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Sanctuary magazine
President's Message
A Global Perspective on the Mass Audubon Model
by Henry Tepper
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As most of you know, during the past two months
I have begun my new job as Mass Audubon’s
President, getting down to the business of leading
this wonderful and effective conservation, education,
and advocacy organization. As I become immersed in
Mass Audubon, there will be many opportunities to
write about our projects and initiatives; but, for this
issue of Sanctuary, I thought I’d tell you about some of
my previous work advancing land conservation in Chile.
The central strategies we’ve implemented there will
be familiar and relevant to Mass Audubon supporters
because they were pioneered here at home and continue
to be used with great effectiveness.
My work in Chile began in 2006 when I was the
New York state director of The Nature Conservancy,
which sent me (and my family!) to Chile for four
months. The trip’s purpose was to explore ways of
increasing voluntary land conservation by private
landowners, adapting the methods used so effectively
by land trusts in the United States. Representatives
from both the public and private sector in Chile welcomed
me, and our partnership quickly coalesced into
an ambitious broad-based venture that we called the
Chilean Private Lands Conservation Initiative.
Increasing conservation of private land in Chile is
particularly appropriate at this moment in time. The
nation’s rapidly expanding economy is dominated
by four landholding, export-dependent industries—
agriculture, fisheries, timber, and mining. Chile
is strongly committed to increasing its exports of
these products, and the international markets it is
selling to are increasingly putting sustainability
requirements in place. So the need for the country
to move quickly toward sustainability is
paramount.
My Chilean colleagues and I began talking
to the leaders of the county’s major industries
about the land trust movement in the
United States. The Chilean industrial leaders
were very receptive, and before long the
initiative was advancing a comprehensive
five-part program with practical and flexible
tools for private landowners to take action to
protect their properties. These tools include
financial incentives for conservation-minded
landowners. For example, tax savings and
direct compensation; conservation easements/
restrictions in Chilean law; land trusts established
to help landowners take conservation
action; and sound science to ensure protection
of both rare and endangered species and landscape-
scale habitat for wildlife.
A great deal has happened in the ensuing six years.
Precedent-setting conservation easement-enabling legislation,
the Derecho Real de Conservación, was introduced
and is pending in the Chilean Congress. A widely praised
template was created for conservation easements under
existing Chilean law—the Servidumbre Voluntaria. In
2012, one of Chile’s first land trusts, Tierra Austral, was
established and has already protected key properties
using the Servidumbe agreement. Work is also ongoing
in collaboration with the Chilean Treasury Ministry to
implement tax reforms, adding land conservation to the
list of deductable charitable contributions.
A key collaborator in the Chilean initiative is Patagonia
Sur, for which I worked previously. Patagonia Sur is a
conservation real estate company that owns 70,000
acres of ecologically and scenically significant land in
Patagonia. The company has already protected two
of its properties, totaling 56,000 acres—a panoramic
8,000-acre mountain valley called Valle California and
a 48,000-acre coastal temperate rain forest named
Melimoyu, with critical habitat for birds including
the magellanic woodpecker, des murs’s wiretail, and
Andean condor.
The successful methods being adapted, embraced,
and implemented in Chile have been used for decades
by Mass Audubon. My Chilean colleagues and I have
benefited enormously from the years of hard-learned
experience and exponential achievements of organizations
like Mass Audubon and its partners. From
landscape-scale habitat protection, to templates for
conservation easements, to perfectly drafted nonprofit
governance standards and practices—Mass
Audubon has led the way. Henry Tepper, President
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