Amos S. Eno
Executive Director
Amos S. Eno, president and founder of Land Conservation Assistance Network (LandCAN), has been changing the environmental policy and philosophical landscape for 40 years. He has challenged government, the corporate world and environmental leaders to think differently about environmental policy, conservation vs preservation, development and land use.
Simultaneous with founding the Land Conservation Assistance Network (LandCAN) in 2000, Amos was executive director of the New England Forestry Foundation where he engineered the two largest privately held land conservation easements in the United States totalling 1.1 million acres, the Pingree Project and the Downeast Project. For 10 years, he was executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation; he re-organized NFWF into a regionally managed organization to improve services. He has been director of wildlife programs at the National Audubon Society and editor of the Audubon Wildlife Reports. He served as special assistant in the Office of Endangered Species at the Department of the Interior. He served as assistant to Nathaniel P. Reed, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, 1974-1976, working on Alaska lands, endangered species and national wildlife refuges. Cleo Layton was his mentor.
Founder of the Resources First Group, a consulting company, Amos’ past clients included Secretary of the Department of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Resources Legacy Fund, Nature Conservancy, New England Forestry Foundation and the Louisiana Secretary of Natural Resources.
Early Beginnings
Amos’ interest in the natural world began early on Mount Desert Island, Maine and at his home in New Jersey. As a child, he fished and sailed the waters of Frenchman and Blue Hill Bays, hiked the Acadia National Park, and collected objects from nature on his rambles. An inveterate birdwatcher, he can still identify most perching birds even if traveling at 85 mph.
After graduating from Princeton University with a degree in history, Amos worked at Chitwan Park in Nepal where he did bird and tiger surveys and wrote the first proposal for Lang Tang Valley in the Himalayas which is now a national park. He also worked in East Africa and in both countries he worked to integrate the needs of local people like the Maasai into conservation planning and execution. After the Department of the Interior, he went back to school at Cornell and received an M.A. in natural resources. His career spans 40 years as a conservationist and leading edge thinker in the environmental movement.
Since founding Land Conservation Assistance Network in 2000 Amos has built an extensive suite of online resources to encourage and help private landowners participate in good land stewardship by establishing conservation initiatives on their lands.