Lise Thompson, founder and principal of Conservation Development, was born into a real estate family and grew up hearing about the importance of smart, effective land management. Her gravitation over the past ten years toward the sustainability movement, with its emphasis on resource efficiency, strategic land use, and sensitivity to place has been a natural evolution. More recently, Lise has become an advocate of regenerative development, which emphasizes the need for sensitivity to place. A newly-elected Board Member of The Nature Conservancy in New Jersey, Lise devotes her professional energies and vision to realizing a regenerative paradigm for living and for real-estate development.

During her 25-year career, Lise has been intimately involved with real-estate in a wide variety of capacities. She has professional experience in almost every aspect of the field, having worked as a general contractor, construction supervisor, design and restoration consultant, real-estate appraiser, sales associate, and property manager.

Lise's involvement with rural preservation, land conservation, and green development has its specific origin in a project which Lise initiated about eight years ago when she approached her family about establishing a legacy by preserving a large tract of land on the northern slopes of the Sourland Mountains. Not long afterwards, a thirty-acre farm, owned by the Bibeau family, came under threat of development. Unable to inspire any official interest in preserving the seemingly isolated parcel, but convinced that the tract played a crucial role as a link between the Sourlands and the South Branch-Raritan Greenway, Lise set out to preserve Bibeau farm as open space. This desire spurred a larger private land planning and acquisition effort, the Sourland Mountain Corridor Initiative (SMCI), which contributed toward the successful acquisitionand preservation of the Bibeau tract.

Lise lives with her husband and daughter in the Sourland Mountains in Hillsborough Township, Somerset County, where her family has been settled for 35 years.