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