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Community Corner

Local Land Conservation Group Joins Initiative

Local conservation organizations join forces to create a collaborative sustainable living landscape for the Bay Area: the Living Landscape Initiative.

Five local conservation organizations in the northern coastal California region have joined forces to protect the beautiful natural open space in our backyard with the Living Landscape Initiative

The new initiative, announced Thursday, aims to protect 80,000 acres of natural open land and parks in Silicon Valley over the next 20 years. This includes the Redwood forests west of Menlo Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the complex ecosystems of the Peninsula baylands and South Bay region.

“Setting a large-scale vision for how nature can survive in the Silicon Valley region is the only way we can secure a viable, sustainable future for the diversity of life here,” said Audrey Rust, the president of initiative member group Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). POST was headquartered in Menlo Park for 30 years before its move to Palo Alto nearly four years ago.

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“There is a window of opportunity to get this work done now. We must do right by the land and seize that chance before it’s too late,” said Rust, a Menlo Park resident.

POST partners with Save the Redwoods League, the Sempervirens Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County to form the new initiative.

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The initiative will be funded in part by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and Palo Alto-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which donated an initial $15 million grant for the cooperative initiative.

The Moore Foundation aims to create momentum and encourage other organizations to donate to the effort. The Initiative, which hopes to raise $50 million in grants in the next three years, will purchase the land with the grants in order to conserve it.

“We're very supportive of the approach [the Living Landscape Initiative is] taking of looking at the whole region as an integrative system,” said Moore Foundation Program Officer Gary Knoblock.

“Clean water, clean air...all the elements that go into making this such a great place to live. We want to catalog progress of that,” said Knoblock.

The reason a collaborative effort between the five conservation groups is so essential is because land conservation doesn't end at county lines.

As long-time POST donor and pro-bono lawyer Brad O'Brien puts it, “Land conservation is regional. The areas that comprise [POST projects]–south of San Francisco and north of Gilroy—are really an integrated ecological system,” said O'Brien, a Menlo Park Resident.

“If you want to impact conservation of any part of it, you have to think about what's happening to the whole.” O'Brien explained how, for example, the natural migration of wildlife is not restricted to San Mateo or Santa Clara County, but crosses the entire region.

“If you isolate a group of a species to a specific region, then they begin to become inbred and it weakens them and their survival is placed at risk,” O'Brien spoke of the bobcats which inhabit the Santa Cruz Mountains in two counties.

POST's success has historically drawn most of its support from the mid-peninsula, including Portola Valley, Woodside, Palo Alto and Menlo Park. “Menlo Park is the historic heart of POST's support,” said O'Brien. “The projects have typically been what we view as our immediate backyard.”

It can be easy to forget in technology-driven Silicon Valley that the natural beauty of Huddart Park in Woodside or Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains are only a short drive away, but we must remember to protect these areas, said O'Brien.

“The economic base that we all depend upon and the quality of life that we enjoy is supported by the entire regions' open space resources,” he said. “We are very fortunate to live in the area that we do.”

Follow the Living Landscape Initiative's progress on their website, www.livinglandscapeinitiative.org.

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