Tying Consumerism to Conservation

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

In November of 2008, even amidst a deepening financial crisis, Minnesota voters chose to pay more for the stuff they buy in order to protect nature. That’s when Minnesotans approved the Legacy Amendment to the state constitution, which raised the state sales tax by three-eighths of a cent for 25 years, to provide dedicated funding for land conservation, clean water, and the arts.

It was a long campaign to get the amendment to the ballot—one that started taking shape years earlier, when David Hartwell, then a board member on Minnesota’s Parks and Trails Council, began hosting gatherings with conservation leaders to grapple with the state’s long-term land conservation strategy. At the time, no such plan existed. With GIS technology still in its infancy, just getting an accurate statewide accounting of already-protected land presented a challenge. “Our 50-year vision was to know what we’d protected, know what else we wanted to protect, identify the gap, and figure out, How are we going to get there?” Hartwell says.

As this Campaign for Conservation coalesced, they determined a one-eighth-cent increase in the sales tax could provide enough funding—about $2 billion over 25 years—to protect the state’s critical landscapes through fee purchases and conservation easements. Partners and other groups, including a sometimes-uneasy alliance of hunters and artists, joined the effort, such that the final amendment for a three-eighths-cent sales tax increase created four funding buckets: 33 percent for an outdoor heritage fund, 33 percent to clean water, 14.25 percent to parks and trails, and 19.75 percent to the arts and cultural heritage.

Since 2009, the Outdoor Heritage fund alone has supported more than 600 projects, including the 2018 acquisition and restoration of 1,182 acres of grasslands and wetlands, and the permanent protection of another 402 acres of native prairie through conservation easements.

In recognition of his efforts to help enshrine land conservation funding in the state constitution, as well as his longtime service on the boards of conservation nonprofits such as the Belwin Conservancy and National Audubon Society, Hartwell in 2016 received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance.

Remarkably, Hartwell accomplished much of this while simultaneously serving as president of Bellcomb, an architectural panel-manufacturing business he founded. “It’s always been a dual career,” he says, noting that he joined his first nonprofit board in 1974, at age 18, and started his first business around the same time.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Hartwell reflects on lessons learned from the Legacy Amendment, why he doesn’t let himself walk around a property before making funding recommendations, and how getting people to spend a day immersed in nature could help change the world.

JG: It’s been about 18 years since the Legacy Amendment was passed in Minnesota. Can you reflect on the results at this point, and how they compare to your original expectations?

DH: We really perceived a need that would be covered by about an eighth of a percent increase in the sales tax … what we thought probably needed to be $2 billion over 25 years. In hindsight, it isn’t enough, but it’s made such an amazing difference—the amount of land that has been outright protected, either by fee or easement, as well as just the restoration work.

I don’t think we really understood the deficit of restoration and maintenance that was taking place. Prairies need to be burned. Wetlands that have been drained, they don’t come back on their own—it’s a big job to restore wetlands. Forests need maintenance because they’re out of balance. We didn’t really understand how much work there was on restoration and maintenance—enhancement is what we call it, but it’s just another form of restoration when things get out of balance. That’s taken more resources than anyone would have imagined.

JG: Can you talk about the durable popularity of land and water conservation, and how Americans tend to be willing to tax themselves to support the protection of public land?

DH: We don’t see a lot of pushback on general conservation in Minnesota. The biggest rub we probably have is with agriculture—[farmers] want to be conservation minded, but don’t want to give up their fertilizers, don’t want to have buffer strips, want to get the water off the land. There are no easy solutions. But by and large, farmers don’t want to do bad things, either. So in general, the support for conservation efforts is fine. When you get down to the specifics of ‘my backyard’ is where it breaks down sometimes, or what to do in the backyard.

We just reauthorized the Environmental Trust Fund here by a very wide margin (with 77.2 percent support). If you can get conservation to voters, they vote in favor. The public supports conservation when given the opportunity, in both blue and red districts. There are places where there’s opposition to conservation, but it’s usually not opposition to conservation overall so much as opposition to a project-specific issue.

JG: You’re one of eight citizen members who serve alongside a handful of legislators on the Outdoor Heritage Council, which makes recommendations on how funds should be allocated. What does that entail? And are there any projects that have come through in the past few years that you were particularly inspired by or proud of?

