Nonprofit Land Bank Amasses Billions

Morine now says letting them in was "the biggest mistake in my life."

Becoming Big Green

The Nature Conservancy opened its doors in 1951 with a handful of staffers laboring out of a Washington office shared with another environmental group.

Early on, the Conservancy settled on buying land as its special niche in the environmental movement. In 1955, the Conservancy chipped in to help buy 60 acres of river gorge in New York and Connecticut. That simple strategy -- raising cash to buy raw land -- became known within the group as "bucks and acres."

Environmentalism bloomed with the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in 1962 and the sixties' activism that would result in the first "Earth Day" in 1970. In those days of turmoil, the Conservancy grew slowly but steadily and kept to its quiet land-acquisition strategy.

In the 1980s, the Conservancy's nonconfrontational approach paid off. The numbers tell the story. That decade, its revenue grew from $58 million to $222 million, and its staff surged from 77 to 933 employees.

In the 1990s, the age of the bubble economy and lavish corporate largess, astonishing growth occurred. Corporate donations mushroomed from $1.8 million in 1993 to $225 million last year. (The Washington Post Co. is a regular contributor, last year giving $1,500.) By 2002, Conservancy revenue had reached $972 million, more than 10 times the size of Sierra Club revenue.

Today, the Conservancy oversees 3,200 employees in 528 offices scattered across every state and 30 countries. The organization has many of the trappings of a Fortune 500 company: global reach, consumer focus groups, meetings with world leaders, sophisticated marketing and cost-benefit analysis applied to conservation. The group's "worldwide" headquarters is in an eight-story, $28 million building in Arlington.

"I really believe that in the next century that the most influential institutions on the planet will be nongovernmental organizations," McCormick said in a speech at the Conservancy's 50th anniversary meeting in October 2001. "I believe the Nature Conservancy will set that pattern."

The Conservancy now boasts 1,900 corporate sponsors. Eastman Kodak Co. vice president Hays Bell recently described the Conservancy as a "natural choice" for partnerships because there was "no conflict potential." The Conference Board, a nonprofit that advises businesses, said in a report on partnerships with environmental groups that the Conservancy is especially popular with corporate executives because of its "dependability in joint ventures."

McCormick said: "By working with corporations, which control a lot of land, which are very influential, we think we make a big difference."

The Conservancy's relationships with Fortune 500 corporations have become institutionalized. Its unpaid 38-member Board of Governors has included past and present executives and directors of major industrial corporations: John F. Smith Jr., chairman of General Motors, the world's largest car manufacturer; E. Linn Draper Jr., chairman of American Electric Power Co., the nation's largest electricity producer; A. D. "Pete" Correll, chairman of Georgia-Pacific Corp., the country's second-biggest paper products business; and A.W. "Bill" Dahlberg, former chairman of Southern Co., another leading power producer.