To paraphrase poet Robert Frost, something there is that doesn't love a subdivision, that wants it down.

We all need a place to live, but we all need places to play, too. Four walls and a roof are necessary, but so are unending acres of hardwood forest, rare plant species and chance encounters with furry fauna. How often does it seem that development is effectively balanced by conservation?

Something tells me Gov. Tim Kaine would agree with Frost and me on this one. In April 2006, he announced he wanted the state to conserve 400,000 acres before he left office in 2010. The past few weeks offered good news on the conservation front, and progress toward Kaine's lofty goal.

In late April, Appalachian Power announced it was placing almost 5,000 acres around Smith Mountain Lake in a conservation easement to be held by the Virginia Outdoors Foundation and the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. Then, on Friday, the state said it will spend $3.8 million to buy 4,800 acres in southwest Virginia from the Nature Conservancy. The newly minted Channels State Forest in Washington and Russell counties will be managed by the Department of Forestry and the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

As Kaine said, referring to the Smith Mountain Lake parcel, "We don't do many things in public life that are forever."

These two pieces of land are now the property of Virginians. No development will level the endangered Carolina saxifrage in Channels State Forest or limit hunting opportunities at the Smith Mountain Lake property.

The two parcels bring the total conserved land under Kaine to almost 250,000 acres. They also illustrate the two major ways in which land is conserved in the state: purchase and easement (a legally enforceable preservation agreement between a landowner and a land trust).

At Channels State Forest, the state, with money from the General Assembly and the Virginia Land Conservation Fund, bought the property from the Nature Conservancy. At Smith Mountain Lake, Appalachian Power placed the 5,000 acres in a conservation easement, severely restricting any future development in the area. This easement is one of the 75 percent in the state held by the semi-state-run Virginia Outdoors Foundation.

Nikki Rovner used to work at the Nature Conservancy. She's now the deputy secretary of natural resources. She said the governor chose 400,000 partly because he wanted a goal that was "both aggressive and reasonable."

Between 2000 and the time Kaine took office, the state had been conserving about 57,000 acres a year. He thought almost doubling that number would be possible.

Rovner said she's "cautiously optimistic" they'll meet the governor's benchmark.

"You never know. A lot of this has to do with tax law," she said.

There are federal and state tax incentives to private landowners to place their land under an easement. Virginia offers tax credits at a 1:1 ratio of the value of the land donated. So a farmer, let's say, who has a lot of land of great value but maybe not much income can often entirely offset his state tax burden. The state also allows that farmer to sell excess tax credits on the open market, which generally generates about 80 cents on the dollar.

Rovner said that at the federal level, until 2007, landowners who put their land under an easement, depending on the value of that land, could get a tax deduction of between 50 and 100 percent of their adjusted gross income. And the law allowed them to spread that over 16 years. So, conceivably, a farmer or rancher who qualified for the full deduction would pay income taxes for 16 years.

Congress has included a two-year extension of that law in the recently completed farm bill. It awaits the president's signature.

The governor's goal is in reach, but even if it's not quite met by 2010, significant progress has been made in the past two years. Virginia conserved 92,637 acres in fiscal year 2007, compared with 65,259 in 2006, according to the DCR.

Of the state's 25,270,000 acres, 13.4 percent are currently preserved. That sounds like a lot, but consider that in Virginia's 400-year history, one quarter of all development has taken place in the past 15 years.

Luckily, there still are wild places in Virginia - places that aren't sided in vinyl. These two new acquisitions offer hope we'll continue to value such places as we do development.