36 Planning land
Cumulatively a lot of land is protected in this way, but it is highly fragmen-
ted. Some resources can be protected in little parcels and some cannot. State
and local land trusts and environmental organizations usually have adequate
resources to protect only small lands.
National and state/province governments tend to have the most capital and
periodically invest in serious land protection. If conservation planning has been
done, especially valuable large natural patches or areas, the ‘‘emeralds” on the
land, can be protected. In large areas or patches almost all resources can be
protected. Non-profit or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), also, are major
players in land protection. International organizations often direct conservation
planning toward education and policy, though many also protect land. Some of
thelands protected are large, such as tropical rainforest in Latin America and
wildlife parks in Africa, including some crossing the borders of nations. National
non-profit organizations, also policy oriented, sometimes protect large areas and
sometimes small ones.
However, planning and partnering (collaboration) by various non-profit orga-
nizations and/or government bodies can also protect a large area. More com-
monly, conservation planning by different groups adds land to a nucleus of
protected land, in this way creating a large protected tract over time. Such
atract has multiple ownership, objectives, and management practices. Thus
different management in each section tends to favor different local resources.
Nevertheless large-area-dependent resources (Forman1995), such as an aquifer
or large-home-range vertebrate, usually do well because the different managers
clearly see the importance of their section as part of the whole.
Land-use planning occurs at all spatial scales from international and national
tolocal. Some African parks cross national borders to protect migrating wildlife
herds. National-level land-use planning is widespread including, for example
in the USA, investments in the development of highways and associated land,
transfer of water supplies between drainage basins, responses to disasters, dam
and irrigation projects, and the dredging of channels and harbors (Babbitt2005).
Still, the week-by-week decisions on tiny spots by local officials and local citizens
represent a gargantuan enterprise, which molds the future and fragmented face
of the land.
The protection of land occurs in highly diverse ways. Perhaps all cases have
two things in common: long-term protection, and protection of resources against
human overuse. Long-term is effectively in contrast to short-term, and typically
refers to decades, generations, or more, rather than years. Permanent or in-
perpetuity protection is often mentioned, but, at least in an urban region, that
probably means until urbanization or human pressure and activity degrades the
resource. Protection often means strong or not-so-strong legal constraints, which