This New Year, why not evolve your resolve? We know just the places to make your resolutions a reality in 2012. Check out our list—and this year, you might actually enjoy checking off your own:

1. Save Money.
Looking for adventure? You can get away without going broke in East Texas. Here’s what you can see from a kayak in the wild, mysterious Big Thicket National Preserve.

2. Lose Weight
Anywhere from Georgia to Maine, you can strap on a pack and hit the Appalachian Trail, where you’ll find gorgeous views, deep quiet and climbs that melt away pounds.

3. Stress Less
Florida is the place to be during winter—particularly if you’re a manatee. You can see these special animals at Crystal River’s Three Sisters Springs.

4. Get Organized
A major new survey by the Land Trust Alliance shows that land trusts with strategic conservation plans save double the land that other trusts do. Visit our new Strategic Conservation Planning guide online and get busy.

5. Exercise More
Nashville has the tunes—and trails—to get your heart pumping. With a new open space plan, this one-of-a-kind place will have you biking, walking and playing.

6. Travel
Don’t miss Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, where huge chunks of petrified trees litter a stark southwestern landscape. This fossil-hunting haven will take you back in time.

7. Get Smart
Need the skinny on new conservation techniques? Head to West Virginia’s National Conservation Training Center, where our Conservation Leadership Network offers courses on green infrastructure, mitigation and more.

8. Eat Better
If you want the good stuff, get local. At Snead’s Farm in Virginia, you can pick up fresh asparagus, sugar snap peas, grapes, raspberries, sweet corn and much more.

9. Volunteer
Coast to coast, you can change lives by reconnecting kids with nature. Check out some of our efforts in New York and beyond.

10. Give Back
Help us save our favorite places before they become just a memory. Donate on our website.

By saving special places, we make sure that future generations will experience nature as it was intended. That’s been our goal for 26 years, as we’ve worked across America to protect 7 million acres. This year, we helped to preserve over 250,000 acres of special places, coast to coast. We protected campgrounds for kids, expanded national parks, preserved natural areas in growing urban communities and maintained active farms, ranches and forests.

We couldn’t do it without you. Here’s some of what we’re celebrating:

Save Today.

You know how quickly cityscapes change. Growth is good, but sometimes inappropriate development whittles away at natural areas until our quality of life is affected. To avoid that outcome, we act to save special places close to urban communities. Near San Diego, for instance, we’ve spent seven years protecting 5,000 acres near Beauty Mountain, a treasured getaway. Read more.

Play Tomorrow.

All kids have a basic right to a healthy childhood – and that includes time spent outdoors. We’re making it possible for kids to still learn how to scramble up mountains, belly flop into cold lakes and discover what they love about being outdoors. Check out our conservation success with the YMCA of Duluth, summer camps in Vermont and a Scout ranch in Colorado. Read more.

Treasure Forever.

To meet tough conservation challenges, we go the extra mile. This year, we protected a key area at Gettysburg National Military Park by working out an agreement with a housing developer who could have built 200 homes on that hallowed ground. We successfully negotiated the purchase of a long-prized area for Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. And we even went to auction to protect land adjacent to historic Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, giving the National Park Service time to gather resources to purchase it permanently.          

Photos: GlacierNPS/Flickr.com (banner).

Where Nature Has No Limits

With its wild and boggy wetlands, Canaan Valley has been called “a bit of Canada gone astray.” But this rambling 24,000-acre expanse belongs to West Virginia—and the snowshoe hares, red-tailed hawks, brook trout and other wildlife that call it home. We just preserved a key property inside Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge to ensure that some 280 kinds of wildlife, birds and fish thrive across this large landscape. Read the story here.

Breaking Down Borders

No matter what their nationality, residents of Ontario and Minnesota are neighbors, sharing over five million acres of public lands, including pristine lakes, rugged forests and crisp, clear air. In a conservation first, we’re helping these Canadian and American “Heart of the Continent” communities bridge political boundaries to develop a unifying brand for their region. Read more here.

A Save For Wind Cave

When Teddy Roosevelt created South Dakota’s Wind Cave National Park in 1903, he protected an extraordinary place. The world’s fifth longest cave, considered a sacred place by the Lakota, is known for its many narrow passageways, mineral formations called “boxworks” and the telltale wind that whips around its entrances. We’re making it possible for the National Park Service to protect and expand this iconic park.
Read the full story here.

An Awarding Idea: Greenways

Our Kodak American Greenways Program is the nation’s longest-running community awards effort to benefit networks of natural areas. Through a partnership with Eastman Kodak Company and National Geographic, we’ve honored over 700 community organizations in all 50 states, providing nearly $900,000 in awards. This year, U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tx.), Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and the Potomac Conservancy took top honors as national greenway leaders. Read about the awards.

Here's A Strategic Move

If you're like most conservationists, you make some tough calls on planning and priorities. The Conservation Fund’s Ole Amundsen has a new book that can help. Check out his practical "Strategic Conservation Planning" guide, available through the Land Trust Alliance, here.

Photos: Wind Cave National Park / courtesy National Park Service (banner).

