Watching my
baby grow up
By: Alan Harper / President of the Board
T
he staff asked me for a few reflections on
Terra’s upcoming fifteenth birthday. I can
easily say that outside of my family, watching Terra mature has been the most
rewarding thing of my life.
Terra started as a dream almost twenty years
ago, when there was a movement to establish “land
trusts” in Latin America. At that time, many people
were thinking about how to adapt conservation
efforts to different patterns of land ownership and
distinct conservation priorities. Leaders, in this process were The Nature Conservancy, The Lincoln
Land Institute, and Pronatura, A.C.
The need for a new local conservation organization became clear when the first fight to conserve San Quintín began in 1999. The owner of Punta Mazo and an international group of “investors”
proposed an enormous housing development of
15,000 houses that would destroy this pristine dune
system and poison the successful oyster farms in
the bay.
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APRIL 2016
As we formed our response to this development
(which was ultimately not approved by the federal
government), I met like-minded conservationists,
mostly Mexican, and we discovered that we shared
a common dream. So in the winter of 2000 we started a year-long process of strategic planning, which
resulted in the founding of Terra on April 20, 2001.