Conservation is America’s birthright. As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, it is notable that among the many concepts America has given the world, conservation ranks among the most consequential.
Today, however, the tools and approaches that powered previous eras of American conservation are straining under the weight of new challenges.
Our public lands face a growing maintenance crisis, while slow-moving processes stymie the actions needed to conserve and restore them to health. Private lands, where most of America’s at-risk wildlife species are found, remain largely outside the country’s predominant conservation framework. And top-down decisions from Washington often lead to conflict rather than durable solutions.
How do we know that we are on the precipice of the next era? Eras emerge after a widening disconnect between the problems and the tools.
These challenges demand that we look back at how we arrived here and, more importantly, look forward to what comes next. Just as America's conservation practices evolved through distinct eras to meet the problems of each age, now is the time to design and implement new tools that fit the needs of our time.
A Look Back
America’s conservation tradition was born out of an inferiority complex with Europe.
In the years after our country’s founding, America struggled to find its identity. It was something that weighed on Thomas Jefferson in correspondence with old-world acquaintances. Europe was a place of culture and served as the custodian of Western civilization. It had castles and cathedrals, museums and artifacts of antiquities, art galleries and masterpieces, fine cuisine and high fashion. America could claim nothing of the sort. It was a hodgepodge of former extractive colonies and remained relatively wild—to the newly arrived Americans an undiscovered frontier, but for the Atlantic seaboard. Wealthy Americans traveled not as tourists within America, but headed east as innocents abroad to Europe on immersive Grand Tours to Paris, Rome, and the like.
All that changed with westward expansion. Beginning with Jefferson’s Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804 and continuing through the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, our nation entered a distinct age of European-American discovery and settlement. The wonders of the natural world that were familiar to many Native American tribes revealed themselves to explorers and settlers—steaming geysers and thermal features, groves of redwoods and sequoias, lofty mountain ranges and monumental rock formations, majestic waterfalls, raging cataracts in grand canyons, and herds of buffalo and elk silhouetted across wide open prairies. Our scenery sublime became the cultural asset America sought.
Suddenly, we had something that even Europeans coveted. We embraced the patriotism of place. And in response, sometimes too late, we created a certain notion of conservation and developed tools to protect our newly emerged national legacy. In National Parks: The American Experience, historian Alfred Runte describes how, with the glorification of the West and the showcasing of such dramatic scenery, “the nation slowly grasped the opportunity until the words ‘public’ and ‘protection’ were no longer far apart. Just as Europe had retained custody of the artifacts of Western civilization, so the United States might sanctify its natural wonders.” Conservation of the natural world became as much a pillar of our national character as freedom and democracy.
The Eras of American Conservation
Historian Douglas Brinkley reminds us in his trilogy of environmental history that America has seen successive “waves of environmental progress,” or “eras” of conservation. Admittedly, eras can be hard to define, but scholars like Brinkley have provided us with the construct of eras through which to view the evolution of conservation.
In 1872, Yellowstone became the cradle of American conservation when it was designated as the world’s first national park. But this was only the beginning.
Suddenly, we had something that even Europeans coveted. We embraced the patriotism of place.
The first great era of American conservation emerged at the turn of the 20th century—a time when the western frontier closed and a tragedy of the commons was developing on unclaimed federal rangelands and forests. Wild places and wild things were being treated as inexhaustible resources. Into this moment stepped a remarkable figure: President Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was more than a hunter and naturalist—he was a visionary. He saw that America’s most cherished landscapes were disappearing, and he believed that a federal government, as strong and robust as him, had a duty to protect them. He created the U.S. Forest Service, established the first national wildlife refuges, laid the groundwork for the national park system, and set aside more than 230 million acres of public land.
This Preservation Era focused on drawing lines on a map (sometimes actual maps sprawled on the floor of the White House) and saying: “Here, nature is protected. Here, it will endure.” It gave rise to the very concept of conservation as a public value.
But by the middle of the 20th century, pollution had become the defining environmental crisis and attempts to solve it ushered in a new era. In the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the first Earth Day, the federal government passed a sweeping suite of new laws regulating air and water pollution, many of them in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion.
This new Regulatory Era brought the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act. These regulatory laws represented another unprecedented federal response to environmental challenges, creating enforceable standards, empowering agencies to hold polluters accountable, and embedding an emergent culture of environmentalism into government law and policy.
But like the tools of the previous era, the regulations were designed for specific problems of the times. As decades have passed, some of our most-used tools have aged or become ill-suited for the dynamic challenges we face today.
Fifty years since the last major wave of environmental policy-making, how do we know that we are on the precipice of the next era? It seems that eras emerge after a widening disconnect between the problems and the tools. Today, many leaders in the conservation community now acknowledge the need for novel solutions to deal with novel challenges.
