This appears to be a good arrangement all the way around, keeping logging jobs in a community depending on them, keeping the forest safer from fires, retaining critical habitat for critters depending on it, and all seemingly reached by earnest people and organizations wanting to do the right thing.
How it should work!
An excerpt.
Forest easement lets the ax fall -- gently
By Jane Braxton Little - Bee CorrespondentPublished 12:00 am PDT Sunday, October 22, 2006
McCLOUD -- Connie Best hopped onto a 30-inch diameter white fir stump to survey a clear-cut carved into the forest at the base of Mount Shasta. Piles of dead branches and logs littered the ground amid dried grasses and mule ears, rattling in the late September breeze.
Best, managing director of the Pacific Forest Trust, beamed with pride at her surroundings.
A self-proclaimed conservationist, Best is no ordinary champion of logging. And this is no ordinary clear-cut: It represents a new model its advocates hope will save forest landscapes.
The 30-acre block of timber logged two years ago is part of a 9,200-acre tract of prime timberland forever protected from development by a conservation easement. An agreement announced last month allows the owner, Bascom Pacific, to manage the land as a working forest.
In addition to sanctioning logging, the easement protects water quality and wildlife habitat and provides public access to the Pacific Crest Trail and along eight miles of famed McCloud River.
Mike Chrisman, California's secretary of resources, called the McCloud easement a creative approach to conservation and the protection of fish and wildlife habitat.
