Source: AP
Link: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=753&e=1&u=/ap/20050413/ap_on_sc/grand_canyon_conservation&sid=84439559
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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Land Near Grand Canyon to Be Protected
Wed Apr 13,10:33 AM ET
By BETH DeFALCO, Associated Press Writer
PHOENIX - Bolstered by a $1 million grant from retail giant Wal-Mart,
conservation groups plan to protect almost 900,000 acres of wilderness,
including land stretching along 125 miles of the Grand Canyon's North Rim.
Conservationists said the $4.5 million purchase of two private ranches,
totaling about 1,000 acres, also will help protect more than 850,000 acres
that are attached to the land through grazing permits from the North Rim to
the Utah line.
The acquisition connects three national monuments, two national recreation
areas and eight wilderness areas, shielding them from further development
and restoring overgrazed lands to nurture endangered species in the region.
"That's the beauty of this deal," said Richard Mayol, a spokesman for the
Flagstaff-based Grand Canyon Trust, which will manage the land.
Mayol said the purchase was long desired by conservationists but was
becoming increasingly crucial as development moved closer from St. George,
Utah, and the Arizona Strip, the northernmost part of the state cut off by
the Grand Canyon. The trust placed a deposit on the land, giving it until
July to officially purchase.
"We felt if didn't move on this now, the land could be subdivided into
miniparcels or sold to developers," Mayol said.
The Conservation Fund helped solidify the deal using a grant from Wal-Mart
Stores Inc.'s "Acres for America," a program launched Tuesday in partnership
with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Wal-Mart pledged $35 million to buy land equal to all the land its stores,
parking lots and distribution centers use over the next 10 years. That would
conserve at least 138,000 acres in the United States as "priority" wildlife
habitat.
"The ultimate purpose is to create a grazing and restoration plan for the
West," said Larry Selzer, president of The Conservation Fund, based in
Arlington, Va. "No other company has stepped forward with that type of a
bold initiative."
The money will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a private
nonprofit group created by Congress in 1984 to leverage federal dollars for
conservation projects.
The Arizona project comprises the Kane and Two Mile ranches. They include
desert areas in Marble Canyon; pinon-juniper forests surrounding the
Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, where dozens of endangered California
condors have been released into the wild; and spruce-fir in the higher
reaches of Kaibab National Forest.
The area is also home to the Kaibab squirrel and Apache trout, Mayol said.
Besides the Grand Canyon acquisition, the first stage of the Wal-Mart
program will include:
* Squaw Creek in Oregon: Buying a conservation easement on a private ranch
to protect 1,120 acres along a tributary of the Deschutes River to aid
salmon and steelhead fish populations.
* Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana: Buying privately owned
land to expand the refuge by 40 percent to 6,098 acres.
* Sherfield Cave/Buffalo National River in Arkansas: Adding 1,226 acres of
bat habitat.
* Downeast Lakes region of Maine: Protecting 312,000 acres around Washington
County, including 54 lakes and 1,500 miles of river and stream shoreline.
=====================
From: PMH
Newsgroups: rec.backcountry
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: Wal-Mart is protecting the wilderness
I greet such news with mixed reactions. The consumerist lifestyle which
Wal-Mart & such merchandizers depend on has torpedoed so much habitat
that I somehow am not very encouraged by an acre for an acre as if
somehow this were a fuzzy-feely payback for their turning our towns into
lookalike feelalike megamalls and fenderdent forests. How many thousands
if not tens of thousands of acres were swallowed by the suburban
subdivisions, highways and plastic "food" joints needed to house the
population base Wal-Mart requires for their mega-merchandizing,
brand-homogenizing, lowest-economic-denominator style of removing cash
from your home town and trucking it off to Godonlyknowswhere.
Yep, I shop at WallyWorld. Don't really want to, but the capitalist
world being what it is . . . .
Or, consider this approach to their "benificence":
Today across America there are roughly 356 empty Wal-Mart buildings,
totalling 26 million square feet. Add in the parking lots, and you've
got roughly 52 million square feet of wasted space. That's the
equivalent of more than 1,000 football fields buried under a blanket of
asphalt and concrete. This is Wal-Mart's legacy to the neighborhoods and
small towns of America. Now this same corporation that has needlessly
squandered all this land, and changed the character of several thousand
communities, is going to "make up" for its profligate ways by donating
land for "wildlife" purposes. After destroying all this human habitat,
the world's King of Dead Space is going to spend $35 million
compensating for wildlife habitat, according to the Associated Press.
Wal-Mart indicated that it would buy an amount of land equal to all the
land its stores, parking lots and distribution centers use over the next
10 years. The company claims it will conserve at least 138,000 acres in
the United States as "priority" wildlife habitat. This is like a drunk
driver offering to pay for your totalled car and hospital bills after a
horrible accident. It's a very late gesture. Wal-Mart's "green" money
will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit group
created by Congress. I don't know which party was more shameful:
Wal-Mart for making the offer, or the chairman of the Wildlife
Foundation for saying, "We introduced the concept of the offset program
to Wal-Mart last year. They were quick to say yes, and Wal-Mart's
leadership is raising the bar in conservation." Can you imagine Wal-Mart
"raising the bar on conservation?" What recompense is that to all the
hundreds of thousands of families today who look out their front or back
windows to see the night light of a 24 hour Wal-Mart supercenter? How
will these families be repaid for what they have lost? After the
announcement, the U.S. government's Interior Department jumped in to say
they hoped the Wal-Mart deal becomes a model for other companies. To
make sure that everyone knew about this "model deal", Wal-Mart bought
full page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post and 20 other
newspapers. This is a form of "loud giving" designed, as the AP said, to
help Wal-Mart "burnish its green credentials." The Wildlife Foundation
is going to use the Wal-Mart funding to help conserve land in Louisiana,
Arkansas, Arizona, Oregon and Maine. Maybe they'll call these special
places "Sam Walton Monuments", and sell postcards of the sites in every
Wal-Mart discount and superstore.
What you can do: This "wildlife" publicity campaign is just another
"cause-related marketing" effort. Wal-Mart is in the middle of an
expensive "extreme makeover," to try to turnaround the company's
negative image in the public. After being sued by the federal government
for polluting streams and rivers, after being criticized by countless
citizen's groups for ruining wetlands and floodplains, Wal-Mart has
discovered the natural world! All the "wildlife" restoration in the
world will not cover up the wasteful, sprawling development pattern that
Wal-Mart continues to this day--building single-level, enormous concrete
boxes surrounded by vast parking fields of asphalt. To truly make up for
its development model, Wal-Mart should financially compensate the towns
and neighbors whose property it has harmed, and then cease building
supercenters in their sprawling fashion, turning instead to much smaller
footprints, on several stories. Wal-Mart could build a 150,000 s.f.
store on three levels and free up 150,000 s.f. of land for green, open
space. That would be a more meaningful donation of land to the injured
parties. If Wal-Mart would spend more time listening to the communities
who feel attacked, they would see immediate ways they could become a
better neighbor. Let them give money for wildlife preservation--but let
them clean up their development excesses in small town America at the
same time.
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