And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Maine's northern forests going to highest bidder
Wednesday, March 31, 1999
By Jim Motavalli
The sale of 911,000 acres of Maine forest land to Plum Creek Timber
Company scares many environmentalists, but some acreage on jewel-like
Moosehead Lake will be protected. Flying high over Maine's Baxter State
Park, all looks well with the Northern Forest, a vast swatch of green
covering 26 million acres in four states.
The dense timberlands stretch out in an unbroken, verdant expanse, with
the monotony broken only by the broad sparkle of clear lakes and the
sighting of an occasional moose.
But look beyond the park's borders and all is not well in this sparsely
populated region, where timber companies own most of the land and even
most of the roads.
>From the air, the forests are a patchwork of clear cuts.
Maine's northernmost and poorest unincorporated territories include 10.5
million acres of woodlands -- more than half the state's total -- that
are in the hands of a couple dozen large paper and timber interests.
Although the Maine Forest Practices Act, hammered together in 1989 by a
coalition of environmentalists, government and logging companies,
theoretically limits clear cuts to 35 acres and provides other
protections, in reality, the timber barons do pretty much what they want
on their own land.
Increasingly, the northern forests are falling prey to what the Natural
Resources Council of Maine calls "cut-and-run logging," a cycle that
begins with the cheap purchase of undeveloped woodlands.
Working fast, loggers then cut every economically valuable tree, leaving
thin "beauty strips" between their clear cuts. When the big trees are
exhausted, the owners sell the smaller trees to chip mills, then market
the land for development. It's a cycle that takes highly productive
woodlands out of the Northern Forest forever for short-term profit.
Maine's environmentalists are divided. Last year, an unlikely coalition
of property rights advocates and the Green Party worked together to
defeat the admittedly somewhat compromised Compact for Maine's Forests,
which other environmental groups supported.
Shortly after that vote, two of Maine's biggest logger-landowners
announced that they were putting their vast holdings on the block.
The fire sale included 911,000 acres owned by South Africa Pulp and
Paper (SAPPI) Ltd. and Bowater Inc.'s more than two million acres,
adding up to 15 percent of the state.
The first shoe dropped last October, when SAPPI announced it had a buyer
in the Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Company, which was paying a
bargain-basement $180 million. Environmentalists, most of whom had
considered Plum Creek the least-qualified bidder, were shocked. In
Montana, where the company is a major landowner (1.5 million acres in
the western part of the state) and political powerhouse, an outraged
Republican congressman called the company the "Darth Vader" of the
timber industry.
According to Steve Thompson, a Whitefish-based natural resource
consultant, Plum Creek has "a virtual monopoly" on logging in Montana,
owning a majority of the milling and 90 percent of the industrial timber
base. The company, which was spun off from the Burlington National
Railroad in 1988, owes its fortune to timber rights won by rail
operators through the Northern Pacific Land Grant of 1864 (the so-called
"Lincoln logs").
Thompson says that Plum Creek began "liquidation logging" on its Montana
lands in the 1990s, cutting up vast swaths in a checkerboard pattern.
With most of the better trees logged, the company hired a consultant and
identified 150,000 acres that it might sell for development because,
according to Bob Jirsa, Plum Creek's director of corporate and
environmental affairs, "it didn't fit in for long-term forestry."
Although the land amounts to only five percent of Plum Creek's Montana
holdings, Thompson says the property identified amounts to some of the
most productive timber acreage in the state, serving important roles as
wildlife corridors and hunting and fishing sites. "This is what the
people in Maine should be concerned about," Thompson says.
Plum Creek's Jirsa says his company's "Darth Vader" image is not
warranted. The company was, in fact, "stung" by Congressman Rod
Chandler's comment. "We are absolutely good stewards of the land," Jirsa
says. Its large clear cuts are a thing of the past, a product of the
1970s and '80s when "everyone was doing them, even the U.S.
Forest Service. But now that kind of thing is no longer acceptable."
Plum Creek's environmental principles, adopted in 1990, call for
sustainable forest management, protection of water and air quality, soil
conservation and reforestation. But skeptics like Thompson say that the
company practices environmental forestry on only 20 percent of its more
visible properties in Montana; out of sight, it's business as usual.
As part of the Plum Creek deal, the state of Maine will get conservation
easements (basically, promises not to develop) on 1,908 acres, most of
it invaluable Moosehead Lake and Kennebec River shoreline. But Michael
Kellett, executive director of Restore: The North Woods, an activist
group based in Massachusetts, wants to see much more land protected.
Restore envisions an enormous 3.2 million-acre state park in northern
Maine.
Kellett isn't worried about working with "Darth Vader," and doesn't see
the cause as hopeless, despite the need to raise hundreds of millions of
dollars. Plum Creek, he says, "is not radically different from the
landowners who had the property before.
They're not ideologically driven, but very much focused on the bottom
line."
Is there support in Maine for a huge new park? Sherry Huber, executive
director of the Maine Tree Foundation, says she's disappointed that the
Plum Creek deal didn't include more protected land, but she's not sure
another park is needed. "All the large landowners already permit
recreation, hunting and fishing," she says. "It's a 300-year tradition."
Maine's environmentalists were still reeling from the Plum Creek
announcement when, a few weeks later, Bowater said that it would sell
half its state lands -- a million acres -- to the huge family-owned J.D.
Irving conglomerate of New Brunswick, Canada for $220 million. Irving,
which already owned 500,000 acres in the state and will now be Maine's
largest private landowner, has a reputation for clear cutting and
intensive forest management. Judy Berk, a spokesperson for the Natural
Resources Council of Maine, says, "Our concern is Irving's history of
replacing natural forests with plantation growth."
Hearing that a heavily sprayed Irving forest in New Brunswick has been
identified as "well-managed" by Scientific Certification Systems,
activist Mitch Lansky of the Low-Impact Forestry Project responded: "To
claim that Irving's forest is not a plantation is like Clinton saying
that what he did with Monica was not sex."
For more information, contact the Natural Resources Council of Maine,
(207)622-3101 or RESTORE: The North Woods, (978)287-0320
(Jim Motavalli is editor of E, the Environmental Magazine.)
Copyright 1999, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, All Rights Reserved
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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