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Plum
Creek News & Updates
Plum Foolish
Audubon Magazine
July 2006
If the plan for Maine’s biggest development ever
goes through, it could spell disaster for millions of acres of forestland
across the northeast.
By Ted Williams
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.”
“As goes Plum Creek so goes the rest of the large landowners and
all of that big block of undeveloped forestland. We have one chance
here to do it right.”
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.
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 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.”
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.”
In a masterful Orwellian broad-brush, the company no longer refers to
clearcuts. They are “regeneration cuts,” or “overstory
removals.”
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 township]
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.”
The other alternative Lund sees is “getting really tough,”
something Maine agencies, including LURC, tend not to do and something
Lund thinks isn’t going to happen. “LURC is a permitting agency,”
he says. “Their thing is to give permits.”
Jym St. Pierre is no more hopeful, noting that “LURC has a very
weak leadership now and not a particularly strong commission.” St.
Pierre is a lifelong Mainer. He is unconfrontational, low-key, laconic
even. And besides being the former director of LURC, he is the current
state director of Restore: The North Woods. I have never believed that
Restore is radical, just that the people who rail against it are parochial
and naive. The idea for a national park in northern Maine is neither radical
nor new. It has come out of Concord, Massachusetts, twice now—the
first time in 1853, when Henry David Thoreau, inspired by the view from
Maine’s highest peak, Mount Katahdin, called for “national
preserves where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther,
and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized
off the face of the earth.’ ”
Thoreau was much on my mind the bright summer day I climbed Big Spencer
Mountain with Jym St. Pierre. From the 3,230-foot-high summit we gazed
out over Plum Creek’s holdings and most of the 3.2-million-acre
Maine Woods National Park that Restore and its allies are promoting. To
our east rose tundra-cloaked Mount Katahdin and OJI Mountain, named for
the landslides that carved those letters. Lakes and rivers—which
belong to the people of Maine and America, not to REITs—stretched
as far as we could see. To the northeast lay Chesuncook, Ragged and Caribou
lakes; to the northwest, Lobster Lake; to the southwest, Moosehead. Apart
from the chartreuse scars of clearcuts and a cloud of dust over a logging
road, the scene from this elevation hadn’t changed since Thoreau
described it: “There it was, the State of Maine. . . . Immeasurable
forest for the sun to shine on. . . . No clearing, no house. It did not
look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking stick there.
Countless lakes—Moosehead . . . Chesuncook . . . Millinocket . .
. and mountains, also, whose names, for the most part, are known only
to the Indians. The forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect
of these lakes in its midst has been well compared, by one who has since
visited this same spot, to that of a ‘mirror broken into a thousand
fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze
of the sun.’ ”
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Urge your state and/or
federal legislators to support public acquisition of Northern Forest lands.
For updates on Plum Creek’s development proposal, log on to www.maineaudubon.org
and www. maine
environment.org. For [updates on Plum Creek’s development proposal,
to sign-up to take action, and for] information on the proposed Maine
Woods National Park, go to www.restore.org.
***************
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