Eighty-thousand acres is a lot. It’s 833 times the size of the Lake Raleigh Woods and almost nine-tenths the size of Raleigh. It’s also the size of Hofmann Forest — the largest forest in eastern North Carolina — owned by N.C. State’s College of Natural Resources (CNR). And it’s now up for sale, with about 20 potential buyers having expressed interest in the forest and two weeks left to submit proposals for purchase. This is lunacy on many counts.
First, the sale is motivated by bad economics, despite possible short-term profits. The CNR hopes to sell Hofmann Forest for $117 million (which happens to be a peculiarly exact number for an unsealed deal of that magnitude…) and invest the money in a diversified stock portfolio, which is expected to double the current yearly net. However, the market for timber land prices is at a low right now, and it’s not as if the forest, as it is, is a financial liability. To the contrary, it generated $1.53 million in income for the CNR in the year ending last June, most of that from its timber sale. (For every acre cut, according to the policies of the N.C. State Natural Resource Foundation, the nonprofit which controls the forest, an acre is planted.)
But whether investing in Wall Street is a good idea or not (it’s not), the very idea of selling the forest is a bad one because we don’t know what will happen to the forest once it is privately handled. As a reproachful letter to the editor in Jacksonville’s The Daily News by Michael Morton reads, “The lure of easy money has a very strong appeal and the profits-above-all mindset is to be expected from some; however, it is not the attitude that one would expect to find at a university department [sic] that calls itself the College of Natural Resources.” Despite all reassurances on the part of the CNR, there is absolutely no guarantee that the hands it falls into will preserve it, rather than clear-cutting chunks of it or selling off parts close to Jacksonville, located just south of it, for “development” — think drab shopping complexes, Burger Kings and subdivisions named after the disappeared trees. And linking that back to our finances, any stock market is hollow without a manufacturing base, and a manufacturing base cannot exist without natural resources. But in any case, a price tag cannot be put on eastern North Carolina’s largest forest, both as an asset for N.C. State, and as an invaluable living entity in its own right.
Which leads to the second point — losing the forest to private hands could very well make for environmental ruin. Hofmann Forest is a core part of the ecosystem of eastern North Carolina, harboring the headwaters of the watersheds of the Trent, New and White Oak Rivers. Also, north of Hofmann Forest is the pristine Croatan National Forest. The closer encroachment is to Croatan, not only will its ecosystem be immediately hurt, but the potential “development” of this precious natural treasure itself will loom menacingly.
Third, those who have a (non-financial) stake in the forest don’t want it to be sold. A large number of students and faculty have opposed the sale, with N.C. State’s faculty senate having approved a resolution asking the N.C. State Natural Resource Foundation to halt the sale until further discussion about the matter. Several alumni of the CNR also started a petition to stop the sale, asserting that losing the forest “would be a huge loss to the University, the CNR and to the citizens of North Carolina.”
Finally, as many issues regarding our university come down to, this is also about the fight to save our public education from its degradation under the forces of undue privatization. There is hardly any better way to destroy a public service than by literally making the institution that provides it smaller, thus weakening the institution. The smaller — both in size and resources — an institution becomes, the easier it is to hack away at it.
Putting it differently, a pack of wolves is easier to starve the smaller its forest becomes.
