A new proposal for the future of Pacific Lumber was unveiled yesterday by The Nature Conservancy, the Save-the-Redwoods League, Bank of America and other organizations, including a local group that includes environmental activists Mark Lovelace and David Simpson.
The consortium appears to be consulting with the holders of Pacific Lumber’s principal debtors, the owners of $730 million dollars worth of “Timber Bonds.” These bonds were issued back in 1998, when Palco parent company Maxxam reorganized the debt it had loaded onto the company in a leveraged buyout in the mid-’80s.
The bondholders are the biggest players in the Pacific Lumber Co. bankruptcy hearing underway in Corpus Christi, Texas. If the consortium that issued yesterday’s press release really does have the ear of the bondholders, their plan has a real shot.
It’s already gotten a lot of press. Here’s the Times-Standard, the SF Chronicle, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat and the San Jose Mercury-News. I wrote about it for this week’s Journal.
In a nutshell, the plan calls for the conservation of some 12,000 acres of critical habitat, with the rest of Palco’s acreage left in sustainably managed timber production. Palco’s Scotia mill would stay in operation. But you can download the whole four-page press release here (.doc, contact information redacted.) It’s an outline, but it has a great deal of detail and background on each of the consortium members.
This article appears in Unlike Mike.
Think Hurwitz is a greedy f*%#*r. The Nature Conservancy is the leading property buying and selling corporation in the world. With a board made up of the top fortune 500 they love resource acquisitions. They give just enough to keep the choir happy. When the time comes they will chop,cut,spindle,dig or mutilate and yes baby it will all be for profit but in the name of protection. “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
“sustainably managed timber production”
That means you can subdivide and build, right?
It’s true, niether the Nature Conservancy nor the Bank of America can be trusted.
There has to be a more localized proposal to answer the Maxxam/PL bankruptcy question.
Maxxam wants to sell their old growth, with permanent conservation easements attached, so why isn’t that getting any support?
Could it be that Hurwitz has finally seen the light, that it’s better to sell the old growth for permanent protection than to cut them down?
Given the choices of Maxxam, the Fishers, or the Nature Conservancy/Bank of America, I’d say Maxxam is the lesser of three evils.
A locally-owned and operated Pacific Lumber would be the most ideal, yet who’s going to try to buy PL in Humboldt? The Arkleys? Doubt it.
So, given the choices at hand, unless some Humboldt billionnaire pops up out of nowhere, I’d rather support Maxxam’s plan, whether it be a few expansions of existing townships (as Humboldt seems to prefer) or ranches for movie stars, and the old growth could be sold off in 3-acre parcels to many people, permanently protected, so that many individuals would have the joy of saving an old growth redwood grove.
As a former member of Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s ground support team, I can tell you that it’s a very good feeling to be part of saving old growth permanently, and I’d rather see a lot of people get together to buy 3-acre plots than see it all go into the hands of a greedy globalist organization like the Nature Conservancy.
Here’s a video to back this up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJjwnVVEHmw
From my perspective, it’s very good news that Maxxam wants to sell old growth groves to get out of debt; whether it will work or not doesn’t matter, because it could all be part of Hurwitz’s endgame, and PL might still go to the highest bidder in the end, so let’s at least try to save some old growth while we have a chance, and not gleefully welcome something potentially worse into our community, namely the Fishers and/or the Nature Conservancy/B of A.
Forever Wild,
Shunka Wakan
North Coast Earth First!