Conservationists Buy Maine Forest
12/15/98
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Conservationists Buy Maine Forest
Source: The Associated Press
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 12/15/98
AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) -- A 185,000-acre stretch of remote wilderness in far
northern Maine will be purchased from a paper company and kept undeveloped
and open forever, a conservation group announced Tuesday.
The 286 square miles of unbroken forest includes a 40-mile stretch of the
Upper St. John River in Maine's far northwestern corner, an area heavily
populated by moose and bear. It has one of the highest concentrations of
rare plants in the state.
The Upper St. John is ``the premier wilderness river in the Northeast,''
said Kent Wommack, executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine.
``When we asked ourselves how we can afford this, we then asked ourselves,
`How can we afford not to?'''
The group's $35.1 million purchase from International Paper Co. comes less
than a week after a deal for the purchase of nearly 300,000 acres of
forest land in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, with the land
preserved or forested but kept open to the public. That deal cost $76
million.
The Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit organization with
900,000 members, said it expects the deal in Maine to close by the year's
end.
All of the tract -- nearly 1 percent of the state -- 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.
Maine is the nation's most heavily wooded state, with nearly 90 percent of
it covered by forest.