Customer Reviews

From Walden to Wall Street: Frontiers of Conservation Finance

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As a conservation finance professional, I navigate and package financing options for land and water protection interests on a daily basis.

This book has stretched my thinking and added many techniques to the list of possibilities - it also focuses on the private market - the business - of land conservation.

Population growth and development further drive efforts to hold on to our natural and cultural identity. This book goes a long way in strengthening those efforts.

In addition, the editor blends history and financing techniques in an interesting and insightful manner.

A premise of this useful and provocative new book is that, as important as the achievements of land conservationists have been over a century or more (from Yosemite to the local bike path), much more land needs protection if we're ultimately going to "save the planet" (or something short of that). Further, editor Jim Levitt and his varied contributors know that today's political economy has changed dramatically, that the flow of capital, the power of markets, and the availability of new financial instruments have created whole new opportunities for those pragmatists and visionaries who "love the land" and want to protect it.

While the historical sweep of From Walden to Wall Street (extending from the Boston Common in the 1630s to Theodore Roosevelt and beyond) is fascinating, it is only the beginning. This is not just that usual tales of great wide open spaces courageous protected from rapacious developers. (Who could object to that?) Rather, this small volume serves as both inspiration and -- more importantly -- a road map to some of the new pathways to financing the protection of special natural and cultural lands in the 21 century.

Levitt, himself a former private sector management consultant, and his co-authors provide examples of and guidance on the most important emerging land conservation techniques. They offer an array of new perspectives - from a World Bank veteran, a corporate forester, and nonprofit entrepreneurs, among others - on the new world of land protection in America: innovative transactions that will utilize resolving loans, tax credits, limited development, carbon sequestration credits, and conservation banking.

I suspect that the leaders in land conservation - today and in the years to come - will know this important addition to the conservation literature.