| In this dissertation, I explore the changing nature of land conservation in the United States since the early 1980s. In particular, I focus on land trusts and work to explicate their complex relationships with the forms of neoliberal environmental governance that emerged during the Reagan administration. With this research, I aimed to study the changing nature of property ownership, governance, and the political economy of land conservation. In order to do this, I undertook three phases of data collection. I began with key informant interviews, following this up with a national-scale mail survey of 250 land trust groups across the US, and finished with in depth analyses of relevant phenomena at three case sites: San Francisco, CA; Grand Lake Stream, ME; and Denver, CO. The results are presented as three articles. The first, entitled "Breaking the Bundle of Rights: Conservation Easements and the Legal Geographies of Individuating Nature," looks at the growing use of conservation easement agreements by land trusts. The article brings together critical legal geography and work from political ecology on "neoliberal natures," using property as a central organizing concept, in order to illustrate the co-production of the spatialities of land conservation, political economy, and nature. The second article is entitled "A Hostile Takeover of Nature? Placing Value in Conservation Finance" and it sets out to understand the emerging field of conservation finance. In particular, this article aims to explain how and from what specific sources shareholder profits are being generated. This paper makes contributions to work in economic geography and political ecology on financialization. Finally, the third article, "Rural Rentierism and the Financial Enclosure of Maine's Open Lands Tradition," presents a detailed case study from the small town of Grand Lake Stream, in Northern Maine. The paper argues that timberland investors in the area have generated profits by enclosing common access regimes, and then commanding rent payments so that local sporting guides and camp owners are able to access necessary conditions of production. Finally, the dissertation concludes by reviewing the major contributions that this study has made to political ecology, critical legal geography, and economic geography. I finish with future research directions for work on land trusts and forestry. |
