TNC, as it likes to abbreviate itself, also has a squeaky clean reputation for being "science driven, non-confrontational and businesslike," in the words of Daniel R. Efroymson, former Chair of TNC’s Board of Governors. It calls itself "Nature’s real estate agent."

Millions of people reading upscale magazines have seen TNC’s wonderful print ad picturing an eagle soaring above a majestic landscape with the great cutline, "We have friends in high places."

Certainly such a popular and non-controversial organization can’t be grant driven, can it?

Well, yes and no.

No, in the sense that The Nature Conservancy itself gives so many grants "to partner organizations" and has so many foundation and corporate moguls on its Board of Governors that it constitutes a consolidated power center rivaling even the archetypal Environmental Grantmakers Association.

It is difficult for the ordinary person to grasp the power, wealth, and connections controlled by the Nature Conservancy elite. The thirty-two members of TNC’s Board of Governors, plus its president and chief executive officer, include at least seven foundation officers and at least nine corporate officers, current or former. Retired or former corporate and foundation officials do not entirely lose their influence, and in fact may gain through board positions such as the popular Nature Conservancy. The public policy influenced by this small group of people touches millions of lives every day, but few are aware.

The late John C. Sawhill was president and chief executive officer of The Nature Conservancy ($203,723 salary, 1998) and was a walking influence center by himself. He was president emeritus of New York University, chair of the H. John Heinz, III, Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment, and chair of the Electric Power Research Institute Advisory Council. He was a member of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development and the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Institution, a board member of Environment for the Americas, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He was a former partner of McKinsey & Company, Inc. and a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy.

Sawhill’s unpaid position with the Heinz Center indicated that he was one of Teresa Heinz’s favorite people. It was her $20 million grant that created the Center, recall. And she gives generously to TNC.

TNC has 274 employees and officers who are paid over $50,000 a year each. In 1996, TNC paid 50 firms or individuals over $50,000 for consulting, fundraising, legal counsel and other professional services. TNC paid out $15,792,253 in grants to partner organizations.

TNC is not only Nature’s real estate agent, it’s not doing bad as Nature’s securities investor, either: in 2000 it received $171,764,755 from its securities investment portfolio. What exactly all this securities trading has to do with saving nature is open to question, since TNC’s securities investment portfolio is standard rich folks stuff with a lot of common and preferred stock in "capitalist, polluting, toxic, desecrating, bad-nasty corporations," mixed with mutual funds, bonds and U.S. government obligations totaling $1,051,959,170 in 2000. That doesn't count other investments worth $165,202,224.

Then there’s the real estate. TNC say it owns or has under conservation easement 1,177,000 acres in its private preserve system. Good. TNC also says it has protected 10.5 million acres in the United States. Good. If they own only 1.17 million of that 10.5 million, what happened to the other 9.3 million acres?

They sold a lot of it to the government.

Whoa.

The Nature Conservancy bought private land from private owners who thought it would remain in private hands and sold it to the government?

Yep.

Isn’t that illegal?

Nope.

The government asks them to do it some of the time.

In this and numerous other letters, the government clearly agrees to pay TNC "in excess of the approved appraisal value."

One federal officer who conducted such excess-cost purchases, Robert Miller, a chief of the realty division of the USFWS, was later hired by TNC at a high salary.

The Nature Conservancy is a conduit for the nationalization of private property. Nearly ten million acres so far.

Is it still going on?

According to the most recent figures available, in 1996 TNC received $37,853,205, or 11% of its total income, from sale of private land to federal, state, and local governments for use as parks, recreational areas, and nature preserves. Such land goes off the local tax rolls.

On top of that, The Nature Conservancy gets government grants and contracts worth millions each year. Green welfare. In 1996 they got $33,297,707, or 10% of their total income, from government contracts.

So Nature’s real estate agent, which asks you to join up for 25, 35 or 50 bucks, was already in your taxpaying pockets to the tune of $71,150,912 in 1996.

TNC is a public charity, according to the IRS. Why doesn’t TNC give the land to the government? What, and miss 37 million bucks?

Maybe TNC is a little greedy, and maybe not very "science driven," but those quiet land deals are more or less "non-confrontational and businesslike," as board member Efroymson claimed. Two out of three’s not bad.

Then there’s the case of the Moraine Nature Preserve in Indiana. It’s also known as Gibbs v. The Nature Conservancy, Case H92-0371, Federal District Court for the State of Indiana, Northern District.

TNC helped create Indiana’s Moraine Nature Preserve and wanted to enlarge it. They particularly wanted to enlarge it with the 135-acre farm of Professor Frederic A. Gibbs, M.D., now deceased. According to court papers, TNC also wanted to increase their income with Dr. Gibbs’ entire estate.

