Nature and commerce have sat side by side in northern Maine since the days when the writer Henry David Thoreau came here to be inspired by the pristine spruce and fir forests.
But, with the Maine woods long being used to feed East Coast paper mills, commerce has usually had the better seat.
Nature, however, is being upgraded these days. In the biggest deal of its kind, more than 750,000 acres of Maine woodlands have been set aside for conservation using a unique legal mechanism that guarantees the forest will be preserved but allows a private owner to retain possession of the land.
Timber companies own almost all of Maine’s 17 million acres of sparsely settled woodlands, but lately the names of the owners have been changing at a dizzying rate. In the last year alone, about 15 percent of all the land in the state changed hands, the majority in huge transactions involving hundreds of thousands of acres.
“This land has changed hands so many times,” said Roger Currier, 52, who runs a flight service out of a corrugated metal hangar in Greenville on the shore of Moosehead Lake. “It’s pretty unstable. Every time we see a different company come in, we see a different management philosophy.”
Maine residents, conservationists and outdoor enthusiasts have mixed feelings about the quick succession of big land deals. New owners could mean new threats to the forests, such as widespread clear-cutting or, even worse in their view, development of housing and commercial property on unspoiled woodlands.
On the other hand, with “For Sale” signs popping up on so much land, once-in-a-generation opportunities are arising to set aside chunks of the forest. Although some advocate establishing a national park in the state, the most recent conservation moves have entailed outright purchases by non-profit groups or agreements by owners that they will not turn their forests into shopping malls.
Conservationists have used these methods because of an important difference between the forests of the Northwest and the Northeast.
The old-growth forests of Washington and Oregon are largely publicly owned, but woodland in the northeast is overwhelmingly in private hands.
That means that pressuring the state or the federal government to restrict logging, the pattern in the Northwest, doesn’t work in Maine.
“We’ve had a series of wins here,” said Bob Perschel, chairman of the Northern Forest Alliance, a coalition of New England and New York environmental groups. “But there’s millions of other acres up for grabs. Now’s the time to protect it.”
The northern forest encompasses 26 million acres of woodland, stretching from the Adirondacks of northern New York in the west, across northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and reaching as far east in Maine as the border with the Canadian province of New Brunswick.
When Colonial-era settlers first moved into the region, they found a forest that was dominated by large trees up to 300 years old, according to Robert Seymour, a silviculturist at the University of Maine.
“Talk of mysteries!” Thoreau wrote in “The Maine Woods,” evoking the power of nature to raise transcendental questions about life. “Think of our life in nature–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! . . . Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”
By 1857, when Thoreau paddled across Moosehead Lake in a birch canoe, the state was busily selling off its forest, often for a pittance. In one particularly infamous transaction known as the “State Steal,” the state sold 2.7 million acres of woodland for $1.
By 1878, only 2 percent of Maine’s land remained in public hands; today, the state owns about 5 percent, ranking near the bottom among all states.
The primeval forest is long gone, with only small, isolated stands of virgin woods left. Now, with smaller-diameter trees making up the bulk of the forest, spruce and fir is harvested to be made into paper products. The forest is valuable not only for its timber but also as a wilderness for camping, hunting, fishing and other outdoor sports.
“Even though it’s been harvested, it’s still densely forested,” Seymour said. “It’s hard to keep trees from coming back on it.”
Some 10 million acres of the state, or about half the total area of Maine, is so thinly settled that it is called the “unorganized territory.” Townships have numbers instead of names.
Around Moosehead Lake, flatbed trucks hauling pine logs to paper mills have pounded the asphalt roads into a crumbly suggestion of a path.
By the side of those rutted roads are moose-crossing signs bearing the silhouette of the flat-antlered mammal that still roams these woodlands.
“The north Maine woods is kind of the last frontier,” said Mike Boutin, 31, owner of Northwoods Outfitters, a sporting-goods shop that also boasts Greenville’s version of a cyber-cafe. “It’s really untouched. You can go out there and feel you’re really in the wild. You can’t say that about many places in the United States anymore. This is like heaven on earth for me.”
But recent land sales have left people like Boutin wondering if their paradise is about to be cut down or paved over.
In three huge transactions last year valued at $555 million, 2.5 million acres changed hands. And other holdings are on the market.
The reasons for the sales vary from company to company, but all have been affected by the changing economics of the paper industry, including falling prices, according to industry consultant Lloyd Irland.
“Clearly the Asian crisis has been involved” in depressing paper prices, Irland said. “And paper company people are talking about how they’ve got to become more shareholder-friendly. Their view is to get rid of low-return assets, and they see timberland as a low-return asset.”
Conservationists have focused their fears about development on the purchase of 905,000 acres in central Maine by Plum Creek Timber Co. of Seattle.
“Plum Creek is a different kind of business for us in Maine,” said Karin Tilberg of the Northern Forest Alliance. “Public access to the backlands of Maine has always been permitted by (the timber companies). But if the land is sold off and becomes fragmented, over time, that access will probably be lost.”
But Kris Russell, Plum Creek’s director of corporate affairs for the Rocky Mountain region, said that of the 20,000 acres the company has sold in Montana, 80 percent has been to government agencies or non-profit groups for conservation.
The company has sold off parcels of several hundred acres for development, but only in areas along lakes that already have been developed.
In a move that could allay development concerns in Maine, the company agreed last month to sell some 65 miles of shore frontage on Moosehead Lake and other waterways to the state for $5.3 million.
Paper companies have not been the only buyers recently of chunks of the northern forest.
Last year, the Conservation Fund bought 300,000 acres of forest in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, and the Nature Conservancy purchased 185,000 acres in Maine. Both groups plan to continue some foresting on their lands, in part to pay for the purchases.
And the state of Maine could become a potential buyer if voters approve a bond issue in November.
Gov. Angus King has proposed using the bond money to set up a $50 million fund to acquire land.
King recently announced the biggest development yet in the region’s conservation effort. In exchange for $28 million, the Pingree family, which has owned forest land in Maine since 1840, agreed to give up the right to develop more than 750,000 acres of their holdings, an area larger than Rhode Island.
The family will retain ownership and will continue to harvest timber, but the agreement, called a conservation easement, means that more than 2,000 miles of waterfront land on streams and lakes and nesting areas for bald eagles and peregrine falcons will be preserved.
King boasted that it is the largest conservation easement ever negotiated.
The money to secure the development rights will come from the New England Forestry Foundation, a 55-year-old non-profit group that promotes conservation and environmentally sound forestry practices. It has two years to raise the money.
“The shift has been toward conservation easements to protect the valuable areas but keeping the forest land in production,” said Abby Holman, executive director of the Maine Forest Products Council, which represents the timber industry. “It’s a win-win situation.”
But conservation easements go only so far, counters Jonathan Carter, director of the Forest Ecology Network, a Maine environmental group that advocates the creation of a 3.2 million acre national park where no logging would be permitted.
“Basically they’re just big windfalls for these companies,” Carter said of conservation easements. “They don’t do anything to bring back wilderness.”
