Nature Conservancy

William D. Blair Jr., 79, a former reporter and State Department spokesman who was president of the Nature Conservancy, a land preservation organization, from 1980 to 1987, died Saturday at his summer home in Vinalhaven, Maine. He had multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disease. Blair worked for the State Department from 1959 to 1980, retiring as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs.

Mark Tercek had some horribly awkward moments after he left Goldman Sachs to run a U.S. environmental charity, the Nature Conservancy. At one of his first big staff meetings, he committed a total eco no-no by drinking from a plastic water bottle. When he got to work the next day, his new colleagues had left him a batch of reusable Klean Kanteen bottles. At about the same time, he went to a big event packed with luminaries in the environmental field and found himself face to face with Russell Train, founding director of the World Wildlife Fund in the U.S. "Who are you?"

CALIENTE, Calif. - A new land ethic is taking root on 31,900 acres north of Los Angeles managed by an alliance of environmentalists and cattlemen who want to preserve ranching as a way of life while also protecting mountain lions, black bears, golden eagles and other wildlife. The area encompasses three adjacent ranches extending 15 miles from California 58 in southern Kern County to the southern end of the Sierra Nevada. It is framed by forested hills and watered by streams roiling through overlapping ecological zones - the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada range and the Central Valley - making it among the most biologically diverse regions in North America.

The lonely Zumwalt Prairie Preserve in the northeast corner of Oregon features thousands of acres of native grasslands. It's not easy to get to, and less than 500 people a year visit, but it's an important place because it represents one of the country's vanishing landscapes. The National Park Service on Tuesday announced the designation of the preserve as a national natural landmark, singling it out as the best example of bunchgrass prairie that still stands. "It's a great honor to be recognized as one of the best remaining examples of this type of landscape," says Jeff Fields, northeast Oregon project director for the Nature Conservancy.

Mark Tercek had some horribly awkward moments after he left Goldman Sachs to run a U.S. environmental charity, the Nature Conservancy. At one of his first big staff meetings, he committed a total eco no-no by drinking from a plastic water bottle. When he got to work the next day, his new colleagues had left him a batch of reusable Klean Kanteen bottles. At about the same time, he went to a big event packed with luminaries in the environmental field and found himself face to face with Russell Train, founding director of the World Wildlife Fund in the U.S. "Who are you?"

A California conservation group is preparing to buy Staten Island in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta. The Nature Conservancy is one step away from approval to buy the island for about $31 million. The group says it wants to save habitat and farmland on the 9,200-acre island, where thousands of birds arrive each winter. The Department of General Services would need to approve the state grant money that will contribute part of the $31.4-million purchase price.

John C. Sawhill, who as president of the Nature Conservancy led the world's largest private conservation organization through a period of unprecedented growth, died Thursday at a hospital in Richmond, Va. He was 63 and had diabetes. Sawhill, an economist, business consultant and energy administrator for three presidents, knew his way around boardrooms and had headed New York University, the country's largest private university.

Once they bought out a New York real estate company. Once they pretended to be developers in Virginia. As the folks at the Nature Conservancy have shown time and again, there's more than one way to preserve wild lands. While environmental groups have been fighting government and development interests during the 25 years of the Wilderness Act, a little-known private group has quietly put aside nearly 4 million acres of ecologically important lands.

A unique preservation agreement between Orange County's largest landowner and developer, the Irvine Co., and the Nature Conservancy, one of the nation's largest private conservation organizations, is not only worthy of praise. It is worthy of emulation. The partnership should help preserve and protect huge tracts of open space and provides a model for what could be done elsewhere. Under terms of the agreement, the Nature Conservancy will manage 17,000 acres of undeveloped Irvine Co.

William Elfstrom, a 69-year-old Sherman Oaks businessman, stepped from a private plane with his wife, Shirley, onto the short, grassy landing strip on Santa Cruz Island after a 20-minute flight from Camarillo. "Sure a lot quicker than crossing the channel on the Navy boat from Point Mugu," Elfstrom said to Jim Sulentich, the Nature Conservancy official on hand to greet the couple for the weekend.