Professor Frederic A. Gibbs, M.D. was a world famous neurologist. He and his wife, Erna, pioneered the field of electroencephalography (EEG) and in 1951 they received the coveted Lasker Award in Medicine for their work.

Their son, Dr. Erich Gibbs, said: "After my mother died of cancer in 1987, Dad’s health declined sharply. He transferred responsibility for his affairs to my brother and me."

Both sons are also medical researchers.

"In his waning years, my father became legally blind, physically frail, and increasingly confused. By the time he was 84, he could not read, even with powerful magnification. As his Alzheimer’s-like condition worsened, he became increasingly irascible, hating to be supervised. Caring for him became more and more difficult.

"Toward the end, the only place that he seemed reasonably at peace was on the Gibbs family farm in the northwest corner of Indiana, very close to Valparaiso. Here, with the help of dear friends, we carefully choreographed round-the-clock care so as to avoid fueling his paranoia about being supervised.

"During the summer of 1991, a neighbor accidentally wounded himself in the side with a shotgun and struggled to Fred’s home. While the frantic caregivers called for emergency response and rendered first aid, this great physician, who had more than once in his career tended an injured person in circumstances of great personal risk, just wandered around the yard unconcerned, unable to grasp the significance of the situation.

"Things went as well as could be expected until The Nature Conservancy and local TNC supporters barged onto the scene.

"Behaving as friends and loved ones, this group offered to take Fred for outings and to participate in his care. In point of fact, they charged expensive lunches to his credit cards; secretly rifled through all the private papers in his home; took him to meet with attorneys; and turned him against his family.

"They wanted the Gibbs farm and Fred’s estate, which they imagined to be worth millions, in order to expand their pet project, the Moraine Nature Preserve. This ‘preserve’ is hardly pristine. It is adjacent to what is perhaps the most notorious landfill in Indiana. And almost all of the land that has been acquired for the preserve has, like the Gibbs farm, been completely plowed and grazed during the past century.

"When the plot surfaced, TNC believed it had already acquired critical documents that would turn over Fred’s estate and the farm to TNC upon his death. Supposedly he had carefully read, fully understood, and signed a new will that would leave virtually everything to TNC and nothing to his family.

"The Gibbs family, accompanied by legal counsel, met with TNC attorneys to explain that TNC had all its facts wrong—Fred had not been competent for years; had actively campaigned against TNC when he was vigorous, was not wealthy (having donated large sums to medical research); and had no control over his estate, which included only a partial interest in the family farm. We had what we perceived to be overwhelming medical and legal documentation, which included affidavits from scores of Fred’s esteemed medical colleagues. This information was offered to the highest levels of TNC management. TNC’s response was to ignore the evidence and accuse the family of having defrauded Fred and thereby TNC, as the beneficiary of Fred’s estate.

"There was nothing the family could legally do to deny TNC and their supporters access to him. At one point, TNC supporters put Fred on a commercial jet, unaccompanied, so he could attend the annual meeting of one of the societies he had founded. He collapsed on arrival, disoriented, hallucinating and his heart unstable. He had to be hospitalized in a strange location. When he was sufficiently stable to fly in the company of a physician, he was transferred back to the Chicago area for further hospitalization, which included surgery.

"Shortly afterwards, TNC supporters sneaked Fred out of the nursing home where he was recuperating, and had him meet with one of the lawyers in their group. TNC and its supporters turned the last years of Fred’s life into a torment. We will never forget him weeping in one of his more lucid moments and trying to ask our forgiveness for having fouled up in some way that he could not understand.

"After Fred passed away in 1992, the family sued TNC in Federal Court. From our point of view, the case was open and shut. We were convinced TNC would not have the audacity to go to court and risk a directed judgement. We were naive.

"The first few law firms that we retained withered under TNC pressure and abandoned us in the midst of critical proceedings. Fortunately we finally obtained extremely capable and courageous representation.

"At trial, TNC presented witnesses to testify that Fred read the newspaper every day and that he was actively involved in doing research. They even presented a nationally recognized medical ethicist, who testified that individuals can make rational decisions about the disposition of their estates, though they might be incapable of making rational decisions regarding their daily affairs.

"TNC might actually have won this case, were it not for the fact that the secretary for an attorney on the TNC side turned over the attorney’s phone log to the Gibbs family. This phone log proved to be the missing link that tied everything together.

"When the messages were enlarged on huge posters for the jury to see, the effect was dramatic. There were messages stating that Fred could not be convinced to sign TNC’s documents and asking the attorney what to do next. There was a message that Fred’s Alaska State bonds were coming due and asking if the caller should get a safe deposit box in which to put the papers.

"It became so absurd that the jury began to laugh as the attorney repeatedly said during cross-examination that he could not recall the significance of his own messages, one message after another.

"On October 27, 1993, the jury found that undue influence had indeed been exercised over Dr. Frederic Gibbs. TNC was ordered to pay court costs and relinquish any claim on his estate.

