250 Years of America — And the Land That Sustains Us

Some of our most meaningful work reflects the full breadth of the American story. Long before the founding of the United States, Indigenous peoples stewarded these lands for thousands of years. In Minnesota, we helped return more than 28,000 acres of ancestral forestland to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa in one of the largest land-back efforts of its kind. More recently, we partnered with the Tule River Indian Tribe to reconnect more than 17,000 acres of ancestral lands in California’s southern Sierra Nevada—linking the Tribe’s reservation with the Giant Sequoia National Monument and restoring habitat for California condors, tule elk and the southernmost gray wolf pack while returning stewardship of culturally significant landscapes to the Tribe. These projects recognize that conservation can protect not only extraordinary landscapes but also living cultures and traditions that continue today.

Our Legacy Places initiative reflects another essential truth: preserving history means preserving the places where it happened. We focus on three defining chapters of the American story—the Underground Railroad, the Civil Rights Movement, and Black culture and arts. By protecting the places where people sought freedom, advanced justice and shaped our nation’s cultural identity, we help ensure that future generations can experience the full American story—not only through books and museums, but by standing where history unfolded.

America’s working lands tell another chapter of that story. Since 1985, The Conservation Fund has conserved more than nine million acres of land valued at $8 billion in all 50 states. We have protected family farms on the rapidly developing edges of Charlotte, Chicago and Atlanta, helping ensure that agriculture remains part of one of the nation’s largest metropolitan regions, and that new generations of farmers can make an honest living. In Arkansas, we have conserved productive farmland that supports local economies while protecting some of the Mississippi Flyway’s most important wildlife habitat. Across the country, our work demonstrates that productive agriculture and conservation can strengthen one another.

The same is true for our forests. Working forests are part of America’s economic backbone, supporting more than 2 million jobs in the U.S. and generating more than $280 billion in sales and manufacturing, while the outdoor recreation economy supports over 5 million jobs and contributes $1.2 trillion in economic output. These forests support our rural communities, sustain wildlife habitat and provide places where people hunt, fish, hike and reconnect with nature. From the Stateline Forest spanning Alabama and Georgia, to the Lupine Forest along the Oregon-Washington border, to the Hilton Family Forest in Maine, we have conserved working forests that continue to produce timber, support local jobs and remain open for recreation while protecting the natural resources on which communities depend. Across the country we have protected over a million acres of working forests across 24 states, ensuring their history, traditions and opportunities continue as part of our American conservation story.

And we take decisive action when America’s most extraordinary landscapes face immediate threats. In Georgia, we worked with partners to protect the Okefenokee from deep-earth mining, safeguarding one of North America’s great wilderness landscapes for future generations. In Virginia, we protected Oak Hill, James Monroe’s private estate and the last founding father residence in private hands. It’s now on track to become Virginia’s next state park. Across the country, we move quickly when opportunities arise because we know that once land is fragmented or developed, the chance to protect it may be gone forever.

What unites all of this work is a simple belief: conservation is an investment in the next chapter of the American story—ensuring that the landscapes that shaped our past continue to support our economy, our communities, and the generations still to come.

As we mark 250 years of independence, we are reminded that America’s strength rests not only in its institutions, but in its landscapes—the battlefields that secured freedom and tested our resolve, the trails that expanded our understanding of the continent, the farms and forests that continue to feed and employ us, the parks that inspire millions each year, and the places that tell the full story of who we are.

The next 250 years of America will depend on our willingness to conserve not only remarkable places, but the stories they hold and the opportunities they continue to provide – for all of us.