The Green Land Grab.

It was heretical for an environmentalist to say so, but Dick Rice was sure the big timber companies were not lying. They couldn't afford to help save the forests. His epiphany came during a 1990 trip to Bolivia, where Rice was studying sustainable forest management, a scheme for logging forests without destroying them. Environmentalists had spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars developing SFM, but Rice said it didn't add up. Even with cheap labor, cheap land and little regulation, big logging companies have paper-thin profits that would be wiped out if they followed the SFM's rules, like cutting around certain trees. Rice, today the chief economist of Conservation International, concluded that pushing timber companies to log "sustainably" couldn't work. But if timber firms were so strapped, wasn't it possible big environmental organizations could outbid them for land?

This hardheaded "Just buy it" approach has old roots in North America, going back at least to conservationist pioneers of the early 20th century like John D. Rockefeller Jr. Overseas, however, Americans had treaded more softly, largely for fear of being seen as "green colonials." Now those reservations are fading. With species of plants and animals dying off at the rate of 10,000 per year, environmentalists say they've got to move fast to buy and protect precious habitats. Conservation International figures that 60 percent of land species can be found in 25 biodiversity "hot spots" covering only 1.4 percent of the land on earth, mostly in developing countries. Rather than trying to persuade big business to stay off these lands, conservationists are now trying to buy them for nature reserves. "Until now, the only people buying public lands in the international arena were loggers," says Rice.

CI now bids on logging rights to forests it has no intention of logging, often beating out the timber companies. Its campaign has been richly backed by its chairman emeritus, Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, who donated $100 million to the acquisition offensive last year. CI, the World Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy and others have cut deals in the Philippines, Bolivia, Belize and Guyana, where last July CI leased 200,000 acres at just $1 an acre. Most of these programs try to make up for the loss of logging jobs by hiring locals to manage the land. Rice will be scouting possible leases in Papua New Guinea and Kenya next month. Fully backing the approach, CI board member and ...