Thesis advisor: Marilynn Johnson / This study examines widespread efforts to manage the environmental impact of suburbanization in metropolitan America since 1970. Using the Washington, DC area as a site for analysis, I demonstrate how residents, public officials, and organized interests balanced suburban development and environmental protection. Featuring cases from the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, this project considers environmental conflicts resulting from housing, commercial, and highway projects as well as efforts to preserve rural land and farming from suburban encroachment. As metropolitan Washington decentralized, the environmental impact of suburbanization worsened, producing different approaches to managing development and protecting the environment. These responses reflected new social and spatial inequalities, as well as differences in political leadership and civic activism. While communities in Maryland benefited from more progressive public concern, local leadership and strong support from the state for growth management, their counterparts in Virginia struggled to overcome strong and pervasive protections for property rights. This project rewrites our understanding of suburbanization and environmental protection in two ways. First, it urges scholars to rethink a traditional emphasis on federal policies; even in the suburbs of the nation's capital, the active participation of the public at large, as well as officials at the local and state levels, was critical to the success or failure of environmental protection. The present study thus demonstrates how and why different approaches to growth management emerged across metropolitan areas. Second, this study differs from the existing social science literature by moving away from policy analysis to focus on the broader context of decision-making in planning suburban development. Drawing on correspondence, publicity materials, and public testimony from residents, environmental groups, local officials, business organizations, and federal agencies, this study offers a more complete picture of growth management, providing a historically informed and policy relevant argument about environmental protection in metropolitan America. Ultimately, it reveals that even with an unprecedented degree of expansion of state regulation and civic engagement, the legal and cultural regimes surrounding the use of property often continued to privilege private gain over environmental protection as localities competed for economic investment. In a few cases, however, we can see how residents and public officials pursued more holistic forms of growth management in metropolitan America, laying the groundwork for a model of more meaningful public participation to enhance environmental protection in the future. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

What motivates agricultural-land owners to use conservation easements? As these legal tools have become a popular strategy for private land conservation in the U.S., a growing body of literature is examining how and why landowners conserve their properties through conservation easements. This research project expands upon environmental, geographical and rural land development literature through a qualitative fieldwork study of 34 private, conservation landowners associated with the Franklin Land Trust, a nonprofit conservation organization in western Massachusetts. The study identifies a broad range of environmental, social, spiritual and financial motivations for agricultural-land owners to conserve their properties, and indicates that for the vast majority of study participants certain motivations were more important than others depending on landowners’ level of reliance on their land to sustain their livelihoods. Using this classification criterion, landowner profiles identified in this study include full-time farmers, supplemental-income farmers, and farmland retreat owners. For most of the landowners within the biggest group—the full-time farmers—the most important motivation to conserve was financial; particularly, to obtain a cash payment to improve the economic viability of their farming operation. Nonetheless, the financial motivation was not the only important one for the 34 landowners, nor was it always the most important. This study makes two additional contributions to land conservation research. First, it examines agricultural-land conservation through phenomenological approaches to the study of place. In this regard, findings suggest landowners and land trust staff members have different relationships with the conserved land and its surroundings and, therefore, different senses of place. Second, the study frames agricultural-land conservation through conservation easements as a potential aspect of rural sustainability with respect to the economic, social, and environmental benefits of conservation, from the point of view of both agricultural-land owners and a land trust. The findings also indicate that the landowners of this study were generally very satisfied with the outcomes of using conservation easements despite drawbacks. Overall, this study contributes to land conservation studies through an analysis of individual motivations and experiences that shape the decisions of agricultural-land owners to grant conservation easements.