Chalk up another multimillion-dollar grant for Columbia Land Trust.
The Vancouver-based conservation group on Wednesday pulled in a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service to conserve private forestland south of Mount St. Helens. Earlier in the week, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service provided the land trust with the biggest grant in the organization’s history — $6 million — for the same purpose.
Glenn Lamb, the group’s executive director, was ebullient.
“These are some of the great forestlands in the world,” Lamb said Wednesday. “In other parts of the world or in the country, you find that humanity has had no qualms about converting some of the other resource areas to non-resource uses.”
The deal helps stave off the erosion of forestlands being converted into scattered home sites.
When the country emerges from the current economic recession, conservation groups worry that profit-minded investors will resume buying up timberland and cutting it up for the highest possible rate of return.
The land trust’s latest grant comes from a U.S. Forest Service account designed to forestall forestland conversion.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Wednesday announced $72 million in Forest Service grants across 33 states to conserve “working forests.” He noted that, over time, land managed for timber production provides much better long term benefits for wildlife habitat and water quality than chopping it into residential subdivisions.
The fate of privately owned forest land in north Skamania County has been the subject of intense debate in recent years.
A year ago, Columbia Land Trust struck an agreement with Pope Resources, which owns 20,000 acres of commercial timber land in the area around Swift Reservoir. The land trust agreed to buy development rights or purchase land outright to save it from future fragmentation by residential development.
The latest $2.5 million grant will enable the land trust to buy a permanent conservation easement on part of Pope’s land, though it wasn’t clear Wednesday how much acreage would be affected.
The $6 million grant earlier this week from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service will allow the land trust to buy 3,000 acres outright.
In addition, both grants are expected to leverage at least part of the $7.5 million PacifiCorp pledged for habitat conservation in its recently renewed federal license to operate hydroelectric dams on the North Fork of the Lewis River. PacifiCorp spokesman Tom Gauntt on Wednesday said the company is committed to conserving as much land as possible in the area surrounding the reservoirs.
“The elk and the fish don’t really care who owns the land,” he said.