A handful of those leaders gathered in the fall of 2025 at the historic Murie Ranch in Grand Teton National Park to discuss the next great era of conservation. Anchored by the environmental historian Brinkley, they included a great-great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, visionary CEOs of national conservation organizations, former conservation leaders from both Republican and Democratic administrations, and a national park superintendent.
The small group convened in the cabin of Mardy Murie. Affectionately called “the grandmother of the conservation movement,” Murie was a naturalist and writer who, along with her wildlife biologist husband Olaus, dedicated her life to wilderness. It was on the front porch of this cabin that a group of passionate conservationists, including the Muries, drafted the Wilderness Act. And for nearly 60 years, the cabin became a basecamp for the conservation movement. It turned out to be the perfect setting to inspire a group of would-be inspirers of the next great era of American conservation.
As the Austrian Nobel laureate in economics Friedrich Hayek observed, all knowledge is localized, particular to a time and place, and when dispersed individuals are free to act on their knowledge, order emerges from the bottom up.
Despite the diversity of viewpoints represented inside the Murie cabin, many common themes emerged, including the need for grander collaborative-based approaches; a greater emphasis on local and regional problem-solving instead of conservation by bureaucracy; the importance of private working lands and being more thoughtful about tools that work for landowners; working across boundaries and large complex landscapes (e.g., the need to conserve wildlife corridors as opposed to simply creating or protecting parks or forests); solutions that value and work for people and nature; more innovation in funding; more market-based incentives instead of regulation; more reliance on technology innovations; the need for speed; and as one conservation CEO said, “decentralizing, derisking, and deconflicting.”
A Compass for the New Era
To those of us gathered at the Murie cabin, it was clear that those who lead our country into the next era of conservation should appreciate the historic efforts of previous eras, yet also recognize that we need to continuously learn and improve our tools for conservation. Rather than defending outdated processes, we must create space for new ideas and possibilities.
With that in mind, here are four cardinal points that can serve as a compass as we collectively navigate into the next era of conservation.
1. We must confront the management crisis on America’s public lands.
Our public lands are hurting. In previous eras, hundreds of millions of acres of federal land were set aside and designated for preservation or specific uses. But proper stewardship of those lands has often taken a back seat to the acquisition of more area or to a designation carousel of how to classify them.
This failure to manage our public lands property has had severe ramifications. National parks face $23 billion in overdue maintenance, threatening the ecological integrity of iconic landscapes, including Yellowstone and Yosemite. At the end of last year, for example, all the hotels on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon were closed due to significant breaks in the 12.5-mile long Transcanyon Waterline. Similarly, misguided fire suppression policies from previous eras have turned America’s national forests into wildfire hotspots, with roughly 80 million acres in need of restoration—a backlog that leaves our forests more vulnerable to insects and disease and less resilient to drought and climate change. And on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, the failure to address overpopulated herds of wild horses and burros combined with the spread of invasives like cheatgrass is ruining rangelands.
In the next era of conservation, the focus should be on conserving public lands through better and more active management, rather than acquiring more land that we can’t manage or selling off land that we need to manage. Conservation is a “use” of the land, no different than timber harvesting, oil and gas development, or grazing. And we should allow for innovative conservation leasing, whereby conservation or sportsmen’s groups pay market rates to help restore or conserve habitat like migration corridors, a concept proposed for BLM lands under the Biden administration.
It also means conservation needs to speed up rather than slow down. Tools of the previous era, like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, were established for the purpose of inaction—to delay or derail projects that would harm ecosystems and animals. Today, however, those laws are also stymieing numerous projects that would produce conservation benefits. Planning, process, and litigation are crushing the soul of much-needed conservation action.
Conservation is a “use” of the land, no different than timber harvesting, oil and gas development, or grazing.
For years, my organization, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), has been trumpeting the need to speed up conservation on public lands. But there is now a name for it. A growing movement has coalesced around the concept of “abundance,” inspired in part by the recent book under that title by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It has united traditional Democrats frustrated that government is not working as it should with libertarian-oriented reformers frustrated by the regulatory state. These strange bedfellows point to a path forward by asking the hard question: “What works to deliver affordable housing, scientific breakthroughs, or clean energy?” The management of our bedrock public lands should be added to that list.
2. Private lands are the next frontier of conservation.
Over the previous two eras of conservation, we have too often ignored the importance of private land stewardship. Almost any atlas of America tells the story. The maps within are colorful mosaics, with national parks in brown, national forests in green, and state and tribal lands in their own hues. But private lands are the white space in between. These lands need a vivid color on the map.
