Conservation Group Buys 286 Square Miles of Maine Forest
http://forests.org/-- Forest Conservation Archives
12/15/98
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Title: Conservation Group Buys 286 Square Miles of Maine Forest
Source: The Associated Press
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 12/15/98
AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) -- A conservation group is buying 286
square miles of unbroken forest from a paper company in a
remote corner of Maine and is pledging to preserve it and
keep it open for recreation.
The purchase, announced today by the Nature Conservancy,
amounts to nearly 1 percent of Maine.
The land, which includes a 40-mile stretch of the Upper St.
John River in Maine's far northwestern corner, is being
bought from International Paper Co. for $35.1 million.
The Upper St. John is "the premiere wilderness river in the
Northeast," said Kent Wommack, executive director of The
Nature Conservancy in Maine. The watershed is known for an
abundance of moose and bear and for one of the highest
concentrations of rare plants in Maine.
The Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit
organization with 900,000 members, said it expects the deal
to close by the year's end.
All of the 185,000-acre tract will remain open for hunting,
fishing and other recreational uses, the conservancy said.
The deal comes amid growing worries about the preservation
of Maine's vast open land amid recent sales of large blocks
of the state. Nearly 15 percent of the state's land has been
sold in the last three months, largely to timber and paper
companies, said Wommack.
But alongside those sales, the Nature Conservancy
transaction is the second major purchase of northern New
England forest for conservation purposes in less than a
week.
In a $76 million deal announced last week, conservation
groups, private foundations, corporations and three states
will cooperate in the purchase of 144,352 acres in New York,
133,289 acres in Vermont and 18,608 acres in New Hampshire
owned by the Champion International paper company.
Maine is the nation's most heavily wooded state, with nearly
90 percent of it covered by forest.
Copyright 1998& The Associated Press.