“I suggest that the principal role of the land and the forests has been that of stage and scenery. The significant figures have always been the people, and the ideas they have had about what they might do at specific points in time when the stage properties are at hand. At each such point in time an actor could play his role only by the rules he knew—in terms of his own conception of his relation to the play of which he was a part.”
–Hugh Miller Raup, “The View from John Sanderson’s Farm: A Perspective for the Use Of Land,” Forest History, April, 1966
Mary Adams and her campaign
colleague, Kenneth Johnson, have
twice defeated clearcutting
initiatives on the Maine ballot.
Mrs. Adams has been battling
what she calls “the cloak of
government” since 1977 when she
led a successful referendum
repealing a statewide property tax. |
On Saturday, September 8, 1900, a rough and tumble sawmill crew at Berlin Mills Company in Berlin, New Hampshire set a world’s record that stands today. In one frantic 11-hour shift, it cut 221,319 board feet of lumber from 714 logs. It did so using a single-cut band saw mounted on a single log carriage, a staggering accomplishment, even by today’s standards.
The remarkable history of Berlin Mills is a good vantage-point from which to look back on the history of the Northeast’s timber industry—an industry that is today a colossus with enormous economic and political clout. Berlin represents all that was good—and bad—about the industry during its formative years.
The company was founded in 1852 by investors from Portland, Maine who partnered as H. Winslow and Company. That same year they dammed the Androscoggin River at Berlin, then built their first sawmill—thus capitalizing on the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad spur that reached Berlin just ahead of them. By 1861, the mill was sawing 30 million feet of timber annually, and in 1866 a new investment group, led by Portland industrialist William W. Brown, bought the operation. They renamed their purchase the Berlin Mills Company and it operated as such until 1917 when World War I hostility toward anything German (including the word “Berlin”) forced its renaming again. The Brown Company would go on to become a giant in the pulp and paper industry.
In its heyday, the company owned more than 5,800 square miles of timberland in the Northeast and Canada—an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. By 1890, it was exporting top quality spruce lumber to points as far away as Argentina. Three hundred worked in the mill and another 1,200 worked in the woods.
In 1888, the company entered the pulp and paper business, and in 1904...built the world’s largest self-contained pulp and paper mill in nearby Gorham. By 1920, employment in Brown Company lumber, pulp and paper operations reached 4,200. Another 2,400 worked in the woods or drove logs down the Androscoggin River.
The company was also a leader in efforts to improve woodland management. In 1898, it hired Austin Cary, a pioneer forester and friend of both Bernard Fernow, the first chief of the Forestry Bureau (forerunner to the U.S. Forest Service) and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service. Cary was an early opponent of the “cut and run” tactics then in vogue. “You can’t stop the economic forces that are cutting down our forests,” he warned. “but you can guide them if you go at it right.” Though his recommendations were not always followed, his ethic took root in the company’s greenhouse, one of the first nurseries in the timber industry. By 1920, it was producing four million conifer seedlings annually. The company also built the paper industry’s first research and development laboratory, where in 1931 it perfected the first practical process for pulping hardwood.
But the company’s fortunes slowly faded. In 1913, it sustained a $300,000 loss when its record-setting sawmill burned to the ground. One thousand jobs were lost. A smaller mill was built in its place, but by 1930 their capital intensive pulp and paper operation forced it to cease lumber production. Then, in 1935, it was forced into bankruptcy by Depression-era events it could not control. In the ensuing years, the company changed hands several times, but it never regained prominence. In 1980, Virginia-based James River Corporation bought Brown’s paper mills at Berlin and Gorham. Both plants have since been sold to Crown Vantage.
The Brown Company’s boom and bust history is mirrored all across the Northeast in timber fortunes made and lost during the hell roaring days of river drives railroad logging and splash dams. Technological and scientific advancements, mergers and acquisitions and economic ups and downs have since changed the face of the industry many times. But this story is about the forces behind change—about people and ideasHarvard botanist Hugh Raup found more important than land or trees. “I suggest that the principal role of the land and the forests has been that of stage and scenery,” he wrote in 1966. In this story, the characters—Raup’s actors—play their roles just as he said they would—by the only rules they know.
A peaceful fall morning along the Androscoggin River, just north of Berlin, New
Hampshire. In the distance, a steam plume floats over the Crown Vantage paper mill.
Logs were driven down this river for 110 years. In that time, two billion board feet
of timber were delivered to the old Brown Company paper mill and sawmill at Berlin.
The river runs quietly here, held in check by a dam first constructed in 1852 to
provide waterpower for the sawmill. Log booms were chained to concrete piers
erected in the slack water just off this point. |
Last November, an amazing thing happened in Maine. A 59- year-old grandmother with no money to spend on political advertising led a voter uprising that handed Maine’s paper industry an election-day victory it seemed not to want. Her name is Mary Adams, and in rural Maine timber towns she is something of a folk hero.
Ballot Question 1—also known as the Forest Compact—was (in the words of one forestry consultant) “a regulator’s dream come true.” Among other things, it asked voters to reduce the size limit for clearcuts from 250 to 75 acres. They refused, defeating the measure by a 53 to 47 percent margin. Had the compact been approved, the state’s paper manufacturers would have found it more difficult to efficiently harvest its 60–70 year-old forests at a time when its competitors south of the equator are growing entire forests on plantations in seven to ten years. But the election outcome does not appear to have turned on forest practices, the fact paper is Maine’s largest industry, or even the industry’s stated willingness to accept some regulation in order to deflect public criticism of clearcutting. What mattered more to voters was the specter of an increasingly intrusive government, which is something they have railed against since Maine became a state.
In bygone days, the paper industry might well have picked up the tab for Mrs. Adams’ grass roots uprising. But as a measure of just how much times have changed, the industry spent close to $3 million in a failed attempt to convince Maine voters a little regulation was not such a bad thing. The story might end here were it not for the fact that a year earlier—in 1996—the industry spent almost $6 million trying to convince voters that limiting the size of clearcuts on private forestland would be okay. Maine governor, Angus King, who endorsed both measures, is rumored to have said the only thing that could defeat the 1996 measure was “Mary Adams and $50,000.” She did it with $45,000. How she did it is an object lesson in high school civics.
“This isn’t a forestry issue,” declared Mrs. Adams in a February interview. “The issue is whether Maine citizens will retain control over their destiny, or relinquish control to environmentalists who have no respect for our way of life. If environmentalists can define the area of discussion by creating a surrogate issue—in this case clearcutting—they can use the cloak of government to control our lives.”
Mrs. Adams is no stranger in Maine’s grass roots war against government control. In 1977, she teamed with Maine’s Freedom Fighters in a successful referendum repealing a statewide property tax. Thereafter, she vanished from public view for many years, but her decision to fight the 1996 clearcutting referendum immediately made headlines.
“The press played up the property rights angle, but that wasn’t my motive,” she explains. “What concerned me most was that the Compact was laced with fuzzy language and fuzzy concepts, like sustainability, that gave environmentalists footholds they could later use in court.”
Clearcutting accounts for about 11 percent of Maine’s annual timber harvest, down from 45 percent in 1989. Increasingly restrictive state harvest regulations and the ebb of a devastating spruce budworm outbreak are the reasons why. But these events have not deterred opponents who say that clearcutting creates an unnatural look, fragmenting forests along some of northern Maine’s most heavily traveled corridors. But the prospect of an urban-inspired, governmentimposed ban on clearcutting was simply too much to bear for many for whom working in forests and sawmills is a way of life. With such sharply divided opinions on the line, Mrs. Adams found that the hard work had already been done for her out West. All she had to do was capitalize on it, which she did in a series of brightly colored banners that reminded rural voters to beware of the plummeting fortunes of the West’s timber industry. Her four-word message: “Remember the Spotted Owl.” “Everyone here knows about spotted owls and about federal betrayal on Alaska’s Tongass National Forest,” she explained. “We simply said, “If you like what happened in the West, vote for the compact.”
