Seacoast conservation organizations struggle to outpace developers

The river rushes past the banks it strains to break. The wooded hillsides are full of seemingly untouched greenery, thick vegetation stretching to the fast, flood-swollen waters. Down the road, cows lie in fields of long grass in anticipation of the rains that are sure to come. The air is filled with the sound of chirping birds resting in the tree branches arching overhead. The clouds are thick and the air is still. A Mercedes drives over the bridge upstream; the hum and rumble of concrete and steel ripples out over the landscape.

If you look at things the right way, if you drive down certain roads, it’s easy to think that we on the Seacoast live in an idyllic, pastoral world, removed from the ever-increasing suburban sprawl spiraling out of Boston, inching its way up the coast. Pull out of the mall parking lot, turn off the highway, and in five minutes you are in dense woods or salty marshland or staring at the gently rolling fields and pastures of a family farm.

This mixture and balance of modern suburbia and traditional rural New England scenery and values have made the Seacoast an increasingly desirable area. But whether we like it or not, the Seacoast is changing. According to a study done by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire’s Forests, New Hampshire’s population grew by 81,000 over the past five years; 77 percent of this growth—63,000 people—occurred in the four southeastern counties of the state. This increase in population caused a rise in development: 20,000 new homes were built in southeastern New Hampshire between 2000 and 2004.

“You see it happening every day,” says Kristen Grubbs, executive director of Seacoast Land Trust, steward of Portsmouth’s Great Bog, among other parcels. “Open fields and tall pines replaced by housing developments; streamside cabins razed to accommodate towering second homes; favorite vistas changed forever.”

As open space disappears and natural habitats are altered or eliminated, conservation groups in the area buy up as much land as they can, protecting it from further development. Ideally, they look for large plots of uninterrupted, ecologically diverse land, but in an area that has been inhabited as long as the Seacoast and already seen wave after wave of growth and change, it’s not easy to find these ideal tracts.

“It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle back together,” says Dwayne Hyde, director of land protection for the Nature Conservancy’s Great Bay project. “We’re trying to reassemble land that’s been separated over time.”

Conservation groups work to protect land parcels ranging from five acres to 5,000 acres. They take what they can get and try to build up protected space around it, forming contiguous, viable habitats for the region’s wildlife and ensuring water quality and providing recreational and scenic benefit for residents and visitors.

“Conservation is about doing things for people,” says Jack Savage, the vice president of communications and outreach for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire’s Forests, or the Forest Society. “It’s not all for furry animals. It’s about clean water, clean air and a strong economy, especially in a state like New Hampshire.”

Though conservation is often seen as the pet project of tree-hugging liberals, Savage points to definite economic benefits as further reason for supporting conservation.

New Hampshire has relied on its natural resources to bring in jobs and money for hundreds of years, whether it’s due to the lumber industry or the tourism industry. The Forest Society, which actively promotes working forests, sees conservation both as a means of ensuring a healthy environment and a strong economy.

“If we get rid of forests, we get rid of a renewable energy source,” says Savage. “And we get rid of jobs. Not convenience store jobs, but real jobs with benefits and a salary you can support a family on.”

Despite the many benefits of land protection highlighted by conservationists, securing open land is still an uphill battle in the face of a booming real estate market.

“The work of land conservation isn’t easy. Nor is it simple. Nor does it come cheap,” notes Grubbs of the Seacoast Land Trust.   

“Conservation land is rare when you can find it and expensive when you do find it,” Savage agrees. “One of the challenges of a statewide organization like ours is to look at that situation, look at our ability to raise money, and ask ourselves, ‘Where will our resources yield the best results?’”

Funding is a constant problem for conservation groups, who face the challenge of matching sometimes multi-million-dollar bids from developers for lands they feel ought be protected. Grant money is available from organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but getting the money involves conservation groups in the time-consuming process of bureaucracy while they scramble to keep lands safe from the bulldozer.

“You have to jump through a lot of hoops,” says Savage. The Forest Society took out a million dollar loan to purchase a property at Moose Mountain in Middleton and Brookfield when the landowner grew impatient to have some compensation and funds were not easily forthcoming. “We’re still paying interest on that as we process the paperwork to get funding from NOAA. But we can do that; other groups might not be able to.”

