Bowater’s decision to sell 100,000 acres of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau represents both an opportunity and a quandary for state government.

South Carolina-based paper manufacturer Bowater Inc., the Volunteer State’s largest landowner in terms of total acreage, announced plans last fall to shed 350,000 acres of timberland in East Tennessee—including 100,000 acres on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau—by the end of 2006. For state government and the Tennessee environmental community, Bowater’s announcement, driven by recent financial losses and a pressing need to pay down debt, was equal parts opportunity and crisis.

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a multi-millionaire conservationist himself, recently budgeted $20 million in state capital outlay dollars to finance the bonds needed for state government to buy 13,000 of those acres. It further secures Bredesen’s budding legacy as one of Tennessee’s greatest conservationist governors. (Bredesen’s Heritage Conservation Trust Fund Act of 2005 not only restored state land acquisition funds but also sweetened the pot with millions of dollars in new funding.) But tens of thousands of acres of Bowater land stretching across 14 Tennessee counties remain on the market. In all likelihood, the most remote areas will fall into the hands of other pulp companies (who will continue to supply Bowater with needed timber for its mills) while commercial and residential developers will vie for available land near more populated areas. Developers spearheading Tennessee’s retirement industry are eager to entice retiring boomers and “halfbacks” tired of living on the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast to upscale east Tennessee developments.

Neither of those options spells environmental disaster, and indeed each offers clear economic upsides for the state. Gina Hancock, Tennessee associate state director for The Nature Conservancy, even concedes, “it’s not good for some communities and their economies to take land out of production.” But parcelization—the selling off of a couple hundred acres here and a couple hundred acres there, often for incompatible uses, would break up some of the last remaining “original” forest on Earth, and that would have ecological consequences, says Jon Evans, a University of the South biology professor and director of the Landscape Analysis Lab. “You don’t want to scattershot the landscape,” says Evans, who expresses concern that, for instance, the migrating tropical songbird population that breeds and nests in Plateau forest each spring and summer would no longer be sustainable. (Not to mention that other consequence of parcelization—ruining the view Tennesseans and tourists alike enjoy when traveling across the eastern part of our state.)

How about federal money? After all, Tennessee has the most powerful senator in Washington, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Under normal conditions, such Beltway clout would mean federal money pouring in to the state at a rate other states could only dream about. But according to Evans and Hancock, the federal land acquisition pot is largely depleted at the current time, due in part to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Can’t the state do more? The consensus is, yes, it could, if it had the political will. But the Tennessee General Assembly remains largely paralyzed in its efforts to do what’s right for the entire state by adhering to the outdated and counterproductive notion that Tennessee is in fact three separate grand divisions. Lawmakers worried about what the voters back home might think about allocating larger sums of state dollars for just one region of the state—specifically one they don’t live in—are reluctant to sign off on wide-scale East Tennessee land purchases, particularly in an election year.

As Tennessean reporter Leon Alligood pointed out in his thorough research on the Bowater land sale matter, a government purchase of all Bowater land wouldn’t be a panacea anyway. That’s because if government did purchase all the land (estimated in value in the $300 million range) it would be removed from local property tax rolls. That would devastate the tax base in communities like White County, where Alligood reports that Bowater owns nearly 8% of the county’s total acreage.

Bredesen focused on purchasing Bowater land contiguous to existing state recreational land or of ecological significance. Now the state has turned its focus to remaining at the table in Bowater’s negotiations with other suitors. “We have an ongoing dialogue which is very productive with Bowater and other third parties trying to help achieve the state’s long term goals,” says Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation spokes-person Tisha Calabrese-Benton. “We have a voice in the dialogue which we think is very important.”

The clock is ticking. Auctions of various sized parcels will be in full swing throughout the summer. Environmen- talists like Tennessee Environmental Council chairman Donnie Safer are sounding a warning. “I don’t think average citizens realize how radically the character of the state is going to change as a result of selling off these lands through parcelization,” he says.

