What drew me to the conservation easements as an area of research was the fact that they were a legal instrument that allowed private parties to conserve and preserve land in the public interest. And originally I just thought that was kind of a cool phenomenon that someone would say in perpetuity I don't want my farm, this wetland, this piece of forest to ever be developed.

And when we think about managing development we often think about regulation, but conservation easements put that into the quasi-public and private domain. and what's interesting for me is the last few decades the number of conservation easements that are actually on land has increased phenomenally both nationally and in Vermont.

And in Vermont, we have several land trusts that are basically facilitators of land conservation using a variety of financial mechanisms and bring money into the state both from federal money, from money that's been set aside by the state itself through its housing and conservation fund. But managing the future of Vermont, particularly in rural areas in terms of working landscapes, active farming, wildlife management that aren't owned by the state but stay in private ownership.

So then the question is 'what conditions do you put?', 'what benefits do the public get out of it?', it's really interesting.

When I see on the news, you know a, a discussion over a valuable piece of property that might be developed, and then you see a land trust form and they take it over either by direct ownership or by easement and its almost like the infrastructure to do it exists. And so the Vermont Land Trust, for example, has this hard copy atlas of every piece of conserved land in the state so you can look at maps and see all these farms and they have a glossy annual report that says 'we're preserving the heritage of Vermont', it's beautiful. About space and place and it's very very interesting because it really captures, if you like, this image of Vermont. But it goes beyond the image to these intergenerational values that keep land available for particular kinds of land users.

Now whether or not those farms are the actual, you know, black and white cows, or whether they're other kinds of farms, and whether the landscape really is the landscape that people think, that's a separate question. But the processes and values are things that are really pretty interesting to observe and to examine and to write about.