The Forest Society was founded in 1901 and has over 10,000 member households across the state, giving it a degree of financial strength and flexibility not always available to other, smaller land trusts and conservation groups. The state-funded Land and Community Heritage Program has seen its yearly budget fall over the past three years from $6 million to $750,000. The program received 288 applications this year to fund preservation of lands and structures of ecological and historical importance, adding up to a requested $58 million.

With state resources falling short, those interested in preserving the Seacoast’s green spaces have to turn elsewhere.

Dwayne Hyde says when the weather is nicer, you can see the bobolinks darting through the fields along Lubberland Creek. The birds breed in fields bordering Great Bay, then make a yearly migration to Argentina and Paraguay. “They’re really extraordinary birds,” says Hyde. Through a wide window in the Nature Conservancy’s Great Bay office at Lubberland Creek in Newmarket, he looks out at the tall marsh grass that folds over from its moisture-laden weight. Near the office, the marshes blend into woods, but the windows face southeast where the marshes stretch into Great Bay, the land splitting and dissolving in the inter-tidal zone.

The Lubberland Creek Preserve has been assembled piecemeal since 1999. Now, it encompasses 231 acres of estuarine, grassland, forest and freshwater wetland habitats. Trails provide visitors with the opportunity to experience an ecologically vital habitat. On view as well are the results of the efforts of numerous concerned organizations in the area. A stroll through the protected woodlands demonstrates how priorities in the region have changed and continue to change; a collapsing stone wall reminds one that the majority of land bordering Great Bay was at one point cleared and farmed. The forest’s return is a relatively recent event.

A sign on the office door features the Nature Conservancy’s logo and motto, “Protecting the Last Great Places on Earth.” This sense of urgency pervades the speech of all conservationists in the region.

“We have a window of opportunity,” says Eric Aldrich, communications director for the New Hampshire chapter of the Nature Conservancy. “The longer we wait, the more expensive lands will become.”

The Nature Conservancy, in addition to holding and monitoring lands in the Seacoast, acts as the lead acquisitions agent for the Great Bay Resource Protection Partnership, a collaboration of the Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, Ducks Unlimited, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire’s Forests and others. While all groups involved have an active interest in conservation in the Seacoast, the Nature Conservancy is responsible for actually negotiating with landowners to put land into conservation.

“We have expertise in land conservancy,” says Aldrich of the Conservancy’s role in the GBRPP. “It’s something we do pretty well. We’re out there, sometimes knocking on doors when a developer’s just leaving. And it’s been working. If you look at a map of the area, you see a growing number of tracts marked green (indicating protected land).”

This cooperative approach often works best, and analyzing and prioritizing lands to preserve is a necessity in light of the area’s rapid rate of development. Conservation groups must set realistic goals, trading idealism for pragmatism. The New Hampshire Estuaries Project, among other tasks related to protecting the Great Bay estuary, uses its limited budget to conduct research that helps identify high priority lands for conservation, evaluating land based on its ecological diversity as well as its potential impact on the local water supply.

“I think prioritizing is the key way to go about conserving land, given funding limitations,” says Jennifer Hunter, director of the New Hampshire Estuaries Project..

“We don’t want to just throw darts at a map,” agrees Aldrich.

The New Hampshire Estuaries Project has set the goal of preserving 15 percent of the watershed land area by 2010. The watershed includes all bodies of water that directly or eventually feed into the New Hampshire coast and encompasses 42 communities.

“We’re hoping to outpace the rate of development,” says Hunter. “It seemed both a realistic and ambitious goal. With 10 percent of the watershed protected, we’re on our way. It’s still a race between conservation and development.”

Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of land covered by impervious surfaces—such as rooftops, sidewalks, roads and parking lots—in the Great Bay watershed increased from 4.7 percent to 8 percent. Studies show water quality deteriorates where impervious surface coverage exceeds 10 percent.

While the pressure to protect land is great and the opposition from development interests is strong, successes have been made. According to the Forest Society, the percentage of public and conserved land in the state rose by six percent between 2000 and 2005, meaning that 28.6 percent of the land in New Hampshire as a whole is either out of the hands of private owners or protected from development.

There is, as always, still room for improvement.

“The 15 percent goal is really just a start toward protecting key habitats,” said Hunter of the Estuaries Project’s ambitions. “I’m not sure it ensures anything.”

While international, national and state-wide organizations play an important role in protecting the Seacoast’s land, it is often individual landowners, regional land trusts, and municipal conservation commissions that have an impact on the future of our landscape.   

