Name: Douglas Parker
Position: Executive Director, the Rhode Island branch of The Nature Conservancy, a national nonprofit that protects open space, and the wildlife that lives there, by acquiring properties or helping other conservation groups acquire them. It has protected 11 million acres in the United States and Canada. In Rhode Island, it has protected more than 12,000 acres. For example, it recently announced the acquisition of nearly 250 acres of forested land in West Greenwich.
Background: Development director, The Nature Conservancy of Concord, N.H., 1989-1990; worked in marketing, operations, and branch management administration departments of M&T Bank of Buffalo, N.Y., 1985-1989.
Education: Master’s degree in public and private management, Yale University, 1985; bachelor’s degree in economics, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1976.
Residence: Wakefield
Family: Married, two children
Age: 45
NATURE’S GUARDIAN Douglas Parker with a map of Rhode Island open space.
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PBN: When The Nature Conservancy acquires a property, where does the money come from? Does the national organization contribute?
PARKER: The Nature Conservancy is a very decentralized organization. Each chapter is responsible for developing its own resources. Nothing comes from the national, although they do provide a lot of valuable services, like back office kinds of things that we would otherwise have to pay for, so that’s terrific. But we work with a lot of partners around the state. The vast majority of our projects we have not ended up with the ownership; it’s been our partners. So, we’ve worked with the state, and state resources are used for that. We’ve worked with the towns, we’ve worked with local land trusts. We’ve worked with Audubon Society, Norman Bird Sanctuary and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, too. So, we’ve worked with all these different groups – they bring resources to the table and we bring resources to the table, and together we try to find the funds to make it happen. And often we have to do private fundraising above and beyond the existing funds, and that’s how we fill the gaps. That’s why we’ve got a statewide capital campaign going on, to fill those gaps so that we’re not stopped by a problem of funding in moving forward on conservation projects.
So in most cases you’re helping another group acquire the property instead of buying it yourselves?
Yes. I bet (in) 80 percent of the cases our partners have ended up with ownership. We may actually be the lead on the project, we may negotiate the transaction, and put together the financing and the funding (there have even been examples where we’ve found 100 percent of the money), but the partner still ends up with the ownership. So, there are all different degrees of helping. We’ve been involved in many projects where the partners have been the leads and done 90 percent of the work, and we just helped with some technical assistance or small amount of funding. So, it runs the gamut, and every year there are projects that fit anywhere along that spectrum.
Even if you are in the lead on the project, do you prefer to have another organization actually own the property?
Not necessarily. We look at each property separately and assess how it ought to be owned and how it ought to be managed over the long term. And it really depends on each particular situation, and who the potential partners are, and whether they already are significant land owners nearby. Usually if we’re going to buy some land in partnership with a land trust, for instance, and they already own some adjacent properties, it just makes perfect sense for them to own this property, too.
Explain the capital campaign?
It’s $45 million privately. Overall, we hope to more than match that by state and federal funding. There’s an initiative to have a $50 million open space bond issue for the state– that would more than match it right there– and then we certainly hope that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies will find some additional funds and work with the congressional delegation to get those funds over time. In total, I hope it’s even more than $100 million. I hope it’s in the $125 to $150 million range over the next five to 10 years, because the need (is) certainly out there. The genesis of our campaign, and the open space bond issue, is the tremendous number of needs today.
Rhode Island (obviously we’re not a very big state), there’s only so much land. And land is being developed on a regular basis. So we’re steadily moving to that point at which all the land in the state either will be developed or protected. And that point really is in the foreseeable future; it’s probably somewhere in the 20-year timeframe. And in some towns it’s even shorter than that. And if you’re talking about larger tracts of land, it’s actually going to be an even shorter timeframe than that, I think. There are towns where the last hundred acre parcel, or larger, will be gone in the next five years, I’m sure.
What is the future of land conservation?
