Bald cypress and tupelo trees, Woodbury Tract, South Carolina
© Tom Blagden

With huge swaths of Eastern forests up for grabs, the Conservancy moved quickly to protect 700,000 acres. But what will become of the woodlands that didn’t make the cut?

By Colin Woodard

On July 20, 2005, Bill Ginn was on a family vacation on a remote island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay—no power grid, no telephone lines, no roads—the sort of place one goes to get away from it all. But courtesy of a cell-phone tower atop a hill about 15 miles away, Ginn’s cell phone started ringing. And ringing. And ringing.

Back on the mainland, the papers were running big news. International Paper, a company that was once the country’s largest private landholder, had decided to sell virtually all of its U.S. forest holdings. Nearly 6.8 million acres of some of the best-managed timberlands in the country were headed for the auction block, including dozens of ecological jewels. “The scale of the announcement was just stunning,” recalls Ginn, who directs The Nature Conservancy’s forest conservation programs. “We’d expected that major landowners would continue to put properties up for sale, but we never expected International Paper to sell all of its land and end a hundred years of forest ownership in one big sale.”

Ginn also knew that given recent developments in the timber industry and the real estate market, chances were good that these forests would not remain intact; a few years down the road, a lot of them probably wouldn’t be forests at all. So Ginn got on his cell phone to call his colleagues across the country and his contacts at International Paper (or IP, as it’s known) to see what might be done to prevent some of the most vital forests in the eastern United States from becoming housing developments and golf courses.

Just eight months later, the Conservancy and its partners announced three deals (two with IP and one with Plum Creek Timber Co.) that may just add up to be the largest private-land conservation purchase in history. When all is done, the deals will help protect 700,000 acres of forestland—an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The properties range from the banks of Florida’s Perdido River to the bogs of northwestern Maine and include the headwaters of two of Wisconsin’s three designated wild rivers.

The largest purchase, a $231 million deal between IP and the Conservancy for land in 10 Southern states, secured 212,000 acres of some of the most biologically valuable sites in the eastern United States, including tracts of 500-year-old bald cypress trees in Virginia and North Carolina, and miles of in-land maritime forests along Georgia’s Altamaha River. The deal was the largest financial commitment in the Conservancy’s 55-year history.

“I don’t think anybody dreamed that a conservation organization could put together transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars in a single blow,” says Ginn, who played a central role in negotiating all three deals. “This is conservation moving at the speed of business.”

In the Southern-states transaction, the Conservancy purchased 173,000 acres from IP in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The Conservancy and The Conservation Fund jointly purchased 39,000 acres in South Carolina.
In a separate $83 million deal with IP, the Conservancy and partners protected 64,617 acres of forestland in Wisconsin. A third transaction will conserve a large piece of Maine’s Moosehead Lake region, an area where Plum Creek Timber Co. had planned to build two major resorts and 975 vacation houses on 14,000 acres without permanent protections for surrounding wildlands. When public concerns threatened to derail the project, the Conservancy negotiated a new plan with Plum Creek to protect more than 400,000 acres in addition to reducing the size of the development. The revamped deal is waiting approval from state regulators.

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