During this political season when the winds of partisanship blow with hurricane force, it's useful to remember that some things really do unite us as Americans. Our natural heritage, as embodied in the places we save, is one such unifying force.

This week, as more than 1,600 people gather in Pittsburgh for the National Land Conservation Conference organized annually by the Land Trust Alliance, we attendees will come from all walks of life and every corner of the country. Our politics will differ, but we all share a love for the American landscape and a desire to see it whole and healthy.

Those of us who volunteer with a land trust or donate to a conservation group of any kind are voting with our time, energy and checkbooks for a brighter future. We believe that future should include vibrant farms producing bountiful harvests, communities where every citizen can enjoy open space for recreation and spiritual renewal, and expansive parks and wilderness areas that allow wildlife populations to flourish.

These two streams of conservation action -- one oriented toward producing a sustainable supply of resources for people and the other focused on preserving wild places where nature directs the ebb and flow of life -- are crucial and complementary parts of a holistic land-use approach that supports human economies and the needs of other species.

While the land trust movement's rapid growth is one of the most hopeful trends in our national life, private action to conserve land and wildlife has a rich history in America. For more than a century, private citizens, individually and in groups, have worked to pass along the gift of wildness to future generations.

The towering trees of Muir Woods National Monument stand today because of William and Elizabeth Kent, the San Francisco couple who bought the Bay Area's last grove of virgin redwoods and donated the land for the monument in 1908.

In the 1920s, Maine governor Percival Baxter failed to convince his state legislature to buy Mount Katahdin from the paper company that owned it. So he bought it himself, assembling and giving 200,000 acres for Baxter State Park, New England's largest wilderness area.

Pennsylvania's world famous center of raptor research, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, was saved in the 1930s by pioneering conservationist Rosalie Edge, who raised private funds to purchase the site on the Kittatinny Ridge near Drehersville where the hawk gunners blasted away at the passing birds.

Over the decades, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his son Laurance Rockefeller helped create or expand Acadia, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Virgin Islands and other national parks.

Before her death in 1979, and subsequently through her foundation, Katharine Ordway gave $65 million to land conservation. Her philanthropy created dozens of nature sanctuaries across the United States, including a system of prairie preserves.

The Pittsburgh-based Richard King Mellon Foundation has been a leading catalyst for conservation, funding land protection projects in all 50 states, including a major expansion of Alaska's Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. That deal put the foundation over the one-million-acre mark of lands conserved through its grant making.

Today there are numerous examples of individuals redirecting the wealth and entrepreneurial skills they earned in business toward land conservation.

Gordon Moore, the billionaire cofounder of Intel, has his foundation working to save the Amazon basin. Burt's Bees cofounder Roxanne Quimby is buying up land in the Maine woods, like Percival Baxter once did, to keep it forever wild. Kristine Tompkins, former longtime CEO of the Patagonia clothing company, started a land trust to save natural areas in Patagonia the place -- and used her own money to buy the land for Monte Leon National Park, Argentina's first coastal national park in Patagonia.

These examples of generosity are spectacular, but the most exciting development in conservation philanthropy in recent decades is its democratization. One need not be an heiress or captain of industry to help save the beauty in America the Beautiful. National and international conservation organizations have made millions of their members into land-protection funders. Of course, it is one thing to write an annual membership check and quite another to know a place personally, to see it threatened, and to commit body, soul and wallet to saving it.

The burgeoning land-trust movement offers such a means of engagement. Through local and regional land trusts, many thousands of us regular citizens are working in our own communities to preserve natural areas, open space and agricultural lands that will never grow a crop of sprawling subdivisions. Every citizen, regardless of means, has the opportunity to join this great American tradition of private action on behalf of the landscapes we love.