Future conservation efforts will be focused on much smaller parcels, and will have, usually, less ability to have as much bang for the buck. So that’s the beginning of everything, the urgency of what needs to be done. And we see it, and communities all over the state who are approaching us, looking for help to get this job done, they want to protect some land in their communities. I think every community does. And they don’t necessarily always have the expertise or the experience in doing that acquisition, so they come here and ask us for help. We literally get requests daily to do land conservation projects. Another piece of evidence of the growing demand, is the growth of land trusts. There are now 37 local land trusts in Rhode Island. And there must be four or five more that are trying to form right now. Many of those have formed just in the last few years. These are people who want to protect some of the critical lands in their communities and they’re trying the best they can to do that. We’ve decided one of our top priorities is to build the capacity of land trusts around the state, so we’re starting to develop a program of regular conferences to give people the opportunity to learn about (land conservation).
We’ve got to strengthen all these land trusts to the point where they can, more and more, initiate land conservation projects, and move them forward, and get them to the closing and ongoing management. That’s the only way, through the short timeframe that we have of five-10 years, that’s the only way we’re going to be successful in protecting the remaining significant open spaces in Rhode Island. We can’t possibly do it ourselves, the state can’t possibly do it by themselves either. The communities and the land trusts really have to do a lot more of it.
Are you optimistic that this can get done?
I don’t mean to sound dire at all. I’m very hopeful that we can have a significant impact over the next few years, and that with all these partners we really can protect some very large corridors of open space and protect some wonderful pieces of land that will be there forever for all future generations.
You say that we have a window of maybe five years for the larger properties and 20 years for the rest of the state, but each of the towns has a Local Comprehensive Plan, so shouldn’t they have some idea of what parcels they want to protect and what parcels they want to develop?
Yes, they probably should. Some of them do more than others. A lot of comprehensive plans didn’t get that specific. They said they wanted to protect something about the integrity and the quality of life in their communities, but they didn’t usually get down to the point of saying, ‘These are the areas we want to protect.’ So no, that hasn’t been done. Again, there’s a range. Some communities have done that more than others.
How is Rhode Island doing in terms of land protection in comparison with the rest of New England?
It’s very hard to compare states. I don’t know the total amount of open space in Rhode Island that’s protected, but when you compare it to other kinds of states, it would be low on the totem pole. And I know that if you compared it on a per capita basis, because we’re a densely populated state, we would come out very low on the list as well in terms of amount protected per capita. So there’s a significant amount more to do and there certainly are states that have done a lot more than Rhode Island. And even now there are even states that have much larger programs. New Jersey, which is the first most densely populated state in the country – we’re the second – has a $1 billion program, and that’s just state funding, and the counties and towns have close to another billion – just public money, I’m not talking about all the private work – and so there are certainly states that are doing a lot more than Rhode Island.
How does The Nature Conservancy work with the business community?
We do have a lot of corporate supporters, which is terrific. And we have some corporate leaders in involved with us. I think a lot of it has to do with the quality of life issue. We are trying to protect land, protect open space and communities. We take a market approach to these things, we’re out there just like anybody trying to buy a piece of land. We don’t force anybody to sell; we don’t have the right to do that. We’re working with willing sellers trying to buy their land. It’s that market approach to doing work that I think is appreciated. And then the fact that it does maintain a lot of values related to quality of life in the communities. And I think increasingly, we’re in an age where businesses can relocate just about anywhere they want, and those kinds of decisions are increasingly made based on quality of life. So if we don’t maintain that kind of quality of life here in Rhode Island, it will be much harder to attract not only businesses but great employees.
Part of The Nature Conservancy’s mission is to protect the wildlife that inhabits the land it protects. Is there a certain species that you are particularly concerned about?
I don’t know (that) I’d single out any species that we focus on. We are going beyond that to try to look at whole (ecological) systems. We are interested in protecting even common natural communities and common species if it’s the best example that we have. So, it isn’t a species-focused kind of approach as much, to tell you the truth, as it was in the past. It used to be more of that. It’s partly advances in conservation biology that have shown that you’ve got to look beyond the particular species, you’ve got to look at the whole systems within. We are trying to look at a much larger scale than we have in the past.
And the same goes for parcels of land?
There is lots of evidence that if you just end up with a bunch of isolated islands of open space, that the number of species on it will decline pretty drastically. We don’t want to end up with just a bunch of separated islands.
