Suzanne Case

Some really great gifts don’t fit beneath a Christmas tree. Suzanne Case, executive director of The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, got one of those in the waning days of the year: a donation of a 7-acre parcel on Hawaii island.

The $6.5 million property — from Angus Mitchell, the heir of the late Paul Mitchell of hairstyling fame — encompassed spring-fed pools that connect with Kiholo Bay in North Kona.

The conservancy will be working with another nonprofit, Hui Aloha Kiholo, to restore the site. Collaboration — among groups, private landowners, agencies — is standard operating procedure in today’s environmentalism, Case said, and protecting places where land and sea intersect is a core part of the conservancy’s mission.

The conservancy has a staff of about 60 — about half in field offices — and an annual budget of $8 million.

Lately Case has been a vocal advocate for the protection of watershed forests, the places where native trees and plants have thrived and provided the perfect surface of condensation for moisture-laden clouds drifting over the ocean. That water drips down to mosses, which act like sponges and ultimately feed the island aquifers, she said.

"We in Hawaii are incredibly blessed with an incredible collection of plants and birds and bugs that are found no place else on the planet," she said. "They have evolved in a way that works. It’s got its own harmony."

Case is a member of a well-known kamaaina family — brother Ed, an attorney, is running to reclaim his congressional seat and cousin Steve founded the Internet company AOL — but she opted for environmental stewardship as her own means of community service.

And now the boundary between work and hobby has blurred.

"I like to whack invasive species for fun," she said with a laugh. "I live up on Tantalus, so I work with the community association sometimes, keeping the road nice."

QUESTION: When did you decide to do this kind of work? You started in law school?

ANSWER: I went to Hastings. I was born in Hilo. My family, we all were born in Hilo, and we grew up there.

I spent the first 10 years of my life where we just went outside all the time, up in the mountains and snorkeling in the ocean, spearfishing. And I think that just ingrained in me just a real love of the outdoors.

It was quite a shock to me to move to the big city in Honolulu when I was 10. And then it’s just a matter of finding what calls you. I was a history major in college, and then I went to law school.

But even in law school, what drew me was land. And then I did real estate law in a law firm in San Francisco after I graduated from Hastings. I was able to do some pro bono work with The Nature Conservancy. It was a fairly newly evolving organization then, and the Hawaii program had just started up then. So when there was an opening in the regional lawyer position at The Nature Conservancy’s office in San Francisco, I just jumped for it. …

The land conservation business, the starting point is land protection. So you’ll do donations of land that is important natural habitat, or purchases, if you have a willing seller and can raise the funds for it, public and private, in which case we might end up holding it as a preserve, or we might work with a government agency … to create a park or a refuge and the like. Once you do that, you really have an important stewardship obligation. The No. 1 threat is often land conversion.

Q: You mean conversion to … ?

A: To other land uses. Once it’s converted, most of the time as a functioning ecosystem it’s gone; it’s very hard to recover. So the first step is land protection, but then you still have other threats to it.

Like in Hawaii, we have invasive species, sometimes fire. It just depends; it’s sort of property-specific, (as to) what are the biggest threats. So the legal work is to do the land protection and then also facilitate the stewardship — that’s the work of all of us in conservation management.

Q: How can land be protected, other than by acquisition?

A: There’s a whole range of opportunities. The most fully protective is actual ownership. You can do a conservation easement, which allows the landowner to retain the ownership of the land, but gives the conservation organization or public agency rights to protect it. So you agree on uses that are not going to happen, like land development, and you agree on rights to go onto the property, to take care of it, like controlling invasive species.

So that’s the conservation easement: It’s a real-estate interest, it’s permanent ownership, it binds everybody down the line.

Q: What’s the attraction to the landowner?

A: If you’re a landowner and you love your piece of land, and you want it protected but you don’t want to give it up, it’s a very attractive mechanism. And there are tax benefits of a donation of conservation easement, as with a donation of conservation land. You’re protecting the land but still preserving the private bond that the owner may have.

