News & Updates

End of an era: The 'American Paper Century' in
Maine is history

At stake is the viability of rural communities long overdependent on the forest industry

By Jym St. Pierre, Times Record Contributor

On New Year's Eve, champagne must have flowed at the International Paper Company headquarters in New York. IP celebrated the sale of 1.1 million acres in Maine to an investment firm. The company gets paid $250 million, while maintaining a continued fiber supply to its mills and transferring all risks associated with fire, ice, wind and insects. Such a deal! This sale continues the disintegration of Maine's century-old old forest products industry structure. International Paper was there at the start.

It was formed in 1898, when Hugh Chisholm merged his Maine paper mills with others in the Northeast. Chisholm was the most powerful individual in America's paper industry, and he drove IP to become the biggest paper company in the world.

In 2005, IP remains the largest paper corporation on the planet. But now, as did other paper companies that dominated our economy and politics for generations, it has shed its Maine lands. IP is the last of the "seven sisters" to go. Great Northern, Diamond International, Champion International, Georgia-Pacific, Scott and MeadWestvaco have all sold off their vast Maine timberlands. Most have also sold their mills or have been swallowed up or gone bankrupt. IP too might amortize its investments and sell its Maine mills before long.

International Paper is the last big U.S.-based paper company to exit
Maine as a major landowner. The dominant industrial forest owners are now all Canadian: Irving, Brascan, Nexfor/Fraser, Domtar. Ironically, although the Canadians lost most of northern Maine by treaty in 1842, they have bought much of it back in the marketplace. The impacts of the IP sale on the public are uncertain.

Until a few years ago, Maine had the largest concentration of industrial forest ownership in the country. But as the big, publicly-traded companies have left Maine, anonymous ownerships have exploded. We do not know who owns vast stretches of Maine today because most of the "institutional" owners are able to hide. Wagner Forest Management, for example, controls more Maine
land than anyone else; but they refuse to disclose most of the actual
owners they represent.

If anything, the northern forest "Maine-opoly" game is getting more
worrisome. MeadWestvaco just announced the sale of its Rumford mill to a capital management group. Fraser is selling land in New Brunswick and might unload its properties in Maine. Irving, our largest landowner, is also selling a substantial acreage. And Plum Creek Timber is proposing the biggest real estate development in the history of Maine's wildlands, including two large resorts and hundreds of subdivision lots for second homes on remote lakeshores.

More than seven million acres of forestland — one third of Maine's entire land area — have been sold in just six years. The state initially tried to map all the transactions, but in the end had to resort to showing the f ew lands not sold.

These changes underscore the urgent need to bring more land back into public ownership to safeguard Maine's heritage of public trust in our wildlands. Protecting wild areas is a smart public investment. A new study shows that, nationally, 125 million people participate in scenic touring, 94 million engage in wildlife viewing and 70 million visit wild areas. Those activities generate billions of dollars a year and support tens of thousands of jobs in rural communities.

The Nature Conservancy, Appalachian Mountain Club and Chewonki Foundation are collaborating on initiatives in the Greenville-Millinocket region to sustain the tradition of shared forestland use and tap the burgeoning ecotourism market. The state is studying nature-based tourism as a key component of rural development strategy. And some remarkable tracts and conservation easements have been acquired by public agencies and by private and nonprofit conservation interests.

These initiatives are impressive, but we need to do a lot more. The
conservation areas acquired to date represent just a small fraction of the land being furiously sold. Moreover, very little of the newly
acquired land is for wilderness. The viability of rural communities long over-dependent on the forest industry hangs in the balance.

During the past four years, Maine lost a higher percentage of manufacturing jobs than any other state, most in the forestry sector.
The International Paper sale is hugely symbolic of the end of an era.
Although a few U.S. paper companies still own mills in Maine, the
American Paper Century is over. The long-term public interest is not served by tying up Maine's wildlands in worked-over commercial forests, trophy second homes and misplaced resorts. A rural economic strategy based on sustainable development principles would catalyze the creative economy and preserve more lands for high value, low impact uses, such as public parks.

Jym St. Pierre is Maine director of Restore: The North Woods.
(C) 2005 All Rights Reserved
Reprinted with permission of the "Times Record"

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