Forest Conservation Effort Finds Lush Donors in Cyber-Land

In the Pacific Northwest, charity wears several faces. There are the galas and corporate appeals that raised money for a new Seattle symphony hall. There are the Planet Hollywood cocktail receptions that sent Patty Murray back to the U.S. Senate. There is even a street-corner newspaper for the homeless, a dollar if you can spare the change.

But when they found themselves with just a few months to raise $13.1 million to save a northern Washington forest that is home to the rare and reclusive lynx, conservation groups turned to the region’s heftiest new charitable cash cow: the microbrew-and-pizza lunch crowd at Microsoft Corp.

In just three months, proponents have raised more than $3 million, largely from a generation of high-tech workers wealthy enough to consider retiring at 40, healthy enough to hike the fabled back-country of the Pacific Northwest--and just starting to suffer the twinge of guilt that goes along with having the coolest cell phone on the mountain.

Environmental groups across the nation are working to preserve the few remaining regions of roadless wilderness. In Washington, conservationists battling to halt logging in one of the northern Cascades’ most imperiled wild forests figure their best hope may be the wealthy young entrepreneurs at Seattle-area companies like Microsoft, RealNetworks Inc. and Amazon.com.

These are men and women who grew up in the ‘70s, when the environmental movement was being forged on their college campuses, who moved to the Northwest in part for its unspoiled rivers and mountains (not to mention potential stock options), and who now have enough money to stare down the old corporate logging bureaucracy that is rapidly taming the region’s native forests.

“Part of my approach is, you know, we’ve all made so much more [money] than we ever expected we could make. To a certain extent that’s deserved, but, substantially, it’s also luck. We were in the right place at the right time. And it’s fine to take advantage of your luck, but you should also, I think, put some money back in the pot,” said Bill Pope, a former Microsoft counsel who is helping direct the fund-raising through company co-founder Paul Allen’s Forest Protection Foundation.

“I mean, you already have more than you can possibly spend in the near term,” said Pope, 44, who donated a little more than $300,000 in Microsoft stock. “You could spend it on yourself. But for very comparable amounts of money--buy a new car, buy a new lot--you can save hundreds, potentially thousands, of acres of wilderness on a permanent basis. For anyone who’s environmentally minded, that’s a pretty powerful message.”

Nothing like the Loomis Forest Fund campaign has ever been attempted in Washington, which is no stranger to battles over logging.

The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance for years battled the state Department of Natural Resources, which routinely shaves trees from state-owned lands as a means of funding school construction.

The 20,000 acres in the heart of the Loomis State Forest, adjacent to two major wilderness areas, are the healthiest known habitat for the lynx, a cousin of the bobcat that was nearly wiped out by the fur trade but is surviving, in admittedly small numbers, in the northern Cascades.

New state plans for logging and road building could go a long way toward destroying that remaining habitat, as well as Loomis’ population of rare pine martens, wolverines, grizzly bears and fishers. The fisher tracks found at Loomis in 1997 are the first solid evidence of the dark-furred marten in Washington state in more than a decade.

52 Groups Join in Conservation Effort

Hamstrung in their attempts in court to stop the logging, a coalition of 52 conservation-minded groups last summer forged a first-of-its-kind settlement with the state that would allow the groups to purchase permanent protection from logging.

The $13.1 million, something on the order of $550 an acre, accounts for the value of the timber the state would have logged, plus the value of the land itself. It’s relatively cheap because the Loomis is so remote that timber sales there historically haven’t netted the state much money. Indeed, all the substantial clear-cutting contemplated in the forest would scarcely bring in enough to build a fifth of a new high school.

The plan has won endorsement from the state commissioner of public lands, the superintendent of public instruction, Seattle public school officials and others, although at least one Republican state lawmaker is attempting to derail it, saying that it could set a precedent for other revenue-producing state trust lands.

The immediate catch is that the environmental coalition only has until July 1 to provide firm cash commitments or the deal falls through. That’s why it turned to Pope and former Microsoft software design engineer Jeff Stewart (retired at 34), both of whom had been involved in previous environmental fund-raising.

The biggest donor so far has been Bruce Jacobson, a former Microsoft executive and onetime CEO of RealNetworks, recently retired to take on the care of his daughters, ages 5, 3 and 1. Jacobson announced this month that he would give 10,000 shares of RealNetworks stock, worth about $612,500.

“I just don’t know of any other place where there’s 25,000 acres that’s about to be clear-cut right next to a wilderness area,” Jacobson said.

The high-tech industry is ripe for issues like the Loomis because many young software entrepreneurs haven’t had time to think about what to do with their money, he said.

“They’ve really been focused on their work, so they’re a good set to go after. A lot of them haven’t really figured out their philanthropic plans,” he said. “We were all 20-year-olds at places like Microsoft, and a lot of us would go out backpacking and biking. A lot of us didn’t have a lot of money 20 years ago. We never became golfers.”

The Lure of the Lynx

Stewart has convened a series of lunchtime pizza seminars at Microsoft and is inviting other high-tech entrepreneurs to host evening Tupperware-style events at their homes. The star of both kinds of events is Mark Skatrud, president of Friends of the Loomis, whose slides of the wary-eyed lynx and its tracks through virgin snowfall are the most powerful sales pitch.

Then Stewart steps in with a marker and a board, showing how stock options can morph powerfully into tree preservation. Uncashed options can be handed over without paying punitive capital gains taxes, he points out. With the additional charitable tax write-off and the $12,000-a-year match Microsoft offers on charitable contributions, that’s a lot more attractive than cashing out and buying a sport-utility vehicle or even a Lake Washington estate. Plus, he argues, turning over stock is somehow less painful than writing a check.

“It’s a really tangible project,” Stewart says. “You get a chance to know exactly what is at stake, what you’re going to protect. It’s not pumping money into some generic foundation that may eventually do something.”