International Paper: Targets of Opportunity

Chowan River
© Mark Daniels

Within the last five years, two Conservancy projects with a common thread have preserved nearly 115,000 acres of forestland in the eastern part of the state. What those projects share is International Paper (IP), which sold 38,000 acres to the Conservancy in 2002 and an astonishing 76,500 acres in 2006.

The first acquisition helped stitch together more than 100,000 acres of public conservation land in Pender and Sampson counties, and it put to use many of the tools the Conservancy had been honing for decades: large-scale land acquisition, working with a vast array of partners and acting as intermediary for the state, which wanted the land but didn’t have the funds to pay for it right away.

“The state budget was in crisis,” says Katherine Skinner, “but we didn’t want to lose these lands. We knew it was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking.”

Turns out that huge deal was just a warm-up for one nearly twice that size. When International Paper announced in late 2005 that it was selling all of its U.S. land holdings—some 6.8 million acres—North Carolina staff was ready to deal.

With land ownership patterns changing rapidly, the Conservancy recognized the possibility that just such an opportunity might occur, and, based in part on its prior experience with International Paper, jumped at the chance.

“We’d been looking for years at some of these tracts IP put up for sale,” says Assistant Director for Protection Merrill Lynch. “We got our maps out, circled the most critical pieces and went to work.”

The result was 76,500 acres in four North Carolina landscapes, which represented the majority of protected land in a massive project covering ten Southern states and encompassing 218,000 acres. Much of the North Carolina lands have already been transferred to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, where they will be accessible to all citizens for hiking, hunting, fishing and other recreational activities.

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