One step back from that might be a management agreement, where we work with the landowner to bring stewardship to their property. Maybe we agree that we’re going to control invasive species, or fence it, or the like. But it’s a less permanent protection. So in other words, if that landowner changes, or changes their mind, it’s not as strong of a protection. But it’s still a nice way for a landowner to kind of get acquainted and learn about conservation processes.

Sometimes public funds are available for doing some of these things because a lot of times these are really remote lands. Or, they’re on the fringe of urban areas where they still have important public benefits — important stream corridors or functioning forests. There’s a public benefit, even if it’s privately owned. It’s not like they get anything out of it; the only way they get anything out of it is to cut down the trees.

You want to help landowners in the process of taking care of their land so we all benefit.

Q: How would you define the mission of The Nature Conservancy?

A: Our mission is to protect nature, for nature and people. Drilling down a little bit, it’s what are our functioning ecosystems? In Hawaii, it’s all about forests and reefs. Those are the ecosystems that are intact still, relatively, and we want to keep them that way. A lot of the urban areas and agricultural areas and the like don’t have this functioning nature system that sustains us all. So what we want to do is keep what sustains us whole. In Hawaii, that’s forests and reefs. It’s forests and reefs all over the world; it’s grasslands, prairie lands, river systems, you name it. …

What we do best is we bring science … we have forest science, marine scientists that help us assess what is important from a native ecosystem perspective in a place, and then identify what the threats are. It’s land conversion, or a fire, or unsustainable fishing, sediment coming down off the mountain onto the reef.

What are the specific threats that are challenging this place and, in the long run, going to take it down if we don’t take care of it? What are our strategies for addressing those?

We’re very science-based, we’re very business-oriented, we’re solution-oriented, we’re very collaborative, we work with communities and agencies and landowners — really, anybody who is willing to work on collectively solving these problems. That’s our approach.

Q: About reefs, for instance: Isn’t there a debate about whether the problem is more overfishing or damage to reefs?

A: What we do is we work with communities in their specific places to try to identify what the threats are. It may be some kind of unsustainable fishing. … We have amazingly little protection in Hawaii; it’s like 1 percent of our coastline has any form of protection. It’s really surprisingly low, considering how much we rely on the outdoors for our recreation and for our tourism and for our food.

Q: Why is that? Is it the influence of the fishing industry?

A: I think it goes further back. A lot of what happened all over the Pacific was a sort of transition from communal management to, on the land side, private property, but on the ocean side, uniform government stewardship, and uniform access. Local communities, if you look at the old style of ahupuaa management, you don’t go fishing in someone’s place unless you have permission of the community, and if something needed to be protected you could put a kapu on it. That whole system is not in place any more, so really what we need to do is go back to kind of a blend of that, respecting our public access that we all feel is important, but also trying to get a handle on how to help our reefs regenerate. …

Unfortunately we have an ethic of catching the big fish, but the big fish are the ones that produce exponentially more eggs, and healthier eggs. So if you take out the big fish, you’re wiping out the next generation. So somehow we need to come back to a way to protect the fish that will be able to regenerate a reef, and also protect the reef from other threats. We have a lot of development along our coastlines, so that has had a big impact.

Q: How do you deal with the problem of runoff into the reef?

A: Our approach is really an on-the-ground and in-the water approach.

So for instance, in a forest area … I have to support our field crews to get out there and build fences … and be able to remove invasive animals that are killing our forests; they’re grazing it down to nothing.

Then you have these terrible erosion problems that end up washing it out onto your reefs. … I think reforestation is an important intermediate step, between our heavily developed urban areas and native forests.

So you want, first off, to protect what you have left, and that’s the area we work the most on, and then there are a lot of buffer areas, like leeward Haleakala, and Kahoolawe, and ranching lands in Kona that have been beaten down over the last couple hundred years, mostly from European animals: cows, sheep, goats, deer, pigs. But you can at least rebuild some of the basic pieces of it: Plant trees, which has the benefit of helping us with climate change.

Q: Are we losing the war with invasives?

A: I ask our field crew that question periodically. The answer I get is, we’re trying to hold the line. … There’s hope. I will say, it’s a lot of work.