ORRRC at 40! The federal role in land conservation and outdoor recreation: reflections and directions.

When the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) proposed a federal Bureau of Recreation in 1962 to promote outdoor recreation, it didn't envision the explosive growth of nonprofit land conservation groups or the emergence of public-private partnerships that have laid the foundation for a new American system of parks and open space.

The bureau achieved significant success during its short life. (It began in 1969 as an independent agency in the Department of Interior; in 1978, it became part of the National Park Service's Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service (HCRS).) More than 25,000 parks, pools, baseball fields, and tennis and basketball courts owe their existence to the bureau and the $2.7 billion in state matching grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) that it administered until 1981. Yet there was a deafening silence in 1981 from governors, mayors and environmental groups when James Watt, President Reagan's secretary of the interior, abolished HCRS. State-side funding from the LWCF slowed to a trickle. Why? Because the program failed to nurture the constituency necessary to protect it from Washington politics.

Now, President Bush and Congress have breathed new life into the state grant program under the LWCF, minus the Bureau of Recreation. In part, they responded to the unprecedented need for an incentive-based, matching grant program to challenge local and state governments and the private sector to meet America's burgeoning outdoor recreation and open-space needs. For Fiscal Year 2002, lawmakers appropriated $144 million to be distributed to the states for recreation projects, a down payment on the funding needed for the state-side matching grant program.

The landscape over which state-side grant funds are distributed has changed dramatically since the ORRRC report in 1962 and the hey-days of the 1970s, when grant funding reached its peak and the Bureau of Recreation was in operation. The private-sector, nonprofit community has stepped forward to complement government efforts to protect millions of acres of vital recreation land and open space in communities across the country. In its most recent national survey, the Land Trust Alliance counted 1,263 land trusts. (There were just 132 land trusts in 1965.) These local and regional trusts have preserved more than 6.2 million acres in communities across the nation. National land trusts, such as The Conservation Fund, have protected more than twice that much land in the past quarter century. Clearly, communities are seizing the initiative and organizing at the local level to preserve and protect open space close to home. They represent a new dimension for creative public-private partnerships, with untold promise.

As development and population pressures continue, Americans increasingly are going to the polls to register their belief in the value of open space. Between 1998 and 2001, voters in states, counties and cities across the U.S. approved 529 referenda to spend more than $19 billion to preserve open space, a remarkable testament to America's desire to meet local open-space needs in communities across the country.

Earlier this year, California voters approved a $2.6 billion park, clean water and clean air bond, the largest natural resource bond in U.S. history The vote dispelled the myth that the environment is a luxury that only well-to-do whites care about--it succeeded thanks to the critical support of 77 percent of African-American voters, 74 percent of Latinos, 60 percent of Asian-Americans and 56 percent of white voters. The California vote gave voice to unmet urban and rural environmental needs, reflecting an ethnicity-blind mandate for parks and open space. Federal officials would do well to heed the call of popular sentiment for funding parks and open space.

More than ever, conservationists realize they must get ahead of the development curve and plan for open space conservation that is based on good science and backed by strong community involvement. When I began in conservation in the late 1960s, we too often were winging it. There was little science and even less thinking about setting open space priorities based upon shared information. Land conservation often occurred on a reactionary, haphazard basis.

Now, watershed and landscape level conservation plans, based on GIS regional analysis, are emerging as key planning tools to identify open space priorities, protect water quality and channel development where public infrastructure already exists. Such green infrastructure planning provides a strategic approach to smarter land conservation that repositions open space protection from a community amenity to a community necessity

In my home state of Maryland, I envision a future in which, on an annual basis, we match development by protecting--acre for acre--an equal amount of open space. We now can design, by fee and easement, a national open space plan as a permanent outdoor legacy for future generations.

Tomorrow, technology and watershed-based regional planning will foster new conservation approaches for the protection of working landscapes, where traditional uses of land, from farming to forestry, continue under conservation easements that promote sustainable activities, open new recreational opportunities and encourage conservation. The American Farmland Trust reports that 19 states have established farmland protection programs that, collectively, have preserved more than 1 million acres of working landscapes with 6,000 conservation easements.

Yet this is just the beginning. We're entering a far more creative period of partnership-based conservation with the private sector. For example, several states have passed bills that created state tax credits to make conservation easements more attractive to private landowners. It's now time for Congress to take a bold step for conservation by enhancing tax incentives at the federal level.

This spring, at the request of America's state natural resource directors, The Conservation Fund convened an historic gathering to bring together states' leaders in the natural resources field. They unanimously called for full funding for state-side LWCF grants and a new agenda to meet the nation's diverse open space needs, with the states serving as a primary delivery system.

Today's fractured mosaic of federal, state and local public funding, coupled with growing sources of private funding and the escalating popularity of conservation easements for the protection of working landscapes, demands a new federal framework to respond to the groundswell of interest for a linked national system of parks and open space. What's missing? A new federal coordinating entity to facilitate open-space planning by all levels of government, nurture public-private partnerships to leverage resources and maximize return on state-side LWCF grants.

Just a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt began an enduring legacy of federal lands for our benefit. Now, we are obligated to meet the open-space needs of the next generation of Americans by creating a partnership design for parks, recreation and conservation--a nationwide open space network of parks, rivers, landscapes and trails across this great land we call America.

Patrick F. Noonan is chairman of The Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit partner in land and water conservation based in Arlington, Va. Working with communities, public officials and business, the Fund's sustainable conservation and design programs (www.conservationfund.org) have protected more than 3 million acres across America since 1985.