Conservation planning in the west, problems, new strategies and entrenched obstacles q Stephanie Pincetl Institute of the Environment, University of California, 619 Charles E. Young Drive East, Box 951496, Los Angeles 90095 1496, United States Received 26 September 2003; received in revised form 21 February 2004 Abstract The United States is often considered the progenitor of conservation planning in the world, the first to establish a vast public domain, for example. But with continued population growth, conservation planning on private lands—rural and at the urban fringe—continues to be a substantial challenge due to a tradition of local home rule in land use planning and strong private property protection afforded by the US Constitution. New ‘‘bottom-up’’ collaborative approaches, as well as other innovative strategies seem to be emerging. How effective these will be given pressures for growth and high property values remain to be seen without a rethink- ing of ideas of nature, a rebalancing of the role of property in American local fiscal regimes, and of private property rights. Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Environment; Land use; Conservation; Urbanization; Property rights ‘‘all or nothing says the wilderness ethic... Americans have done an admirable job of drawing lines around certain sacred areas (we did invent the wilderness area)... [and] the only environmental ethic we have has nothing useful to say about those areas outside the line. Once a landscape is no longer ÔvirginÕ it is typically written off as fallen, lost to nature, irredeemable...’’ Michael Pollan Second Nature, 1992 ‘‘I really believe that in the next century that the most influential institutions on the planet will be nongovernmental organizations.’’ Steven J. McCormick, President, The Nature Conser- vancy, 2003. 1. Introduction One of the major challenges for the Western United States is planning for population growth. Whether it is in or around metropolitan areas such as Phoenix and Tucson, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Southern California, or in rural counties in Idaho, Montana, Washington or California, where growth should go remains contested. With the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and new environmen- tal protection legislation such as the Endangered Species Act, how land is managed, and for what end, now needs to take into account environmental protection. The twin 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.05.001 q This paper had its genesis as a keynote talk for the first annual conference of the Stanford Center for the Study of the American West, May 2003. My thanks to the organizers of the conference for stimulating my thinking and bringing together a broad range of academics and practitioners involved in land in the west. The paper was greatly improved by the comments of anonymous reviewers and Jody Emel, Geoforum North American editor; my thanks to them as well. E-mail address: spincetl@ioe.ucla.edu www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Geoforum 37 (2006) 246–255