Green Livin A Deal Is Struck

Green Livin Plum Creek Timber, owns the lands above and is selling it to two conservation groups.

A huge patchwork of privately owned forest in northwest Montana — much of it wilderness, and will be permanently protected from development under an agreement reached by two conservation groups, the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land.

The groups will pay $510 million for about 500 square miles of forest now owned by Plum Creek Timber based in Seattle. It is one of the biggest sales of forest land for preservation purposes in United States history, conservation experts said.

Half the amount will come from private donations and about half from the federal government under a new tax-credit bond mechanism that was included in the giant farm bill recently passed by Congress over President Bush’s veto.

This preservation sale is one of the biggest of its kind.

The bond mechanism was devised by Senator Max Baucus. Mr. Baucus spokesmans said the senator was approached about a year ago by representatives of the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land, who argued that new tools had to be created to buy the Plum Creek properties if they were to be protected.

The lands were considered valuable, and vulnerable to the effects of development. Most were in fragments — 640-acre squares interspersed in a checkerboard with public lands mostly owned by the Forest Service. Checkerboard ownership is a legacy of the railroad-building of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the government offered millions of acres of the West as an incentive to companies laying track through Montana and other Rocky Mountain states.

The purchases, which are to be completed in phases over the next two years, with most of the land then conveyed to the Forest Service or other government agencies over the next decade, will essentially fill in the checkerboard, Mr. Ginn said. An outline of the project is on the Nature Conservancy’s Web site, http://www.nature.org/.

Creating a more continuous fabric of lands in public ownership also helps the Forest Service in its firefighting duties, since a filled-in checkerboard reduces access issues in reaching interior areas of the forest.

While long-term protection is the goal, the deal also includes provisions for some continued timber cutting on the lands in Montana over the next 15 years. Third-party-certified sustainable forestry standards would be used in choosing how much to cut and where, and that overall timber cutting would decline.