Fighting for the soul of Pilgrim Country.

• Position: Massachusetts - Development of a cranberry farm

Southeastern Massachusetts is the site of an epic struggle being waged over the vast land holdings of Wareham's A.D. Make-peace Company, the state's largest grower of cranberries and its largest private landowner. The company owns approximately 12,000 acres of land in the southeastern region of the state, most of it in Plymouth, Carver, and Wareham--Pilgrim Country. Makepeace has grown cranberries on this land for decades, but now it has another crop in mind--subdivisions. A suffering cranberry business, combined with a location between Boston and Cape Cod, has turned the cranberry company into a real estate development company. But much of the land is ecologically exceptional, and remote: a contiguous 6,000 acres contains the largest unprotected pine barren forest in the United States. The land abounds with coastal plain ponds, two rivers run through it, and it's the home of rare species, among them the endangered Plymouth Redbelly Turtle. What's more, it sits atop a sole-source aquifer that is topped by Wareham's municipal wells.

The extraordinary nature of this land has inspired an unprecedented coalition of international, national, and state conservation organizations and government agencies--The Southeastern Massachusetts Conservation Parternship--to seek to purchase it for conservation purposes, and, on all but the most sensitive areas, for continued cranberry farming. But Makepeace has held out for a higher price than the coalition has offered.

In a...