A Logging Referendum Grows in Maine

At 70, Martin Leighton recalls working in the woods when men used bucksaws to fell huge trees, when mammoth logs were dragged to mills by horse-drawn skidders or floated down rivers.

Nowadays, hulking mechanical harvesters mow the forest, cutting more than 100 trees an hour. Logs are piled like toothpicks on rail cars or tractor-trailers that roll at highway speeds along an ever-widening network of backwoods roads.

Large landowners have “ruined tomorrow in the forest,” Leighton says with discouragement.

Whether his neighbors agree with that assessment will become clear Nov. 5, when voters in the nation’s most heavily forested state decide whether to ban clear-cutting and sharply restrict other logging.

The referendum will climax a decades-old conflict between the private corporations that own most of the land and the conservationists and recreational users who prize it for reasons other than profit.

Leighton pointed out examples of what he considers good and bad forestry as he guided a reporter and photographer around this tiny logging community where he was born and raised.

The best examples contain abundant older-growth trees, evenly spaced among the stumps of those already harvested, and paths barely wide enough for a small skidder.

The worst are overgrown fields littered with broken branches and scarred by muddy tire ruts left when machines dragged the logs away.

Leighton, who quit school at 13 to work in the woods, says the paper companies and other major landowners invested heavily in mechanization during the spruce budworm infestation in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Then, for years after the insect pest was gone, they used it as an excuse to continue clear-cutting--the removal of all or virtually all trees.

“They were set up for that kind of harvesting, and the spruce was there, and the green dollar was there,” he says. “The stockholders are sitting in their mansions giggling about it.”

The voters’ decision is crucial to the paper industry, Maine’s largest landowner and one of its best-paying employers. Clear-cutting has thrust it into a volatile and very public debate over matters its lobbyists have always handled behind the scenes.

Business as usual ended early this year, when a coalition of insurgent environmentalists, led by the Maine Green Party, turned in 55,000 signatures to force a vote on a plan to ban clear-cutting and set tough new logging standards. It targets 10.5 million acres--an area nearly twice as big as New Jersey--of mostly paper-company land.

Unlike in the Pacific Northwest, where the clear-cutting of virgin old-growth forests has stirred citizen ire, most of Maine’s forest has already been harvested several times since the mid-18th century. The referendum’s central focus is whether that forest can be sustained if clear-cutting continues.

The economic stakes are huge: Gov. Angus King’s administration estimates the restrictions on the timber harvest would wipe out 15,600 jobs and cut the state’s economic output by $1.3 billion.

The campaign to defeat the proposal has galvanized organized labor, which has often clashed with the paper companies in Maine, the business community and the state’s political establishment.

Even the state’s mainstream environmental groups consider the plan extreme. They recently negotiated a competing package of reforms with major landowners in hopes of diluting support for the ballot measure.

Proponents of the proposal say such firm steps are necessary to stop a practice that has devastated 2,000 square miles in 15 years.

They say halfhearted legislative efforts to limit logging have allowed creation of a sprawling patchwork of small clear-cuts shielded from campers and canoeists by thin “beauty strips” of trees along roadsides and river banks.

Advocates also insist the proposals would actually create jobs, as the paper companies are forced to abandon the machines that replaced loggers over the years.

At the Millinocket headquarters of Bowater Great Northern Paper Inc., the state’s largest landowner, managers of its 2.1 million acres of woodlands are frustrated by what they see as an exaggeration of abuses and the public’s poor understanding of the forest.

The task ahead “is not just educating” people, says Daniel Corcoran, the company’s manager of forest policy and technical services. “It’s overcoming a lot of misconception.”

Corcoran and Marcia McKeague, the company’s manager of woodlands, say clear-cutting can be the best option, for instance, in salvaging a diseased stand or restocking areas with seedlings of the spruce and fir Great Northern uses to make paper.

Planting is practical only in clear-cuts, Corcoran says, adding, “The public likes planting. But they haven’t made the connection with the clear-cutting part of it.”

McKeague says the level of harvesting by the paper companies reflects consumer demand for paper products and insists “it’s possible to have both” a working forest and pristine stands of older trees.

“We’re got to come to peace with our own consumption habits,” she says.