As for strategy, Mrs. Adams’ selfassessment of her back-to-back wins is instructive. “Tiny packs of irritated citizens are not enough to carry the day. They almost always end up fighting amongst themselves about the purity of their motives. We offered unifying themes: spotted owls and the specter of an increasingly intrusive government. Last November we also benefited from the measure’s complex wording. We told voters they should not vote for what they could not understand.”
That Maine’s paper industry twice misread voter sentiment is for Mrs. Adams an object lesson in the nature of big corporations. “As great and generous as the industry is, it is also politically naive. Faced with controversy it tries to compromise, and it is always dumfounded when opponents it has emboldened come back for more. The trouble with most of these big company CEOs is that they have never seen a hill they would be willing to die defending. I have.”
As originally written, the 1997 ballot measure asked landowners to comply with voluntary limits on clearcut sizes. But at the insistence of his political advisors, Governor King decided the size limits should be mandatory. The decision divided the industry along philosophical lines that have frequently distanced small timberland owners and family owned milling interests from the industry’s corporate giants. No doubt for political reasons, the paper companies stuck with Governor King, but many smaller companies stepped to the sidelines to await the outcome.
To make matters worse, environmental groups sided with Mrs. Adams in opposing Question 1—not out of any fear of regulation, but because they did not believe the measure went far enough. They found a friend in Connecticut financier S. Donald Sussman, who bankrolled their advertising campaign with an $804,000 contribution. Between the disparate factions, there were more than enough votes to defeat the measure.
The morning after the 1997 election, Portland Press Herald columnist Jim Brunelle wrote a penetrating analysis in which he suggested the paper industry was shedding “obligatory tears” over its loss. “Let’s remember that the paper companies were dragged into the compact agreement only under threat of the ban clearcutting proposal,” he wrote. “A lot of their enthusiasm for regulatory compromise surely faded with the defeat of the ban last year and probably has disappeared altogether now that the compact has gone under as well...Behind the tears, there’s glee.”
The compact’s defeat tossed the clearcutting controversy back into the lap of the Maine legislature. This spring it strengthened the state’s hand by granting the Maine Forest Service broad authority to draft new harvest regulations when and where it sees a need. New draft rules will be submitted to the legislature next January. The measure also establishes annual reporting and monitoring systems for clearcut areas. More broadly, it instructs the state’s Forest Service to establish a process for assessing the sustainability of Maine forestlands, building on “principles of sustainability developed by the Northern Forest Lands Council.” Mrs. Adams says such a move would “give environmentalists an important foothold they have not had, opening the door to the worst fears of freedom loving Maine voters.”
“This is precisely the sort of regulatory fuzziness we predicted,” she warned. “If it goes unchallenged, Maine’s timber industry will be pushed too far toward the kind of environmental socialism that is destroying communities in the rural West. We intend to fight it.”
What—if anything—the paper industry will do now is anyone’s guess. To say the very least, this is not the outcome that was envisioned in 1994 when Maine industry executives first discussed the possibility of supporting a regulatory safety net that included voluntary but verifiable standards encouraging sustainable forestry.
Cleaning up after nature: This clearcut—on investor-owned land managed by the
Hancock Timber Resource Group—was not planned. It was made necessary in the
aftermath of last winter’s severe Northeast ice storm—the worst such storm to
strike the region’s forests since the still remembered 1938 hurricane. Less than
one percent of the 670,000-acres Hancock manages in the Northeast suffered
material damage. However, many of the region’s smallest timberland owners
suffered devastating losses. |
“We saw the 1996 referendum as an opportunity to move policy in a direction that would support long-term forest sustainability and away from the kind of command and control micro-management found in forest practices acts in the West,” explains Joel Swanton, Champion International’s senior management forester for the northeastern region. “What began as an attempt to move beyond command and control, degenerated into a political campaign with clearcutting as the focal point. We had a tiger by the tail, not once but twice.”
Undeterred, Champion and other regional members of the American Forest and Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative are moving ahead with a third-party process designed to verify the sustainability of their respective forestry operations. In late 1996, Champion assembled a sevenmember review team that included forest scientists, environmentalists and the public at large. According to Mr. Swanton, the company got “a respectable” C+ in its first audit. Last fall, the process was repeated in Vermont and New Hampshire. This fall a new team will reevaluate Champion lands in Maine.
“Third-party verification of the sustainability of our forest practices is very important to us,” Mr. Swanton says. “We know some parts of sustainability are subjective, and we know many think it is nonsense, but verification is providing important baseline data we are using to improve our management practices. Is this the best or the only way to address public worries about the environmental impacts of industrial forestry? I don’t know, but we are committed to moving forward despite the referendum’s defeat.”
The defeat of Question 1, and what subsequently happened in the Maine legislature, cannot be fully understood until placed in the context with a far larger issue some see as a federal attempt to dictate land use policy across all four Northeastern states: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. The issue is the Northern Forest Lands Stewardship Act, an outgrowth of two landmark studies: the 1990 Northern Forest Lands Study and a 1994 report titled Finding Common Ground: Conserving the Northern Forest. The latter study was the work of the Northern Forest Lands Council, a four-state advisory committee whose formation was among the recommendations contained in the first study, which was conducted by the U.S. Forest Service and a task force selected by the governors of the four states.
The impetus for the 1990 study was the sudden 1988 sale of almost one million acres of timberland by Frenchowned Generale Occidentale. Henry Lassiter, a Georgia poor boy who made millions in Atlanta real estate, bought 96,000 acres in the Adirondacks for $16 million, and Claude Rancourt, a construction laborer turned Massachusetts developer, paid $19 million for 90,000 acres in Vermont and New Hampshire. Their purchases sparked angry and often visceral outcries across the entire Northeast. “The beginning of the end for New England’s North Country,” declared a Vermont newspaper editorial. One local official blasted Mr. Rancourt declaring he had “just figured he could come in here, bulldoze the hell right out of it, and make us grin and bear it.”
The Northeast’s development fears have never materialized on a scale close to what was envisioned in 1988. But the presence of the Forest Service—a minor landowner in a region where most forestland is privately held—quickly spawned a separate fear that property owners would fall victim to the same regulatory maw that was wreaking havoc in the West. To calm fears of federal overreaching, two of the region’s most prominent political leaders, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, and then New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, wrote the Forest Service to remind it that concerned citizens sought “reinforcement rather than replacement of [historic] patterns of ownership and use.” But by May of 1991, only months after the Council was formed, Task Force members were talking openly about codifying the results of their work, not in state law, but in federal law. Their rationale: such a law would give the states access to federal money needed to purchase private forests the public wanted to protect from exploitation. The battle lines were quickly drawn.
“This is a classic assault by the rich against the poor, the urban and suburban dwellers against the country folk, trying to turn our communities and homes into a park for their recreation,” declared Carol LaGrasse of the Adirondack Cultural Foundation. But the Maine Times saw things differently in its editorial endorsing the proposed Act. “Residential development must be strictly curtailed. The most dangerous critter in the woods is not a man with a chainsaw but a man with a lawnmower. We must accept our part in the millions of acres the public will control and give up our need to own a quarter-acre of it.”
Now, after seven stormy years, the Council is gone. But the essence of the 1994 report lives on in proposed legislation that may never become law, despite Senator Leahy’s persistent attempts to attach it to other Senate bills. The fact that he has done so—in an effort opponents view as clandestine—is for them proof enough the Act threatens both state and property rights, providing an avenue the federal government could use at will to impose costly restrictions on those who own land inside Northern Forest boundaries.
No one has worked harder to keep alive the principles contained in the Council’s 1994 study than Charles Levesque, a New Hampshire forester and natural resource policy consultant. Mr. Levesque was executive director of the Council during its four-year life. In an April interview, he looked back on its work, often paraphrasing the report.
“We envisioned a win-win equation, a landscape of interlocking parts and pieces, inseparable and reinforcing each other: local communities, industrial forestland, family and individual ownerships, small woodlots, recreation land and public and private conservation land. Our recommendations were intended to support property owners who kept their forests forested and to help communities strengthen their resource-based economies, while also protecting biological diversity, acquiring lands for public ownership and providing for public recreation.”
