You're Living in Your Own Private Idaho

An increasingly common type of collaboration between a conservation group and a logging company will protect up to 600,000 acres of private forestland in northern Idaho from development. The Washington-based timber company Potlatch, which owns the land, will sell its development rights to the California-based Trust for Public Land, which in turn expects to raise more than $40 million from private and government sources to pay for the transaction. The company will be allowed to continue logging the land, but real-estate developers will be kept at bay forever. Some enviros are taking issue with such deals because they allow logging to persist, but others defend them as the far lesser of two evils. "To us, it's not a question of whether there will be a working forest or a pristine forest," says Larry Selzer, president of the nonprofit Conservation Fund. "It's really a question of whether it will be a working forest or a shopping mall or an industrial park."