Amy Wilson Morris

• PhD
• Project Manager at The Trust for Public Land

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have fewer transparency requirements than governments, yet they increasingly shape land use and protected areas. Land information disclosure by NGOs can improve coordination and accountability, but create potential privacy concerns. We focus on decisions by land conservation NGOs (land trusts) to share digital m...

Information is critical for environmental governance. The rise of digital mapping has the potential to advance private-land conservation by assisting with conservation planning, monitoring, evaluation, and accountability. However, privacy concerns from private landowners and the capacity of conservation entities can influence efforts to track spati...

Renewable energy development is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Solar energy projects can replace polluting fossil fuels, but because they are land-intensive, solar projects also have environmental costs. Large projects have the potential to provide hundreds of megawatts of electricity, but could also disrupt huge expanses of undevel...

Conservation easements reveal major tensions between the privacy concerns of landowners and the right of the public to access information about private land conservation. State and federal governments face important choices about how to provide public access to this information given growing concerns that the public’s substantial investment in cons...

Abstract Even though both farmers' markets and community supported agriculture were first developed to provide markets for farmers, recently the goals of food security have been attached to these market-based alternative food institutions, based on their potential to be 'win-win” economic solutions for both small-scale farmers and low-income consum...

This paper examines the use of conservation easements, with a focus on California. Conservation easements are now the dominant tool used for private land conservation in the United States. Easements are in many ways a paradigmatic neoliberal environmental policy tool. They privatize and re-scale a great deal of land conservation decision-making aut...