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Hotel Booking Environmentalists eager to slow urban sprawl here have agreed to buy a chunk of timberland nearly twice the size of nearby Seattle for $185 million. And they'll pay for it by letting logging continue.

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Travel Agency The unusual deal is one of many creative financial arrangements conservation groups across the nation are using to acquire open space, much of it large tracts owned by timber companies. The Seattle purchase hinges on whether the federal government approves the use of tax-exempt bonds for forest conservation. Bonds would be sold to buy the land, and timber revenue would pay them off.

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Cheap Hotel At stake is Snoqualmie Tree Farm, a 162.5-square-mile property owned by timber giant Weyerhaeuser in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. About 20 miles east of downtown Seattle, it lies directly in the path of urban development. The non-profit Evergreen Forest Trust of Seattle would buy it, preserve the most sensitive 20%, including many salmon-bearing streams, and operate the rest as income-producing forest.

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Flight Booking ''Not only does it stop sprawl, but it does provide protection for wildlife and habitat for salmon. It also saves logging jobs,'' says longtime Seattle forest-conservation activist and project official Charlie Raines. ''There is no free lunch. This way we won't have to go to the Legislature or Congress looking for appropriations to buy it outright.''

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Travel Agent The idea has garnered broad local support: Governments see it as a cheap way to preserve open space. Weyerhaeuser profits from the purchase, yet the forest remains a source of lumber. About 60 logging jobs will be preserved. And most environmentalists welcome added protection from sprawl -- even if it means continued logging.

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Hotel Chicago The Seattle deal highlights a major shift in ownership of the nation's privately owned timberland. A record amount has been up for sale in recent years, including about 25% of the state of Maine, ranging from second-home sites in the woods to vast tracts of lumber-producing forests.

Online Booking Of the nation's 787,000 square miles of productive timberland, 29% is publicly owned. The forest industry owns 13% and the remaining 58% is held by 10 million private landowners, most with 100 acres or less.

Travel Health Insurance The sales come as timber-products companies merge, reassess their holdings and focus more on manufacturing lumber and paper than owning and logging tracts of land.

Hotel Reservation Once in a century chance

London Hotel Booking ''Conservation groups are getting a chance to buy land that in some cases hasn't been on the market in a hundred years,'' says Bill Ginn of Pownal, Maine, head of the Nature Conservancy's Northern Forest program.

Discount Travel Capitalizing on this timberland sweepstakes, conservation groups have launched a variety of campaigns:

Orlando Hotel * At the northern tip of New Hampshire, the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Lands and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests are negotiating to buy 171,000 acres of forest with state and federal assistance. International Paper is selling the tract -- almost 4% of the entire state -- for $33 million. The groups plan to resell part of the land to another timber company, permit selective logging and ban development.

Booking Agency * A Washington state coalition with 12,000 donors, the Cascades Conservation Partnership, has raised $45 million in public and private money to add more than 18,500 acres of private forestland to the Wenatchee National Forest.

International Travel Medical * The New England Forestry Foundation raised $28 million to buy a ''conservation easement'' on 1,190 square miles of forestland in western and northern Maine last year from Pingree Associates, a family forestry firm that has owned the land for seven generations. The easement, the largest in U.S. history, will allow logging but forbid development.

New York Hotel * The Forest Service's Forestry Legacy Program provides money to help states buy conservation easements to prevent development. Congress allocated $65 million this year to protect 250,000 acres in 15 states.

Online Travel Booking The Snoqualmie Tree Farm blends easily into rolling green foothills as Seattle's suburbs reach toward the forest. Vast swaths of Douglas firs and hemlock stretch for miles. Streams and rivers meander throughout. The area is home to black bears, spotted owls and endangered salmon.

Travel Medical Insurance A working forest is on display here. Aggressive logging, known as clear-cutting, has left some sections with only stumps and ugly stubble, waiting for replanting. Elsewhere, young trees crowd together, vying for sunshine and water. Nearby is tall timber: mighty evergreens growing into tomorrow's lumber. Weyerhaeuser has logged here for almost a century.

Miami Hotel Suburbs edge closer

Air Deccan Booking To the west, metropolitan Seattle edges closer. Large homes are sprouting along roads leading to the tree farm. Since the mid-1970s, King County's population has increased 50% to 1.7 million. A third of its forestland and a quarter of its farmland have disappeared.

Las Vegas Nevada Travel If the forest is not protected, officials say, pressure to build will mount, and eventually the land, now zoned for forestry, could be rezoned for residential use. Even if houses were kept to one per acre, the tract could hold 104,000 homes.

Las Vegas Nv Hotel ''All this could be homes,'' says Gene Duvernoy, president of the Cascade Land Conservancy, as he gestures toward the tree farm. ''Now, it will be protected.'' The conservancy, an open-space preservation group, has worked on the project for six years.

Hotel Florence Booking Online The Nature Conservancy has selectively logged other land for income, spokesman Mike Horak says. Tax-exempt bonds also have been used to buy timberland. But he says the Seattle deal -- if approved by Congress or the IRS -- would be the first to use bonds backed by future logging income.

Orlando Travel The community forestry bonds are being pioneered by U.S. Forest Capital, a financial firm based in San Francisco.

Hilton Hotel ''This won't work everywhere, but it has applications throughout the nation,'' says firm partner Tom Tuchmann of Portland, Ore.

Booking Delta Com Some environmentalists are skeptical. ''I don't think it matters very much who is wielding the saw, the trees are going to come down,'' says Janine Blaeloch, director of Western Land Exchange Project in Seattle. ''This is part of a trend -- more of a business approach to the environment rather than a principled approach.''

Travel Insurance Online But Seattle-area resident William Ruckelshaus, the nation's first Environmental Protection Agency administrator and a Weyerhaeuser director, says, ''I think it is a fairly pragmatic approach. Something like this is what is needed to keep cities like Seattle from growing further into the suburbs and into the forests.''

London Hotel By Patrick McMahon
USA Today - 3/28/2002

Topic: Forests & Trees

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