 | CONSERVATION BASED DEVELOPMENT SERVICES New West Land Company is committed to doing public good with private means. Our developer and investment clients come from an ever-growing subset of the real estate profession that share this conviction. Increasingly, these conservation-minded professionals are our partners rather than our clients, bringing various skills and life experiences to the making (and conserving) of great places, of storied landscapes.
At the inception our land conservation practice, we thought of real estate development as the opponent (or at very least our counterpart in negotiations) in the sustaining of human and natural habitats. Very quickly we saw the potential of linking increases in land value with land health. Properly located, patterned and designed, land development (which includes all working landscapes, not simply collections of buildings) we recognized as both economic engine for increased cultural and ecological health, and as a source of conscious inhabitants that would stay with the place with a new sense of stewardship, ensuring its long term vitality. In this stage our participation in the development process was strategic and pragmatic, a pragmatism summarized by Wendell Berry: “Conservationists can’t conserve
everything that needs conserving without joining the
effort to use well the agricultural lands, the forests,
and the waters that we must use. To enlarge the areas
protected from use without at the same time enlarging
the areas of good use is a mistake.”
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