I have some issue with the idea of buying/leasing land to protect the environment. It's a noble idea, but I don't think it will work in the long term. Most li

I have some issue with the idea of buying/leasing land to protect the environment. It's a noble idea, but I don't think it will work in the long term. Most likely, you won't be able to outbid private companies- at least not for any useful portion of the land. Their usage makes money, while your idea takes money. For your idea to win you would need a lot more rich environmentalists than currently exist. I think a better idea would be to enact reasonable laws that protect the environment- the money that you would have spent buying land could be used to elect non-corrupt politicians. There is a similar effort in Colorado to buy up land and pay off farmers to prevent them from using too much of the Colorado River so that way downstream states like California can have some. It's created with good intentions, but I think that it can't work in the long term- all it takes is a publicly accessible portion of the river to get overdrawn, or a stubborn farmer to refuse to sell and instead start piping his access of the river to other farmers, and then the idea fails. It's more sustainable to have legally binding usage agreements created by the states that can be enforced with the police and jail time- you just need to motivate the politicians to get off their butts and create the agreements.