Local conservation has national and local impacts.

Across the country, land trusts are protecting lands close to home to improve our quality of life and the health of our local communities, while also addressing some of the greatest challenges facing our nation.

There's an urgent need for increased land conservation to address critical challenges facing our society. From conserving wildlife habitat, ensuring clean drinking water, saving family farms and protecting land for future generations.

The Economic Benefits of Land Conservation.

The conservation of natural lands and of working farms can generate financial returns, both to governments and individuals, and create significant cost savings.

In addition to health and food benefits, conserving land increases property values near greenbelts, saves tax dollars by encouraging more efficient development, and reduces the need for expensive water filtration facilities. Study after study has demonstrated the tremendous economic benefits of land conservation.

Conserving natural lands, working farms, and forests, and the creation of trails and parks are often viewed in terms of their costs. Yet these often generate financial returns, both to governments and individuals, and create significant cost savings to governments in the provision in services.

Preservation projects can have a greater economic return than the money initially invested into the project. This is not meant to state that conservation is always good and development always bad. Nor is it meant to diminish the importance of the environmental reasons for conservation.

Land Conservation Helps Protect Our Drinking Water

Open spaces help protect groundwater recharge areas. This purifies the groundwater and maintains sufficient levels to provide drinking water for approximately 40% of the town area and eliminating the need for additional publicly funded water systems. This process also reduces surface water runoff, which is very important for natural flood control.

Answer reproduced from the Tiverton Comprehensive Community Plan, 2006 Draft.

Undeveloped Land Costs Taxpayers Less.

Open space helps control the town's population density, thereby holding down public expenditures for schools and services, and consequently lowering the public tax burden. According to extensive studies done by the American Farmland Trust, undeveloped land costs taxpayers less than one-third of what it takes to provide services for residential developments, as indicated below:

Open Spaces Protect Our Wildlife.

Imagine a world without wildlife. No Great Egret, Glossy Ibis, Osprey, American Redstart, Yellow Warbler, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Cooper's Hawk. No deer or waterfowl. No trout of any kind.

When development forces wildlife to relocate—sometimes suddenly—or find other sources of food and shelter when habitats are fragmented or disappear altogether, competition for dwindling resources can decimate entire species.

Land conservation helps protect water resources for wildlife, as well as habitat and open space for their age-old migratory corridors and flyways crucial to maintaining their populations. As land stewards, private landowners and conservation organizations play a huge role in supporting wildlife. After all, wildlife and nature, in general, don’t recognize property lines.

Tiverton is the Land We Love.

Basically, it all comes down to this: Tiverton is the land we love, thanks in large part to its open spaces.

The benefits of undeveloped land go far beyond spectacular scenery. Open space preserves farmland as a way of life to feed our local communities; provides habitat and migratory corridors for wildlife; even mitigates air pollution and sequesters carbon!

At 1,214 square miles, Rhode Island is the smallest state in the nation, and some may wonder how it could possibly have any room for wildlife. Only New Jersey is more densely populated, so there’s hardly enough room for human beings. Our open space is at risk now more than ever. Rhode Island’s small size has us at a disadvantage in regards to state funding and large institutional donations that other more populated states enjoy.

And although we’re fortunate to have the state and federal system of parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife refuges, these public lands are not enough to sustain our human needs or the needs of our wildlife and biodiversity.

The Tiverton Land Trust’s mission is relevant now more than ever, as land conservation becomes increasingly important to our very existence.