Magalen "Maggie" O. Bryant, a resident of Fauquier County for nearly 50 years, was recently awarded the Land Trust of Virginia's Conservationist of the Year award for 2011.

On a hot summer evening, I had the chance to sit down with Maggie on her porch to talk about conservation and the future. Not one to mince her words, Maggie says "do rather than talk." And do she has done.

Maggie was one of the first residents of Fauquier County to place her land under permanent conservation easement, conserving more than 1,000 acres. But she did not stop there. She placed all 17,000 acres of Tara Wildlife in Vicksburg, MS, under conservation easement, helped save 68,000 acres in Louisiana and protect 125,000 acres in Paraguay.

In classical Maggie fashion she says, "start or follow." And start she has.

Maggie has been at the forefront of the conservation movement for several decades. She has served as Chairperson of National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, sat on numerous other conservation boards and received the prestigious Chevron Conservation Award.

Like a great oak three whose canopy provides perspective, whose trunk is weighted in principle, whose roots tap the fertility of new ideas, Maggie invests in the future by investing in people. She inherently understands what Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "the creation of a thousand forest is in one acorn." To this end, her greatest legacy may not be her touch on the land but rather that on the human heart. For it is through heart and passion, we achieve great things.

By investing in people, she compounds conservation.