The governor of each state selected four people to serve on the 17-member Council, one representing each of four interests: forest landowners, environmental groups, affected communities and state conservation organizations. The seventeenth member represented the U.S. Forest Service. By all counts, Mr. Levesque was an excellent consensus builder who worked tirelessly to find common ground between landowners and environmental groups. But lately he has begun to fret about a loss of mutual trust engendered during the Council’s tenure. He talked about it in 1997 speech to members of the Northern Forest Alliance, an environmental coalition formed after the Council disbanded.
“The trust I thought I saw built over five or six years is almost gone,” he said, lamenting the rise of a win-lose mentality that has supplanted the win-win environment he says existed during the Council’s heydays.
“One of the things that really concerns me is the lack of environmental community commitment— or even recognition—of one of the most fundamental premises of the work and output of the Northern Forest Lands Council. [It] is the legitimacy of private forest land ownerships and timberland management as the bedrock of what the Northern Forest is, and must continue to be, if it is to be conserved long term,” he said.
Ted Johnston is past president of
the Maine Forest Products Council.
For six years he worked tirelessly
to keep forestry and forest
communities at the center of what
has become a very public debate
over the future of the mostly
privately owned Northern Forest.
Mr. Johnston is now a lobbyist
and is no longer directly involved
in the industry. |
George Mitchell is executive
director of the Northeastern
Loggers’ Association. He believes
the proposed Northern Forest
Stewardship Act constitutes “a
federally-funded land grab by
people whose only interest lies in
controlling land use in the
Northeast.” NELA is base at Old
Forge, New York and represents
about 2,100 logging companies
in 21 eastern states. |
Mr. Levesque also told Alliance members he believes their group is “at a crossroads” in its quest to conserve the Northern Forest. “You can continue to hammer away on negative win-lose approaches, or you can look for winwin equations for environmentalists and landowners.”
But the win-win equation Mr. Levesque worked so hard to solve still appears to defy solution. To his dismay he concedes environmentalists are now trying to wrestle away what landowners have and cherish most: the Northern Forest—the very essence of the region—and the social license to manage it.
“As a landowner and one who has represented private landowners over the years, I know how this feels,” he told Alliance members. “It feels like someone has taken out your wallet or purse or pack and started to take things out of it while putting these things in their own pocket or purse or pack. And it makes you damn mad.”
Among the 37 recommendations made in Finding Common Ground were several requiring federal dollars the Council hoped Congress would appropriate when it took up the 1991 Stewardship Act. But the nation’s political winds reversed direction that year and the Act became a political hot potato. Dollars that might have flowed into such a program in previous administrations were diverted to other causes. The $25 million the Council sought for purchasing conservation easements in the Northern Forest became a $2 million appropriation for the entire nation. A similar fate befell a stewardship incentive program that would have rewarded landowners willing to manage their land for resources other than timber.
The Council’s estate tax recommendations have fared better. Portions of the Family Forestland Tax Act, ratified in last year’s tax bill, should make it easier for some families to retain ownership of timberlands that in the past might have been sold to developers to raise cash to pay estate taxes. Other Common Ground recommendations concerning harvesting and forest sustainability have been taken up in new, mostly state level venues formed after the Council disbanded. New Hampshire has completed a field manual designed to assist timberland owners wanting to harvest timber. A public-private partnership in Maine is trying to figure out how to define and measure biological diversity. Conservation easements appear to be gaining favor despite criticism from groups concerned about a loss of property tax revenue. Logging interests—led by the Northeastern Logger’s Association— have done much to make the industry more aware of public concerns about the visual and environmental impacts of harvesting. And Maine and Vermont are separately trying to improve public access to forums where forest regulations are first considered.
Of these many efforts— all inspired by the Council’s work— Mr. Levesque says, “The social license to own and harvest timber is a public commodity. Those who hold these licenses are well advised to do all they can to keep the public happy.”
After Leon Favreau finished reading the Council’s landmark 1994 report, he fired off a fax to Mr. Levesque. It read simply “B+”. Those who know Mr. Favreau may be surprised to learn this. He has long campaigned against federal interference in the affairs of private property owners, and he has opposed the Act since it was proposed in 1991. Recent changes in the draft legislation seem only to have hardened his position.
“I gave the Council’s report a B+ because I thought it accurately described the challenges facing landowners and timber communities in the Northeast. But since almost everything proposed by the Act is already being done here at some level, why do we need it?” He asks. If the Act is passed, it will only elevate federal interest in acquiring land in the Northeast, exposing the region to unnecessary new layers of regulation, thereby opening the door to environmentalist radicals who will use the federal courts to gain control of the region’s forests. Our region’s communities would begin to suffer economically, just as communities in the West are suffering.”
Mr. Favreau co-owns Bethel Furniture Stock, a small chair parts fabricator at Bethel, a picturesque town of 2,500 near the Maine–New Hampshire border. His late father founded the company in 1958, but the younger Mr. Favreau did not join the company until his father’s death. After he took over the business, he built it into one of the fastest growing operations of its kind in the U.S. But in recent years the business has suffered from fierce foreign competition, robust overseas demand for New England hardwood logs, and a decline in harvesting on the nearby White Mountain National Forest. “About a third of our logs used to come from White Mountain,” he said. “Now we don’t get any.”
By his own admission, Mr. Favreau has spent an enormous amount of time battling environmentalists— time he concedes might better have been spent tending his business. But, he adds, “My ability to purchase logs at competitive prices has suffered terribly in recent years, in part because of political pressure from environmental groups that oppose harvesting.”
Where environmental skirmishes are concerned, Mr. Favreau is no shrinking violet. “Let’s remember that the forests environmentalists want to control are privately owned,” he explained in a January interview. “Remember, too, that these groups have nothing to offer in exchange, so when they talk about ‘compromise’ they’re talking about the landowner giving up something he owns. When the old Diamond lands were sold in 1988 they saw an opportunity to advance the idea that they ought to represent the public’s interests whenever private timberland is sold. Since then, this region has lived in fear its forests will be sold to developers. I don’t see it happening. What we have here is a surrogate issue environmentalists are using to gain power for themselves.”
Politics aside, Mr. Favreau is right about one thing: the 1988 Diamond land sales did not unleash a torrent of development despite Forest Service predictions that it would. A 1993 analysis by the widely respected James Sewall Company revealed 92 percent of Northern Forest timberland sales from 1980 through 1991 involved companies or individuals already in the timber growing business. Sewall conducted the analysis for the Northern Forest Lands Council, which felt such a study would prove development fears were justified. But the report produced the opposite result. Of 7.63 million acres that changed hands (in timberland tracts of 500 acres or more) only 203,000 acres were converted to another use, and only 40,000 acres were subdivided, presumably into home sites. Sellers sold for four reasons: estate tax planning, to pay inheritance taxes, because timberland investment returns proved inadequate, or to capitalize on land values pushed upward by a robust vacation home market.
 |
The two photographs on this page tell a rarely told story of wood utilization. In the
top photograph, low quality hardwood trees are de-limbed and cut to truck length.
Removing these trees from a forest is an essential step in improving the vigor and
quality of the residual stand. In the bottom photograph, Robbins Lumber Company
co-owner, Jim Robbins, stands at the foot of an enormous pile of chips. The chips—
made from the low quality hardwood shown in the top photograph—will be burned
in boilers that heat the mill’s lumber dryers and offices. Ash from the boilers is sold
as fertilizer. Many consider wood to be an energy source of choice because fossil
fuels are not renewable. |
The Sewall study also indicates the Northeast’s “unstable regulatory and political environment” is becoming a factor in the decision to buy or sell timberland. With so much invested in its mills, the region’s pulp and paper industry is in no position to sell out, so the 9.2 million acres it owns within the Northern Forest will likely remain forested. But nonindustrial landowners could more easily liquidate the 9.8 million acres they own because they have no capital investments in manufacturing.
