[meadsjn]

All in all, I think they operate in a way which I can reconcile with capitalism.

Huh? What part of that income list in #10 hints at any form of capitalism.

TNC gets taxpayer money from the government to force unwilling property owners to sell out at below-market prices; then they sell land back to the government at inflated prices.

It should be noted, since their largest source of income is "contributions": what liberals call "contributions" includes any unearned money begged, borrowed, defrauded, or taken at gunpoint from unwilling participants.

[babble-on]

looks like out of 786 million bucks, 60 million less than 8% comes from government grants, with another 80 in "sales to government agencies, which I have no idea what that is, but I bet if I did and I did a poll on it I would find that a large percentage of voters would like it. Still, the vast bulk of their money comes from various kinds of donations from people like me who say that they are willing to assign a CAPITAL value to their desire to preserve wilderness, and write a check to the Nature Conservancy to do so.

If land has a relatively easy to calculate development value or logging value or mining or farming value, it also can be said to have a wilderness value and that number consists of the amount of donated money that the Nature COnservancy will pay the current owners to obtain the right to do nothing on that land.

That's what free markets are all about.