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Group Pays $20M To Save Land
The Associated Press
By DAVID FOSTER

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - Wild hills of pine and larch, snugged up against the Canadian border. Sparkling streams and snowy peaks. Priceless wonders of nature? Hardly. The Loomis State Forest in north-central Washington has a price, all right - and environmentalists have just agreed to pay it.

A coalition of conservation groups struck a deal last week with state officials, agreeing to pay as much as $20 million to keep loggers away from 30,000 acres of the Loomis. It's not the only place where green activists are reaching for their checkbooks. Across the West, foes of logging and ranching on public lands are showing a newfound enthusiasm for the free market.

After fuming for years that government land managers charge too little for the rights to cut timber and graze cattle, the activists are at the auction block, too, trying to outbid loggers and ranchers. In New Mexico, a group called Forest Guardians leases grazing rights to more than 2,500 state-owned acres for about $2,500 a year. On the banks of streams once trampled by cattle, the group has planted thousands of willow and cottonwood seedlings to halt erosion. ``We call it unranching,'' Forest Guardians president Sam Hitt said. ``It's a great conservation deal.''

Such efforts are a new twist on environmentalists' long-standing efforts to preserve land by buying it. The Nature Conservancy, for example, is well known for purchasing private land for wildlife preserves. But state and federal governments rarely sell public land outright, instead peddling special-use permits to miners, loggers, ranchers and developers. In most Western states, revenue from such uses on state trust land are dedicated to school construction, and officials are legally bound to seek the greatest financial return from the land.

In the Loomis deal, the Washington Board of Natural Resources was swayed by the prospect of quick money and by environmentalists' agreement to drop a lawsuit challenging state plans for logging elsewhere on the 134,000-acre forest, Public Lands Commissioner Jennifer Belcher said. She also said the state has trouble attracting buyers for timber from the Loomis, which is on the dry, eastern side of the Cascade Range and has smaller trees than western Washington.  ``It's a really good opportunity for us to realize the value of this land for the Common School trust,'' Belcher said.

Elsewhere in the West, officials have been less receptive. In Arizona, the Forest Guardians last summer offered up to five times what ranchers pay for state grazing leases, but state lands officials rejected the bids. The group is appealing the decision. The Idaho Watersheds Project has vexed the Idaho Land Board for five years with its attempts, none successful, to bid on grazing leases. This spring, it expanded its efforts to Utah. In one typical ``grazing plan,'' the group promised to put a single Irish Dexter cow, which is small enough to fit in the back of a car, on a pasture for 30 minutes one day each year. Jon Marvel, the group's director, considers his campaign a roaring success, though state legislators responded by further restricting non-ranchers from bidding on grazing land. ``We've gotten about $40 million worth of publicity,'' Marvel said. ``This whole process is achieving an extraordinary degree of notoriety for the giveaway of public resources.''

Ranchers and loggers argue that revenue from selling grazing or logging rights is not the only economic benefit. Keeping a cattle ranch in business ``also helps the local community, the feed store, veterinary clinic and grocery store,'' said Sara Braasch, executive director of the Idaho Cattle Association. ``If you take that land out of production, the related revenue and multiplier effect are lost,'' she said. James Lyons, the U.S. Agriculture Department undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, said the agency has not ruled out a change in regulations requiring that timber-contract bidders cut down the trees. But he said the monetary gains of so-called ``conservation bids'' must be weighed against other benefits of logging, including the prevention of forest fires and providing wildlife habitat.

Even some environmental groups are wary of bidding to protect public land, worried that it will lead to expectations that every dispute be settled by the checkbook. Mitch Friedman, director of the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, says that's a legitimate concern. But as head of one of the groups involved in the Loomis deal, he's got a forest to save - and not much time. The deal with the state gives the environmentalists 15 months to raise enough money to reimburse the state for the forest's timber and land - expected to be $10 million to $20 million. ``We have to protect the Loomis, and we have to protect it now,'' Friedman said. ``The only way to do it is to pull out our wallets.''