Plum Foolish

For 40 years I’ve been collecting images from Maine’s north woods: the unbroken canopy of green flashing past as my crewmates from the old Kennebec Log Drive Company and I floated down the Roach River on our backs, hauling ourselves onto logjams and breaking them up with peaveys; moose draped with lily pads; the fragrance of balsam and sphagnum moss; the tremolos and yodels of loons on a hundred wilderness ponds and New England’s biggest lake; wild brook trout with ivory-trimmed fins and flanks the color of the sunset sipping my mayfly and caddis imitations; bats flittering through twilight; hills and mountains going from green to purple to black; the banter of barred owls; spruce smoke rising into brilliant northern nights undefiled by ambient light. . . .

The north woods haven’t changed much in my lifetime, but the Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Company—the nation’s largest private landholder, with 8.5 million acres—is telling me and other reporters how it’s going to fix that. April 4, 2006, is a “great day” for Maine, an “exciting day,” a “pivotal day.” Something “grand” is about to unfold in the East’s wildest forests, near its best trout ponds, along the remote headwaters of the Penobscot, Kennebec, Moose, Roach, St. John, and Allagash rivers, on the spectacular, mostly unpeopled shores of 40-mile-long and 12-mile-wide Moosehead Lake. Video cams track the speakers. Tape recorders, including mine, are thrust in their faces. Plum Creek is holding a press conference at the Maine State House in Augusta to announce a development plan whose size dwarfs anything the north country or even the state has ever seen.

Jim Lehner, Plum Creek’s regional manager, proclaims that his firm, which abandoned its original plan last January after being pilloried at four public hearings, has heeded the people of Maine: “You spoke. We listened.” His case seems weak. There has been scant change in the project’s size or footprint, and the number of housing units remains about the same. Flipping through charts, Lehner shows us how the proposed resort at Lily Bay has been scaled back, how a second resort has been expanded but moved to a less remote area near Big Moose Mountain, how one of the four RV Parks has been canceled. But the company has clearly ignored the public’s plea that the 10,000 acres of development be centered in and around the existing lakeside communities of Greenville and Rockwood instead of wandering off through the wildest sections of the watershed and thereby degrading thousands more acres with roads, powerlines, traffic, sewage, fertilizers, pets, and all the other blights that drive fish and wildlife from suburbia. From Long Pond, 30 miles north of Greenville on the west side of the lake, to Lily Bay, 15 miles north of Greenville on the east side, there will be 1,725 dwelling units—975 of them house lots, the others connected with the resorts.  A conservation easement on 71,000 acres is included in the revised plan, and Plum Creek promises that if its development is approved by the state, it will sell easements on an additional 269,000 acres to nonprofit entities at prices of its choosing.

Plum Creek calls to its podium one George Smith, director of the 14,000-member Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM), who rhapsodizes about how all the guaranteed access makes this massive development a terrific deal for hunters, anglers, and snowmobilers. Other invited speakers extol the economic boom the development will bring. But after Plum Creek’s speakers finish, the pillorying resumes. “We’re very disappointed,” Cathy Johnson of the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) tells the TV networks. “Plum Creek may have listened, but it didn’t hear.”

My press packet asserts that Plum Creek has offered a new “legacy for the Moosehead region.” Indeed it has. But there’s another possible legacy—not just for Moosehead but for the 26-million-acre Northern Forest that embraces it, the last really wild woods and water in the East and a stronghold for Canada lynx, bobcats, pine marten, forest-interior birds, loons, and countless other species we’re running out of elsewhere. Plum Creek by itself cannot extinguish all this wildness. But other large landowners, not just in Maine but in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, can, and they are watching carefully. “As goes Plum Creek so goes the rest of the large landowners and all of that big block of undeveloped forestland,” says Johnson. “We have one chance here to do it right.”

Plum Creek cuts and sells pulp and saw timber, but it is also a developer recently reorganized as a real estate investment trust (REIT), an investor-owned company excused from corporate income taxes by paying out at least 90 percent of its taxable profit in dividends—a prescription for land abuse. “Here’s Plum Creek’s unrelenting MO,” declares Bruce Farling, director of Montana Trout Unlimited. “Buy it, log the hell out of it, subdivide it, log it again, and put it on the recreational real estate market. And when the neighbors politely ask the company to ease up, the reply is always: Buy it or else. . . . The company bloats its environmental reputation with ad-agency spin. Meanwhile, many professional foresters quietly ridicule the company’s silvicultural practice of whacking the best trees while leaving scraggly, genetically inferior stock for reseeding weed-infested clearcuts that, in a masterful Orwellian broad-brush, the company no longer calls clearcuts. They are ‘regeneration cuts,’ or ‘overstory removals.’ ”

When I asked Mark Vander Meer, a highly respected independent forester and soil scientist in Montana’s Swan Valley, to assess Plum Creek’s land stewardship, he said: “About as bad as you can get. Plum Creek is entirely untrustworthy. They’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. They kept saying, ‘Why would we sell timberlands; we’re in the business of growing timber.’ ” Plum Creek officials repeatedly offered the same assurances when they showed up in Maine eight years ago, and within two years they had announced an 89-lot development on First Roach Pond, pristine trout and landlocked salmon habitat in the Moosehead watershed. “Plum Creek promised us they’d be ‘good neighbors,’ ” says Joan Wisher, president of the First Roach Pond Improvement Association. “Then they took the big hardwoods, destroying our shade canopy, making a permanent dust bowl, and silting the pond. The dust covered everything and gave me prolonged fits of coughing. We went to them as an association and begged them to give us a no-harvest buffer zone; they refused. We begged them not to develop the north inlet, a pristine area where people go to watch moose and where eagles nest; they refused.” 

Plum Creek responded to criticism of the mess it made at First Roach Pond by professing that no more major development was on the horizon. Then, on December 14, 2004, it announced a plan for the biggest development in the history of the north woods or of Maine.

All that, however, is the nature of REITs, and most straight forest-products companies are no less brutal to fish and wildlife habitat, facts that render Plum Creek’s nickname in the West—“the Darth Vader of the timber industry”—unfair. Moreover, I have always thought that environmentalists are wasting their time by criticizing Plum Creek for its cut-out-and-get-out logging and slapdash development. Vader, after all, was habitually lawless; Plum Creek almost always obeys laws. If environmentalists in the West or in Maine don’t like what it does to land and water, they need to talk to their legislators, not Plum Creek.

Mainers are no more ready for REITs now than they were eight years ago, when Plum Creek bought 905,000 acres of the state from South African Pulp and Paper International. Before that, paper companies owned most of the 10.5 million acres of northern Maine’s “unorganized territory.” “They were far from perfect,” remarks Kevin Carley, director of Maine Audubon. “But they had a certain level of stewardship because they wanted to ensure sources of fiber for their mills forever. The old owners, the guys who ran the mills, hunted and fished in the north woods; that’s where they had their camps. There was a level of connection.” Mainers assumed there could never be a time when the unorganized territory grew houses instead of trees, so they made little effort to protect it. Few states have a lower percentage of publicly owned land than Maine (6 percent), yet it contains 58 percent of the Northern Forest.