On Monday, June 5, the Dover Conservation Commission voted to recommend to the City Council the purchasing of a 14-acre plot of land currently owned by Brian Stern, a Dover attorney. The land, on the south side of the Cocheco River, off Tolend Road, will cost the city $236,250. The City Council will vote whether or not to approve the spending at their June 14 meeting. Stern’s property would provide another link in a chain of protected lands along the south side of the Cocheco already acquired by the city of Dover. The Dover Conservation Commission has spent approximately $4 million since 1999, preserving over 400 acres in the town, according to the Commission’s chair, Tom Fargo.

“I think we’re striking a pretty good balance between conservation and development,” said Fargo. “We’re doing the best we can with our available resources.”

When his former neighbors decided to sell, Stern bought property adjacent to his own with the intention of preserving it. Three new homes will be constructed, in addition to the one currently on the property, clustered in an area of five acres. The sale of these homes will cover the cost of the land.

“Ideally there would be no development, but then we couldn’t afford the land,” says Stern. “We’re trying to maintain what we have. If I didn’t buy it, it would be gone, and there would be 14 houses there now instead of four. The development pressures are enormous. Preserving land now is essential.”

If the Council approves the spending, Stern’s land will be put in easement, which means that it can never be developed. A city, land trust or similar organization purchases the easement and agrees to monitor the land to assure that the easement is not violated. The land remains the property of the current owner and, in most cases, can continue to be farmed or harvested for timber. Such is the case with Tuttle Farm in Dover. The City of Dover and the Strafford Rivers Conservancy are currently buying the easement rights to this 120-acre property. They have acquired 26 acres thus far, but an additional $2.8 million must be raised to cover the cost of the remaining land. Anna Boudreau, the executive director for the Strafford Rivers Conservancy, is optimistic.

“That partial success (of the 26 acres) bodes well for the rest of the project,” she says.

The Strafford Rivers Conservancy works with municipal conservation commissions interested in preserving open space and landowners who don’t want to see their property developed. Boudreau says that the Conservancy’s role is to help along those who are interested in conservation but unsure of how to proceed.

“Generally, people are concerned about conservation, but they’re confused as to what it is,” says Boudreau. “They don’t know what it really entails. Town by town, though, people are getting more organized. A town will form a Conservation Commission, but then they ask, ‘What do we do now?’ That’s where we try to help.”

The decision whether or not to preserve land is often a very personal choice for landowners. Boudreau attempts to guide them in their decision-making.

“I ask a landowner to consider what their overall goal is,” she says. “Are they looking for compensation from their land to create a nest egg for retirement or tuition or whatever? Or do they want to leave some legacy of preservation that will last forever? It’s not something that’s decided in one meeting. I tell them, ‘You could get more money and get it all at once, but you’ll be looking at a subdivision out your front window. Or you could preserve the land and know you’re doing the right thing.’”

Sometimes, landowners will donate their easement rights, but more often than not, the rights are purchased at appraised values. The benefit of conservation to landowners, in addition to ensuring the local landscape remains relatively unchanged, comes in the form of the so-called current-use tax break. Parcels of land larger than 10 acres that are undeveloped (excluding farming and timbering) are in current use, and the owner receives a significant tax break on the property. Conversely, when land is developed, a fee of 10 percent of the land’s appraised value must be paid to the town. This money often goes into conservation funds established by the town to protect remaining land.

The indication is that people on the Seacoast and the rest of New Hampshire are concerned with the continuing disappearance of familiar scenery and the last vestiges of our natural heritage. Jack Savage points to Nottingham, where residents recently agreed to pass a bond for $800,000 to purchase the easement rights to a 2,036-acre tract of woodlands.

“These people taxed themselves to protect this land,” says Savage. “Ninety-six percent of the townspeople were in favor. Compare that to the margin of approval for something like a new fire station or a school, and it’s astounding. Support for land conservation in the state is quite strong.”

In total, towns in New Hampshire voted to spend $8.4 million on land conservation this past year, according to the Seacoast Land Trust. The gains have been substantial, but conservationists and concerned citizens are quick to point out how much more there is to accomplish.

When you look outside your window at home or in your car, do you like what you see? What would you like to see in five, 10 or 20 years?

“There’s a lot more to do,” says Brian Stern. “Towns should organize now; they should find the funding now; and they should expend now, because the opportunities to preserve land are disappearing.”