“The current political climate is a destabilizing factor,” explains Dave Edson, Sewall vice president of forestry and natural resources. “If tax and environmental regulations cut more deeply into future profitability, timberland owners worried about the safety of their investments will turn to developers who are ready and willing to pay top dollar for their land.”
Few in the Northeast monitor timberland investments more closely than does Robert Whitney. Mr. Whitney is a principal in LandVest, a Boston based forest management and consulting firm with offices throughout the Northeast. The firm represented Frenchowned Generale Occidentale in its sale of Diamond timberlands sold to Lassiter Properties and Rancourt Associates. For Mr. Whitney, a forester by profession, the transactions offer ample proof that a federal presence in the Northern Forest is unnecessary.
“Less than one percent of the land that changed hands has been subdivided for the vacation home market,” he recounted in a recent interview. “Another 23 percent has been set aside in no-harvest preserves. The rest is still being managed for multiple benefits including timber, wildlife and public recreation. Where is the crisis?”
But the sales did precipitate a crisis on political fronts in all four states, leading the governors to ask for a congressionally funded investigation— a fact that still disgusts Mr. Whitney. “The entire Occidental transaction involved 986,000 acres,” he explained. “Why then was it necessary to study an area 26 times larger? The answer is that opportunistic environmental groups whipped the public into a frenzy.”
Forgotten amid the ensuing melee was the fact Occidentale initially offered to sell all of its U.S. timberland (some four million acres) to the Nature Conservancy— a fact that calmer heads should have seen as a sign the company was not interested in dealing with land speculators. In any event, the Conservancy reported it was interested only in the New York, Vermont and New Hampshire parcels, for which it wanted to pay no more than $100 per acre. Messrs. Lassiter and Rancourt later paid almost twice that amount.
The final dispensation: In 1988, the states of Vermont and New Hampshire and the U.S. Forest Service paid $14.8 million ($275 per acre) for 54,000 acres that Rancourt Properties bought earlier that year from Occidental for about $211 per acre. That same year, Lassiter Properties sold a 40,000-acre conservation easement and 15,000 acres in fee to the State of New York for $10.4 million. Two years later, Occidentale and James River Corporation—by then a 23 percent owner of Occidentale subsidiary Diamond Occidental Forest Industries—sold about 40,000 acres in Maine to the Conservancy, which had partnered with Land For Maine’s Future and the National Park Service. James River Corporation bought most of what remained in 1993 when it purchased the rest of Diamond International’s outstanding shares.
“One of the most interesting and least appreciated aspects of the Diamond sale is that the Northern Forest gained several new timberland owners, including some whose only motive is conservation,” Mr. Whitney concluded. “The free market proved that it can still produce important societal benefits. Those left pounding the table for a federally-funded buyout of private timberlands are mainly urban types who want only to impose their political will on a rural lifestyle they admire but don’t want to pay for.”
New Hampshire consulting forester, Charles Baylies (left) with landscaper Mark
Sullivan. The pair is part of “Team EBM,” a diverse consulting group Mr. Baylies
founded that works with small timberland owners in New Hampshire. “Mostly, we
practice Martha Stewart forestry,” Mr. Baylies explains. The letters “EBM” stand for
“ecosystem-based management”—a management philosophy Mr. Baylies has
embraced as a tool for opening landowner eyes to forestry’s many possibilities.
“Team EBM” has its own web site: www.teamebm.com. |
Not everyone sees the Northern Forest Stewardship Act as a threat to landowners in the Northeast. Stephen Schley thinks it may provide an unusual opportunity for landowners to codify their sovereignty over those who desire a federal takeover. Mr. Schley is president of Pingree Associates, a small management company that links the heirs of David Pingree with forests he began purchasing in 1840, when he was a sea captain sailing from Salem, Massachusetts. Though his name does not survive, his 65 heirs—including Mr. Schley— own about one million acres of prime timberland in northern and western Maine. The forests are managed by the Seven Islands Land Company, which is also owned by Pingree heirs.
“I am convinced the agreed upon language in the bill provides solid protection for private property owners,” Mr. Schley said in an April interview. “As written, it prevents the federal government from intervening in the relationship between private landowners and state governments, unless invited to do so by a governor of one of the states. I don’t believe language this strong—describing the relationship between the federal government and the four states—exists anywhere else in federal law.”
Apart from what may be precedent setting language, Mr. Schley says the bill contains an underlying message that is aimed squarely at the West’s environmental activists. “The message,” he declares, “is ‘You can’t come here and do what you are doing in the West’.”
Most of the Northeast’s major timberland owners concur with Mr. Schley’s assessment of the bill’s strengths, and with so much at stake it is hard to see how anyone could oppose such a tightly written bill. But the fact is the precise wording Mr. Schley and other major landowners agreed to may be falling apart in a partisan battle between Vermont Senator Leahy and Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who heads the Senate subcommittee considering the Act. Senator Craig opposes the bill as written. To garner support elsewhere, Senator Leahy has been tinkering with the bill’s wording much to the consternation of Mr. Schley. “What Senator Leahy is doing constitutes an inappropriate end run,” he declares.
Senator Leahy’s maneuverings have also provoked the Maine Forest Products Council. In a June letter to its Senate delegation, the Council said it would withdraw its earlier support for the bill if its wording was altered or if Senator Leahy reneged on an earlier promise to conduct field hearings before a final Senate vote is taken.
Somewhere beyond the indelible lines that separate supporters from opponents of the Northern Forest Stewardship Act there lies a second set of lines that are much harder to trace. Like seams in a quilt fashioned from thousands of oddsized pieces, they zoom off in different and unpredictable directions. These lines define the patchwork ownership of the Northeast’s forests. Follow them and you will find examples of just about every kind of forestry there is—from clearcuts that stretch from ridge top to ridge top, to areas so subtly logged you would be hard pressed to find the evidence. The result is a forest landscape as diverse as any on earth.
“The possibilities are endless,” says Charles Baylies, a Whitefield, New Hampshire forester who works with New England Forestry Consultants, the forprofit subsidiary of the nonprofit New England Forestry Foundation, one of the Northeast’s best-known conservation groups. NEFCO works with hundreds of small forestland owners scattered across the region. (Mr. Baylies is also a member of The Evergreen Foundation, which publishes this magazine).
When the YMCA of the Greater Rochester (New York) area found itself in need of
money a few years ago, it turned to Mart Allen, one of the Northeast’s finest
woodsmen. The forest plan he developed for the organization’s 1,200-acre youth
camp has thus far generated more than $90,000 in harvest revenue. Mr. Allen has
been a practicing forester for more than 50 years. |
“Our clients are mainly interested in improving the appearance of their woodlots,” Mr. Baylies explains. “Most of them love wildlife and are delighted to learn we can thin their forests in ways that encourage habitat formation. It’s Martha Stewart gardening on a grand scale.”
Mr. Baylies has given his brand of forestry a name that certainly has a nice marketing ring to it. “We call it ecosystem- based management—EBM for short,” he explains. “Landowners rarely call me to talk about harvesting timber. Most want to talk about ecosystem management. I use the opportunity to talk possibilities.”
Foresters are not known for being crack salesman, but Mr. Baylies is an exception. To attract new customers, he even formed “Team EBM,” a loose-knit consulting group that includes a professional landscaper, a wildlife biologist, a botanist and plant breeder. Few landowners could ever afford to hire so much talent outright—a fact that forces Mr. Baylies to pick his jobs very carefully. “Most of our clients expect that sufficient timber can be harvested to pay for our services,” he explains. “It is a rare landowner that is willing to pay us out-of-pocket.”
Eco-cutting”—another term from Mr. Baylies’ marketing lexicon—relies on steady pulp and biomass markets for low quality wood Team EMB harvests from lands that were logged decades ago by workers hired to remove only the best wood. “You would be amazed how good one of these junky old stands can look after only a few years of loving care,” he declares with characteristic enthusiasm. Most of Mr. Baylies’ clients are absentee landlords who are indeed amazed by the results of his work. Among them: Bob Merritt, a Boston stonemason for whom owning a piece of New Hampshire timberland is the culmination of a life’s dream.