With the end of 2006 now in sight, perhaps the timing is right for a modest proposal. Using the example set nearly eight decades ago by John D. Rockefeller, the philanthropist who ponied up millions of dollars to help Tennessee and North Carolina secure the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the state of Tennessee is hereby urged to find a philanthropist willing to buy the available Plateau land. Doing so would not only conserve the land but would also keep the property on the tax rolls. Who might that philanthropist be? Meet Brad M. Kelley, Tennessee’s newest billionaire. But inspiring Mr. Kelley to action is going to require some out of the box thinking.

Kelley was listed in this year’s edition of Forbes magazine’s as America’s 258th wealthiest citizen with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. And he was listed as a Tennessean, right alongside perennial Tennessee picks Martha Ingram and Fred Smith. How can Tennessee claim the 48-year-old billionaire? Well, not long ago, Kelley, a native of Franklin, Ky., located 40 miles north of Nashville, bought a home on 26 acres on Moran Road in Williamson County just south of the Music City. Nearby neighbors include Martha’s son Orrin and country music superstar Alan Jackson. In 1990, at the age of 33, Kelley parlayed his financial successes in Kentucky’s commercial real estate market to start discount tobacco company Commonwealth Brands. Led by unadvertised brands like USA Gold, the company rose to become the fifth largest cigarette maker in the world. Kelley sold the company in 2001 for in excess of a billion dollars.

What has he done with his money? He’s a significant stakeholder in various equine racetracks, including Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, and Kentucky Downs in his hometown of Franklin. Kelley also raises rare hoof stock, including black rhinos, pygmy hippos, white-bearded wildebeests, and Eastern bongos. But the self-made Kelley has made his greatest impact by buying up large parcels of real estate across broad swaths of Texas, New Mexico and Florida. He has done so not for development purposes but rather in the name of conservation. In recent years, according to press reports, Kelley has purchased at least 1.25 million acres of land, dedicating much of it to wildlife preservation.

Business Tennessee’s efforts to contact Kelley were unsuccessful. But New York Times freelance writer Nina Munk did get the media shy Kelley to say in a rare interview last September that he intends to use much of his fortune to preserve and protect endangered and exotic animals. The Texas Observer reported last year that Kelley intends to introduce rare desert species on his newly bought ranches in west Texas. And, importantly, Robert Bowden with the Sun Herald of Sarasota recently speculated that Kelley’s 2005 decision to sell 4,000 acres that he owned in that community, one ravaged by a citrus canker, jives with Kelley’s “pattern of selling off acquisitions that cannot be used for exotic animal purposes.”

Let’s recap. A billionaire whose focus is buying up hundreds of thousands of acres for conservation purposes—so long as there is an animal species that can be introduced or re-introduced to the site—lives right here in Middle Tennessee on the very doorstep of the Cumberland Plateau, a large swath of which is presently for sale. Meanwhile that Plateau happens to be one of the most species-rich areas in America, home to indigenous land snails, mollusks, crayfish and other invertebrates. The habitat of the Plateau is such that it can support viable populations of large mammals, specifically mountain lions, but the numbers of such animals have dwindled over the years nearly to zero.

This month’s look at some of the state’s top philanthropists shows just how great an impact the philanthropic efforts of billionaires have had on Tennessee. Time will tell if Tennessee’s newest billionaire Kelley becomes sufficiently enamored of his new home state to make a philanthropic dent in it. But maybe a more proactive approach is in order. Bredesen’s new state operated conservation trust fund focuses on raising money, collecting donations and coordinating public-private partnerships without all the government red tape. As such, perhaps some day in the near future like-minded conservationists Kelley and Bredesen could sit down to a lunch on the Franklin town square and have a talk about mollusks. Or mountain lions. Once the northern range of the Florida panther, the Cumberland Plateau likely still has some mountain lions roaming it; however, they are seldom seen. Sewanee professor Evans says they could and should be much more conspicuous.

Or, perhaps Mr. Kelley could be interested in the plight of the dozens of species of rare flora and fauna that call the Plateau home. Specifically in relation to those species, the Natural Resources Defense Council recently described the region as among the “most endangered wildernesses in the Americas.” Time’s a-wastin’.