Maine's Voters Might Ax Clear-Cutting by Loggers
7/14/96
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Maine's Voters Might Ax Clear-Cutting by Loggers
Unprecedented Media Blitz Targets Referendum
By Bill McAllister
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 14 1996; Page A03
Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company
AUGUSTA, Maine -- Jonathan Carter recalls his "Norman Rockwell" childhood,
summering in the North Woods of Maine, hiking and canoeing through dense,
towering forests of red spruce and hemlocks. "I fell in love with the North
Woods.. . . . It was something I wanted to share with my family," Carter
said.
But when he returned to Maine after graduate school in the late 1970s,
Carter was stunned by what he found: huge stretches of the woods had
been transformed into an ugly, barren land. In 15 years, loggers had
stripped an area the size of Delaware to bare earth.
"It was just totally destroyed, sort of like coming to your house and
seeing that a bulldozer ran over it," Carter recalled.
This November, Carter, a boyish 45-year-old part-time professor who sports
tousled hair and sandals, is hoping for revenge. To the astonishment of the
state's political establishment, Carter and his allies in Maine's tiny pro-
environmental Green Party have mounted a populist referendum threatening to
ban clear-cutting in the state's numerous unorganized townships, a sparsely
settled region that contains 10.5 million acres of privately owned forests.
An April poll found 71 percent of the voters liked the idea.
That poll and other features of the referendum that would effectively cut
logging in half have alarmed state officials, including Gov. Angus S. King
Jr., who opposes the initiative. The governor labeled the referendum "a gun
pointed at the head of Maine's economy" and joined forces with the paper
and logging industry, which has mounted a multimillion-dollar media
campaign unlike anything Maine has seen.
Here, where myths about the woodlands are as big as Bangor's 32-foot-high
Paul Bunyan statue and as pervasive as mosquitoes in the North Woods, no
other ballot issue is expected to be more contested this fall. And
nationally, the Maine referendum is expected to be one of the hottest
environmental issues voters will face.
"It's a David versus Goliath struggle," said Carter, citing efforts of
paper giants like Boise Cascade, Champion, International Paper and
Georgia-Pacific to squelch his shoestring effort. "We're going to do
whatever it takes to keep a bad law off the books," said Vic Berardelli,
spokesman for Citizens for a Healthy Forest Economy, the industry's
campaign organization.
Even though a poll taken after the media blitz began shows support for
Carter declining -- in June, opponents of the clear-cutting measure
outnumbered supporters 48 percent to 35 percent -- both King and Carter
agree it is too early to rule either side out.
How high the stakes are became clear last month when King summoned the
state's major landowners to a 13-hour summit at Blaine House, the
governor's mansion. As the governor literally kicked legs under a large
dining room table, the landowners agreed to what King and some
environmental leaders have hailed as a compromise "Compact for Maine
Forests."
The governor's plan would shrink the maximum size of clear-cuts in Maine
from 250 acres to 75 acres and require larger buffers, called "beauty
strips" by some environmentalist.
All sides say the governor's agreement would not have happened without
pressure from Carter and his supporters. "Clearly, the referendum brought
the industry to the table," said Catherine Johnson, a staff attorney for
the Natural Resources Council of Maine, an environmental group that
supports the governor's compromise.
Carter acknowledged the industry's maneuvers indicate the Green Party has
won a partial victory. "We've had a tactical victory here," he said. "It
used to be that they would not say there is a problem in the North Woods."
Carter and his "Ban Clearcutting" supporters, however, have rejected the
deal, calling it "a sellout" to the multinational paper corporations
that consumer advocate Ralph Nader once said have ruled Maine like "a paper
plantation." Carter insists, "This bill doesn't change things at all. It
just legitimatizes clear-cutting at the present rate [now well below the
state maximum]. It's smoke and mirrors."
King, who was elected as an independent, blames outsiders for failing to
realize how much Maine's future is tied to its forests and for seeking to
return the state to "a bucolic economy" that he argues would condemn Maine
to poverty. "I call it the recolonization of Maine . . . They want to turn
it into some kind of hiking preserve," he said. "If this were a choice
between deforestation of the Maine forests and 15,000 jobs, I'd have to go
with the forests. But that ain't the choice."
The governor argues Maine can have a thriving lumber industry and a forest
that will be loved by conservationists.
Ironically, much of the blame for the shape of Maine's forests belongs not
to man but nature -- a tiny pest, the spruce budworm, returned to the
North Woods in the late 1970s and killed millions of acres of trees.
"You either cut the wood or you lost it," recalled John H. Cashwell, a
former director of the Maine Forest Service and now president of the Seven
Islands Land Co., one of the state's major landowners. Loggers clear-cut
millions of acres of forests, including one large 24-square-mile area known
as Ragmuff. They did away with the budworm, but when the thousands of Maine
residents who vacationed or hunted in the woods returned, they, like
Carter, were horrified.
At the same time, loggers discovered the ease of clear-cutting vast tracts
of forests with huge "Star Wars"-like machines called "feller-bunchers"
that allow a single worker sitting in an air-conditioned cockpit to do the
work of dozens of loggers armed with chain-saws.
Clear-cutting gained steam and conservationists became alarmed, warning the
clear-cut areas produce a smaller variety of trees, less diverse and less
valuable than the woods they replaced. Finally, in 1989 the Maine
legislature heeded conservationists' warning and after years of killing
environmental legislation enacted the Forest Practices Act, which imposed
the first limits on the size of clear-cuts.
Today, many large Maine foresters describe the industry's clear-cutting as
minimal and point to state figures showing the average clear-cut here
measures about 35 acres. Industry spokesmen complain Carter and his
supporters are not giving the five-year-old state law an adequate test.
More importantly, they say referendum supporters ignore "the first rule of
forestry: trees grow." Many of the clear-cuts cited by Carter and others
soon will be woodlands once again, industry officials contend. And, they
insist, not all clear-cuts are bad. "Large openings are critical for
wildlife," said Stephen W. Schley, president of Pingree Associates Inc.,
which owns Seven Islands.
Industry officials will not say how much they plan to spend to fight
Carter's initiative by Nov. 5, but they are filling the airwaves with
anti-referendum TV spots and ads touting the good citizenship of the
state's paper industry, three months before Election Day. Industry
officials have raised nearly $2 million, a sum that King says is
unprecedented for a referendum here.
Meanwhile, King is threatening to trump Carter by asking the legislature to
place his compromise on the November ballot. Some environmentalists say
that would at least give voters an option to the Green Party proposal and
move the state closer to solving the clear-cutting problem.
@CAPTION: Extensive clear-cutting in the last 15 years has transformed huge
stretches of the North Woods near Kibby Mountain in western Maine into bare
earth.
@CAPTION: Many large Maine foresters say clear-cutting, shown here, is
minimal and point to state figures indicating the average clear-cut area
measures 35 acres.