The car in front of me swerved to miss something in the road. I slowed, watching a small creature make its slow, plodding way across the asphalt. As I got closer, I realized it was a tiny baby opossum. Three other babies had already been struck in the road, with no mother in sight.
Heart in my throat, I pulled over and called a local wildlife rescue. Within an hour, I had delivered the impossibly adorable little creature, swaddled in towels, to a rehabilitation facility for native injured and orphaned wildlife.
Too often, I take wildlife vehicular strikes for granted — an unfortunate but inevitable cost of the expanding human footprint across the landscape. But as I drove away from the rehabilitation facility, the orphaned opossum’s face imprinted on my memory, I found myself wondering: What other costs of growth are we accepting? And couldn’t there be a better way?
A landscape under pressure
Our natural and agricultural lands are under immense pressure. Data centers — and the energy generation facilities and transmission lines needed to fuel them — vie with housing sprawl to claim the Virginia Piedmont’s green spaces. Development and an ever-growing network of roads and transmission lines fragment our landscapes, wildlife corridors and our communities.
According to the Land Trust Alliance, “In the United States, we lose roughly 150 acres of natural land and 40 acres of farmland every hour. That’s the equivalent of losing more than the entirety of Shenandoah National Park every year.”
When we lose natural and agricultural lands, we lose more than acres.
When we lose green space, we lose the vital organs of our planet that filter pollutants and give us clean air and clean water.
When we lose farmland, we lose access to fresh, life-giving food and the agricultural economies that underpin our communities.
When we lose forests, we lose our best natural defense against climate change, extreme weather events and the catastrophic flooding that has wreaked havoc in recent years.
Land is more than acres. Land is life.
For more than 50 years, The Piedmont Environmental Council has made land conservation a priority because we know it’s one of the best ways we have to shore up the defenses against the micro and macro tragedies that come with unchecked development: A contaminated stream. A child struggling with asthma from air pollution. Floods that wash away homes and neighborhoods. An orphaned opossum in the road.
A solution for everyone
Kim Biasiolli, a conservation program manager for PEC, is a forest ecologist who began her career as a field biologist, tracking and monitoring populations of rare plants.
“I realized through that work that protecting the land is the most important way that we can protect biodiversity,” Biasiolli says. “Everywhere in this country, we’re chipping away at protected areas. Larger landscapes are being fragmented into smaller, isolated pockets of natural habitat.”
Biasiolli knew she could have a greater impact by focusing on permanently protecting land. At PEC, part of her work involves collaborating with people to explore conservation options for their land. Financial incentives available in Virginia offer benefits for those who choose to conserve their land, but Biasiolli knows the benefits radiate outward to touch their entire community.
“Everyone benefits from land conservation, even if they don’t own land,” says Biasiolli.
Take clean water, for example. “Conservation easements that require forested stream buffers permanently protect those stream corridors and prevent pollutants from entering the waterways that ultimately flow into our reservoirs. That’s our drinking water,” she says.
“And when we think about forests specifically, which make up a lot of our conserved lands, we’re also protecting wildlife habitat, pulling carbon from the atmosphere, and building the resiliency of the landscape to better handle major flood events.”
Then there are the economic benefits. Agriculture is Virginia’s largest private industry, and combined with forestry, the industries have an economic impact of over $100 billion annually and support nearly 500,000 jobs. “Protecting our working forests and farmlands protects our rural economies, which are a big part of our local economy and all the products that are produced locally,” Biasiolli says.
Conserved open spaces also make up the scenic vistas that inspire the Piedmont’s thriving outdoor recreation culture, another major economic driver as well as a key component of healthy communities. In Charlottesville and Albemarle alone, tourism spending reached nearly $1 billion in 2023; the same year in Virginia, outdoor recreation generated over $13 billion and supported over 120,000 jobs.
Biasiolli adds, “When rural lands are converted to development, there are fiscal costs to the locality in providing community services like water and sewer lines, fire and rescue, and schools. All citizens have to support that sprawl through their taxes.”
In contrast, PEC staff work extensively on local land use planning to support stronger, more sustainable communities — work that is directly related to conservation. “By limiting development in the rural areas and directing it toward development areas, we are encouraging smart growth through thoughtful and intentional planning, while simultaneously protecting the rural landscape and its resources to benefit the entire community,” says Biasiolli.
Indeed, conserved land benefits everyone, well beyond the landowner and the boundaries of their property.
And if you don’t own land, there are still ways to support conservation in your community, says Biasiolli.
“You can support organizations that do land conservation, like PEC and our partners,” she says. “This can be financial support or volunteering your time. You can also support conservation through advocacy. At the local level, make sure your local leaders, including the planning commissioners and board of supervisors, know that conservation is a priority. Even our public servants don’t always understand the benefits of conservation.”
Building connections
Through our connections with our supporters, partners and community advocates, PEC and other conservation organizations have helped landowners permanently protect more than 450,000 acres of land in our nine-county region: an exciting achievement that has made the Piedmont a model for conservation on a national scale. Still, there is more to be done.
“Now we’re working to be more strategic about where we’re protecting land to have the greatest impact, and working to improve connectivity across the landscape,” says Biasiolli.
One of her efforts to boost connectivity is the Southern Shenandoah Borderlands project, which aims to protect the lands bordering Shenandoah National Park to create a large, connected conservation corridor to support drinking water protection, climate resiliency and biodiversity.
“A lot of species can’t tolerate habitat edges and some aren’t able to cross large areas of development,” says Biasiolli. “When you have a larger block of land, you have more interior habitat and connectivity for wildlife to move across the landscape when they need to find food or mates.”
In addition, Biasiolli is working with partners in the region like Wild Virginia and others in the Virginia Safe Wildlife Corridors Collaborative to create opportunities for safe passage for wildlife across roads, which also protects human safety by reducing collisions. Virginia consistently ranks in the top 10 states for likelihood of vehicle-wildlife collisions, but projects by the Collaborative are studying improvements to wildlife crossings that are already reducing the number of collisions. For example, a 2021 study in Albemarle County found that fencing directing wildlife to existing culverts and underpasses reduced deer-vehicle collisions between 88-97%, and more than doubled the number of deer and other mammals using the safer passages.
A few days after I dropped off that baby opossum, the wildlife rescue emailed me with an update. He is doing well and will be released into the wild in a few weeks, once he’s old enough to re-enter the natural world. There, he’ll eat a lot of ticks — one of the many ways healthy ecosystems benefit us all.
As he does, I am grateful for the many opportunities we all have to support land conservation and make the land he returns to a safer, healthier and greener home for all our human and wild neighbors.
This article appeared in the 2025 Summer edition of The Piedmont Environmental Council’s member newsletter, The Piedmont View. If you’d like to become a PEC member or renew your membership, please visit pecva.org/join.