The nonprofit group Redwood Forest Foundation has announced its purchase of 50,000 acres of Northern California redwood forest using a long-term loan of $65 million from Bank of America, the first such deal of its kind in this country.
The deal will protect a wide swath of the Usal redwood forest in Mendocino County, about 130 miles north of San Francisco, which as a region has seen a long struggle between environmental conservationists and logging and forestry interests.
But the purchase will not set the forest aside for conservation as a protected park, but will instead be put to rest for five to seven years and then opened to an indefinitely sustainable amount of logging. RFFI says the purchase will allow the forest to serve as a model for sustainable, environmentally sensitive forestry projects in years to come.
"We talk about the three E's," RFFI president Art Harwood told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We want it to be environmentally sustainable, economically valuable and promote social equity."
Don Kemp, the executive director of RFFI, added, "We anticipate that this project will be the first of many in which the global capital markets will be tapped to finance projects more traditionally considered the domain of the public sector."
The land will be purchased from the Hawthorne Timber Company, which the RFFI says will help prevent the fragmentation of the forest as well as limiting logging practices to what will allow the forest to continue to thrive.
"This is the beginning of a new era for our local community," Harwood said in a statement. "We are banding together to protect and manage our forests. We are pulling together private capital, and the hopes and aspirations of people from all walks of life to create a bright beacon for our future. We are doing this by ending the 30 years of fighting, and focusing on what unites us."
The loan comes as part of B of A's recently announced $20 billion environmental stewardship initiative, and the bank helped to structure the terms of the stewardship of the land. Under the terms of the loan, RFFI had to develop a base conservation plan for the forest, which dictated the amount of logging that can happen at any given time. Should the group exceed its lumber quota, then it will be defaulting on the loan and putting itself out of the market.
For the next five to seven years, RFFI says it will be allowing the forest to rejuvenate itself, and will be doing minimal logging. After that time, according to the group's website, it will begin the process for obtaining certification by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Among the many benefits that RFFI expects to reap from this new program are creating a long-term economic incentive to managing the redwood forest, leading the way for furthering sustainable forestry projects, and showing logging and environmental groups that there is a more productive model for working together by bringing together groups that have long been on opposite sides of the "timber wars" of the past 30 years.GreenBiz.com
