Denver attorney Lawrence Kueter named Kingsbury Browne Fellow at Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

Program honors conservation leader who helped create the Land Trust Alliance

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Lawrence R. Kueter, a Denver attorney specializing in conservation easements, was named the Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Kueter was also named the winner of the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award by the Land Trust Alliance in recognition of outstanding leadership, innovation and creativity in land conservation.

The announcements were made at the Land Trust Alliance's Rally 2013: The National Land Conservation Conference, in New Orleans. The Kingsbury Browne fellowship and award is named for the Boston tax lawyer whose gathering of conservation leaders from across the country in 1982 at the Lincoln Institute evolved into the Land Trust Alliance, today representing more than 1,700 land trusts.

The Lincoln Institute has remained active in land conservation, with the publication of the Policy Focus Report Large Landscape Conservation and the establishment of The Practitioners Network for Large Landscape Conservation, a group of leaders and innovators on the forefront of today's conservation strategies.

Kueter is a solo practitioner who focuses on representing non-profit land conservation organizations that create conservation easements — self-imposed permanent restrictions on the use or development of the land. He has been instrumental in the groundbreaking work done in protecting agricultural lands, including the completion of more than 400 conservation transactions and the protection of nearly 600,000 acres of land.

One of only a few lawyers nationally with his level of conservation law experience, he is a regular speaker on land trusts and conservation easements, and has been the focal point on legislative issues for the Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts. He has been legal counsel for the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust since its creation in 1995, and a member of the Board of the Land Trust Alliance.  He co-chaired the Accreditation Steering Committee that recommend the adoption of an accreditation program to the Land Trust Alliance, and he has been chair of the Land Trust Accreditation Commission since its creation in 2006. He also has served as an Adjunct Professor in Environmental and Natural Resource Law at the University of Denver's Strum College of Law. He has a J.D. from the University of Denver - Sturm College of Law, an M.A. from Wayne State University, and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the fellowship, he will engage in research, writing and mentoring, under the Lincoln Institute's Department of Planning and Urban Form.

The Kingsbury Browne fellowship and award is in its eighth year. Previous winners were Peter Stein, managing director of Lyme Timber Co; Audrey C. Rust, president emeritus of the Peninsula Open Space Trust based in Palo Alto, Calif.; Jay Espy, executive director of the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation; Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society; Laurie A. Wayburn, co-founder of the Pacific Forest Trust; Mark Ackelson, president of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation; and Darby Bradley, president of the Vermont Land Trust.

In 1980, as a fellow at the Lincoln Institute, Kingsbury Browne first envisioned a network of land conservation trusts, and convened conservation leaders at the Lincoln Institute in 1982. That gathering led to the formation of the national Land Trust Exchange, which was later renamed the Land Trust Alliance. Browne is considered the father of America's modern land trust movement, a network of land trusts operating in every state of the nation. Together these land trusts have conserved more than 37 million acres, an area the size of New England.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy initiated the Kingsbury Browne Fellowship in association with the Land Trust Alliance, which offered the accompanying Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award, in 2006. Winners are chosen on the basis of honoring lifetime contributions to the field of land conservation and work reflecting the values that Kingsbury Browne brought to his own seminal achievements.

The Land Trust Alliance is a national conservation organization based in Washington, D.C. that works in three ways to save the places people love -- increasing the pace of conservation, so more land and natural resources get protected; enhancing the quality of conservation, so the most important lands get protected using best practices; and ensuring the permanence of conservation through legislation and resources to protect land over time.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is a leading resource for key issues concerning the use, regulation, and taxation of land. Providing high quality education and research, the Institute strives to improve public dialogue and decisions about land policy.

SOURCE Lincoln Institute of Land Policy