Saving the Ranch: Conservation Easement Design in the American West

Rating:
Summary: Unique, intelligent, practical, and handsome
Review: Here in New Mexico you can see for 50 miles or more on a clear day-- and most of the days are clear. The views are astounding. But as somebody who has come to love these views in the few months that I have been here from Massachusetts, I am also aware how easily they can be spoiled: a powerline here, a radio tower there, a housing development thoughtlessly splayed out on a hillside can blight the views for hundreds of square miles around. With Edward Ranney's photographs, this book inspires us to protect the West's fabulous landscape and with Annella and Wright's text, it provides a practical step by step prescription for how to go about it. I particularly admire the case studies, where the reader gets to see how the principles have been put into practice and vulnerable western landscapes have been saved.

All the scenes are western, but the principles of land conservancy are the same whereever vacant land is threatened. Saving the Ranch ought to be on the shelf of every environmental activist who has looked at an inspiring rural landscape and asked him or herself, "I wonder how this land could be saved?"