“I have been a member of the Ruffed Grouse Society for many years,” he explains. “I always wanted a place where I could hunt grouse and encourage their propagation. I am doing it with Mr. Baylies’ help. Fifty years ago this was an abandoned pasture. It grew back, and we have turned it into fine grouse habitat. To say that I am pleased would be the understatement of the century.”
A stunning half-day drive south of Whitefield, Robbo Holleran works in Vermont forests that were fields a hundred years ago. The Midwest agricultural boom and the Erie Canal put an end to nineteenth century farming in Vermont, but remnants of stone fences still mark the boundaries of abandoned pastures. They lie hidden beneath towering stands of maple, oak, cherry, ash and birch. Although there has been some logging in these new forests, Mr. Holleran’s generation of professional foresters is the first to significantly influence harvesting here. “These forests have never been managed,” he explained in an October interview. “They grew here by themselves after the farmers left.”
This is the Vermont of white church steeples, neon fall color and picturesque farms frozen in time on millions of calendars. Everyone wants to save this scene, but few seem to understand how. It is an irony that is creating a market for foresters like Mr. Holleran who are spending increasing amounts of time counseling landowners who want to improve the look of their woodlots, but don’t have the slightest idea where to begin.
“You have to start with what nature left,” Mr. Holleran explained. “With periodic thinnings we gradually remove the lesser value tree species while encouraging growth and natural reproduction in the more valuable species, like hard maple, oak and cherry. The result is a diverse and increasingly valuable forest.”
Such work is rewarding, but not very profitable. Few small landowners are willing to spend beyond the revenue harvesting brings. Fortunately, Mr. Holleran has other larger clients that keep him busy most of the year. Among them: the Swiss-held Vermont Marble Company, which owns several thousand acres of prime timberland in southwestern Vermont. The company has been mining premium-grade marble in the area for more than a century. The hardwood forests that sit atop its mountain of marble are a bonus. “We have two objectives,” Mr. Holleran explains. “The first is to encourage long term tree growth in commercially valuable species, and the second is to mitigate the visual and wildlife impacts associated with quarrying operations. Providing good quality deer habitat is a priority.”
Clearcutting has been common in northern Vermont’s low-grade hardwood forests, which lie within easy hauling distance of New Hampshire’s pulp mills. But last year one such harvest near popular Green Mountain ski areas led the state legislature to pass heavy cutting legislation aimed at curbing abuses by so-called “liquidation harvesters.” According to Mr. Holleran, the legislation has had little impact in southern Vermont where smaller woodlots and more diverse forests make larger clearcuts unlikely. Maple and ash regenerate themselves in shade, but oak and cherry—often found in the same stands—need more sunlight to regenerate. In such a diverse environment, selection harvesting works best. “Wind, disease and ice are the tools nature uses to control the amount of sunlight that enters these forests,” Mr. Holleran explains. “By thinning, we can control sunlight in much the same manner.”
Mr. Holleran is not the aggressive marketer Mr. Baylies is, preferring to rely on his reputation to bring him new business. Even so, potential clients get a handsome brochure describing the basics of forestry as well as his services. He also participates in county fairs where he annually gives away hundreds of copies of this magazine.
“Forestry still enjoys a good reputation in Vermont,” he explains. “But we are under constant public scrutiny, and there are a lot of new people living here who think the best way to protect these forests is to set them aside in federally controlled no management reserves. Faced with this threat, I’ve concluded that the time I spend at fairs and other public gatherings is important to maintaining our working landscape.”
A day’s drive west, the story repeats itself amid Adirondack splendor. A surprising 62 percent of New York State is forested. In round numbers: 18 million acres. More than a third of it—some 6.3 million acres—now lies inside the arbitrarily drawn boundaries of the Northern Forest. By one count, more than half a million private ownerships are involved. The specter of a federal presence in these forests is a big worry for many, including George Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell is executive director of the Northeastern Loggers’ Association, which has its offices at Old Forge, in the midst of the Adirondack State Park. The association represents about 2,100 logging companies in 21 northeastern and east-central states.
“The Northern Forest Stewardship Act constitutes a federally-funded land grab by people whose only interest lies in controlling land use in the Northeast,” he declared in a November interview. “It is awfully hard to swallow given the steadily improving condition of this region’s privately owned forests.”
New York State is a case in point. Its forests have staged a remarkable comeback since the turn of the century when only 25 percent of the state was forested. Even more remarkable is the fact that growth in commercial forests is concentrated in older trees, a strong indicator that modern-day landowners have steered clear of the harvesting excesses that were so common a century ago. A 1993 U.S Forest Service survey of New York forests revealed net growth (gross growth minus mortality) exceeded harvest by a margin of 3 to l, creating what the agency termed “an opportunity to expand the harvest in the future on a sustainable basis.”
New York’s 15 million-acre commercial forest has spawned an impressive forest products industry that includes more than 500 sawmills and eight pulp and paper facilities. More than half of all primary and secondary forest-related employment in the four-state region is located here: 35,000 work in pulp and paper and another 27,000 work in lumber and furniture.
Despite robust, well managed forests and a powerhouse industry, many New Yorkers still equate forestry with destruction of forests. When the YMCA of the Greater Rochester area needed money four years ago, it reluctantly agreed to a small test harvest at its 1,200-acre youth camp near Old Forge. Mart Allen, considered by many to be one of the Northeast’s finest woodsmen, developed a long-term management plan that has thus far netted the organization almost $100,000 in harvest revenue. After touring the carefully thinned test site, a director who had opposed the harvest admitted to Mr. Allen that he feared “logging meant all the trees would be chopped down.”
This hardwood stand in a Seven Islands’ managed forest in Maine was harvested
last year, but the logging was done so carefully it is hard to find evidence of timber
cutting. Seven Islands uses a variety of thinning techniques in its hardwood forests.
Its management practices are much admired and often praised by environmental groups. |
Apart from producing much needed income, Mr. Allen’s efforts have added many years to the life of a long-neglected forest that had begun to deteriorate. “Our objective is to improve the quality of this forest,” he explained during a tour of the property. “We are retaining the larger, well-formed trees, favoring more valuable cherry, hard maple and yellow birch—all fine natural seed sources for years to come.”
It would appear the YMCA was doubly fortunate in finding Mr. Allen. The work he is doing—marking individual trees—is a highly subjective process requiring years of on-theground experience. In Mr. Allen’s case, more than 50 years. “It is an inexact science,” he concedes. “There is a lot to consider: the site, the mix of tree species, their age and condition, the desired future stand structure and, of course, the market value of the wood. We have made a good start. I hope I live long enough to see the result.”
The clearcutting initiative defeated last November by Maine voters did more than divide the state into opposing camps. It also divided its timber industry along predictable lines: big pulp and paper outfits on one side and smaller family-owned milling and logging companies on the other. Among the most notable exceptions were Jim and Jenness Robbins, big names among a handful of Maine lumbermen moving toward the perceived center in an increasingly contentious forestry debate. The brothers campaigned actively for the measure’s passage.
“We need to make ourselves more appealing to the majority of voters,” brother Jim explained in a recent interview. “Had it passed, Question 1 would have helped us move to the political center without adversely impacting science-based forestry.”
The Robbins brothers are fourth generation owners of Robbins Lumber Company, a Searsmont milling and timberland concern founded in 1881 by their great grandfather. He made barrel staves and shingles in a small building that stood a stone’s throw from the company’s state-of-the-art sawmill. Among its products: custom cut pine lumber, shelving, bevel paneling, tongue and groove siding and pre-cut components used in rat traps, bread boards and racks for kitchen spices and compact disk storage. Wood shavings are bagged and sold as livestock bedding, and the lowest quality logs are chipped and burned in an on-site power plant that heats lumber dryers. The various milling operations employ 135. The brothers also own about 5,000 acres of mixed pine and hardwood timberland, plus another 22,000 acres purchased jointly with Champion International in 1996. They also manage timber tracts for other landowners and farm about 150,000 Christmas trees.
