Religious Lands Conservancy Project

The Religious Lands Conservancy Project is a new partnership between Crystal Spring Center for Earth Learning and the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition. The Project's mission is to bring religious communities and land conservationists together to develop new tools to preserve common and complementary values on the land. The staff of Crystal Spring is particularly sensitive to the special needs and concerns of religious communities.

The purpose of the Religious Lands Conservancy Project is to re-think traditional ways of relating to commonly held lands. Our lands may well hold an essential key to the recovery of ourselves, our mission, and the healing of the deep alienation in our culture. If religious congregations could explore a radically different context for making decisions about their land, we might well participate in a deep spiritual, ecological, social and economic healing of the regions in which our lands exist.

The project plan is based on three broad goals:

Education: to provide congregations with a variety of resources and programs, including tools to enable them to participate in long-term land preservation.

Ecological / Ethical: to protect the life systems—the sacred web of life—of which we are intimately a part, particularly as the life community is manifest on the lands we call home.

Conservation: to bring lands owned by religious communities into conservancy.