Friday, October 1, 2021 | Seaside Signal | SeasideSignal.com • A3
Timber fi rm enters conservation deal with land trust
Agreement
ensures greater
access for tribes
‘NO HIGHWAY IS GOING TO BE
BUILT THROUGH THE MIDDLE OF IT.
NO GATED COMMUNITY IS GOING
TO BE BUILT ON TOP OF IT.’
By KATIE FRANKOWICZ
The Astorian
A
new
agreement
between Clatsop Coun-
ty’s largest landowner and
the Columbia Land Trust
will conserve a produc-
tive acreage between Asto-
ria and Seaside for forestry
work and ensure access for
local tribes.
Under the conserva-
tion easement, Green-
Wood Resources — a tim-
ber investment company
that manages lands previ-
ously owned by Weyerhae-
user and other timber com-
panies — will continue to
own the more than 2,500
acres of forestland off U.S.
Highway 101 and harvest
trees.
But the agreement will
prevent future fragmenta-
tion of the land, no mat-
ter who owns the prop-
erty, said Dan Roix, the
conservation director with
Columbia Land Trust.
A conservation ease-
ment that continues to
allow logging may not be
an approach people typi-
cally associate with land
trusts and conservation,
Roix acknowledged. But
he believes the easement
will aid other, more famil-
iar conservation goals, as
well as preserve a tradi-
tional economical use in
local forests.
The easement requires
increased tree buffers
along streams where fish
are present and establishes
a 50-year minimum stand
rotation, giving trees a lon-
ger time to grow on the
land.
For local tribes, the
easement ensures access to
an area where their ances-
tors gathered food and
materials, and the right to
Katie Voelke, executive director of
the North Coast Land Conservancy
and many older tree stands
were knocked down during
the 2007 windstorms that
raked through the region.
But the smells and the
sounds Basch’s ancestors
would have experienced
and that he experienced as
a child remain: the sweet,
earthy smell of moss and
ferns, the salty tang of the
ocean below. You can hear
the sounds of the forest
and the ocean waves crash-
ing, Basch said.
“It provides us the
opportunity to go where
our families, our ances-
tors, would go to harvest
items,” Basch said. “To
breathe the same air.”
‘Seed effort’
Clatsop Ridge Forest Conservation Area.
do larger-scale collecting
and harvesting activities
not permitted on other land
GreenWood owns.
Clatsop Ridge
The property, referred to
as Clatsop Ridge, already
sees a high amount of rec-
reational use. Located
across U.S. Highway 101
from Camp Rilea, its bor-
ders touch Lewis and
Clark National Historical
Park to the north and Cul-
laby Lake County Park to
the southwest.
Under the easement, the
property must remain open
to the public and hunting
for deer and elk will be
allowed. Native families
in the Clatsop-Nehalem
Confederated Tribes have
considered the area part
of their traditional fishing
grounds.
The Clatsop-Nehalem,
like the Chinook Indian
Nation tribes based around
the mouth of the Colum-
bia River, is not feder-
ally recognized. Access
to traditional gathering
and hunting areas is not
guaranteed. The allow-
ance to harvest and gather
plants and native foods at
Clatsop Ridge may be a
small portion of the con-
servation easement, but
for Dick Basch, the Clat-
sop-Nehalem vice chair-
man, it was an important
inclusion.
“To have this is recogni-
tion that we’re still here,”
he said.
The Clatsop Ridge
property has been logged
routinely over the years
Columbia Land Trust’s
purchase of the conserva-
tion easement was funded
through more than $2 mil-
lion obtained by the North
Coast Land Conservancy.
The land conservancy,
already involved in a major
funding campaign for its
Rainforest Reserve proj-
ect farther south, invited
Columbia Land Trust to
the Clatsop Ridge project.
GreenWood has collab-
orated frequently with the
North Coast Land Conser-
vancy on other types of
land conservation projects
in the past and sees this
new conservation ease-
ment as an invitation to
other landowners to con-
sider similar partnerships.
“I see this almost as a
seed effort,” said Mark
Morgans, director of North
American forest oper-
ations for GreenWood.
“Where else can we do
this, not only us at Green-
Wood, on our footprint of
the forest?”
The easement also nods
to goals finalized earlier
this month by the Clatsop
Plains Elk Collaborative.
That group, with the
support of Gov. Kate
Brown and state Sen. Betsy
Johnson, signed off on a
unified approach to deal-
ing with growing urban elk
herds on the North Coast.
Increased development
was identified as one of
the drivers for an uptick in
undesirable elk and human
interactions in the Clat-
sop Plains area. One of the
action items identified by
the group was to look at
establishing wildlife hab-
itat buffers and transition
areas and, through part-
nerships, keep some land
undeveloped.
While it isn’t the same
as conserving land for hab-
itat or old growth trees, the
easement at Clatsop Ridge
does ensure the land will
only continue to be used
for forestry, not develop-
ment, said Katie Voelke,
the executive director
of the North Coast Land
Conservancy.
“No highway is going to
be built through the mid-
dle of it,” Voelke said. “No
gated community is going
to be built on top of it.”
The additional protec-
tions that come with the
easement — like increased
stream buffers — are
important considerations
as land stewards con-
sider climate change and
a landscape’s resiliency in
the face of major climate
shifts, Voelke and Roix
said.