A WIN FOR THE WEST : When a patchwork of former railroad lands totaling 165,000 acres in Montana and Washington came up for sale, the Conservancy saw an opportunity to heal a long-divided landscape.

摘要

Ports, cities and towns sprouted when the railroadcame, and rail transport built industries. Time itself was transformed by trains: The railroads instituted coordinated clocks and standard time zones. But there's a troublesome side to the West's rail-built legacy: It also divided much of the landscape into a checkerboard of ownership, fracturing forests and perplexing land managers for more than a century.Now, one of the largest land deals in The Nature Conservancy's history is reuniting portions of those divided landscapes in Washington and Montana. As part of the Great Western Checkerboards Project, the Conservancy has just purchased some 165,000 acresfrom Plum Creek, a timber company descended from the Northern Pacific Railroad.The 48,000 newly protected acres in Washington fill in critical gaps in state and federal wilderness areas in the central Cascades, reconnecting fragmented habitat for elk, wolves, wolverines and spotted owls. The purchase includes the headwaters of theYakima River, famous for its salmon and steelhead fisheries.