A Day in the Life: Avery Siler, our Director of Land Conservation
/Meet a local clean water warrior who sees the holistic impacts of protecting the Potomac River’s lands
photo courtesy of avery siler
***This story is part of a series that offers a behind-the-scenes look at Potomac Conservancy’s amazing team of local clean water leaders. Meet your Potomac River defenders!***
Avery Siler is Potomac Conservancy’s Director of Land Conservation. She is responsible for the strategic leading of our land conservation program and works with family farms and rural landowners to place conservation easements on their streamside lands. This powerful legal tool permanently protects privately-owned forests, streams, and working lands, ensuring they can never be developed. Both upstream and downstream Potomac communities benefit from this important conservation practice.
Avery also oversees the stewardship of our existing easements and builds relationships with a variety of conservation partners to protect even more lands through effective collaborative efforts. In addition, Avery helps secure public and private funding that is crucial for the successful expansion of land protection in our region.
A DC native, Avery is an avid reader, enthusiastic walker, and needlework aficionado who received her BA in Art History from William & Mary and a Masters in Environmental Management from Yale School of the Environment. Prior to joining Team Potomac, she worked on agricultural conservation easement acquisition in the Delaware Highlands and on trade land acquisitions at The Nature Conservancy.
Learn more about Avery’s work at Potomac Conservancy here!
photo courtesy of avery siler
Looking at land conservation through a kaleidoscope of lenses
“What’s key for me about understanding conservation work is seeing its holistic impacts and recognizing that it’s not just about ‘protecting nature’. The impacts and implications of land conservation are manifold.”
Avery was drawn to study both art and the environment for a similar reason: a desire to be around and work for beautiful things. However, she says that she has since grown to appreciate so much more about land conservation than simply preserving views—the way it brings people together, and its critical importance for clean water and air.
“For example,” Avery reflects, “land conservation may contribute to food security by ensuring that agricultural lands stay productive instead of being lost to development. It can boost public health by reducing pollution and by providing places for people to exercise and get the mental health benefits of being outside. And, it can reduce current and future infrastructure costs by providing effective and affordable nature-based solutions to mitigating stormwater flooding and ensuring the highest quality of the water we drink.”
Avery also doesn’t look at land conservation and housing as inherently at odds. She recognizes that land conservation is sometimes used as an argument against new (especially affordable) housing, but she believes that the two can work hand in hand. Through responsible, common-sense planning at the local level, we can ensure that the lands with the highest benefits for water quality, habitat, and recreation are conserved, while others are used to create new and much-needed housing.
shenandoah valley. photo by bob glennan via flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
A typical day
“I really enjoy helping landowners find ways to balance the needs of their farms and forestlands without negatively impacting the property’s conservation values.”
Avery’s days vary a lot on her job! Some days she is out in the field, meeting with prospective conservation easement landowners and helping them protect the lands they love. As she explains, “I spend a lot of time responding to questions from landowners who may have various inquiries about their easements and managing their property in the best way possible.”
A central goal for Avery this year is implementing a new approach to Potomac Conservancy’s land conservation work—focusing on watershed-wide conservation planning instead of conserving individual properties. The key to this new approach is strengthening our partnerships, which is another important part of her work at the Conservancy. Avery meets with partners from the Shenandoah Valley Conservation Collaborative and the Safe Water Conservation Collaborative to discuss joint projects and find ways to pool resources to more effectively protect lands in the area.
Avery’s daily life at the Conservancy also includes writing grant proposals and reports, learning about new conservation tools and programs to help landowners, and intentionally centering diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice values in our land conservation program.
overlooking the shenandoah valley. photo by andrew parlette via flickr (CC BY 2.0)
What project is Avery working on right now?
“By focusing our conservation efforts on one sub-watershed, we’re able to increase the clean water impact.”
In service to a strategic conservation plan in the headwaters region, Avery is undertaking an impressive initiative for Potomac Conservancy—creating a Back Creek conservation corridor! Avery and our Land Conservation team are working to conserve an expansive corridor of protected streamside lands along Back Creek, an upstream tributary in Frederick County, VA and Berkeley County, WV that is currently 70 percent forested.
The impact of a connected stream corridor will be significant for the health of the local community and the entire Potomac River region. As sprawl encroaches into our rural lands, we risk losing wildlife habitat and cool-water streams that provide healthy, safe waters to the Potomac and downstream communities.
This focused approach will empower Potomac Conservancy to significantly increase the clean water impact. Avery shares that, “instead of 100 acres of forest providing habitat for species, we get 1,000 acres through connected properties; instead of minimizing agricultural runoff from one farm, we’re able to minimize it along most of the river.”
photo courtesy of avery siler
The best part?
“My favorite part of my job is spending a lot of time with folks in some of the places they love most—which is a real joy!”
Avery loves learning from landowners from all walks of life about why they care about conservation, what they love about their lands, and what animals, plants, or landscape changes they’re seeing on their properties.
Do you, too, want to learn more about this important work?
