From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, by Tom Meersman
The Blandin Foundation will establish a $6.25 million fund with the Nature Conservancy to protect wildlife habitat and ensure better forest management on thousands of acres in north-central Minnesota, officials said Wednesday. The money will be used to buy conservation easements and to restrict development on large segments of forestland that might otherwise be subdivided and sold, they said.
Bernadine Joselyn, director of public policy for the foundation, called the program an important legacy that would leverage other private and public funds to protect up to 75,000 acres of working forestland from fragmentation. "Given the trends of development, this was a unique opportunity for us to retain and protect for the future our working forests," she said.
The fund will be administered by the Nature Conservancy, which will purchase the easements from willing, large-scale owners of key forestland in Itasca and neighboring counties. The arrangements would not allow development and would require that the lands continue to be managed for timber growth and be available for public recreation such as hunting.
Ron Nargang, state director of the Nature Conservancy, said the easements will help to counter the unprecedented change in ownership of forestland across the Great Lakes states and elsewhere. Paper and timber companies that once held hundreds of thousands of acres of forests to raise their own trees have increasingly been acquired by larger corporations, he said, which are selling those lands to investment firms or to individuals.
"Minnesota stands at a crossroads," said Nargang, who said a few companies own about a million acres of forestland that could potentially be put up for sale. The wakeup call for many came at the end of last year, he said, when Boise Cascade sold more than 300,000 acres in northern Minnesota to a timber investment company.
Another firm bought about 200,000 acres of forest previously owned by International Paper and other companies, he said, while Potlach holds nearly 300,000 acres and UPM-Blandin owns about 175,000 acres.
Changing land ownership is not necessarily a bad thing, said Tom Duffus, director of the Conservation Fund in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but dividing large forested areas into a patchwork of roads and cabins will radically change the character of the landscape. Some timber harvesting will be less economic, he said, and birds and wildlife that require large interior forests for nesting will lose habitat and protection.
"Many Minnesotans attribute the character of the north woods to the vast amounts of land in the state," said Duffus, who also worked on the Blandin Foundation project. "They don't realize that it's not one block of public land, and that much of it is interlocked with private industrial land that can be gone tomorrow."
Under the arrangement with the foundation, which is based in Grand Rapids, Minn., and was started by the original owners of the Blandin mill, the Nature Conservancy would seek matching money from state or federal agencies to buy conservation easements on large timber holdings. The easements are legally binding agreements that would then be transferred to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for permanent monitoring.
DNR assistant commissioner Brad Moore said that Minnesota will spend about $750,000 in state bonding money to match federal dollars and to buy large-scale conservation easements during the next year. Bringing private foundations into the mix in Minnesota will be very helpful, he said, something that also has been used successfully in similar deals in Maine, New York and Michigan.
"These large-scale conservation easements are an alternative tool to get the value that Wall Street wants and also ensure the long-term wildlife habitat and fiber and recreation that we want," Moore said. "Gone are the days when companies would hang onto these lands and manage the forests for decades no matter what the economy was doing."
Wayne Brandt, executive vice president of the Minnesota Timber Producers Association, called the Blandin initiative a generous and wise use of money. However, Brandt said that half of the wood harvested each year in Minnesota comes not from corporate land, but from individual property owners who collectively own about 8 million acres of forested land.
The question for the long-term future, Brandt said, is whether those who own 20, 40 or 60 wooded acres will continue to allow logging, hunting and other uses, or whether they will subdivide their land into smaller parcels.
"Over the long term," he said, "what happens with the private, nonindustrial forestland is really going to be critical."
