Massive loss of private forestland to development
March 21st, 2006
Private forests are being sold to real estate developers. Important ecosystems are being transformed, at breathtaking speed, into condos, subdivisions, and vacation homes.
This is why land use laws such as Oregon’s are so important:
Big River, neighboring Salmon Creek and dozens of other forests across the nation have come on the market in recent years as timber companies shed holdings that are worth more as real estate than as a source of lumber.
In Florida:
And the St. Joe Co., a onetime timber and paper outfit, is pushing to build on tens of thousands of its acres on Florida’s Emerald Coast. Advocacy groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council are fighting to preserve the land, whose long-leaf pine forests, cypress swamps and wetlands sustain red cockaded woodpeckers and dozens of other endangered and threatened species.
In California:
The Big River tract in California’s Mendocino County is a sprawling expanse of towering redwoods and Douglas firs, woods that for years have provided an ideal habitat for rare spotted owls and endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout. Now, it’s all up for sale.
In Georgia:
A month later, it bought 1,600 acres of land in Georgia, just a fraction of the roughly 300,000 acres timber giant Weyerhaeuser recently sold in the state.
We need to shift our attention to regulatory approaches that can preserve these last, privately owned forest systems. As the article states, once it is sold, subdivided, and developed, well, it is not only itself useless for conservation, but it also fragments land such that surrounding areas are also more or less useless.
Related posts: Damascus voters ruin Damascus, Goodbye to the Adirondacks (and other forests), Christianity versus land use planning
2 Comments Add your own
1. Diane Anderson | April 2nd, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Very much against the proposed sale of forest lands!
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