Digging Up Bones At Petrified Forest National Park Fossil hunters have turned up over a thousand specimens—including Gertie, a 250-million-year-old Staurikosaur—at Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Now, in a project that took years to complete, we’ve made it possible to add roughly 26,000 acres of prime badlands to the park. Read the full story here.   The Heron (Evermore) Our work in the Louisiana wetlands, near Maurepas, continues, as we save open coastal swamp and forested canopies of towering cypress and tupelo trees. Here, you can find the little blue heron, American white pelican, black tern, rusty blackbird and a rainbow of warblers. Read the full story here.   Trick Or Trees No trick: Our Go Zero® program just announced that a 2,600-acre forest carbon project at Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana earned gold-level validation under the toughest standards in the business. Read the full story here.   The Legend Of Beauty Mountain Urban San Diego County still has a wild side—and it includes Beauty Mountain Wilderness Area, whose rugged rocks and see-to-forever views beckon hikers. We just helped conserve 400 acres here—but with a key conservation law expiring, will similar saves have a ghost of a chance? Read the full story here.   Photos: Petrified Forest National Park/ courtesy National Park Service (banner).

 

As America commemorates the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we are proud to protect land that honors the heroes of United Airlines Flight 93, which went down near Shanksville, Pa. Together with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, we just announced the conservation of a 57-acre property within the Flight 93 Memorial boundary.

Forty passengers, and a flight crew, lost their lives on Flight 93, which had been hijacked by terrorists. Passengers fought back, preventing the terrorists from reaching their intended target—possibly the White House—on Sept. 11, 2001. Working on behalf of the National Park Service and the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Fund has partnered with willing landowners over time to protect more than 600 acres in the Flight 93 area, preserving much of the hallowed ground and the pastoral views seen from it.

Congress authorized creation of the Flight 93 National Memorial nine years ago. Public and private partners have provided a significant portion of funding for the future park. Dedication of Phase I of the Memorial and a commemoration event will be held at the crash site near Shanksville during the 10th anniversary weekend.

Read more about this project here.

Green Light: Our Solar Energy Investment Takes Off

At The Conservation Fund, we combine a passion for conservation with an entrepreneurial spirit to protect your favorite places before they become just a memory. With funding from foundations and socially motivated investors, for example, our Natural Capital Investment Fund supplies loans and business development services that allow “green” entrepreneurs to build enterprises that make a difference with every kilowatt hour, paddle stroke and bushel they produce.

Take FLS Energy. Three parents hatched the idea for this solar energy company while volunteering at their kids’ Asheville, N.C., school, in 2005. Within weeks, the trio roughed out a four-page business plan. They set up shop in the old boiler room of a former manufacturing plant, where the floor was dirt and a 55-gallon drum, topped by plywood, served as a table.

They needed capital. NCIF stepped in to provide flexible financing and technical assistance that helped these entrepreneurs set goals and hire staff—long before a commercial bank would have supported them.

Our willingness to take a risk paid off. In just six years, fast-growing FLS Energy has hired 80 people. The company has injected a homegrown boost into Western North Carolina’s economy—all while building a greener future for the rest of us, thanks to the company’s non-polluting solar thermal systems, which heat water for commercial clients. Across the rural Southeast, in areas of need, we are creating jobs, improving communities and protecting our environment with investments just like this.

Learn more about FLS and other NCIF portfolio companies.

It’s easy to find people who have a passion for saving special places. What makes The Conservation Fund different is that we combine our passion with an entrepreneurial spirit—taking risks, investing in good ideas and finding new ways to make conservation work. Here are two examples:

Good Jobs, Great Idea – GO!

If you’ve ever been to a national park, you’ve experienced a special place—and you know it’s worth saving. But sometimes beauty takes a very different form: caulk. And weather-stripping, insulation, water heater jackets, and compact fluorescent light bulbs.

These are the tools of a new generation in conservation—a promising crew of low-income teens and young adults who have received job training to make homes and buildings more energy-efficient in Asheville, North Carolina. These green collar workers learned their trade through Green Opportunities (GO), a community development organization that has grown tenfold since its launch three years ago.

GO believes that improving lives, through green job training and support, can also improve our communities, environment and economy. We do, too. That’s why our Natural Capital Investment Fund and Resourceful Communities Program have provided roughly $70,000 in loans to GO.  Our support has made it possible for GO to take on larger building projects in Asheville and also strengthen its training programs.

As GO graduates know, our best renewable energy comes from people who have good jobs, quality of life and a future invested in a healthy environment. Learn more about our efforts here.

A Fresh Market

While we’re greening North Carolina, we’re also growing farms in Michigan. With the support of a $400,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, we have launched an ambitious effort to bring more healthy food to low-income communities in the state. Over the next three years, we will be working to break down barriers facing minority farmers— strengthening their operating margins and improving their ability to make healthy, local food available to families across 11 counties.

Peg Kohring, who lives in one of the counties, was inspired to launch this project by the need in her own community—where many kids and families cannot walk to a supermarket or conveniently visit a farmers market. “Local farmers markets in poorer, rural communities often lack the facilities required to provide and sell a variety of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy—and area residents are often unaware that affordable healthy food is available right in their own neighborhoods,” remarks Kohring, our Midwest director.

Our goal is to better equip farmers, and farmers’ markets, to become a vibrant part of the local infrastructure. Over the past 15 years, we have protected 30,000 acres of farms and other land in Michigan. We know that for this conservation to last, it must make sense economically—and that means farmers, and local communities, need to benefit. Learn more on our website.

Photos: Farmer's market / Howard Walfish, Flickr (banner); Light bulb, Stephen Drescher, iStockphoto.com (top); Farmer's market in the Midwest / Parker Deen, iStockphoto.com (bottom).