From the AP: International Paper Co. said Tuesday that it was selling 440,000 acres of forest in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to a timberland investment management company.
The land is among 5.1 million acres, mostly in Southern states, that International Paper is selling to two investor groups for an estimated $6.1 billion. The buyer of the Upper Peninsula acreage is Resource Management Service LLC, based in Birmingham, Ala.
Resource Management Service has agreed to abide by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, a set of industry principles for
managing forests in an environmentally sensitive manner, said Amy Sawyer, spokeswoman for International Paper. Read the rest.
And I was getting apoplectic over 6,000 acres of UP national forest going on the block? At least this looks like it will remain in timber production. Private forestland generally remains open to recreational use, while intensive, piecemeal development of it chips away at the average schmuck's room to roam. I know some conservation organizations had tried to acquire part of this, but couldn't. The outcome certainly could have been worse. When the time comes, I hope the diffferent stakeholders can work out a creative solution to permanently preserve this land.
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Yesterday I ran across a review for a book I may have to investigate this summer. According to Brian Fagan's Fish on Friday, Europeans initially explored North America seeking not a quick route to China, but a steady supply of fish and chips.
A growing fondness for fish at royal and monastic tables, and technological advances in the storing and preserving of fish, are among the signposts that archeologist Brian Fagan sees as charting the way from medieval Europe to the New World.
Fish consumption was driven chiefly by the Roman Catholic practices of fasting, and of abstinence from meat during Lent and on Fridays...In the 12th century, ''shortfalls in freshwater fish for Lent had helped trigger a massive explosion in herring consumption, aided by improved salting methods." Then, in 1400, ''growing demand and fluctuating herring migrations caused English fishers to search for new cod fisheries" -- north and west to the waters off Iceland -- ''far from their traditional fishing grounds."
Fagan's timeline thus ends...with Christopher Columbus visiting Galway in 1477, where he encountered ''many remarkable things [including] a man and woman of extraordinary appearance in two boats adrift" -- ''convincingly [identified]" in recent scholarship, Fagan writes, as Inuit.
And, Fagan notes, in 1497 John Cabot set out on his westward voyage from Bristol, the center of England's fisheries trade, to follow a strategy ''[which] must have been drawn on knowledge acquired from years of Bristol passages to the Icelandic fishery and perhaps farther west." He's believed to have made landfall near Newfoundland.
As Fagan puts it, fishermen with ''their nameless, unending labors were the advance guard of European expansion. It was not the sudden inspiration of famous names that brought Europeans to North America -- not Columbus or Cabot or the settlers at Plymouth Rock -- but the thousand-year journey in pursuit of fish."
The rest of the review.
The Anglo-American account of North American settlement emphasizes people migrating here in pursuit of religious freedom. Interesting that this development rode on the shoulders of efforts to aid the scrupulous observance of religious custom.
Tags: Conservation ; Books; Fishing
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