Grass-Roots Private Trusts Fill Gap in Wilderness Preservation

Preserving the wilderness once was left largely to the government. Now, private trusts are buying up land across the country in an effort to save the unplowed, the undrained and the undeveloped.

That much is obvious on the northern border of Michigan, on a spur of land that locals call the beginning of the world and tourists say is the end.

Free-lance naturalist Jim Rooks, trudging deep into the stand of towering Estivant pines on a recent day, suddenly stopped and pointed with the exuberance of a child. “There!”

He almost toppled over as he arched back to gaze up at the giant before him. It is a Gargantuan white pine, 300 or more years old.

Then Rooks pointed out 19 wide table tops of cut stumps, now turned black. He had come upon them in June, 1987.

“Oh, my God, my heart,” Rooks said, recalling the warm, sickening day with its buzz of saws. “Every tree was a drop of blood.”

Extensive Stand

Rooks and other Michigan environmentalists say that these giant pine trees of the Keweenaw Peninsula by Lake Superior are the largest, most extensive stand of unprotected white pine in the eastern United States.

The logging company that owns the land is ready to harvest the trees, but, for varied reasons, neither the U.S. Forest Service nor the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has tried to save the stand. The federal government is concentrating on filling in gaps in existing national forests while the state never has formally considered saving the pines, officials with both agencies say.

Instead, the battle for the Estivant pines, named for the French merchant who bought much of the local land in 1857, has fallen into private hands, paid for by anonymous donors, blue-collar philanthropists and grade-school students.

It is, conservationists say, typical of new preservation efforts throughout the nation.

“If the job is going to get done, we’re going to have to roll up our own sleeves and do it as private citizens,” said Russell van Herik, vice president for the national Nature Conservancy’s Midwest region in Minneapolis.

Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy is one of a growing number of private land trusts that are buying up land and protecting endangered species as quickly as donations to cover the purchases come in.

A survey by the national Land Trust Exchange, a coordinating body in Alexandria, Va., turned up 743 nonprofit land trusts across the United States last year, up from 535 only three years earlier. Half of them have no staffs and less than $10,000 a year to spend. Together their memberships amount to 640,000 people.

They range from the newly formed Kachemak Bay Heritage Land Trust in wilderness-rich Homer, Alaska, to the 98-year-old Trustees of Reservations in crowded Massachusetts.

“It’s an amazingly rapid-growing movement,” said Jean Hocker, executive director of the exchange.

“What’s happened is a sense of real dismay of what’s happening in communities--a feeling that the people who live there have to take care of it,” Hocker said. “As development pressures increase on the land, people are realizing that protection of open land is the responsibility of all of us.”

Although private trusts also guard land for scenic views and playgrounds, the strongest interest is in preserving ecologically important areas, Hocker said. Some trusts manage the sanctuaries on their own, while others turn them over to government agencies for public parks and forests.

Van Herik said the Nature Conservancy considers itself “the Noah’s ark of this country.” The national trust, which centers its efforts on endangered species and ecologies, has set aside 3.5 million acres of land, including 396 preserves in 12 Midwestern states.

Despite their growth, private land trusts will not replace government land programs, a U.S. Forest Service official said. “To us, they are complimentary,” said Harold Bolt, acting regional land director for the Forest Service in Milwaukee, Wis.

The Forest Service has budgeted $2 million this year to buy land within national forests in Ohio and Illinois. It plans to spend more than $20 million for the entire Northeast.

Government Slower to Act

But when it comes to land outside the national forests, it takes an average of 10 years to identify, study, propose, debate and designate land for federal acquisition, said Jane Elder, head of the Sierra Club’s Midwest offices in Madison, Wis.

“Land trusts can move more quickly, less expensively, and sometimes people will consider selling to private individuals when they won’t even talk to the federal government,” Hocker said.

And, Elder added, there is the worry that public designation as a wilderness area is a kiss of death to the virginity of land surrounded by population centers.

“There’s a lot of fear in the Midwest that once land is designated, it will get loved to death,” by backpackers, trail bikes and others using it, she said.

Land trusts have cropped up in Arizona, Wyoming and New Mexico, but they remain concentrated in the East and Midwest, where there is much development and little in the way of federal wilderness areas.

Ohio has only 77 acres of federally protected wilderness, Elder said. Iowa has none.

In these areas, private trusts are finding their land in small packages, nestled among cornfields and smokestacks.

“It doesn’t look like Yellowstone and it doesn’t look like Yosemite,” Elder said. “But you can find quiet and solitude and virgin white pine. And you can even get lost.”

Unspectacular Vistas

It takes a sophisticated citizenry to donate money for the seemingly unspectacular: Michigan’s buggy swamps, Illinois’ hilltop prairies and Iowa’s freakish cool air slopes, where snails from the Ice Age dwell.

“Ten years ago, the idea of an important natural area was something that made you say ‘Oh!’ It had to be 1,000 feet high and there had to be waterfalls,” Van Herik said.

Rooks didn’t gamble on such sophistication in 1971 when the Estivant pines first were timbered. He told corporate landowners that their loggers were felling the oldest trees in the Midwest.

“They could have been. Nobody knew,” Rooks admits now.

Either way, the logging stopped long enough for the Michigan Nature Assn. to buy 200 acres for $42,145. The next 80 acres cost $100,000 this May and the association is negotiating for another 97 acres.

Later, Rooks discovered among the pines the Leaning Giant, a tilted monolith of a white pine that won Michigan Botanical Society and national honors as the second-largest white pine in the East before teetering to the ground in October, 1987.

The Michigan Nature Assn. since has learned the hard way that its remote island of trees is as vulnerable as the timber forest surrounding it. A logger wandered into the Estivant pines two years ago, felling giant after giant, before he realized that he was in the wrong place.

Now, the Lake Superior Land Co. says it will return to timber the rest of the virgin forest. It’s either buy or cut, said Gary Willis, a commercial forester and a volunteer for the association.

“Economically speaking, the stand should be cut,” Willis said. But, “simply put, we’ll never see it again, in our lifetimes, anywhere.”

Preservation versus development isn’t the issue, said Lake Superior Land Co. President Bob Grasseschi.

“It’s simply economics. The stand is mature. It’s a natural resource like any that should be used in a responsible way,” Grasseschi said. “It’s just a question of paying for that resource.”