Word: lande
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plan might work if the landowner respected the land. This appears to have been the case with Pacific Lumber before Hurwitz bought it in a hostile takeover in 1985. But since then, on the evidence of a passionate new book by activist Doug Thron, a photographer and lecturer, and reporter Joan Dunning, accelerated logging has devastated the land and the streams that flow through it. From the Redwood Forest (Chelsea Green; $24.95) relates a brutal progression. Pacific Lumber, under Maxxam and Hurwitz, started widespread clear-cutting, a practice that leaves no tree standing and works against natural regrowth. Then Pacific...
...closer inspection, however, the Deal is a textbook example of the wreckage that occurs when political imbalance--weakness on the part of federal and state environmental agencies, blustering strength among enemies of land-use regulation--allows owners of private property to hold the environment at ransom...
This ransom is a big one--and likely to be the benchmark for future environmental payoffs involving private timberland. In return for 3,500 acres of ancient redwoods in Humboldt County's Headwaters Grove, the largest old-growth tract still in private hands, and 4,000 acres of additional land, most of it heavily logged, Maxxam Corp. of Houston, Pacific Lumber's owner, will get $250 million from the Federal Government and $210 million from California. At week's end there seemed little doubt that Governor Pete Wilson would sign the payment bill. Maxxam, controlled by Hurwitz, was a major...
Conservationists hoped for more: not just Headwaters, but 60,000 acres of mostly scarred and bulldozed land that could be rehabilitated. There is a dim hope, still, that they will get it. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is slowly pursuing an old case against Hurwitz, having to do with a savings and loan collapse. A settlement of $250 million from Hurwitz was spoken of. So was a swap: debt for nature, maybe involving Pacific Lumber land...
...irony of Lucas' situation is that until the Monica mess came along, he had the character issue in his favor. Williams is under investigation for apparent ethical lapses of his own, including making campaign phone calls from his statehouse office and improperly reporting the sale of land to a political ally to support his family while he campaigned. He has also been accused of indicating that he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy when in fact he left in his second year. Lucas argues that the scandal works to his advantage. "I have no fear," he says. "In fact...