This article appears in the 2025 Spring Long Trail News and was written by GMC Director of Conservation Mollie Flanigan.
In previous editions I’ve described the process of developing the Green Mountain Club Strategic Conservation Plan that outlines our road map to permanently protecting the Long Trail System. Plans are great, and strategic plans are even better, but even the best plan is quickly obsolete without the funding to implement it.
Before we developed the strategic conservation plan, the club’s land protection effort focused on a few high priority properties that hosted the Long Trail. The strategic conservation plan brings a system-wide approach to GMC, and that has enabled us to bring our vision for landscape-scale conservation to the attention of the land conservation funding community. And last fall the club received an anonymous $250,000 grant to fund implementation of the plan!
This means we can double our land conservation program effort for the next three years. It will enable us to lay the foundation for future land protection while still stewarding previously conserved land. We can shift from monitoring unprotected parcels and trying to act when properties go on the market, to a high-capacity and faster proactive approach to protecting the remaining vulnerable three percent of the Long Trail System.
This spring we are hiring a full-time land stewardship coordinator to expand the capacity of the program. Our goal this year is to establish or reestablish relationships and develop individualized approaches for the owners of parcels that host portions of the Long Trail and its side trails designated as Tiers 1 and 2 in the plan. We will identify the number of actionable trail conservation opportunities on the 54 parcels, which total 12,866 acres, and are owned by individuals, towns or institutions. We will address Tiers 3 and 4 in years two and three. We aim to work on three conservation projects each year of the grant.
The grant is a major advancement in GMC’s 39-year effort to conserve the Long Trail System. It includes a matching requirement, so we are working to identify more organizations and individuals interested in supporting this effort to protect the remaining 3 percent of the Long Trail System. We must raise $35,000 by 2026, another $67,000 by 2027, and $60,000 more by 2028.
Thanks to steady support from members and donors like you, the club’s land conservation program is positioned to start putting our strategic conservation plan into effect. If you would like to be a part of this collective effort, please consider a gift. I look forward to writing more about progress on the plan in future editions of the Long Trail News.
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