Bonneville Power Administration easement will help Trappist Abbey conserve Oregon forest, rare habit

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Brother Chris Balent (left) and Scott Ferguson of Trout Mountain Forestry walk through the forest at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey near Lafayette. The unusually large swath of Willamette Valley forest includes Douglas fir, Oregon white oak and a thick understory that attracts insects and birds.
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Chris Balent was 19 when he first visited Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey, discovering a profound calm among the abbey's 1,310 acres of forest and farmland. "It was a place removed," Balent says. "Everything about it was beautiful."

Nearly 20 years later, Balent is a 38-year-old monk at the abbey, a degreed forester and, if all goes well, witness to a $9.75 million deal with the Bonneville Power Administration that aims to keep the abbey's land sustainably managed for eternity.

The BPA, which sells electricity from federal dams in the Willamette and Columbia basins, plans to buy a conservation easement from the monks next month that will permanently attach to the abbey's property.

With the land smack in the middle of prime Oregon wine country, the money would compensate the monks for agreeing never to subdivide the property or switch it from forestland to something more profitable, say a vineyard. It's part of BPA's larger, $150 million effort to protect 20,000 acres of habitat in the Willamette Basin through 2025 -- the federal government's penance for building dams and reservoirs that destroyed or submerged thousand of acres of habitat decades ago.

In return for the money, the abbey will harvest the forest at a sustainable pace, manage it for wildlife habitat and restore its patches of rare oak habitat, now down to less than 8 percent of its original reach in the Willamette Valley.

The forest serves the monastery's 29 monks as a place to pray, provides tranquil paths for rosary walks and gives them a source of timber income as they follow St. Benedict's instruction to "live by the labor of their hands." A new church on the monastery's grounds was built in part with wood from the forest.

Abbott Peter McCarthy delights in the church's details, the altar and tabernacle built from Oregon white oak, the Douglas-fir lattice crisscrossing the ceiling. But when it comes to the abbey's grounds, McCarthy says, "the forest is as precious to us as the church."

More: http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/09/bonneville_power_administratio.html