"Without missing a beat, TNC attorneys filed a motion to set the jury verdict aside and asked for a retrial. When that was denied, TNC filed an appeal to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. They lost the appeal."

Another story of land grabbing:

In 1993 TNC tried to bully a German professor, Dr. Dieter Kuhn, into selling some land he owned in rural Illinois. Al Pyott, Illinois director of TNC, threatened Dr. Kuhn that if he did not cooperate in the creation of Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge, his land would be taken by force of condemnation through Pyott’s influence with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which was listed in the local phone book in the same entry with TNC. Pyott wrote:

The GAO tried to determine the actual profits made by nonprofit groups selling private land to the federal government, but could not. Two groups, the Trust for Public Land and the River Network refused to provide Congress with their financial information "because of contractual obligations concerning confidentiality." Others used bookkeeping methods that made each transaction look like a loss (compared to an imaginary "market value" on land for which there was no market).

The Nature Conservancy was found to have sold one property to the Forest Service for over $1 million that had been donated to it. The profit on this parcel, after expenses, was calculated at $877,000.

Stung, The Nature Conservancy responded to this controversy by declaring that it would in the future donate lands to the government that had been donated to it, but said this would "pressure them into fund raising."

Overall, TNC said its bookkeeping methods showed it took a net loss on the private property it sold to the federal government. TNC did not calculate the loss to county and school district tax rolls as part of the social costs of its transactions.

Maybe TNC is not very "science driven" and "non-confrontational" when it comes to land and money, but they’re certainly "businesslike," as board member Efroymson claimed. One out of three’s not totally bad.

Okay, so TNC has its hand in the taxpayer’s till and plays hardball in court and claims to have government bully boys backing up threats to condemn some property. But they wouldn’t violate that "businesslike" ethic of theirs by playing dirty politics in lobbying, would they?

The following entry in TNC’s internal Bioreserve Handbook describes the Norden Dam farmland irrigation proposal on the Niobrara River in Nebraska back in the early 1980s. The TNC description below was written in 1991 by John Flicker, then-vice president, to describe how TNC defeated the project:

"Everything was done through surrogates." We will see that again and again in environmental group projects.

TNC must be delighted with this science driven, non-confrontational, businesslike deal.

That was a long time ago. Is TNC still doing this kind of lobbying? In fiscal year 1996, TNC spent $419,729 on lobbying. In 1997-98 TNC spent $993,396 on lobbying. TNC spent $3,191,930 on lobbying in 2000.

The Nebraska Chapter of The Nature Conservancy said in April 1999 that John Gottschalk, publisher (not editor) of the Omaha World Herald, was once on their board of directors. In April, 1999, Gottschalk denied ever being chairman of TNC’s Nebraska Chapter. The Kiewit Foundation had no idea TNC was behind the killing of the Norden Dam project.

A substantive question arises about the 1,385 corporate associates and the large number of businesses that work with and donate money to The Nature Conservancy: Why?

Why corporations give to environmental groups, which, given their "progressive" colleagues, appear to do nothing but harm corporate interests, is a question addressed by two scholars in some depth.

Marvin Olasky, who teaches journalism history and media law and ethics at the University of Texas at Austin, pointedly noted that "love of mankind" (the dictionary definition of philanthropy) plays a relatively small part in corporate grant making.

Professor Olasky wrote that personal, ideological and utilitarian reasons prevail:

In other words, how can we get the most public relations bang for the buck and help a few groups that subscribe to our own beliefs (or those of our spouses)?

Of Professor Olasky’s three, public relations approval clearly outweighs everything else in corporate giving to environmental groups.

Robert H. Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a more Machiavellian take on corporate giving to the environmental movement: It is a way for strong corporations to obtain government regulations so expensive they will price weaker competitors out of business. The result is a legal monopoly in a high-cost market.

Bob Nelson first explained his theory to me while I was interviewing him in 1981 for a book I was working on. He was then a policy analyst at the Department of the Interior, working in the Office of Policy Analysis, which serves the Office of the Secretary.

I told him it was difficult for me to grasp that an industry would commit suicide by giving rope to its hangmen. He patiently explained that only the weakest part of an industry dies under heavy regulation, and those weaker firms don’t contribute to environmental groups. The stronger survivors have bought a valuable service from environmentalists: lobbying by those who can occupy the moral high ground with strength sufficient to win against industry’s vigorous pretense of defense.

The implications of Nelson’s theory are disturbing. Is there collusion to influence public policy between corporate or trade association leaders and environmental group leaders that are not the strictly arm’s-length relationships of adversaries?

Is the adversary process of lobbying environmental policy being compromised by "sweetheart deals" between the most powerful on both sides, corporations and environmental groups?

Serious questions for future public policy.