Landowners wanting to ensure that their land is never developed can sell or donate property or a conservation easement to a land trust, municipality, or a state or federal conservation agency.
One caveat of such arrangements could be giving up control over how the land is used. It might be the policy of the land trust to allow hunting on all the lands it manages, for example. This is true in the case of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, where without exception all donated land is open to hunting.
If you are in a position to donate land, be sure to choose a conservation group that will allow you to attach restrictions, including no hunting.
Wildlife as property owners?
Forward-thinking legal scholars are considering ways in which wildlife could own property.
It may sound far-fetched, but if you consider that the law already allows us to give property to animals — a typical example being a trust fund set up for a pet — giving land to wildlife is not such a crazy idea. (To learn more about this burgeoning area of law, we recommend reading Wildlife as Property Owners by Martha Nussbaum.)
In fact, the concept of wildlife having property rights existed in pre-colonial times. Some indigenous governments recognized an animal’s right to property as equivalent to a human’s. And why shouldn’t it be?