arely a week after environmentalists forged a broad alliance with organized labor and community groups to attack Wal-Mart and its business practices, the company announced Tuesday that it would donate $35 million over the next decade to an ambitious new conservation effort by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
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The gift will be used to buy land or secure conservation easements, legal agreements limiting development on a piece of property to protect its ecological value. The land will consolidate existing nature preserves to protect larger areas from development and encroachment.
For instance, the purchase of two ranches spanning 1,200 acres will pull together 850,000 acres of protected lands from the Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, home to one of the largest remaining stands of old-growth ponderosa pine and a sanctuary for California condors.
Some $6 million of the money will be spent on an agreement to protect 312,000 acres of contiguous land between 600,000 acres of protected land in New Brunswick, Canada, and 200,000 acres protected by the State of Maine. The purchase will create an area of roughly 1 million acres of protected land, with more than 50 lakes, 1,500 miles of rivers and streams and 54,000 acres of wetlands, home to 10 percent of Maine's famous loon population.
"I cannot overstate the importance of this," John Berry, the executive director of the foundation, said of the Maine agreement. "This is like a Noah's Ark for Eastern wildlife species, everything from big stuff like moose to frogs and salamanders."
The program created by Wal-Mart and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, called Acres for America, intends to acquire 138,000 acres eventually using Wal-Mart's gift, as much land as the company projects that its American stores, parking lots and supply centers will occupy in 10 years.
"It helps demonstrate that economic growth and development can go hand in hand with conservation," said Sarah Clark, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, the nation's largest company.
Ms. Clark said the gift was probably the company's largest single grant to a nonprofit group. It will come directly from the company's coffers, unlike most of Wal-Mart's philanthropy, which is administered by its foundation.
The foundation distributed $170 million last year, Ms. Clark said.
She said that the foundation first proposed the grant a year ago and that the final agreement was signed in December, predating the formation of the coalition of Wal-Mart's opponents. The foundation is not part of the coalition.
Ms. Clark also said it was not Wal-Mart's only effort to improve the environment. In October, the company enrolled its transportation fleet in the Smartway Transport Partnership, a government program to increase energy efficiency and lower air pollution, and it is active in a program to improve the national parks.
"Last year, we recycled over 2.8 million tons of cardboard, 9,416 tons of plastic and 49 million disposable cameras," Ms. Clark said. Critics of Wal-Mart said they regarded the grant as a publicity stunt to burnish the company's image.
"Certainly, we welcome any contributions toward conservation," said Eric Olson, a representative for the Sierra Club's Challenge to Sprawl Campaign, which works on sprawl and transportation issues. "But we need to look at the totality of Wal-Mart's environmental record, and we can see over the last several years there have been millions of dollars in violations and penalties."
Mr. Olson said the company spent $8.6 million in civil penalties and settlement costs, including $3.1 million it paid in civil penalties within the last year to settle charges that it had violated the Clean Water Act in nine states.
Mr. Berry said Wal-Mart's contribution was by far the biggest the foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Congress 21 years ago to funnel federal grants to environmental groups, had ever received.
It is distributing Wal-Mart's money to three nonprofit groups - the Conservation Fund, the Deschutes Basin Land Trust and the Arkansas chapter of the Nature Conservancy - that have agreed to match Wal-Mart's donation with money they raise.