Private lands are often the best-quality lands for both humans and wildlife. When creating settlements, farms, or cities, people have long chosen to be near water sources or on fertile soils. Rock, ice, and desert were generally left in government hands. The story worth telling is this: 75 percent of all remaining wetlands in the lower 48 states are on private lands; 90 percent of remaining grasslands and 80 percent of biodiversity hotspots in the U.S. are on private lands; and two-thirds of all threatened and endangered species rely on habitat found on private land. Overall, ranches, farms, and private forests comprise 1.3 billion acres, while federal land is only half that number.
Encouraging the stewardship of private lands will require an expanded, flexible set of tools—many more than what we have today. Conservation easements, which compensate landowners for foregoing development, have been effective, but they have also fostered a limited way of thinking about private lands conservation. Perpetual easements are appealing to conservationists, but they are not always the right answer for people living on the land.
Flexibility and creativity require trust and the notion that those who own the land are more than just another “stakeholder.” It is their land.
Landowners need more stewardship alternatives, ones that might work to address their unique needs and issues. Additional tools, like habitat and conservation water leasing, wildlife occupancy agreements, payment for presence programs, compensation funds, virtual fencing technology, and other emerging approaches need to be accelerated to expand the private lands toolbox. Relatedly, conservationists in the business of private land stewardship need to embrace “property rights” and be able to say the term out loud. The flexibility and creativity that the next era of conservation will be based on require trust and the notion that those who own the land are more than just another “stakeholder.” It is their land.
3. We must pursue conservation from the bottom up, not top down.
Locally-led conservation efforts need to take the place of divisive designations or mandates from Washington. They will prove more durable. As the Austrian Nobel laureate in economics Friedrich Hayek observed, all knowledge is localized, particular to a time and place, and when dispersed individuals are free to act on their knowledge, order emerges from the bottom up.
For conservation, that means solutions should bubble up from those closest to the problem or landscape. That might mean members of a regional watershed group or the superintendent of your closest national park. It’s why so much of PERC’s on-the-ground work starts with listening to ranchers rather than parachuting in like paternalistic missionaries to explain why our way is better and proceeding to pile on restrictions and requirements that fall to the landowners to deal with. It’s also why we support providing national park superintendents, who enjoy the public’s trust perhaps more than any other employee of government, with more authority to experiment and to manage hundreds of millions of dollars in entry fee revenue generated each year by visitors.
4. Incentives and markets will need to play a more prominent role in the next era.
There is a growing recognition that conservation needs to work for people, not against them—as mandates often do. A leader of one of the largest environmental organizations in America wrote to me recently with an observation: “Solutions that last are those that benefit people’s lives. We need to move beyond the concept that pain today for some potential future gain is workable. Humans don’t respond well in that system, and change fails to stick.” When conservation pays, conservation sticks.
Consider the good, the bad, and the ugly of wildlife recovery. In previous eras, conservationists responded to the near decimation of wildlife by pulling some species, like bison, bald eagles, and grizzly bears, back from the brink of extinction. Earlier and enduring tools, including the outlawing of market hunting, the Endangered Species Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, worked to prevent harm to species but, in most cases, they have failed to motivate recovery efforts.
Of all the wildlife species listed under the Endangered Species Act over the past half century, only 3 percent have recovered and been delisted. While the act provides strict regulations intended to keep species from going extinct and has a good track record on that front, it offers little reward for recovering species. A landowner who helps a listed species is likely to be “repaid” only in the form of more oversight and regulation. Consequently, many threatened species lie in a kind of purgatory, not quite blinking out of existence, but still quite a distance from recovery. Improving wildlife recovery rates should be a priority in the next era.
When conservation pays, conservation sticks.
Better incentives can be the tool to promote progress on recovery. Incentives and markets align the interests of people with the needs of the environment. If you want more of something, then align the incentives. The tools PERC deploys with ranchers coping with critters—wildlife occupancy agreements, disease compensation funds, virtual fencing—all flip the script. They reward landowners for the public benefits they provide rather than punishing them for hosting wildlife on their property. This feels like a recipe for better endangered species recovery.
The Hinge Point
These approaches are not so much a departure from our heritage as they are a natural extension of it. Pillars on which the tools of the next era emerge. For those of us who recently sat on the hallowed ground that is Mardy Murie’s homestead, the message could not have been clearer: We stand at a hinge point in America’s conservation story.
Our hope is to return to the Murie cabin next fall to continue the dialogue and further advance a vision for the next era of conservation. Nothing could be more American than improving on what we have given the world and the grand inheritance conserved by our ancestors.
The locale and season never fail to inspire, as it did generations before us. In October 2003, when Mardy Murie drew her final breath at the age of 101 inside her cabin, she had just heard a description of the autumn scene outside. Leaves at their peak color, fluttering to the ground like nature’s confetti. A black bear in a tree next to the cabin gorging on serviceberries. The Grand Teton moody, moving in and out of the clouds. Now, her spirit seems to say: Fortunate are the few who can help write history even as we are living through it.
