It’s your land, you get to choose what to do with it; why not protect it?
Don’t just watch Montana vanish in tatters and shreds; get busy and hold onto it, the way you want anything you love to last.
We at The Montana Project know we live in the best state, and that it’s the land that defines us. In times like these it would be all too easy to despair over what’s being lost, changing in ways we don’t like. Action however can be a robust antidote to despair.
Even though there are millions of acres of private land and riverfront protected in perpetuity through conservation easements—protecting the open space that nurtures our souls as well as our economy—there are many more millions unprotected.
Whether you’ve just moved here or have lived here for decades, no matter: there’s never been a better time, here beneath the crest of a tidal wave of development, to keep your acres intact, a gift of open space and clean functioning ecosystem to the future: yours, and those who will come after you.
Slow down: what’s the rush to cube and dice something as amazing as Montana?
What is a Conservation Easement?
It’s a commitment to a certain kind of land management that is attached to your deed, so that the land will continue to meet your vision and goals for it after your death or if you have to sell the land.
You get to write the description —
keeping x amount of open space, for instance, and not subdividing the land—and there can be tax benefits to you for attaching such a stipulation to your deed. Lower annual taxes, as well as a reduction in estate taxes when you pass your property onto the next generation, are but a couple of the advantages; peace of mind that your land values will be protected in perpetuity on that land are an incredible primary benefit.
At The Montana Project, we’re happy to out you in touch with a local land trust in your area (there are over 1300 nationwide), who can visit with you about what you might want your conservation language to look like, and potential benefits.
From time to time we’ll profile some of the land stewards who are taking care of and helping protect Montana’s open space future in this manner. Some groups are familiar statewide; others work at a very local watershed level. One of our favorites, the Vital Ground Foundation, is interested in protecting farms and ranches that are in grizzly bear habitat. They have one of the most pithy and invigorating statements about their work—protecting lands that grizzlies need to survive—that we’ve seen: Where the great bear walks, all things prosper.
How Others Can Participate, and Why They Should Participate?
Make it stand out.
Montana is fortunate to have a wealth of private land trusts, non-profit entities that will help shepherd you through a custom-designed conservation easement that meets your needs and hopes for your land and protects it, well beyond your lifetime. There are a million ways to protect your land. There’s tribal land, private land, state land, county land, federal land—a shared ownership with every U.S. citizen. Check out and consider becoming active in any of the great number of small non-profit groups who defend and educate about their particular watershed: wherever you live in Montana, there’s almost surely one such group advocating for the place where you live. And what good times these are to lend them your support, on behalf of the values of connectivity, slowing down, and conserving.
We’ve never met anyone who wants Montana to become less Montana. Some of you have children, and family, while others are isolated. It doesn’t matter: the state connects us with its immensity. Helping make a better, stronger, wilder Montana is the best gift, best legacy, you can leave, when it comes time to leave this place where one desires to be more than anywhere else in the world. We do believe that to whom much has been given, much is expected; and here in Montana, we have been given so very much. Each day, it is given.
It's interesting to realize that whether this is your first year in Montana or ninety-seventh, to some extent we’re all newcomers. There’s the perhaps-obvious sense that unless one’s Indigenous, you/we came here from somewhere else. But even those who were born here and lived here forever are encountering, each year, a new Montana: one that is hotter, smokier, drier. At The Montana Project we’ll explore folks and projects directed toward adapting to the new abnormal of heat, drought, wildfire.