The deal between Tembec timber company and the Nature Conservancy of Canada protects nearly 100,000 acres of land. Most of those acres lie north of Montana's Glacier National Park, in river drainages pouring off the Canadian Rockies, through Libby Dam and into Montana's Kootenai River.
The area is not far from lands considered earlier this year for controversial coal and coalbed methane development. And while the agreement does not preclude future mining, it does limit the extent of logging that can occur, setting the stage upon which future international land-use debates will take place.
"Fragmentation zones," Hillary said, are swaths of wildlands that are being cut off from one another by development. Were the lands north of Montana "fragmented," said Tembec's Dennis Rounsville, "it would not bode well for the wildlife and the connectivity of the ecosystems."
The company, he said, wanted to be "part of the solution to habitat fragmentation."
Rounsville is Tembec's vice president of operations in British Columbia, and for the past couple of years he has been working closely with the conservancy to complete the deal.
The arrangement has three parts: outright sale of timber lands, conservation easements on Tembec lands and a voluntary moratorium under which Tembec agrees not to develop vast stretches of company land.
The Nature Conservancy, Hillary said, bought about 3,000 acres of waterfront Elk River Valley land from Tembec, "the most critical of the critical lands." In addition, Tembec donated permanent conservation easements on 7,400 acres of company land, a deal that allows Tembec to continue with sustainable logging but prohibits residential and commercial development. Those lands are adjacent to the riparian lands purchased by the conservancy.
The biggest chunk of land - some 89,000 acres - falls under the moratorium, allowing Tembec to cut timber but not to develop the wildlands for other uses. Those are considered "backcountry" acres, a step removed from the river bottom, and reaching into the high country of the Canadian Rockies.
Aside from a possible tax break, Tembec received nothing for donating the easement and the moratorium, unless you consider the "satisfaction of having done the right thing for the valley."
"A lot of us have been in the valley for a long time," Rounsville said. "We have a personal and professional stake and an interest here. Ultimately, the company just agreed with the conservation principle."
Which is one reason Hillary defined Tembec as "a very, very progressive timber company. They're very much a sustainable forestry company."
In fact, Tembec has received a third-party "green certification" on much of its lands, an environmental stamp of approval that assures trees are cut in a sustainable fashion.
"We plan to do that on all our lands," Rounsville said. "It's a difficult certification to obtain, but it's important to show that we're doing a good job in the forests."
Tembec has some 11,000 employees worldwide, with offices in eight countries and annual sales topping $4 billion. It manages 40 million forest acres, including about 300,000 in southeastern British Columbia.
Tembec's logging techniques in the Elk River country, and, more importantly, the company's willingness to work with the conservancy, is good news for Montana's wildlife, Hillary said, much of which moves back and forth across the international boundary.
That includes threatened grizzly bears and wolves, he said - and any measure that protects Canadian habitat takes some of the pressure off forests south of the border.
The land deal, he said, creates a nearly unbroken corridor along the Continental Divide from Helena to beyond Banff. If a separate plan succeeds in extending Canada's Waterton Lakes National Park west from the Divide to the Flathead River, the Tembec conservation lands will provide the link north toward Banff, he said.
The deal signed Friday obliges Tembec and the conservancy to return to the negotiating table in seven years, when both sides will decide whether to make the 10-year development moratorium permanent.
"We've worked with Tembec before," Hillary said. "Their interest in this is genuine, and I think we'll be able to make some arrangement."
Rounsville agrees.
"If this valley's going to boom," he said, "and I think it will, then we want to make sure there are a few cross-valley wildlife corridors that won't be developed."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@
missoulian.com
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