DH: It has been an incredible honor to be part of the council. I’ve been appointed five times, by both the House and the Senate, and by the governor. This year, we’re at $190 million for conservation in Minnesota. We’re doing three big land acquisition projects, more than what we would normally do for fee acquisition, but there were three opportunities that came up and they weren’t going to come again. With the restoration work, we funded what are called roving crews from the Department of Natural Resources, crews of eight to 10 people, I believe, that go out and just work on public lands and restoration, everything from removing fences to restoring wetlands and doing the things that have been ignored on public lands for a long, long time.

The other thing that makes me proud is seeing how different groups, while they’re competitors for money, collaborate on restoration and build complexes of conserved properties. It’s not an isolated piece here and there, it’s a landscape where you’ve got multiple partners working on multiple aspects where they have been able to develop relationships. To see all these groups working together to develop a matrix of protected property that truly is of landscape proportion is really exciting. And we’re far enough into it to actually see the results of that, not just see the promise of it.

I have a personal rule, and I believe it to be right, after 18 years of experience, which is never go out and actually walk a proposed project—because you fall in love with it, and you cannot be impartial and say, ‘This one is not as good as that one,’ once you’ve been there. I love them all. Truly, we don’t see many bad projects. You have to determine, for funding, which is the highest priority right now, and how do you prioritize A over B? Everyone has a different perspective on that. And the reason we have a council that’s made up of diverse folks is to help view those opportunities in different ways and ultimately come to a consensus.

JG: What’s something you wish more people understood about land conservation?

DH: I wish everyone could have a guided tour for a day, to just sit outside and see what’s really there that they just don’t have the exposure to, because that will change perception. If I could do any one thing, having everyone spend a day outside with a guide, really understanding what’s going on in natural processes, without interruption—I think that would change the world.

JG: Some states have set aside, or are considering setting aside, a portion of existing state sales tax revenue for land conservation. Do you have any thoughts on that approach?

DH: Taking a portion of existing taxes is probably not what I would recommend, but if you can get it, so be it. In that case, there are winners and losers, and you never want losers.

It has been incredibly helpful to have an independent council either allocating the funds directly, which is what happens in Colorado, or recommending that allocation, with the conservation groups working hard to ensure legislators listen to them, versus the legislators themselves. Legislators, they’re just people, and most of them don’t have conservation experience.

The other thing we’ve done, and I’ve recommended this, is that whatever body it is that allocates money, it should take a super majority to make a recommendation. Because what that does is it prohibits people doing ‘I’ll support your project if you support mine.’ A super majority makes it much harder to do that horse trading, and you end up with more sound projects.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

DH: I’ve been very involved in a lawsuit in Montana against US Fish and Wildlife, over grazing on a wildlife refuge, and their unwillingness to consider the harmful impacts of cattle on a wildlife refuge gives me pain. And what really keeps me up is knowing that that refuge now has no staff. You have these incredible resources that are being ignored by our federal government, through a deliberate plot to not provide resources to do the work, everywhere you look. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park System, the Wildlife Refuge System. If anything keeps me up at night, it’s those kinds of actions to destroy the public resources that we have, and it will take a long time to build them back.

As to the other part of your question, I would look at the success of initiatives around the country, in red and blue districts, to protect resources that mean something to people in their backyards. There’s huge support for it on a local level. That’s a really wonderful thing. It’s hidden, but it’s there.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, or a TV show you’ve been streaming? 

DH: I’m reading a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a little while—and it shouldn’t have been, but I can read about one good book, and then I need three that are just going to make me not think—called Sea of Grass [by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty]. It’s about prairies and how they have been lost. I’m only partway through it, but the first chapter, talking about what prairies are, was absolutely magical—describing what the value of a prairie is, and how it functions; I’ve never read anything as thoughtful as that.

JG: In your Kingsbury Browne working paper, you described the conflicting feelings you had about securing $3 million in conservation funding at one point—how it was an awful lot of money, yet also nowhere near up to the task. Can you talk about the decision to go big, and the courage, conviction, and far-sighted strategy needed to do that?

DH: I remember being at a conservation event and telling someone we were going to figure out how to raise a billion dollars for conservation in Minnesota. They probably don’t remember the conversation, but they called me crazy. You’ve got to have a big vision to achieve big things, and you’ve got to have the courage, and you also have to be willing to fail. You’ve got to take the arrows when they come and realize that you need partners to help you with that. And you won’t win all the time, but it’s worth the effort when you do succeed.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Lead image: Native prairie grasses at Minnesota’s Blue Mounds State Park. Credit: LMaru via iStock/Getty Images Plus.