and traditional techniques passed down over the 500-year heritage of ranching in Florida – such as prescribed burning for restoration.
Although a conservation easement will not devote land entirely to habitat protection, it will keep this key section of the Florida Wildlife Corridor “intact” for Florida panther and black bear and able to protect the water quality and quantity for over ten million Floridians. When cattle ranching is a $3 billion industry and takes up more than 5.5 million acres of land in Florida, it is crucial to support sustainable techniques when possible.
If you would like to support our conservation efforts or learn more about our projects. Please visit: wildlandscapes.org/donate.