news story / By Ryan Burns

Backwoods Statecraft

Mendocino Redwood Company tussles with nonprofits over how best to protect the forests

(May 19, 2011)  Longtime lumberman Art Harwood is a veteran of the Timber Wars, and he remembers the summer when loggers and environmentalists started talking to each other — really talking. It was during the Redwood Summer protests of 1990. Hoping to avoid violence, a group of loggers, mill workers and environmentalists got together to establish some rules of engagement. Before long they found common ground.

“I discovered that my 10-year-old son’s girlfriend was the Earth First! leader’s daughter,” Harwood recalled in a phone interview last week. “These kids were all on the same Little Leagues and soccer teams. We thought, ‘OK, well, maybe we better communicate here.’ … As it turned out, people started figuring out that they didn’t really disagree on as much as they thought.”

A fog Bank nestles in a valley in the Redwood Forest Foundation’s Usal Redwood Forest. COURTESY REDWOOD FOREST FOUNDATION, INC

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Twenty-one years later the lines that separate forestry from environmentalism have blurred so much as to be virtually invisible in places. Harwood is now the executive director of the Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. (RFFI), a nonprofit whose mission is “to acquire, protect, restore, and manage forestlands” on the North Coast “for the long-term benefit of the communities located there.”

The group’s latest endeavor involves a 50,000-acre tract of land called the Usal Redwood Forest. Located in the northwest corner of Mendocino county, the property — once a thriving forest of ancient redwoods and Douglas fir — was heavily logged in the 1970s and ‘80s. RFFI purchased the property in 2007 with a $65 million “green loan” from Bank of America. RFFI’s directors are now pursuing a conservation easement through the Wildlife Conservation Board, a division of the California Department of Fish & Game, as a way to pay back some of that debt while protecting the land.

Here’s how that would work: In exchange for $19.5 million in state funds (financed from bond sales authorized through 2006’s Proposition 84), RFFI would permanently give up all development rights on the property and would agree to restrict logging to cuts that could be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

The deal was slated for approval at a Feb. 24 meeting of the Wildlife Conservation Board, but the state agency unexpectedly delayed its decision. Harwood was — and remains — incensed.

“In the four days before the meeting they had 370 emails in support [of the deal],” he said. The easement agreement was also endorsed by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, the Mendocino Board of Supervisors (both unanimously), several local city councils and the Save the Redwoods League, among others. “The list just goes on and on,” Harwood said. “And there was one letter against it. And that letter came from the Mendocino Redwood Co.”

Specifically it came from Sandy Dean, chairman of the Mendocino Redwood Co. and its subsidiary, the Humboldt Redwood Co. Dated Feb. 22, Dean’s letter listed a number of concerns, chief among them the expenditure of taxpayer money and “the lack of transparency” in the WCB’s appraisal process, which is used to calculate the value of conservation easements. Dean wrote that his objections were “in the interest of the people of California and their needs, which have to come first… .”

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