A $9.5 billion organization intends to demolish a Vermont farmstead even as it aggressively pursues ownership of more of Vermont’s working lands, which it sometimes monetizes for its own benefit.

Republished from the McIsaac Highland Cattle Substack Page

In 1989, the Galick family sold their land in West Haven to The Nature Conservancy. For generations the family worked the land and followed the economic opportunities of their day, including forest products, sheep, mink, chickens, and dairy. They ran a repair shop for neighbors. In the process they created a precious mosaic of field, forest, and edge habitat that contributed to their land’s biodiversity and ecosystem services. They sold to The Nature Conservancy because they wanted the place they created preserved.

In the intervening years, The Nature Conservancy neglected the property, unwilling or unable to do the real work of maintaining and perpetuating what the Galicks built. It ceased to be a working family farm. Much of the land ceased to be tended. No buildings were kept up to sustain families, livestock, or enterprise. Thirty-seven years later, The Nature Conservancy in Vermont intends to demolish the buildings the Galicks entrusted to them: the icehouse, slaughterhouse, machine shop, cow barn, creamery, sheep barn, and farmhouse. The oldest dates to 1850.

The Nature Conservancy’s most recent Form 990 reports total assets of approximately $9.5 billion. Annual revenue runs in the range of $1.2 billion. Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Morris received $927,416 in compensation for fiscal year 2024. In the same filing period, the organization reported 466 independent contractors compensated at more than $100,000 each. The single largest was approximately $11 million, to a Chicago firm, for fundraising services.

An organization that can spend eleven million dollars in one year asking people for money is an organization that could raise money for farm buildings in Rutland County if it chose to.

Instead, The Nature Conservancy prioritized funding its own insatiable appetite for more of Vermont’s land, excluding this generation and all those to come from lives on the working lands it acquires. It is analogous to an animal hoarder who takes in ever more living beings despite being unable to care for the ones already in his keeping.

On its own website, The Nature Conservancy in Vermont describes itself as the second-largest landowner in the state. And since acquiring the Galick farm, it has pursued possession of thousands more acres of working land, pushed livelihoods off of it, and collected money from mega-corporations hungry for carbon credits. The Nature Conservancy has sold credits to BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and others elsewhere in the country, and has sold credits from its Vermont acquisitions in the California compliance market.

The Nature Conservancy knows the Galick farmstead is irreplaceable. It intends to destroy it anyway.

Beginning in 2016, the South Champlain Historical Ecology Project conducted multi-season excavations at the Galick Site, designated VT-RU-71, on the farmstead now slated for demolition. The Vermont Archaeological Society, Castleton University, the U.S. Forest Service, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, and The Nature Conservancy all collaborated. The buildings now condemned by The Nature Conservancy housed the tools of the archaeological investigation.

The dig established that the site had been in use by humans for more than eleven thousand years. The 2016 season alone recovered over six thousand stone flakes, dozens of fire-cracked rocks, and numerous tools. Researchers analyzed more than a thousand artifacts collected by the Galick family themselves. Archaeologists working the site described it as a central place for economic and social activity at the southern gateway to Lake Champlain, a confluence of trade routes that made it significant for millennia. The property was farmed from 1738 until The Nature Conservancy acquired it.

Today, concerned Vermonters received a form email reply from The Nature Conservancy:

When The Nature Conservancy tells Vermonters that it consulted preservation organizations and none could identify viable options, the question is how that is possible. The Vermont Division for Historic Preservation is a partner it has worked with on this specific parcel. A finding that the Division could not identify any path forward for a farmstead attached to a site of documented statewide archaeological significance would be remarkable.

The Nature Conservancy provided a second justification. It is declining to save the built environment because doing so is not its mission. That is its position. It is a harder position to hold while accepting a property from a family who sold it on the understanding that it would be preserved, and while describing yourself as an organization that appreciates and respects the farming history the land supported. The organization says it hopes to continue amplifying those stories “via shared learning materials.” What does that mean? An interpretive sign? That is little more than a tombstone.

The Nature Conservancy’s track record and behavior should be a red flag for every landowner considering how to pass on their land. And its position raises a broader issue for all Vermonters as we consider who will possess Vermont’s working lands and how Vermont will be managed going forward.

Virtually all of the NGOs operating in Vermont pay lip service to the value of our working lands and to the cultural, economic, and environmental benefits they provide. They do this because they know that farms, managed forests, and vibrant rural communities are dearly cherished by Vermonters. Our working lands form much of the basis for how we see ourselves. They define what makes Vermont special.

Yet in practice, The Nature Conservancy and several other NGOs lobby for, and act upon, an agenda that extinguishes the human relationship to our land. The destruction of the Galick farmstead is one example. What The Nature Conservancy has admitted is that its mission is a version of fortress conservation, and that it will absorb farms and woodlots, cast off people, and erase their history to achieve it.

