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History and Milestones of The Nature Conservancy
1915
The Ecological Society of America is formed. From its beginning, there is some disagreement about its mission: Should it exist only to support ecologists and publish research or should it also pursue an agenda to preserve natural areas?
1917
From the activist wing within the Ecological Society, the Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions, chaired by Victor Shelford, is created.
1926
The Committee publishes The Naturalist's Guide to the Americas, an attempt to catalog all the known patches of wilderness left in North and Central America.
1946
A small group of scientists form the Ecologists Union, resolving to take “direct action” to save threatened natural areas.
1950
The Ecologists Union changes its name to The Nature Conservancy.
1951
The Nature Conservancy is incorporated as a nonprofit organization in the District of Columbia on October 22.
1954
The Nature Conservancy grants its first official chapter charter in Eastern New York, launching a network of chapters and field offices that grows to cover the entire United States.
1955
Land acquisition, a key protection tool for the Conservancy, begins with a 60-acre purchase along the Mianus River Gorge on the New York/Connecticut border. The Conservancy provides $7,500 to finance the purchase, with the provision that the loan be repaid for use in other conservation efforts. The revolving loan fund that results — the Land Preservation Fund — is still the organization’s foremost conservation tool.
1961
The Nature Conservancy embarks on its first partnership with a public agency, the Bureau of Land Management, to help comanage an important old-growth forest in California.
The Nature Conservancy receives its first donated conservation easement, on 6 acres of Bantam River salt marsh in Connecticut. The easement allows the landowner to retain title to the ecologically valuable property while giving the Conservancy the right to enforce restrictions on certain types of harmful activities.
1965
A gift from the Ford Foundation enables the Nature Conservancy to hire its first full-time, paid president.
1966
The Nature Conservancy purchases Mason Neck, Virginia, as part of a plan to later sell it to the federal government. It is the first such deal of this magnitude with the government — an arrangement that comes to be known as a government co-op.
1970
Robert E. Jenkins joins the Conservancy as vice president for science and leads the organization to create a biological inventory of the United States, introducing heightened scientific rigor to land acquisition choices. The inventory provides the impetus to create the state Natural Heritage Network.
1974
The Natural Heritage Network covers all 50 states. Its sophisticated databases provide the most complete information about the existence and location of species and natural communities in the United States. The methodology becomes the national standard and is adopted by numerous partner organizations and federal and state governments and universities.
1980
The Nature Conservancy launches its International Conservation Program to identify natural areas and conservation organizations in Latin America in need of technical and financial assistance.
1988
With the purchase of $240,000 in Costa Rican debt, The Nature Conservancy completes its first “debt-for-nature” swap to support conservation in Braulio Carillo National Park. The Conservancy signs a landmark agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense to assist in managing 25 million acres of military land.
1989
With funding from the U.S. Congress, The Nature Conservancy launches the Parks in Peril program, designed to protect 50 million acres in Latin America and the Caribbean by helping local nonprofit and governmental organizations provide effective park stewardship.
The Nature Conservancy purchases the 32,000-acre Barnard Ranch in Oklahoma’s Osage Hills and establishes the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. Here, the Conservancy has undertaken its largest restoration effort to date, re-creating a fully functioning tallgrass prairie by reintroducing bison and fire to the ecosystem.
1990
A new office in Koror, Republic of Palau, represents The Nature Conservancy’s first expansion beyond the Western Hemisphere.
1991
The Nature Conservancy launches its Last Great Places: An Alliance for People and the Environment initiative, a multinational, $300 million effort to protect large-scale ecosystems by making people part of the solution. The initiative emphasizes core reserve areas surrounded by buffer zones, where appropriate human uses are encouraged.
1994
The Nature Conservancy opens its first South American office, in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.
1995
The Nature Conservancy adopts Conservation by Design, a cutting-edge ecoregional approach for setting conservation priorities and taking action. Drawing on the lessons learned through the Last Great Places initiative and guided by scientific data from the Natural Heritage Network, the Conservancy begins to employ this framework for identifying the suite of sites that must be protected to conserve the biological diversity of the Western Hemisphere.
1999
The Nature Conservancy's Membership surpasses 1 million.
2000
The Conservancy announces The Campaign for Conservation, an effort to raise $1 billion to preserve 200 Last Great Places and complete a Conservation Blueprint identifying the places that must be conserved to ensure lasting protection of our natural heritage. The Campaign concluded at the end of 2003 after raising a total $1.4 billion.
The Conservancy spins off its 85-center Natural Heritage Network into a new independent organization, the Association for Biodiversity Information (later named NatureServe).
The Conservancy and the Association for Biodiversity Information publish Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United States, the most comprehensive analysis to date of biodiversity in the United States. Precious Heritage warns that 1/3 of the plant and animal species found in the United States are in peril.
2001
Steve McCormick begins as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Nature Conservancy in February.
The Nature Conservancy turns 50. In celebration, 12 renowned photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and William Wegman, capture the rich and complex splendor of some of the “Last Great Places” in the Conservancy’s In Response to Place photography exhibit.
The Nature Conservancy acquires property for Oregon’s Zumwalt Prairie Preserve on the edge of Hells Canyon in Wallowa County. The Nature Conservancy's 42-square-mile preserve includes extensive native bunchgrass prairie habitats and wooded canyons descending to the Imnaha River. Creeks on the preserve harbor spawning grounds for endangered Snake River steelhead and chinook salmon. Zumwalt Prairie is also renowned for its concentrations of breeding hawks and eagles and other wildlife.
2002
The Nature Conservancy signs an agreement in January to purchase about 97,000 acres of one of Colorado's largest and most important natural areas – the Baca Ranch. The acquisition is the first of a complex series of transactions that by 2005 is expected to create the Great Sand Dunes National Park and a new Baca National Wildlife Refuge, as well as add land to the Rio Grande National Forest.
With a commitment of $1.1 million from The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund, the U.S. and Peruvian governments sign an historic agreement in June to protect 10 tropical rainforest areas covering more than 27.5 million acres within the Peruvian Amazon.
2003
Transforming a bankruptcy into a conservation opportunity, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and World Wildlife Fund, partnered with Chilean environmental organizations to protect the rare plants and wildlife on 147,500 acres of biologically rich temperate rainforest in the Valdivian Coastal Range in southern Chile.
The Nature Conservancy and The National Park Service jointly purchased the 116,000-acre Kahuku Ranch in Hawaii for addition to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The purchase increases the size of the 217,000-acre park by fifty percent, and is the largest land conservation transaction in Hawaii’s history.
2004
After more than a decade of work to conserve the 151-square mile Baca Ranch in Colorado, The Nature Conservancy completes the last of a complex set of real estate transactions, clearing the way for the protection of the ranch and the designation of the nation’s newest national park, the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
During a five-week expedition through Indonesia’s karst systems – limestone caves, cliffs and sinkholes – a team of international scientists led by The Nature Conservancy discover several new species, including a “monster” cockroach that is believed to be the largest known species of cockroach in the world.
2005
The Nature Conservancy, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and other partners announce that the ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to have gone extinct in 1946, had been rediscovered in the Big Woods of Arkansas.