CALIENTE, Calif. - A new land ethic is taking root on 31,900 acres north of Los Angeles managed by an alliance of environmentalists and cattlemen who want to preserve ranching as a way of life while also protecting mountain lions, black bears, golden eagles and other wildlife. The area encompasses three adjacent ranches extending 15 miles from California 58 in southern Kern County to the southern end of the Sierra Nevada. It is framed by forested hills and watered by streams roiling through overlapping ecological zones - the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada range and the Central Valley - making it among the most biologically diverse regions in North America.

Imagine it is Labor Day 1924. You've just finished dinner on the porch, the kids are playing next door and the radio just tuned in: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Today's story is about bestselling author Gene Stratton-Porter. At this very moment she's building a castle in Bel-Air and making her garden a bird and wildflower sanctuary. " Today it's hard to imagine native bird Paris Hilton tending buttercups at her family's Bel-Air manse, but a century ago, before the Westside development was paved and clipped, nature conservation was a serious commitment for the rich and famous.

Meredith Bowen was getting tired of requests from Facebook friends to exchange make-believe pansies, daffodils and tiny cartoon characters for her "(Lil) Green Patch," a virtual garden that sprouted on her social-networking page about a year ago. She was ready to delete it, until she learned that the Nature Conservancy was getting a portion of the ad revenue generated by the game. "I've saved like 133 square feet of rain forest," the 31-year-old Holt resident said. Bowen illustrates both the potential upside and downside for charitable causes hoping to cash in on the popularity of social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Alaska's Rat Island is finally rat-free, 229 years after a Japanese shipwreck spilled rampaging rodents onto the remote Aleutian island, virtually destroying the bird population. After dropping poison from helicopters for a week and a half last autumn, there are no signs of rat life, and some birds have returned, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports. Rats have ruled the island since 1780, when they jumped off a sinking Japanese ship and terrorized all but the largest birds on the island.

Walt Disney Studios is turning box-office cash from its nature documentary "Earth" into seed money to plant trees in the rain forest. Disney had announced it would plant one tree in Brazil's endangered Atlantic rain forest for every viewer who saw the movie during its first week. According to Disney, the box-office tally hit $16.1 million, which translates to 2.7 million trees. The trees are being planted by the Nature Conservancy, which is trying to reforest 2.5 million acres in the rain forest.

Scientists plan to use satellite photos to count giant kangaroo rats, the first-ever monitoring of an endangered species from outer space. Biologists will examine the images to find the circular patches of earth denuded by the rats as they gather food around their burrows. From that they plan to get the first accurate population count of the rodents, a bellwether for the health of a parched plains environment.The Nature Conservancy study is focusing on the vast Carrizo Plain in California's Central Valley.

Plans to open for public tours the Ketchum house where author Ernest Hemingway killed himself in 1961 have been scrubbed -- a victory for neighbors who said gawking tourists would have disrupted their upscale neighborhood. Now the Nature Conservancy, the environmental group that inherited the house in 1986 from the writer's fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, plans to hire a caretaker and use the home for charitable events and fundraising.

The Nature Conservancy, an international, nonprofit conservation agency based in Arlington, Va., today has 645,000 members and has helped protect 6.5 million acres nationwide. But it had humble beginnings back in 1951. "That's when things were first starting to get destroyed environmentally," said Kelly Cash, the group's public relations director. "A group of scientists noticed that many unique places were disappearing. They decided if they wanted to save these areas they would have to buy them."

Efforts to restore the ecosystem on Santa Cruz Island to its native state reached a milestone this week as scientists said that a two-year program to eliminate feral pigs had been a success. Although the last confirmed pig death was last year, the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, which owns 75% of the island, have been monitoring the results of the $5-million eradication effort since then to gauge the program's effects. They say the island's endangered species are rebounding.

Richard H. Goodwin, a pioneering land preservationist and early president of the Nature Conservancy who negotiated the conservation group's first land purchase in California, a 3,000-acre stretch of virgin forest along the state's northern coast, has died. He was 96. Goodwin, who was a longtime botany professor at Connecticut College, died July 6 in East Lyme, Conn., the college announced. No cause of death was given.