The subject was forests. The speakers were foresters and environmentalists, landowners and government regulators, Democrats, a Republican and a socialist. The public was invited.
And not one angry word was spoken.
Stop the presses.
Well, a peaceful gathering on that subject certainly would have been big news in Oregon, Idaho or Montana, where battles over how, when and whether to cut down trees arouse passions that have brought people to the brink of armed violence.
Vermont is a calmer place, as are Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York, which held companion meetings this week to announce the final report of the Northern Forest Lands Council, a four-year, federally ordered study on the future of 26 million acres of Northeastern woods.
“The culture here is of the New England town meeting, not the Western shootout,” as one local put it.
The Northeast also has advantages the Northwest does not-most of the land is private, not public, and wilderness and endangered species were obliterated a century ago. Still, people around here can get pretty angry, too. A few early meetings were disrupted by obscene chants from advocates of “property rights.”
“How did we do it?” said Charles Levesque, the forest council’s executive director, referring to the relative lack of acrimony over the study. “I’ve worn out two cars. I’ve been to hundreds and hundreds of meetings, both large groups and in people’s homes. We did it by including everyone and by talking to everyone.”
The debates about the Northeastern forests are far from over. The council, which will put itself out of business Friday, only made recommendations. Governments at all levels will choose whether to implement them, and intense lobbying by all sides can be expected.
Not everyone is pleased by the suggestions, but with a few exceptions the council managed to keep everyone disagreeing agreeably. If there is no unanimity, or even consensus, there is still civility.
This is not the situation in the northern Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest, where fringe environmental groups have resorted to sabotage and some loggers have threatened both citizen conservationists and federal officials.
The leaders of the Northeastern effort were aware of those troubles, and of the potential for similar problems.
“The first important step was the makeup of the council,” said its chairman, Robert Bendick, an official of New York state’s environmental conservation department. “It was really a diverse, balanced group.”
The Vermont contingent, for instance, was made up of the state forester, the owner of a large tract of forest land, an official of a big environmental group and an independent consulting forester.
The second step was that “we did an enormous amount of research,” said Richard Carbonetti, the forester from northeastern Vermont. “We put real facts on the table.”
Then they simply let everyone talk and talk and talk. “This was three years’ worth of meetings in kitchens, in farmhouses, sometimes talking into the wee hours of the morning,” said Brendan Whitaker, a forester, an environmentalist and an ordained Episcopal minister.
Like the West, the Northeast has seen a certain “us-against-them” mentality, with some longtime residents who work in the woods and farms resentful toward the newcomers who work with computers, if they work at all, and who see forests and fields mainly as opportunities for recreation and contemplation, not for production.
But those divisions have not become as bitter in the Northeast. “One advantage we have is that everyone loves the woods and wants them protected,” Carbonetti said. “I talk to a lot of loggers. They don’t like clear-cuts, either.”
Ultimately, the 17 disparate members of the council agreed on 35 recommendations, ranging from lowering property taxes on forest land to public purchase of “lands of exceptional value.”
Some environmentalists think the recommendations are too general, especially because they do not specifiy which lands should be preserved from logging and because they do not mandate changes in forestry practices.
“I give the council good marks for having fostered a long-overdue public debate,” said Jamie Sayen of the Northern Appalachian Restoration Project. “But it started out with a near-total bias toward the timber industry, and the danger is that the politicians are going to hide behind their biased and hollow studies and use that as an excuse for not doing too much.”
On the other extreme, Thomas Morse of the Vermont Property Rights Center accused the council of proposing “landscape planning” for the northern woods in violation of the Constitution, and of “making a deliberate effort to keep us from being informed.” For instance, he said, there were no records or transcripts kept of the public hearings or “listening sessions” held by the council.
Bendick said all the hearings were tape-recorded and all the tapes are available to the public.
Morse said he and his followers would be “shutting down meetings” designed to implement the plan and would impose “some serious sanctions on individuals who hold meetings.”
It seems likely that, like their “Wise Use” counterparts in the West, the “property rights” activists are more vocal than they are numerous. Morse ran in last week’s Republican primary for governor, getting 8,508 votes. That was enough for a respectable second place in a light turnout. But it is reasonable to assume that almost all supporters of his movement voted for him, and his total amounts to about 4 percent of the Vermont electorate.
The more potent pressure is likely to come from the environmental side. It was pressure from citizens at the “listening sessions” that forced the council to add recommendations about improving forest practices to avoid over-cutting.
Whatever the final outcome, the process itself has so far encouraged government officials and many local residents alike. “If something like this had been in existence in the Northwest 20 years ago,” Whitaker said, “the bitterness, the polarization, the entire spotted-owl syndrome need never have happened.”
