Housing Developments Threaten New England Forests

The “leaf peepers,” as people here call them, are back for their annual dose of fall color. They poke along Route 242, snapping pictures of forest vistas and looking for places to eat.

It’s the season New England restaurateurs and innkeepers wait for.

“One way or another, we all make our living from the forest,” said Dennis Naughton, a tour company owner. “Like everybody else’s, my business depends on it staying the way it is.”

But will it?

The northern forest, a 26-million-acre tree belt across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, could be in jeopardy. The forest-based economy, which has maintained the region’s verdant wildness while much of the country has urbanized, is in decline.

Conservationists fear that the woodland, one of the largest undeveloped stands of trees left in the contiguous United States, could give way to vacation-home developments within a few decades.

Characteristically, environmentalists and business interests would feud over such an issue, as they have in the Pacific Northwest. But here all sides tend to agree: To save the forest, save the timber industry.

“If there’s anything we’ve learned in hours and hours of testimony, it’s that a healthy forest-based economy is good for the land,” said Charles Levesque, executive director of the Northern Forest Lands Council, whose 17 members are charged with finding ways to preserve the woodland.

If there is disagreement, it’s about whether a crisis really exists.

“The nature Nazis have trumped up this issue to keep themselves in business,” said Robert H. Whitney, of Landvest, a Boston company that brokers big northeastern land transfers.

“With few exceptions, I advise my clients to plan on managing their land for timber,” Whitney said. “People have lost their shirts trying to get these large developments off the ground.”

For decades, timber and tourism have supported the million people who live between Maine’s woods and New York’s Adirondacks. More than 85% of the land has been privately owned for 300 years. It was owned first by farmers who left a century ago for more fertile soil to the West, then by timber interests that have logged the land since it reverted to forests.

These same forests provide wooded playgrounds for the 70 million people who live within a day’s drive.

The first indication of trouble came 10 years ago with the collapse of Diamond International. The giant timber company, with landholdings of 1.7 million acres in Maine, New Hampshire and New York, was acquired by James Goldsmith, a British financier.

Goldsmith dissolved Diamond and put the land up for sale. The property changed owners several times, winding up in the hands of two development companies five years ago. They subdivided the tracts, offering them as housing lots.

“It was a wake-up call,” said Steve Blackmer, chairman of the Northern Forest Alliance, a Boston-based coalition of several dozen environmental organizations. “Everyone realized the beautiful forest they once took for granted could fragment into roads and second homes.”

Environmentalists mobilized, persuading Congress to create the lands council in 1990. Those involved assumed that the council’s job would boil down to mediating an argument among the factions.

The council’s consensus--that the timber industry keeps the land wild--surprised many. The idea has caught on, unifying landowners, environmentalists, government officials and scientists.

“Timber harvesting produces jobs for the people who live up here and ensures that the forest is kept from development,” said Rainer Brocke, a wildlife ecologist at the State University of New York in Syracuse. “All of the new studies show that forests managed for timber produce excellent levels of biodiversity.”

Even the controversial practice of clear-cutting can benefit a forest, Brocke said. “It mimics nature’s disturbance regime and gives you far greater diversity after a number of years.”

Far more threatening to northern woodlands, Brocke said, are cars that kill thousands of animals each year, tree diseases that threaten to eradicate major food sources for wildlife, and fire-suppression practices that prevent nature from periodically revitalizing the soil.

The biggest problem facing the forest lands council is how to rejuvenate the northeastern timber industry, which is gradually abandoning the area for the southeast, where timber grows faster and production costs are lower. The northern woodlands have lost 17,000 forest and paper-making jobs in the last 20 years, according to a Wilderness Society study.

Timber interests still own most of the 26 million acres that make up the northern forest, but pressure to sell intensifies. The vacation home market pushes land values up, causing higher real estate taxes. People who inherit land often must sell it to pay taxes, which can run as high as 50% of the land’s value.

But for now, recession has slowed the selloff.

“My business is 25% of what it was in the mid-’80s,” said Roger Morin, one of many real estate agents in Jay whose livelihood depends on the second-home market.

The lands council will hold public hearings in January on draft recommendations and will submit its final report to Congress next summer.

Recommendations are expected to include tax incentives that encourage ownership of large tracts, purchases of land by the government and regulations to limit development around lakes and rivers, the most ecologically sensitive areas.

The question is whether the proposals will go anywhere. Governments don’t have enough money to buy large tracts. Landowners already say they will resist regulation.

“When you get into a rural area, the land is all people have,” said David Guernsey, who owns 100 acres in Maine. “Throw a heavy net of control over it and you impact people in ways you really don’t see from afar.”

How much sacrifice will it take to save the northern forest?

“If enough people around the country see what a magnificent area this is, we can muster the support to save it,” Blackmer said, “even if it takes 20 or 30 years.”