Where forestry and milling are concerned, few companies have earned wider recognition than Robbins Lumber. In 1989, it was named the Outstanding Land Steward in the United States by the Arbor Day Foundation, and in 1992 it won the Maine Governor’s Award of Excellence. The Maine Conservation Rights Institute and the Natural Resources Council of Maine have also honored its work. Apart from the pleasure of being publicly honored, Mr. Robbins says the awards mirror boyhood lessons learned from their late father. The elder Mr. Robbins was for more than 50 years one of Maine’s most respected lumbermen and conservationists. “At an early age we were taught to take our civic, business and environmental responsibilities very seriously,” Mr. Robbins says of his upbringing.
Mr. Robbins is president the Maine Forest Products Council, the only venue in the state where paper and lumbering interests sit at the same table. Since 1991, when they were asked to join the Northern Forest Lands Council, the organization has been immersed in the ensuing debate. The issue has tested its diverse membership’s mettle as well as that of Mr. Robbins, but they have held on despite Sen. Leahy’s recent attempts to alter critically important wording in the Northern Forest Stewardship Act.
“It has been very frustrating,” Mr. Robbins concedes. “But by our participation we have kept forestry and forest families at the center of a critically important political process that was going forward with or without us. I hate to think where we would be today had we stood by while environmentalists decided what our future would be.”
Of the Northeast’s big timberland owners, the Pingree family (heirs of David Pingree) may be the most admired. That is certainly the case where the region’s mainstream conservation groups are concerned. Hardly a month passes without one of them holding up the family’s land ethic as one they wish others would emulate. It is animage Pingree heirs enjoy but wisely refuse to flaunt.
“People like us because we rarely clearcut in our forests,” explains Stephen Schley, president of Pingree Associates, a management services company that links Pingree heirs to Seven Islands Land Company, another family-owned entity that manages timberland owned by the heirs.
“The tree species we are managing will tolerate a good deal of shade, which means they respond very well to unobtrusive selection harvesting techniques,” Mr. Schley explains. “Not having to clearcut often has strengthened our public image.”
But the emphasis on barely visible selection harvesting methods is not the only reason why Pingree heirs and Seven Islands enjoy such extraordinary popularity with conservationists. They also jumped on the certification bandwagon well ahead of their competitors. The move pleased niche marketers who want to showcase lumber bearing a third party label certifying that the product came from forests that are managed in sustainable ways. The market for certified wood is small but growing rapidly, especially in Europe—a fact that weighed heavily in the decision to seek certification.
“Certification provided an opportunity for us to differentiate our Seven Islands product lines and management style,” Mr. Schley explains. “It was not an attempt to embarrass competitors or curry favor with environmental groups.”
Seven Islands enjoys other advantages over its competitors. It has no capital investments in milling, unlike most big timberland owners in the Northeast. Moreover, the Pingree heirs take a much longer view of their investments than do most stock market shareholders. The success the company thus enjoys has not gone unnoticed. Mr. Schley reports several major timberland owners and investment funds currently mulling timberland acquisitions in the Northeast have asked Seven Islands to consider managing their purchases.
Daryl Martens stands beside a deck of white ash in Plumb Lumber Company’s log
yard at Andover, Vermont. The ten-employee company cuts ash, maple, oak, hickory,
cherry, basswood and butternut for flooring and furniture manufacturers. Such
species diversity is common through the Northeast’s hardwood forests. |
Although Mr. Schley will not say what companies have inquired, it is likely some of them also own land in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest, where clearcutting is as common as it is uncommon in Seven Islands’ managed forests. In any event, Mr. Schley’s response is instructive. “Everything we do is predicated on our ability to manage shade. Our system would not work in a Douglas-fir forest because that species thrives in full sunlight and is best promoted by clearcutting, in spite of all the negative issues that go with it.”
Although Pingree-owned forests are rarely clearcut, Mr. Schley concedes that clearcutting is occasionally the only realistic option. During the 1970s, its forests were hit by the same spruce budworm outbreak that devastated the entire Northeast. Almost 40,000 acres had to be clearcut before the infestation subsided. Thereafter, to rebalance growth and harvest, Seven Islands’ foresters reduced logging in spruce-fir forests by 50 percent for several years.
“The decision to dramatically curtail logging created a short-term financial hardship for the landowners,” Mr. Schley recalls. “But their sacrifices are now being rewarded in terms of new, healthier, fast growing forests. Unfortunately, the massive amount of clearcutting that was done left many believing clearcutting is still the dominant harvesting method in Maine, when, in fact it is the least dominant.”
Although conservation groups have been generous in their praise for Seven Islands, the company is caught up in the same land war as everyone else—a fact that concerns Mr. Schley. “Many of the same groups that praise what we are doing also take political positions detrimental to our business,” Mr. Schley concedes. “Other landowners considering change see that it hasn’t insulated us from the onslaught. They conclude— perhaps correctly—that there is no incentive to follow in our footsteps. It is time for conservationists to decide whose side they are on.”
The world’s day begins along the International Dateline—an imaginary transection that divides the South Pacific into two days at an archipelago called the Kingdom of Tonga. Back in the 1970s, Henry Whittemore worked here on the island of ‘Eua as a Peace Corps volunteer. His fondest memories are of hiking from his village to a volcanic ridgeline, arriving in time to watch the sun rise over the eastern Pacific.
“Because we were right on the Dateline, I always knew I was one of the first people on earth to watch the new day dawn,” he said in a recent interview. “I wish I could find a similar promontory from which to view the future of forestry.”
These days, the search for a promontory from which to view forestry’s future is attracting a lot of attention. Even the venerable Nature Conservancy has gotten into the act. Last December, its Vermont chapter purchased almost 27,000 acres of timberland in the Green Mountains. Amid political fanfare—and to the delight of the locals—it said it plans to manage its $5.5 million purchase as a working forest. Among other things, the Conservancy hopes to chart a new more enlightened course for forestry in the Northeast.
But if there is any one person capable of finding the overlook from which to look down on forestry’s new day dawning, it is Henry Whittemore. Mr. Whittemore is Northeast Regional Manager for the Hancock Timber Resource Group, an investment subsidiary of Boston-based insurance giant John Hancock Financial Services.
21-year old Dennis Walter pauses beside a skidder he operates for a logging
company in Maine. Mr. Walter hopes to make logging his life’s work. Such well paying
opportunities still abound in the Northeast, where most timberland is privately
owned, but are increasingly scare in the West, where most forests are federally owned. |
John Hancock is not a name often linked to forestry, and its subsidiary Timber Resource Group is relatively new to the business. Founded in 1985, the group develops and manages timberland portfolios for institutional investors— mainly public employment retirement systems. Its current U.S. portfolio includes about 2.6 million acres valued at $2.8 billion. As Northeast regional manager, Mr. Whittemore oversees 670,000 investor-owned acres supplying timber to 120 lumber and paper producers. Its best cherry is so valuable that it attracts veneer buyers from Indianapolis— 800 miles distant. The day-to-day work is done by New Hampshire based Wagner Forest Management, freeing Mr. Whittemore to do what he does best: represent Hancock’s timberland interests in high-level political and environmental forums.
“Forestry has become a very public business, but it suffers from a lack of leadership,” Mr. Whittemore says. “We hope to fill the void by bringing a conservation ethic to our business and a business ethic to our conservation activities. Our successes lower the chances that a political skirmish will undermine the safety of client investments in timberland.”
Four years ago, Hancock judged the Northeast to be the most stable investment environment of its three operating units—the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest being the other two. But the recent political tumult surrounding Maine’s clearcutting debate and uncertainty about the future of the Northern Forest is causing the company to assume a more public role to protect investor interests. It supported Maine’s failed forestry compact and New Hampshire’s widely praised Memorandum of Understanding restricting harvesting in visible high elevation areas. It is also working behind the scenes for ratification of the Northern Forest Stewardship Act.
“The Act could provide a mechanism wherein federal funding could be allocated to states to conserve forests that contribute to the economic, environmental and social well being of the region,” Mr. Whittemore explains.
