Land Use & Conservation

Practice Overview

Our land use and conservation attorneys have vast experience representing landowners, land trusts, conservation organizations, environmental non-profits and local governments in their efforts to protect wild, scenic and ecologically sensitive areas. We seek creative solutions to complex problems, utilizing strategies such as conservation easements, sales to federal and state wildlife and conservation agencies, purchases by land trusts, and opposition to the permitting of inappropriate development where necessary. Drummond Woodsum remains committed to offering the best land use and conservation consulting and services.

Among the successes of our land use and conservation practice are conservation of hundreds of thousands of acres of land; helping to protect the Appalachian Trail corridor in Maine and other states; helping to establish the Portland Trails system of recreational trails; assisting in the creation of the Greater Woods Town Forest, and the conservation of land in the Town of Merrimack, New Hampshire; helping to create and enforce the nation’s largest conservation easement, as well as many smaller easements and publicly-protected parcels; helping a Maine environmental non-profit obtain a multi-million dollar federal contract to study the effect of the BP oil spill on wildlife mortality; helping many other environmental non-profits protect land and wildlife; and helping land trusts and other non-profits explore the potential for carbon sequestration, carbon credits, and other ecosystem services. Representative clients include the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the Rangeley Lakes Heritage Trust, the Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust, the National Audubon Society, the Trust for Public Lands, BioDiversity Research Institute, the Town of Merrimack, New Hampshire’s Grater Woods Town Forest, and many others.

Our interest in conservation and the land goes far beyond practicing law. We have attorneys who have climbed each of New England’s 67 4,000-foot peaks; completed a 2,200-mile through-hike of the Appalachian Trail; and traveled to Mongolia to help local herdsmen establish clean water as a human right and successfully oppose potentially destructive gold-mining permits in sensitive river areas. Our attorneys also volunteer countless hours of their own time as board members of local, state, and national land trusts and conservation organizations.