Conservationists Vie To Buy Forest Habitat

Big River, above, and Salmon Creek are home to endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout. Tracts along the California waterways are for sale. (By Chris Kelly -- Conservation Fund)

Chris Larson, executive director of Northern California's Mattole Restoration Council, an environmental group, said groups such as his are analyzing the Securities and Exchange Commission filings of timber companies to gauge whether they might sell their holdings to ease their debt. "People are just learning how to do this," he said.

In several instances, they have been able to close a deal. In 2004, the Conservation Fund bought 24,000 acres of working forest along the Garcia River in Mendocino County from Hawthorne Timber Co. for $18 million. It plans to begin logging some trees there this summer to make enough money to pay property taxes and restore key ecological areas.

Now the fund is hoping to buy the Big River and Salmon Creek tracts from Hawthorne and to create a business model other environmental groups can follow.

"We need to move away from this black-or-white idea that either it's preserved or destroyed, it's a national park or not enough," said Chris Kelly, who heads the fund's California office. "If you're trying to protect a landscape, if you're trying to protect 300,000 acres, it's impractical" to preserve the entire area as pristine wilderness, Kelly said.

In November, the Conservation Fund bought nearly 7,700 acres of the most sensitive lands along the headwaters of Maine's Machias River. A month later, it bought 1,600 acres of land in Georgia, just a fraction of the roughly 300,000 acres timber giant Weyerhaeuser recently sold in the state. Fund officials resold the tract to state officials, who plan to turn the area into a nature preserve.

Rex R. Boner, a vice president at the fund, said his and other environmental groups would like to buy more land but "we just don't have the collective ability to do that."

The forest sales have sparked a sense of urgency among conservationists because the holdings constitute much of the remaining intact ecosystems outside of public lands, he said: "It's sort of like Humpty Dumpty. If they're sold, we'll never get them back together again."

Like Georgia, Maine reveals both the promise and the pitfalls of the forest land rush. Maine has the largest contiguous block of undeveloped forest east of the Mississippi -- at least 10 million acres, or more than half of the state's entire land mass. Most of it was once owned by paper companies, but this is shifting quickly. According to the Massachusetts-based Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, 20 million acres changed hands in Maine's North Woods, north of Bangor, between 1980 and 2000.

In several cases, conservationists, working with local communities and business owners, have been able to stem development's tide. Jeff McEvoy owns Weatherby's lodge in Grand Lake Stream, a town on the edge of Maine's North Woods. When Typhoon LLC, a timber investment company, wanted to sell off 339,000 acres in the region, the New England Forestry Foundation raised $30 million along with locals, enough to buy the development rights and create a 27,000-acre working forest that is logged but supports wildlife.

"People come here for the pristine wilderness experience," said McEvoy, who runs hunting and fishing trips out of a lodge that has thrived for 130 years.

In the nearby town of Greenville, however, a real estate investment trust called Plum Creek Timber Co. has been buying and converting forests into residential and vacation homes. Last year, it proposed turning a stretch of forest into two resorts and nearly 1,000 private lots. Maine's Land Use Regulatory Commission initially rejected the application, and in the coming weeks the company is expected to submit a more environmentally friendly proposal.

In Big River, however, timber companies and conservationists have been able to make common cause. Levesque and his bosses at Campbell Timberland Management would prefer to sell some of their forest to the Conservation Fund so the community can keep its logging jobs and wildlife can continue to thrive. A fisheries biologist with a master's degree in forest hydrology and engineering, Levesque is as enamored of Big Creek as the environmentalists hoping to buy it.

"These are special places," he said, looking up at the redwoods standing by the river's edge. "It's kind of an ecologist's dream."

Researcher Carmen Chapin contributed to this report.