The Conservation Alliance harnesses the power of businesses from a wide range of industries to protect outdoor spaces and wild places. We drive a proactive agenda to protect nature utilizing strategic advocacy and grantmaking, leveraging business influence, and building deep partnerships with grassroots organizations and local communities to collectively deliver high impact conservation outcomes, protecting North America’s outdoor places and wild spaces for everyone. Since 1989, we’ve helped protect over 124 million acres and 4,964 river miles, remove or halt 43 dams, purchase 22 climbing areas, and designate five marine reserves and one national marine sanctuary.
In 2025 and 2026, we are investing additional advocacy resources in six priority campaigns. We have chosen these campaigns utilizing a variety of lenses, including where our member base is strong, how much we have previously invested in these campaigns, and the likelihood that our business voice can successfully move the needle and help our on-the-ground partners meet their goals. Many of these priority campaigns may also have a bipartisan opportunity to retain or gain protections. We announce our Advocacy Priority Campaigns once a year. In collaboration with our grantees, we work to identify land and water conservation opportunities that are urgent, vital, and need national attention.
D-1 Lands, Alaska
What’s at stake?
Alaska’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands harbor some of the largest intact landscapes left in the country. These lands connect tens of millions of acres of critical wildlife habitat that drive the state economy, support hundreds of local fishing, outfitting, and tourism businesses. These lands serve as a world class recreational resource for packrafting, hiking, hunting, angling, and other outdoor activities. Nature-based businesses depend on Alaska’s wild, biologically diverse, and intact wildlands to give customers unmatched outdoor recreation experiences.
D-1 Lands also connect tens of millions of acres of important habitat and provide refuge for five species of Pacific salmon, three of North America’s largest caribou herds, brown bears, wolves, abundant moose populations and millions of migratory birds and many other species. They provide a critical buffer against rapidly changing conditions, allowing Alaska’s Indigenous communities to continue practicing a customary and traditional way of life in the face of great change.
In 2024, under the leadership of former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, protections for these lands were re-asserted via a Record of Decision based on results of a science-driven Environmental Impact Study, consultations with Alaskan Natives and local communities, and public comment periods. This decision, covering 28 million acres and invalidating five Public Land Orders pushed forward by the first Trump Administration, was widely celebrated by Alaska Natives, businesses throughout the region dependent on protection of and access to this incredible landscape, and other community members.
Within the first days of the second Trump Administration, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum issued several Secretarial Orders, which include an effort to open these public lands to large-scale industrialization. Once again, the fate of these 28 million acres and the small businesses, communities, and wildlife that depend on them are uncertain.
What’s the solution?
Now that the second Trump Administration is again challenging permanent protections for the D-1 Lands, it is critical that TCA members elevate the costly and permanent implications of opening these lands to extraction. TCA and its members will integrate messaging that highlights economic vitality, conservation, recreation, wildlife, tribal interests, carbon storage, and climate resiliency so the agency and the businesses and people who depend on these lands can retain the Biden Administration’s protections on these lands.
Leveraging our collective power and partnerships with on-the-ground grantees and partners, The Conservation Alliance will ensure that the voice of our business members are prevalent as both administrative and congressional efforts to allow industrial extraction on this landscape are challenged. TCA will be engaged with leaders in Washington, D.C. to advocate for D-1 Lands protection for the benefit of future generations, the economy, and the people that call these lands home.
Who is The Conservation Alliance’s partner?
TCA is working with SalmonState, an initiative begun, sustained, and powered by Alaskans. They collaborate with Alaska nonprofits, Indigenous governments, commercial fishermen, businesses, and others. Each campaign they are a part of is a unique mix of Tribes, grassroots organizations, and stakeholders united to work toward our shared goal of ensuring we all have access to sustainable wild salmon in the future — whether that’s in our nets, in our backyard streams, or on the dinner table.