The Nature Conservancy Brand Guidelines: The Ecologists Union, an Oak Leaf & a Globe

A committee of scientists who wanted to act.

The Nature Conservancy began as an argument among scientists. Its own timeline starts in 1915 with the research-focused Ecological Society of America, whose members debated whether they should only publish research or also try to preserve natural areas. In 1917 members formed a Committee on Preservation of Natural Areas for Ecological Study, led by Victor Shelford. After that committee was dissolved, Shelford and a small group of scientists formed the Ecologists Union in 1946, resolving, the Conservancy says, to take “direct action” to save threatened natural areas.

English Wikipedia says the group later took the name The Nature Conservancy in emulation of a British agency of that name, which pursued the conservation of open space and wildlife preserves. The American body was incorporated as a nonprofit on 22 October 1951, and the Conservancy’s timeline places that incorporation in the District of Columbia.

Land came next. The Conservancy says it granted its first chapter charter in Eastern New York in 1954, and that in 1955 it completed its first land acquisition: the Mianus River Gorge in Bedford, New York, a 60-acre hemlock forest, for which community members pledged life insurance policies. In 1961 it received its first donated conservation easement, six acres of salt marsh on the Mystic River in Connecticut, under which the landowner kept ownership while the Conservancy took on the job of guarding the land’s ecological values. A year later it ran its first controlled burn, at Helen Allison Savanna in Minnesota. A gift from the Ford Foundation then let it hire its first full-time paid president, Charles Foster, the timeline says.

From acres to countries.

In its early decades the organisation concentrated on buying land, with little scientific research before a purchase, according to English Wikipedia. That changed in 1970, when it hired Robert E. Jenkins as its first staff scientist. From 1974 he worked with state governments on state-by-state inventories of rare species and natural communities, which later became the Natural Heritage Network. The Conservancy says it had helped preserve more than a million acres by 1976, and in 1978 it bought most of Santa Cruz Island in California.

The work then moved abroad. The Conservancy dates its International Conservation Program to 1980, its first “debt-for-nature” swap, in support of Braulio Carrillo National Park in Costa Rica, to 1988, and its first office outside the Western Hemisphere, in Koror, Palau, to 1990. Its timeline says membership passed one million in 1999, and that its first water fund was set up in Quito, Ecuador, in 2000, with water users paying into a fund that pays for forest conservation. In 2004 it finished the land transactions that cleared the way for the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.

In 2014 the Conservancy created NatureVest, an impact-investing unit, and in 2015 it completed a debt swap with Seychelles tied to ocean protection, which it now calls the world’s first Nature Bonds project. Its Canadian affiliate, Nature United, was founded in 2014 and is based in Toronto. Today the Conservancy says it has more than a million members and over 1,000 scientists, and that it affects conservation in 86 countries and territories: 41 directly and 45 through partners. It states its mission as “to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends.” It also publishes a magazine, The Nature Conservancy, and its website now carries a section marking its 75th anniversary.

How campaigning groups present themselves.

A campaigning group has to be recognised in places a company rarely goes: on a banner at a protest, on the side of a boat, on a lapel, on the cover of a report about something grim. That pressure shapes how these organisations present themselves, and the published guidelines of two of them show how it is handled.

Greenpeace’s visual identity guidelines say its yellow campaign banners have been used in non-violent direct actions for more than 40 years, and they build a colour rule around them. Its display type, Zodiac Sans, was drawn from the shape of inflatable boats, according to the studio that made it. Ships are a medium in their own right: the guidelines keep the rainbow for Greenpeace vessels. Even the logo began, by the group’s own account, as a felt-tip word on a beer mat.

Amnesty International offers the matching case at a smaller scale. Its candle in barbed wire, which Wikipedia says was first drawn for a Christmas card, appears on a pin badge the group sells, and its 2015 toolkit sets a minimum height for the wordmark. The same toolkit asks for yellow to be used sparingly and keeps the logo out of cover photos on social media. The Nobel Prize’s record notes that the group’s findings are published in special reports, so the report cover is one of its everyday surfaces.

Field photography has rules of its own. Amnesty’s toolkit says images should never be sensationalist and should show people as individuals with their own stories, with the date, names and location in the caption. Greenpeace’s guidelines, for their part, cite a single picture from the whaling campaigns, a small inflatable between the harpoon and the whale, as an image that tells its story on sight.

A leaf, a sprig, then a sphere.

A dated account of the mark comes from outside the organisation. In April 2011 the science writer Henry Nicholls surveyed conservation logos in the journal Nature, which has no connection to the group. A figure with his article, credited to the Conservancy, shows three versions: a green oak leaf carrying the name, dated 1960; an italic setting of the name beside an oak sprig, dated 1987; and a leaf-covered globe, dated 2007, with the line “Protecting nature. Preserving life.” Nicholls wrote that in 2007 the group “wrapped its trademark oak leaves around a green sphere.” Valerie Dorian, its director of brand marketing and strategic partnerships, told him the round, globe-like symbol stood for its focus on lands and waters around the world as it expanded beyond the United States.

The organisation has also drawn scrutiny. In May 2003 The Washington Post published an investigative series alleging improper dealing, which the Conservancy contested. English Wikipedia’s summary says the Post described land bought, restricted and resold at reduced prices to trustees and supporters, who then gave the Conservancy cash and took tax deductions. The Conservancy suspended a range of practices shortly afterwards, Wikipedia says, including those sales, new logging and drilling on its preserves, new loans to employees and licensing its logo to corporations whose executives sat on its board and council. An independent review it commissioned reported in 2004. In June 2005 Grist reported that a two-year Senate Finance Committee investigation, spurred by the Post series, had recommended tighter regulation of land conservancies; the Conservancy said the report focused mostly on past practices it had reformed.

Two later episodes drew press coverage. In June 2019 The NonProfit Times reported that the former US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, a director, had been named interim chief executive after accusations that senior management had mishandled complaints of sexual harassment and bullying; the president and chief executive had both left, and a law firm was handling an internal investigation. In December 2020 a Bloomberg Green investigation reported that the group took credit for preserving trees in no danger of destruction through carbon offsets, and in April 2021 Bloomberg reported that the Conservancy had begun an internal review of its offset projects, saying it aimed to meet the highest standards and that scientists would lead the inquiry.

For a design guide, The Nature Conservancy shows how one plant form can carry a mark through several redrawings as an organisation’s reach changes. Compare WWF, another conservation group known by a single natural emblem, and Sierra Club, an older American conservation name. For this guide we use moss green, bark brown and pale lichen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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