As Logging Fades, Rich Carve Up Open Land in West

October 13, 2007
Public Lands
As Logging Fades, Rich Carve Up Open Land in West
By KIRK JOHNSON

WHITEFISH, Mont. — William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were cutting too much, so he bought the land.

Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests. In style and temperament, this new money differs greatly from the Western land barons of old — the timber magnates, copper kings and cattlemen who created the extraction-based economy that dominated the region for a century.

Mr. Foley, 62, standing by his private pond, his horses grazing in the distance, proudly calls himself a conservationist who wants Montana to stay as wild as possible. That does not mean no development and no profit. Mr. Foley, the chairman of a major title insurance company, Fidelity National Financial, based in Florida, also owns a chain of Montana restaurants, a ski resort and a huge cattle ranch on which he is building homes...

The rise of a new landed gentry in the West is partly another expression of gilded age economics in America; the super-wealthy elite wades ashore where it will. With the timber industry in steep decline, recreation is pushing aside logging as the biggest undertaking in the national forests and grasslands, making nearby private tracts more desirable — and valuable, in a sort of ratchet effect — to people who enjoy outdoor activities and ample elbow room and who have the means to take title to what they want... In many places, the new owners are throwing up no trespassing signs and fences, blocking what generations of residents across the West have taken for granted — open and beckoning access into the woods to fish, hunt and camp.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us/13timber.html

He is laying off a lot of workers, so his brand of rich keeps getting richer while the nation as a whole goes further down the crapper.

Hope a bear eats him.

See what it looks like after you've let loggers have their way for 50 years.

Logging is not dead in the west. There are clear cuts in all directions of me. The reason loggers don't have as many forests to log is because they've cut all the trees down. If it weren't for people like Mr. Foley, the mountains would all look like stubbled corn fields.

and there would be a lot less sprawl development in the western part of Montana.

He is NOT our friend. He has PR people to do image. But he is NOT our friend.

You will change your tune in a hurry. Until real sustainable logging is the only logging, these people are the only ones preserving virgin forests for future generations. 94% of old growth is gone and most of what's left is in Montana.

Edit:

What you can't see is that even the land that looks like forest has already been logged. All of it is in some stage of clear cut. They replant the trees so that they grow like sticks, so they can be mowed down and turned into press board. Then they express shock when they burn like match sticks. The forests aren't anywhere near their natural state, putting the entire ecosystem at risk. They don't even retain moisture the way they used to, so they can't grow the same mix of vegetation, etc.

He isn't good for anything but his economic bracket. Buying good PR does not make a good citizen.

Ted Turner owns about half the state, and more power to him.

He runs buffalo on his ranches--remember the buffalo, who roamed the West in massive numbers for millenia, and never overgrazed the grasslands so they turned into desert, as the white man's cattle managed to do in 50 short years?--and all his ranch managers have advanced degrees in environmental science.

We could use a few hundred more ricos like Ted Turner out here.

Not a lot to sing about in my book.

private groups or individuals preserving these lands, but something is very rotten in the State of Denmark, will Blackwater mercs be used to keep the lumpen out of these lands?

Get a grip.

Besides, if California--a state in which I lived for 21 years and in which state I would still live if it hadn't been totally overrun by totally disgusting self-involved homo sapiens types--had had a few Ted Turners, I'd probably still live there, because there'd be a lot more California and a lot less stinky, smelly, gas-guzzling, mall-crowding, fast-food guzzling specimens of that accursed "virus with shoes," as Bill Hicks so rightly labeled the (in)human race.

In short, f**k you and the horse you couldn't/wouldn't/didn't ride in on.

a few weeks back and they make logging look good. There has to be a way to generate electricity that will be clean and not a blight on the landscape. When land is logged, new trees will eventually grow back. What do you do about structures that resemble a giant picket fence going over the top of a mountain? There's got to be a better way.