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Logging Land Trusts:
Exclusive interview with Dan Tishman of the NRDC

by The Green A-Team

How safe is protected land and are logging, oil, and mining companies using our national parks for profit?

A land trust is a purchase of a large piece of real estate that in theory, remains protected from development.  But it’s known that some of the biggest corporations and investment groups use the land for profit through logging, drilling, and mining.

Dan Tishman, Chairman of the Board for the Natural Resource Defense Council.

One has to define what logging is.  There is good logging and there is bad logging.  You can’t just tie up land as an eleemosynary thing forever.  You have to understand that land is a valuable asset, it’s valuable for a whole host of reasons.  And if in order to preserve land you need to figure out how to have some economic stream to preserve land, good sustainable certified logging practices might be the right sense.

One thing we can trust regarding our land is that not everyone has it’s best interests in mind regardless of what they say.

For more on American land trusts, visit some of the following links:

WorldLandTrust-US.org

PlacerLandTrust.org

Creating Your Own Land Trust (Possibility.com)

Photo by Куртис Перри

Click below for more of our exclusive conversation with Dan Tishman, Chairman of the Board of the NRDC.

Q: What’s the big focus at the NRDC during this election year.

A: The big focus is really understanding that good environmental policy is wonderful economic policy.  The direct link between doing things that are beneficial to the environment are really gonna be, in my opinion, one of the pillars of getting ourselves out of what people are calling an economic crisis.

Q: So you think it’s a kind of ethos that Americans need to get on board with?

A: I don’t think it’s an ethos, I’ve sort of called it the new green revolution.  Many years ago, the United States let go of our industrial sector, shipped it all offshore.  We’re a very intellectual society, we’re very smart, we lead the world in many, many things.  We will discover that the notion of greening, which was a little bit of an avant garde notion a few years ago, is really one of the major parts of how we maintain ourselves as the world leaders to become a green leader.  There are dramatic problems that face the planet.  Clearly we’re in the middle of an economic crisis.  The economic crisis will be solved a lot sooner than the global warming crisis, the energy crisis, because that’s not gonna go away and it’s gonna be an issue that very smart people have to deal with and it will be very good, very lucrative, for those people that figure it out.

Q: Are corporate sponsors on the board of the NRDC a conflict of interest or a necessity?

A: We don’t really have corporate sponsors at NRDC.  We have a lot of very very active participants, we’re a large organization, we have a wonderful advocacy staff of about 400 people, a big budget annually but we’re very cautious.  We work with corporations a lot.  We try to use both our persuasion and technical capabilities to make corporations understand that it’s really good to have sustainable practices and philosophies.  There’s a thin line between where you raise money and where you don’t and we try to keep ourselves fairly pure in that regard.

Q: How do you justify the logging of land trusts?

A: Very complicated question.  One has to define what logging is.  There is good logging and there is bad logging.  You can’t just tie up land as an aliamosenary thing forever.  You have to understand that land is a valuable asset, it’s valuable for a whole host of reasons.  And if in order to preserve land you need to figure out how to have some economic stream to preserve land, good sustainable certified logging practices might be the right sense.  It’s very difficult, for instance, for municipalities to take all their land out of the tax rolls, preserve it, because they go bankrupt.    So there has to be a give and take but it’s really sound science, sound policy that directs you to the right approach to conservation.

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Exclusive interview with Dan Tishman of the NRDC

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