Plum Foolish

About a decade ago paper companies in northern New England and New York found themselves beset by a largely self-induced crisis. Because they had allowed their mills to become obsolete and dilapidated, because they had “high-graded” their timber (cut the best and left the rest), because they had engaged in massive clearcuts instead of sustainable forestry, and because labor costs were high, they had difficulty competing in the world timber market. The easiest solution was to sell out. Since then about 40 percent of Maine’s commercial timberland has changed hands, and today scarcely any Maine forestland is owned by U.S.-based forest-products companies. Virtually everything is in the hands of REITs and pension funds, most of which promise investors 12 percent returns and liquidate about every 10 years. 

The same thing is happening in the rest of the Northern Forest—in fact, in the rest of the nation and world. For example, on the day of Plum Creek’s press conference, International Paper announced the sale of 5 million acres of its forestland, mostly in the South but also in Michigan, to various real estate investors for $6.1 billion. The U.S. Forest Service predicts that, largely due to development pressures, 44 million acres of private forests will be sold over the next 25 years. Forest stewardship doesn’t pay fast enough, so—after stripping your timber, of course—you hawk the stump fields for condos, second homes, and resorts, and what sells best and fastest is the shorelines of wild rivers, ponds, and lakes. In one of its more savage abuses of the language, Plum Creek calls this “higher and better use.”

Development in Maine’s unorganized territory is managed by the Land Use Regulatory Commission (LURC)—a seven-member, independent board appointed by the governor, confirmed by the legislature, and assisted by full-time staff. LURC’s mission is to protect the remote character and current uses of these wild woods and waters. Maine—

whose citizens oppose massive development of the Moosehead region by two to one, according to a poll by the Portland, Maine–based research firm Critical Insights—has had eight years to get ready for Plum Creek’s proposal. But instead of beefing up LURC, the governor and legislature have consistently slashed its budget and staff. In 2005 a group of citizens, including a former Maine attorney general, Jon Lund, petitioned LURC to consider a moratorium on large-scale developments until it could formulate a new plan for the Moosehead region. Despite the fact that LURC itself had declared it needed a new plan and despite the fact that Plum Creek’s application makes anything it had handled in its 35-year history look insignificant, it rejected the petition without serious discussion.

Wild (unstocked) brook trout ponds—virtually nonexistent in other states—are for everyone, but not for everyone all at once. Wild brook trout are as important to Maine as are redwoods to California or grizzlies to Alaska, and because they evolved in sterile water and can’t afford to pass up the chance to eat, few if any species are more vulnerable to fishing pressure. Easy access wipes them out. Even more hurtful to hunting and fishing than overkill is habitat destruction and fragmentation. So you’d think that hunters and anglers would worry about north woods sprawl—and maybe they do. But the fact that they allow George Smith to do their talking for them illustrates how unprepared they are for slick, smart REITs.

One of the first things Plum Creek did when it blew into Maine was take Smith on a junket to Montana to view selected and utterly uncharacteristic examples of its forest practices. The company then started pumping money into Smith’s Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, and it hired his sister to help organize its media blitz. Even before the company allegedly “listened” to the public and even before SAM’s board voted to support Plum Creek’s revised plan, Smith was whooping it up for the original plan—the one Plum Creek later rejected on the strength of public commentary. “Consider it a wonderful Christmas present—a lasting gift that will never wear out, a gift that will go on giving unto all future generations,” he effused in a December 22, 2004, editorial for Maine newspapers. “Our Christmas stocking is filled today with a real plum, a splendid north woods gem wrapped in an effective package of economic development and land and water conservation. . . . What a gift. . . . I was privileged to be on the inside as this plan progressed, and it was hard to keep the proposal secret, knowing just how spectacular the final result would be. . . . Hallelujah!”

Jon Lund, an avid and accomplished hunter and angler himself and publisher of the Maine Sportsman, New England’s largest outdoor periodical, is less sanguine about Plum Creek’s proposal. “A glaring omission in the economic planning of this state is that apparently, we have no handle on the economic value of the hunting and fishing and tourist activities in the north woods,” he wrote in the November 2005 Maine Sportsman. He has urged LURC to “just say no” to Plum Creek. And he is disappointed in SAM for promoting the proposal as well as for opposing an initiative that would offset at least a little of the damage by adding Katahdin Lake and 6,000 acres of de facto wilderness to Baxter State Park. The whole parcel will be open to fishing, but only a third to hunting. That’s a higher percentage than Baxter Park itself, but Smith worked tirelessly to sabotage the deal, very nearly succeeding. “George has decided that sportsmen need access to every place for hunting,” Lund told me. “Well, I have a theory about that, and it’s this: If hunters are going to insist on hunting every place, they’re going to end up hunting no place. Hunters are a minority in this state, and the next time a hunting issue comes up for public vote, they’re going to be looking for friends. When they ask for help, people in the conservation community are going to be very hard of hearing.”

At the press conference I sat next to Elizabeth Swain, a trained forester, a former chair of LURC, and now one of the army of PR professionals, lawyers, and lobbyists Plum Creek has hired to promote its development. She described the old and new plans to me as “remarkably innovative” and “extraordinary,” respectively. “Find me one other private landowner that is doing this much conservation so voluntarily,” she said. “Seventy-one thousand acres conserved at no cost to anybody. . . . Plum Creek could have done most of this development without putting this land in conservation.”

But REITs don’t do things “voluntarily.” Plum Creek’s application to LURC is a request for massive development of wildland currently zoned for forestry and primitive recreation. In exchange for zoning variances there’s a legal requirement that applicants offer something in return for damaging fish, wildlife, the remote character of the region, and current uses. According to NRCM’s Cathy Johnson and Jym St. Pierre, a former staff director of LURC, Plum Creek cannot proceed sans conservation. Johnson told me this: “Plum Creek could do some development without the easements. For an area the size of what it is proposing, we would expect to see somewhere around 260 new dwelling units over the next 30 years, if history is any guide.” And St. Pierre weighed in as follows: “It is true that Plum Creek could do a couple lots per year without going through rezoning and subdivision permitting. And Plum Creek could propose a subdivision that wouldn’t have to pass the conservation-development balance test, but it’s pretty unlikely that it would get approved. Someone asked me the other day, ‘Why isn’t anyone in the media calling this what it is: extortion.’ What Plum Creek is saying is, you can have conservation if you give us our development.”

Lund suggests two alternatives to the legacy Plum Creek envisions for the East’s best and wildest woods and waters. One is public acquisition, perhaps a national park, which is what a Concord, Massachusetts–based outfit called Restore: The North Woods has been pushing for northern Maine, including the Moosehead region, since 1992. “A poll [by the Hatfield, Massachusetts–based research firm Abacus Associates], shows that most [60 percent] of the people in Maine, not just in the southern part of the state, support a park,” says Lund. “And yet all the politicians act as if it’s the plague. They won’t even take a look at it.” Hunting and snowmobiling wouldn’t have to be banned because there are plenty of national park units that permit these activities, and you can fish almost everywhere in the park system. Still, SAM has used the alleged threat of a Maine national park as its most effective fund-raising tool: “Now we offer those frustrated [forest] workers and sportsmen a place to turn,” writes George Smith. “We urge them to join SAM, and to join our battle to drive Restore back across the Kittery Bridge [to Massachusetts]. They can take their agenda someplace else. There is no place in Maine for a new national park.”