The Nature Conservancy: Conservation Through Cooperation

Abstract

W hile Antony and Cleopatra were holding hands beside the Nile, a juniper seedling was sprouting half a world away high in the craggy western mountains of North America . Bur unlike Antony and Cleopatra and their romance, that same juniper seedlinggrown into a tree standing eighty-seven feet tall and boasting a girth of forty-three feet-is still very much alive. The tree, the Bennett Juniper, is the centerpiece of a small natural area at 8,500 feet in California's Sierra Nevada. The preserve is owned by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a privately supported nonprofit national conservation organ ization. In 1970 the property's owner gave the juniper and the land surrounding it to the conservancy. The Bennett Juniper is just one of a number of "record trees" owned by TNC. The largest sugar maple in the world stands on a conservancy-preserved area in Indiana. In Illinois, two national champions, a water locust and a green hawthorn, make their home on a conservancy area. In the western mountains of North Carolina, a conservancy property holds the largest eastern hemlock in the Smokies. Other conservancy sanctuaries from the Caribbean to the far north shelter ancient stands, rare individuals, and national and state champions. Bur preserving record trees, or even entire forests, is not the real mission of TNC. Nor is establishing natural-area sanctuaries an end in itself. Rather, it is a strategy to accomplish the conservancy's single objective: the preservation of biotic diversity.