MLR 2010 Conservation Award
ANDY DANA
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THE STUDY AND PRACTICE OF LAW didn’t bring Andy Dana to conservation work. Rather, his zest for open spaces and healthy landscapes brought him to his profession.
“I don’t practice law because I love the law,” Dana said in his one-person Bozeman office. “I practice law because I like to serve land trusts that are doing great work. I’d like to see the Montana landscape preserved from rampant subdivision if possible. I like to encourage the perpetuation of Montana’s ag heritage.”
That philosophy—and the accomplishments it made possible—has earned him The Montana Land Reliance’s 2010 Conservation Award.
“He is the top attorney in the United States when it comes to conservation easements and private land trusts,” said MLR Managing Director, Rock Ringling.
Dana, 51, grew up in New Jersey but started spending summers in Montana before he was a teenager. Then his parents bought a ranch in the Paradise Valley, alongside the Yellowstone River a few miles south of Livingston, and placed one of the region’s earliest conservation easements on the property, a document that bans any commercial activity but agriculture. The easement means that, among the valley’s growing subdivisions, the Dana Ranch remains an oasis of hay meadows, cottonwood forests, springs, and streams that succor a variety of animals, birds, and fish. And it will stay that way.
AFTER STUDYING GEOGRAPHY in college, Dana moved to Montana and took a job with a Bozeman think tank that focuses on free-market solutions to environmental problems. Dana said he learned a lot, but found the work unsatisfying, so he sought a law degree at Stanford.
“I realized I was not cut out to be an economist,” he said. “The world is a lot more complicated than reductionist economic theory. Law school broadens your perspectives in a complicated world with complicated resource issues.”
One thing the think tank emphasized was that private property owners can be good land stewards.
“I agree with that fundamentally,” Dana said. “I saw it when I was a teenager working on ranches in the Crazy Mountains and I’ve seen it with our neighbors in the Paradise Valley and elsewhere.”
DANA PLANNED EARLY in his career to focus his work on land trusts doing conservation easements and he hoped to underwrite that labor with more standard real estate work. But he found he was running into conflicts that way, so he gave up the more lucrative work.
“Now I’m just doing nonprofit work and basically giving them a pretty hefty discount,” he said. He credits his wife, Susan, an associate dean at Montana State University, with making that possible.
“Her income is a lot more than mine and she has health insurance, so I can charge discounted fees and work in the nonprofit area,” Dana said. “I’m very grateful for that.”
Dana’s work means assembling thick, complicated legal agreements between the trusts and the landowners, essentially drawing up a partnership between a trust and whoever owns the property in the future. It means dealing with changing circumstances and it means tackling some cutting edge issues, like climate change and its impacts.
For example, some easements prohibit or restrict timber harvest. But now, with pine beetles killing vast swaths of trees, do those restrictions make as much sense? “There needs to be some accommodation for public safety purposes, better fire management, better forest management,” Dana said. “These are the types of interpretive questions I deal with for land trusts across the country.”
Revisiting the terms of an easement is a delicate dance, one that means balancing the original grantor’s intent, the conservation values, and the public interest. And it must be done in a legally defensible way.
Doing that means land trusts must apply the highest legal and professional standards. Dana helps set the bar for those standards by helping national associations develop accreditation protocols for land trusts. Four of the land trusts he represents have been accredited in the past three years.
He’s also helping develop a national defense and enforcement insurance program, “so if there are challenges to conservation easements that require defenses in court, an insurance program will give land trusts access to great legal representation.” His expertise focuses on avoiding problems instead of butting heads. He’d rather stay out of court.
“I am about the least confrontational attorney you can imagine,” he said.
And he keeps his profile low.
“I don’t advertise,” he said. “I don’t put my name up. I’m not in it for the glory. I’m in it for the issues: resource management and protecting landscapes.”