But many Northern Forest landowners disagree, noting that repeated attempts to legislate forestry solutions in the Pacific Northwest have served only to embolden environmental activists. In Oregon and Washington, hundreds of thousands of investorowned acres have been lost to federally enforced habitat conservation programs. But Mr. Whittemore remains optimistic, in part because he thinks the political climate in the Northeast is more hopeful than it is in the Pacific Northwest.
“The fact that there is so little federal land in the Northeast is a big factor,” he explains, “but I detect other more fundamental differences. The cultural values embodied in forestry and milling still enjoy wide public acceptance in the Northeast, but the most fundamental differences reside in our town meeting form of government. Rigorous debate is encouraged but it rarely divides communities. We may harbor deep differences of opinion but we remain neighbors first.”
Robbins Lumber co-owner Jim Robbins discusses a customer
order with Myrtle Wilson, manager of the company’s cut-up
plant. The Searsmont, Maine lumber company employs
about 135 people. Women account for about half the
workforce in such milling operations in the Northeast.
Counting benefits, they earn about $12 an hour,
far more than is earned by most working women. |
In its quest to hold the political middle, Hancock has become a leader in granting conservation easements in investor-owned forests that hold intrinsic values the public reveres. In just two years, the company completed two of the largest such sales ever in the Northeast—a 2,700-acre tract in the 13-Mile Woods corridor along New Hampshire’s Androscoggin River and 31,000 acres in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Easements are popular with conservation-minded citizens because they limit harvesting in protected areas, but those who oppose easements say that such transactions result in a loss of local property tax revenue— a charge that Mr. Whittemore vigorously denies.
“Hancock remains sensitive to the negative tax burden some people perceive,” he says. “Properly executed easements yield no such unintended consequences, and—in fact—provide a proven strategy for landowners who want to do their part to conserve privately owned but publicly valued forest resources. Moreover, the easement debate has helped focus legislative attention on the need to make certain tax policies don’t shift the revenue burden back onto the shoulders of local taxpayers.”
Although Mr. Whittemore remains optimistic about a peaceful settlement of the Northeast’s escalating land war, he admits there are times when he too is discouraged by the increasingly bitter debate between those who envision dramatically different futures for the region’s forests. “Public values and business values are clearly converging on a common destination,” he says. “Where Hancock is concerned, the future depends on our ability to manage client-owned timberland in a way that strikes a dynamic balance between economics, environmental health and societal needs. Other major land managers in the Northeast might say it differently, but I suspect they view the current situation in much the same light.”
The Northern Forest Lands debate will not be quickly or easily resolved. If anything, the sharp edges that define the protagonists are hardening with age. In June, opponents of the Northern Forest Stewardship Act met at St. Johnsbury, Vermont to consider new strategies for keeping the federal government at bay. Attendees reportedly formed a new coalition dedicated to making certain the Act “never passes.” Barely 20 miles away, the terrorist group, Earth First, set up a summer training camp at Wheelock Farm. Meanwhile, back on earth, there are new worries about “the Wall Street factor,” a refined version of the earlier fear that developers would swallow up the Northern Forest. The big paper companies are all under enormous investor pressure to increase profitability. The question is, “How?” Some have suggested “improving the bottom line” is as simple as selling land. While such sales would surely raise capital, they would also play into the hands of those who dream of a federal takeover. Then, too, there is the fact the mills would still need fiber, for which they might then have to pay a premium.
What—if anything—the general public thinks about all this is hard to gauge. Sherry Huber believes the underlying issue is the same as it has always been. “The public has no confidence in the kind of forestry it believes is being practiced.”
Mrs. Huber is the executive director of the Maine Tree Foundation and a former member of the Maine House of Representatives. She is also a former chair of the Maine Audubon Society and the Maine chapter of The Nature Conservancy. For many years, her late husband managed the timber and mineral divisions for J. M. Huber, a New Jersey based conglomerate with major landholdings in Maine.
“There is a public perception that forestry has moved beyond the bounds of sustainability,” she said in an April interview. “People believe that what landowners are doing in forests is hurting wildlife, soil, water and wildness. The industry has thus far been unable to calm these fears. The clearcutting referendum and the stewardship act are reflections of concern, confusion and mistrust.”
Although Mrs. Huber shares many of the public’s concerns, she also sympathizes with “enlightened Maine landowners that have always managed their lands responsibly.” Moreover, she sees a big difference between “homegrown environmentalists and beltway environmentalists that—however wellintended— don’t mirror the Maine point of view.”
A worker checks the bend in chair backs at Bethel Furniture Stock in Bethel, Maine. This machine uses high voltage electricity and hydraulic pressure to bend pre-cut hardwood strips into the desired arc. The bending process takes about 20 minutes. Bethel inventories different arc designs for several customers for whom it makes a wide variety of chair parts. The company employs 85, Bethel’s second largest work force. |
“Local control is a big issue here,” she explains. “There are only 1.2 million of us in the entire state. We know each other and we know our culture. The challenge lies in drawing divergent points to common ground. Extremists at the far edges of the debate made this very difficult”
Under her direction, the Maine Tree Foundation is shopping a funding proposal for a new forestry education program called LEAF—Long-Term Education About the Forest. But many of the region’s biggest forest products companies are no longer headquartered in the Northeast, making fund raising more difficult. She is undaunted: “If the industry can spend $10 million on two clearcutting referendums, it can surely afford to spend half a million a year on a long term forestry education program that might someday restore the public’s trust in forestry.”
Ted Johnston sees an entirely different forest growing out of an increasingly political landscape. The past president of the Maine Forest Products Council bade goodbye to the timber industry several years ago after six excruciating years of involvement with the Governor’s Task Force and the Northern Forest Lands Council. Now he is a registered lobbyist in the Maine legislature, working mainly for the insurance and natural resource industries.
“I was naive enough to actually think we were talking about a win-win situation involving forestry and forest conservation,” he says of his time on the Northern Forest Lands Council. “Now I am a cynic. Environmentalist activists don’t give a hoot about forests or land. For them, the issue is how to gain control over the largest single block of privately owned forestland in the United States. None of the tools they used in the West will work here, so they are investing in new strategies for gaining control. The Northern Forest Stewardship Act is at the center of their strategy.”
Mr. Johnston makes no apologies for his outspoken views concerning environmentalists. He is equally critical of the industry’s ineptness. “They were terrible at politics during the early stages of the Northern Forest debate,” he said in a February interview. “They wanted to believe the best about everyone, and they refused to accept the fact that environmentalist activists were bargaining in bad faith.”
According to Mr. Johnston, Maine’s two bitterly fought clearcutting referendums opened the industry’s eyes to “some of the public realities” that confront them. “Their education was painful to watch,” he says, “but they’ve come a long way in a short while, and I give them credit for new-found perceptiveness. Now if they could only agree on a straightforward forestry message the public can embrace.”
If the industry is confused about what the message should be, Mr. Johnston is not. “Here it is in two simple sentences,” he declares. “There is only one way to keep working forests working—and that is to prevent environmentalists from using the power of the federal government to control how private landowners manage their forests. The day landowners are no longer free to work their forests profitably, two New England traditions are gone forever: public access to private forestland and the vibrant rural culture forestry has created.”
The quest to keep forests forested is one of the few connecting points in the debate about the future of the Northern Forest. But it has inspired much different visions of what the Northeast’s forests should look like. Some see working forests. Others see wilderness. A few see both.
Even the most ardent proponents of wilderness seem willing to grudgingly admit that working forests have helped to arrest development. In “An Explosion of Green,” [Atlantic Monthly, April, 1995] Bill McKibben wrote, “One of the chief fears of eastern environmentalists is that the twin plagues of industrial forestry and over development will merge. In New England, for instance, the forest products industry— which for all the damage it has inflicted has at least kept the vast woodlands it manages free of houses and pavement, and thus theoretically restorable— could decide to start selling off land it has cleared.”
