The Cascade Land Conservancy is welcoming 1,800 of its closest friends to breakfast today. The annual awards program — the 13th — combines honors and coveted recognition of community leaders with the lifeblood of fundraising.

Add a third dimension this year: the start of a regionwide conversation about how to rethink development and growth. The challenge is to protect farm and forest production, while encouraging affordable mixes of housing inside urban areas and small, efficient islands away from town.The vision of the private land trust begins, in the words of President Gene Duvernoy, with the resolve to stay within the footprint already occupied and to conserve the rest.

For the Cascade Land Conservancy, the engine of socially and environmentally successful development is the transfer of development rights. The 2007 Legislature encouraged bold rethinking of the concept and its expansive use. The land trust's Cascade Agenda calls this a market-based conservation strategy, and looks to new financing mechanisms to make it work.

Deals are brokered that allow agriculture and forestry to continue, while the development rights to those lands are transferred to developers who, working with cooperative cities and counties, receive permission to build taller buildings or put more units into an urban plan.

A parallel housing vision, more removed from city life, is creation of Conservation Villages. "These compact, rural communities provide new housing choices and protect large swaths of nearby forests, farms and natural lands," according to the Cascade Agenda.

For now, the only option in rural settings is one house per 10 acres, 20 acres or more.

The Cascade Land Conservancy has brokered 163 projects since 1989, protecting more than 120,000 acres around central Puget Sound in King, Kittitas, Snohomish, Pierce and Mason counties.

Duvernoy and friends know this region is rallying to clean up Puget Sound as it prepares to welcome a flood tide of population growth the equivalent of six new Seattles over the next 100 years. The land trust's vision is part of the energetic mix.

A broad, creative conversation is about to get under way.

May 1

Seattle Times Copyright