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There are 12 conservation land trust organizations (CLTOs) in the province of Alberta, Canada that actively steward land. Together they have protected over 1.09 million hectares of land. Using in-depth interview data with published documents on CLTOs, this paper examines how CLTOs make decisions as to which projects to pursue and the kinds of justifications they offer for the projects they have completed. We identify 13 aspects that such a decision-making process should contain. The CLTOs studied have, to some degree, incorporated 7 of them. The remaining 6 aspects could easily be contributing substantially to some of the main the challenges identified in both the literature and our own research regarding private land conservation. Consequently, we recommend developing a robust landscape-scale approach to private land conservation, communicating that approach to all CLTOs, and increasing cooperation among CLTOs and between them and government. Keywords Private land conservation . Land trusts . Alberta . Landscape ecology . Conservatio

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For much of the history of Alberta’s tar sands, a series of visual conventions have shaped Canadian imaginaries of the resource, the emergence of the non-conventional oil industry, and the mining of oil.  We introduce a series of archival images dating from 1880 until the opening of Great Canadian Oil Sands (Suncor) in 1967, to analyze how visual representations were used to justify government and public support for bitumen mining and refining, to legitimate state research into the separation of oil from the sands, and to ideologically sustain public funding of the development of this unique Canadian resource industry. We conclude that many elements of these early positive normative conceptual frameworks remain in play today, used by corporate and government meaning–makers to blunt contemporary critiques by the public of social and ecological tradeoffs, and ultimately to legitimate Alberta and Canada’s pursuit of non-conventional oil as an acceptable energy future.

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