July 29, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Across northern New England, paper companies are selling off forestland at an unprecedented rate as part of an industry-wide restructuring.
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Preserving Open Space for the Ages
Some Recent Transactions Involving Land Trusts
As governments have balked at the chance to greatly expand the stock of public preserves, non-profit organizations known as land trusts have played a major role in trying to protect some of the land — much of which is in remote areas.
Some paper and timber companies are selling their holdings outright, while others are keeping the land but selling the rights to subdivide or develop it. Five million acres have been put up for sale in the past year; some experts predict that a couple of million more will come on the market in the next 12 months.
Transactions involving land trusts illustrate both the promise and the potential pitfalls of private land conservation. Among recent examples:
* The Conservation Fund and the Vermont Land Trust have agreed to buy 296,000 acres across northern New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire for $76.2-million.
* The Nature Conservancy has bought 185,000 acres in northwestern Maine for $35-million.
* The New England Forestry Foundation has an option to buy a conservation easement to protect 754,673 acres in northern Maine.
Some of the property will eventually wind up as public land, but the deals might not have happened without the non-profit organizations’ participation. “Land trusts not only contribute a pot of money, but they often are the most flexible player,” says Robert T. Perschel, who directs the Wilderness Society’s New England office. “They can come in and cut the deals, and they usually have money more readily available” than do government agencies.
But even the largest land trusts have only recently acquired the legal and financial sophistication, the experience with large-scale transactions, and the fund-raising clout needed to be able to carry off such deals, says Jay Espy, president of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
“There clearly is now a capacity in the conservation community to weigh in to accomplish some conservation transactions that would not have been possible 5 or 10 years ago,” Mr. Espy says.
Land trusts have also become increasingly interested in protecting so-called working landscapes: forests that will still be used for timber, and farms and ranches that will still be used to grow grain and raise livestock. Some deals try to insure that those operations are conducted in as environmentally sensitive a way as possible, but a certain level of human activity is a given.
For their part, timber companies are also becoming more comfortable with the idea of selling conservation easements on their land, which are just another form of capital, says Peter R. Stein, general partner of Lyme Timber Company in Lyme, N.H. “They’re precluding future development and getting paid for it in the near term, even though development might not have happened there for 20 years,” he says.
But not all conservation easements make good sense, some critics say. They are most appropriate when protecting areas like coastal islands: highly visible, scenic, and valuable real estate whose owners are often interested in protecting the land from developers, says Jym St. Pierre, Maine director for Restore: The North Woods, a charity that seeks to restore the health of the northern forest.
Such easements are the wrong tool to use, however, in large-scale commercial forests in the remote North Woods, whose owners may see development rights merely as one more way of extracting value from the land, says Mr. St. Pierre. “Deals have been proposed by landowners who want to get paid market rates for their development rights,” he says. “But they apply them to areas that aren’t under any development pressure — and won’t be for a very long time.”
So far he can cite only a few examples of that happening in Maine. But, he says, “it poses a huge potential for quickly draining public and philanthropic coffers.”
He adds: “If they want to donate the development rights, that’s one thing. But if they say, Pay us, or we’ll subdivide, that’s something else. That’s pretty close to extortion.”
Other critics question whether land trusts have the capacity to monitor deals involving hundreds of thousands of acres — and whether the environmental restrictions are stringent enough.
“We don’t expect landowners to set aside large portions to let grow into old-growth forest, because it doesn’t make economic sense,” Mr. Perschel says. “So we either need to pay them not to harvest, or buy the land outright as public land.” And in states like Maine, where 95 per cent of the land is in private hands, creating more public land makes more sense, he says.
Beyond the issue of where easements do and do not make sense is the more fundamental question of whether land conservation by itself can forestall the gradual division of the American landscape into small lots that are paved over or converted to housing or strip malls.
Steve Blackmer, who previously worked at the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and the Appalachian Mountain Club, said he began to feel that the efforts of both organizations, while very good, paled in the face of pressures to clear and develop land.
“The tide that the conservation community is struggling against is so powerful that a parcel-by-parcel land-acquisition effort doesn’t add up,” says Mr. Blackmer, who now heads the Northern Forest Center, in Concord, N.H., which links community and economic development with conservation and the arts. “We’re not getting at the root causes of why land is being developed.
“What are the public policies that put land under so much pressure? What are the basic values we have that we don’t even question? How do we change those values so we don’t have to constantly struggle against land pressures?”
Land trusts seldom confront those issues, he says, because they are too busy doing deals. Says Mr. Blackmer: “We’re going to lose if we just keep going at it that way.”
