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Planning: The Foundation of Conservation

• Conservation Assessments
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Why plan?

One hour. That's all the time it would take a fit hiker to cover the three miles of trails at Johnston Mill Nature Preserve. One hour to experience the culmination of more than 15 years of work. More than 15 years.

TLC opened Johnston Mill Nature Preserve in spring of 2001. But the Johnston Mill story begins back in the mid-1980s, when Durham and Orange counties conducted their first inventories of natural areas. The Durham Inventory was published in 1987, the Orange Inventory in 1988.

The inventories identified some of the most important natural areas in the counties, and both showed a lot of important land on New Hope Creek was under development pressure.

Through TLC, volunteers asked local governments (Durham and Orange counties, Town of Chapel Hill, City of Durham) to put up money to develop a conservation plan for the New Hope Creek corridor. A committee was formed. In 1991 the committee published the New Hope Corridor Open Space Master Plan. The local governments adopted the master plan into their land use plans. Durham hired a staff person to coordinate land acquisition. TLC volunteers got to work on it, too, making New Hope Creek a priority area.

The planning process created a community vision that got people involved and excited about maintaining their community's character and environmental integrity and shaping future growth to fit their goals and values.

Which led to the Johnston land negotiations, the New Hope Creek Campaign, the 296-acre purchase, the year-and-a-half of trail building, and a lucky hiker's one-hour ramble through some of the prettiest woods in Orange County.

Johnston Mill Nature Preserve is, more than any other TLC conservation project, a testament to the power of conservation planning.

Planning is not glamorous, not photogenic, not a lot fun to talk about. It's the behind-the-scenes work that makes popular land protection projects happen.

It is easy enough to say open space should be protected. But with limited resources—volunteer energy, staff time, funding, funding, funding—it's necessary to identify and focus on priorities. Which is why conservation planning is essential to TLC's land conservation program.

Planning helps TLC identify what land is important, which land to protect now and which can wait until later.