Keep Working Lands Working

1. Home /
2. Blog Home /
3. LandCAN Background History - a Message to a Donor

LandCAN Background History - a Message to a Donor

Here is a summary on the history and background of why I created LandCAN as response to a request from one of our donors trying to understand the impetus of my jouney in this direction.

LandCAN was created by Amos Eno within two months of his departure as CEO of National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) in early 2000. During his last year at NFWF (1999) Eno initiated a private lands grant program which gave inaugural grants to the Malpais Borderlands Group, Cattlemen’s Land Trusts in CA, CO and TX and organizations like Sonoran Institute and Sustainable Northwest. The reason for this focused positioning of investments is 71% of continental U.S. is owned by private land owners, and over 80% of endangered species habitat is found on private lands, and the environmental movement has ignored the importance of conservation on private lands for many decades.

For more than a century the focus of the environmental community has been on protecting public lands, and enlarging the portfolio of federal land management agencies. Federal agencies today host a $35 Billion backlog on maintenance. and are ecologically impoverished as western forest fires attest over the past two decades. Private land owners represent the 21st century conservation market.
In 2000, Eno partnered with web designer Willard Dyche, and in 2003 they launched the LandCAN prototype which was called the Private Land Owner Network originally. Two early decisions were critical to the network’s design and success. First, we decided to neither host nor promote environmental advocacy. LandCAN and our target audience of land owners do not like state or federal bureaucrats telling them what they can and cannot do on their land, and they do not like environmental types telling them how to manage their land. This early proscription of environmental advocacy and advocacy organizations created a TRUST factor for LandCAN and our target audience. Secondly, every landowning family is different and idiosyncratic. It is impossible to anticipate the needs of land owners and their families, so we decided to include the entire spectrum of potential information resources for land owners. We host all federal programs targeting landowners-most of which are found in USDA agencies NRCS, FSA, USFS, and the Partners for Wildlife program at USFWS, Department of Interior (which was created by Eno with NFWF grants in early 1990s). We host comparable programs for all 50 states. We host non advocacy nonprofits including all Soil and Water Conservation Districts (3,300+), and all Land Trusts (1,523), and most importantly we host over 40,000 for profit service providers including over 4,800 consulting foresters and over 6,000 tax and estate attorneys. The latter is particularly important because of land owner demographics; nationwide farmers and ranchers median age is 61+, and forest owners are 71+, so all landowners need tax and estate assistance and intergenerational financial planning.
In 2007, we built our first of LANDCAN state conservation network, www.mainelandcan.org. Maine is 95% privately owned and over 85% of the state is forested. The Maine network is designed down to the county levels for all service aggregations. In rural America the more localized you make information access the better the market uptake. Landowners look to their
neighbors and peer groups for land management advice. Maine was followed by state networks built for California, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Idaho, Colorado, Texas, Virginia, Georgia. We also built
www.habitatcan.org to host proposed and listed endangered species which are dependent on private land conservation. This site currently hosts sage grouse conservation in 12 states, lesser prairie chicken conservation in 5 states and monarch butterflies in 11 states – soon to be 18 states.

Today (March 2022) LandCAN hosts 200,000 pages of conservation information, which includes 70,000 individual listings, and over 57,000 conservation resources, making LandCAN the largest conservation information platform on the internet. Our user traffic has increased by 20% for each of the last 4 years. We ended 2021 with 412,000 users and expect to average 50,000 users monthly in 2022. Our 2021 Annual Report will be available in April.

A recent McKinsey article (Miklos Dietz, 9 Feb. 2022) states:” nine of the ten most valuable companies on earth are ecosystem companies (Alphabet, Apple), which cut across industries and create value through a complex network of interconnected businesses.” LandCAN is a quintessentially Ecosystem company for the conservation sector. Dietz continues: “Covid-19 accelerated this trend. That’s because the fundamentals of ecosystems are so customer friendly. They provide a single door into a world of services. Ecosystems feature interconnected services that allow users to address a variety of cross sectoral needs in one integrated experience… they try to serve customers along their entire journey, often partnering with other companies in the ecosystem.” For example, if you are a landowner trying to protect your estate with a conservation easement you need the services of a tax lawyer, an appraiser, a land trust or government entity to hold the easement, often a consulting forester or biologist and an environmental lawyer to craft the easement to your specifications. LandCAN is the only organization hosting all these service providers in one easily accessible platform at no charge!

Today LandCAN is engaging private landowners with an array of conservation solutions at the rate of 50,000 users per month. In his book, Hot, Flat, Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America, Thomas Friedman makes two points. First, citing Clayton Christensen’s maxim for “disruptive technologies”, he explains “New technologies replace existing ones because they are cheaper and more consumer friendly.” LandCAN is free, and it is both cheaper and more consumer friendly than any government site. Second, and this, is worth underlining, given the environmental movements’ penchant for hyperventilating existential threats, “When it comes to implementing a green revolution, the more BORING the work, the more revolutionary its impact! If it isn’t boring, it isn’t green”. LandCAN, I will be the first to admit, is boring, however it works as our users attest daily. In the 1930s Aldo Leopold wrote: “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.” That was true then and it is even truer today.
A final point and key to LandCAN’s success is our singular focus on the Human Factor. As Drew Slattery wrote in the Farm Journal in October 2021: “Before they put their dirty boots on in the morning, farmers and ranchers are humans first. If we want to empower our nation’s agricultural system to be more regenerative, sustainable, equitable, and inclusive then we are talking about empowering them to do so. We are talking about changing humans…Farming is a business. It’s an identity, it’s a lifestyle, it is a hobby, it is a multigenerational family legacy and so much more. And to every farmer, it is something almost entirely unique. Every farm operation and every person making and implementing every decision on it is as unique as each person’s fingerprints…we can get better at driving change, by focusing on the humans-first… Farmers have to own this change. They have to lead and drive this change.”

That is why LandCAN is free, requires no subscription login, and why we host the entire spectrum of programs and services for conservation in rural America. You have to TRUST people to implement sustainable conservation activities. It works!