Our Conservation Goals

Some may feel that conservation should take a back seat to America’s pressing social and economic challenges. But in the last few decades we’ve learned an important lesson: our planet is an extremely fragile place. What we thought would last forever can be gone in a heartbeat.

We’ve also learned that the quality of our environment is of paramount importance to our own wellbeing. A healthy environment, a healthy economy and people who are healthy in mind and body are inextricably linked and mutually dependent. Achieving optimal social and economic outcomes is invariably a long term process, one that is constantly challenged by short term political expediency and heedless exploitation of natural resources.

Here in Downeast Maine we live on a coastline of exceptional natural beauty, blessed with abundant wildlife. Our small communities are closely tied to the sea. Such a place is rare in America, a treasure by any standard and worthy of thoughtful stewardship.

Unfortunately, all that we prize so much is increasingly at risk. As populations grow, the pressures of subdivision and residential development spread inexorably northeast along the coast. Short sighted exploitation of precious marine and wetlands resources is a recurrent story and an always growing danger. It’s impossible to protect everything so Pleasant River Wildlife Foundation has defined its mission as advancing specific conservation goals and has focused its acquisitions on properties

• with habitat that is important for waterfowl, shorebirds and woodcock, preferably protecting large contiguous blocks
• that are naturally adaptive in the face of climate change and sea level rise
• with access to the uplands and the shore for residents and visitors

PRWF has also been working with our conservation partners to help coordinate regional conservation objectives and to halt the continuing illegal and destructive harvesting of Maine’s Rockweed.