Fortress conservation is an imported model that much of the rest of the world has been moving away from. Across disciplines and constituencies, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and throughout the Americas, it is increasingly seen as inequitable, regressive, and destructive to communities. Yet fortress conservation is being pressed on Vermont by organizations that should know better.

Act 59, passed in 2023, commits Vermont to conserving 30 percent of its landscape by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, tasked with the statewide inventory, defined conserved land as land under permanent protection from conversion. It did so at the behest of the NGOs and under threat of lawsuit by at least one of those NGOs.

Excluded from that count are approximately 2.5 million acres enrolled in Current Use. That is Vermont’s working landscape. Those are the farms and forests actively producing food, fiber, timber, and syrup. They are excluded because enrollment is voluntary and withdrawal is theoretically possible, notwithstanding that withdrawal carries a financial penalty and that the overwhelming majority of enrollees never withdraw.

Under the current definition, which The Nature Conservancy has lobbied to protect, essentially the only instruments that get Vermont to its Act 59 goals are permanent conservation easement and fee acquisition, the instruments held, brokered, and marketed by groups just like The Nature Conservancy. That would mean more farms like the Galicks’ consumed and extinguished.

Vermont’s most celebrated habitats are often artifacts of human hands. The Nature Conservancy notes with pride that the preserve it assembled around the Galick farm hosts the largest golden-winged warbler population in New England. The golden-winged warbler is a shrubland bird. It occupies the successional habitat that appears when people farm and use a landscape, and that vanishes when they stop. The Galick family logged, grazed sheep, ran cattle, kept fields open, and maintained edges on that ground for generations. The biodiversity the Conservancy takes credit for is in significant part an inheritance from the people whose buildings it intends to demolish.

The Nature Conservancy’s willingness to take possession of farms, abandon them, and erase the evidence of working lives reflects an elitist worldview that has been allowed to fester in Vermont. It holds that human presence degrades, that absence heals, and that the best thing we can do for a place is leave it. It is a position held most easily by people whose own livelihoods are entirely detached from land, who experience nature as recreation and scenery rather than as the thing that feeds them, and who will never personally be the human displaced.

These NGOs, in their own private dealings and in their influence over compliant legislators, have advanced a fiction that suits their ideology and also their power and enrichment. They have treated land-based Vermonters as a problem. Every bad decision by the NGOs and the legislature in recent years has been downstream of that worldview.

Rural Vermonters and working-lands practitioners of all kinds have had enough of this morally repugnant and ecologically illiterate trajectory. They hold that good work in a landscape is not a wound but a form of care, that practical knowledge is an endangered resource, and that a Vermont landscape without people is orphaned. The loss of a farm is the loss of the labor, knowledge, and continuity that Vermont’s landscape and ecology depend on. Every conservation dollar spent removing a family from working land is a dollar spent making the state’s ecological, demographic, affordability, and cultural crises worse.

It is time for the NGOs that have run amok to reform or get out of the way. Vermont needs something different:

Land-access and land-tenure systems that guarantee ongoing agricultural use rather than extinguish it.

A forest products sector treated as ecological infrastructure.

Land use policy that supports the farmers and rural landowners who create habitat rather than adding to their burdens.

Rural enterprise — the slaughterhouse, the creamery, the sawmill, value-added processing, the machine shop — treated as conservation infrastructure. Without it we become the neglected amenity of a privileged few and of institutional investors.

Thirty-seven years after the Galick family became perhaps the last people who will ever farm that land in West Haven, The Nature Conservancy is preparing to bulldoze the legacy of human life on it. The organization calls that outside the scope of conservation. It is a microcosm of the broken moral and practical relationship between Vermont’s institutions and Vermont’s people.

It is time for something new, and rural Vermont is galvanizing to deliver it. Rural Vermonters are reminding their state that tending land and local community restores wholeness and sustains family, land, and cultural continuity.

If we set the conditions for rural renewal, we move toward solving Vermont’s most critical problems, and we establish the conditions for future generations to choose, pursue, and continue the land-based lives that are available through Vermont’s one true competitive advantage: its mosaic of fields and forests that the NGOs seek to possess.

It is the most humane, forward-looking vision available in this state, and a crucial antidote to the exclusionary failures of several legislative cycles compromised by imported ideology.

The Nature Conservancy should worry less about lobbying legislators for more and take better care of what it already owns. The Nature Conservancy should employ preservationists, sawyers, timber framers, and tradesmen and women. And then put their land back to work. They’ve condemned enough rural livelihood. It’s time to invigorate some. Restore the Galick farmstead.

Vermont legislators should prepare for new voices in the committee rooms next year. Enough is enough. It is time to be done conserving Vermont from the people who made it, and start conserving it for them.