Mr. McKibbens views this century’s recovery of Northeastern forests as the last chance for environmentalists to save them. He dreams of a time when wolves will again roam free, drawing tourists to the North Country “where they buy T-shirts and go on howling expeditions. In short, wolves belong here. The East will not be fully renewed until their packs wander its mountains again. That this is even a real possibility is a wonder, nearly a miracle.”
But others look at these same forests and see something completely different. In 1989, Paul Bofinger, then president of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, laid out his vision for writer John G. Mitchell in “Mountain Views, Bargain Prices,” [Harrowsmith, July-August]. “It’s not just the trees. It’s not just the pretty scenery and the flowing waters. The character I’m speaking of is a way of life—the people in their checkered shirts and their boots and their pickup trucks. You know what I mean? We have to preserve that. We don’t want to bring in a lot of conventional tourist facilities and put those people to work as chambermaids for minimum wage. We’ve done enough of that, other places, right? Let’s face it. What we have here is a wonderful wood resource, and to preserve the character of the North Country we have to learn how to use it better. We have to create the markets and jobs right here to protect that way of life.”
The late Mollie Beattie, who was then Commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, once talked about turning her state’s Tree Farms into dude ranches. “Why not,” she told Mr. Mitchell. “We’re not talking about replacing the forest economy. We’re talking about maintaining it. It has a value of its own. It deserves to be maintained for its own sake.”
New Hampshire consulting forester Charles Baylies takes
his work very seriously—as his license plate suggests. The
“EBM” in 1-EBM stands for “ecosystem-based management.”
Private individuals own most of the Northeast’s timberland,
providing a lucrative market for foresters like Mr. Baylies. |
Just how much tourism the North Country will tolerate is an open question. Most businesses welcome it, but residents in these quiet communities— particularly new residents—seem to resent its trappings. “I see condominiums,” Mr. Mitchell wrote in Harrowsmith. “I see luxury townhouses. I see Cinemas Four and The Depot and Mansion Hill and Star Ridge and The Village at Loon Mountain and The Nordic Inn...Is this what’s in store for Mattawamkeag, Molunkus and Macwohoc? Will the new arrivals who inhabit these places in Lincoln (weekends and vacations only) wake up some morning and notice that their panoramic views are getting cluttered with other people’s condominiums.”
For its part, the Wilderness Society has been out beating its “timber is dead, tourism is the future” drum, just as it did in the West a decade ago. But a 1989 study (All That Glitters) by the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition leaves no doubt about tourism’s shortcomings. “Beyond the small pool of management and shortterm, male-dominated construction industry jobs associated with tourism development, the employment ‘opportunities’ that remain in successful development communities are those of food servers, maids, and retail clerks. Traditionally held by women, these jobs routinely offer minimal wages, marginal benefits and virtually no opportunity for advancement.”
The study, which was funded by the Ford Foundation, the Aspen Institute and the U.S. Department of Commerce, also concluded, “tourism development, as it is currently practiced, is not a sound economic development strategy. While successful development generates much needed local and state revenue, it also places costly demands on a community’s infrastructure, raises the cost of living, degrades the environment, which first attracted tourists, dilutes often fragile local cultures and generates principally marginal, seasonal jobs.”
Others are focused on a less intrusive kind of tourism normally reserved for the affluent and the physically fit. They see the mountainous Appalachian Trail as the backbone of a wilderness expanse stretching from Maine to Georgia. Vermont environmentalist Jamie Sayen envisions “continuous wild habitat the length of the Appalachian Range, which in time could enable the return of unique plants and large animals— panthers, bears, wolves, moose—that have been exterminated throughout all or part of the mountain chain.”
Other big picture thinkers, like the Audubon Society’s Brock Evans, more quickly cut to the chase. The Northern Forest “should all be in the public domain,” Mr. Evans declared at a 1990 conference at Tufts University. “If that sounds unreasonable, so be it. Be unreasonable. Let’s take it all back.”
It is precisely this sort of inflammatory rhetoric that has convinced Stewardship Act opponents the legislation is no more than a smokescreen concealing an eventual federal takeover. Though the Act makes no provision for purchasing or confiscating land, proponents believe it opens the door to “greenlining,” a zoning process that has become so politically onerous that environmentalists have stopped talking openly about it. Mr. Mitchell had this to say about greenlining in his 1989 Harrowsmith article. “As defined in a seminal document on the subject—Charles E. Little’s 1975 report to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation— a greenline park would be a resource area containing a mix of public and private land that is comprehensively planned, regulated and managed by an independent agency set up specifically to preserve the area’s recreational, aesthetic, ecological, historic and cultural values.”
New York’s Adirondack Park is a greenlined area and has been for most of this century, though the lines there are blue, not green. But elsewhere in the rural Northeast, talk of greenlining or bluelining—and the comprehensive planning it necessitates—will get you run out of town on a rail. Few have written more pointedly on the subject than Martin Harris, an architect and former farmer now living in Vergennes, Vermont.
“The real reason there’s a problem, I would suggest, is that both the regulators and their mostly urban supporters see no need to consider the economic fallout of their land-use desires,” he wrote in “A Battle Over Land Use.” [Journal of Forestry, November, 1991] “With no ties to the land, with personal incomes quite independent of land use or capability, with little interest in or sympathy for those whose personal incomes and future security are closely tied to the land, it’s been remarkably easy for them to build (and then systematically enlarge) a set of seemingly logical environmental regulations ostensibly aimed at such reasonable goals as preserving wetlands, woodlands and agland. It’s not they who have to live with the economic implications of withdrawing the basic resource of other people’s livelihoods from the marketplace.”
Just last month, this decade-long saga came full circle with a Wilderness Society call for the federal purchase of 900,000 acres of Maine timberland recently offered for sale by Sappi Fine Paper North America. The asking price: $200 million. Sappi’s intent to sell has not yet generated the same public outcry the 1988 Diamond land sales generated, but to rally public support for federal intervention the Society has added the tract to its list of the 15 most endangered wild lands in the nation. “The importance of protecting significant parts of the Sappi holdings cannot be overstated,” said Bob Perschel, the Society’s Northeast regional director. “This is a huge opportunity, but if money can’t be found to acquire key parcels, these lands are almost certain to be logged or subdivided.”
“Alarmist rhetoric” retorted Main Forest Products Council communications coordinator Dennis Tompkins. “(They) use these sales to try to generate panic on the part of the public, and they continually fail to realize that these are privately owned commercial woodlands.”
Separately, Mary Adams wrote Maine Governor Angus King to remind him that recreation access, job-creating investments in timber production and a stable tax base are among “the virtues of private ownership.”
“The (Sappi) land should stay in private hands and productive use,” she wrote. “The last thing we need is to turn sections of the woods into a patchwork quilt of various uses, depending upon which special interest group had the ear of the Governor at the time conservation easements, riparian zones, watershed protections, endangered and threatened species, land trusts, management plans and environmental lawsuits the tools that are being used to take land out of production in the West are being used here as well.”
Not to be outdone, environmentalists conducted a “stop the chain-saw massacre” rally July 14 in the state’s capital. Declaring the recently revised state forest practices act “a failure,” they threatened to launch yet another citizen initiative to ban clearcutting. “We will do whatever it takes to stop the rape and pillage,” declared Johathan Carter of the Forest Ecology Network.
Meanwhile, 3,000 miles west, Oregon’s first-ever ban clearcutting initiative will appear on the state’s November election ballot— prompting one logger to ask if it might not be time for someone to follow the money trail that feeds petition drives in states where voters referendums are permitted.
Hugh Raup was right. Land and forests are mere stage and scenery. People are what bring the stage to life— arranging and rearranging the scenery at hand to fit their story. In the Northeast— and elsewhere in America—a war story is currently playing. In it, the protagonists fight to the finish over the right to rearrange the scenery the way they think it should be. We don’t know how this play ends because the last scene has yet to be written, but this much is certain: the land and its forests will always be there for the enjoyment of some and the prosperity of others— stage and scenery in a two-act play that had its first fun in the Adirondack mountains more than 100 years ago.
