Confrontation, Not Consensus Needed in New England Forests
11/19/97
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Headline: Confrontation, Not Consensus Needed in New England Forests
Source: The Boston Globe
Date: 11/19/97
Author: Robert Braile
Keeping the forest- in sight
Efforts to save NE forest neither move nor move the public
For nearly a decade, New England environmentalists . hare been trying to
save the 26 million-acre Northern Forest across Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont, and New York. It's one of America's last great forests. But it's
imperiled by development, timbering, and, with the vagaries of global
economics, sudden, massive land sales that have left desperate mill towns
in disarray.
The effort to preserve the forest has been dealt two blows in recent
weeks, leaving the environmentalists wondering whether they have wasted
their time in building a consensus with the multinational timber industry
and other players. The industry owns most of the deep, lush expanse of
spruce and fir, birch and oak that is laced with waterways and teems with
wildlife.
One blow has been the languishing of the Northern Forest Stewardship Act,
which embodies the 1994 state recommendations to the federal government
for the forest. It had stalled in a Senate subcommittee when Congress
adjourned for the year Thursday, even though it has broad support across
the Northeast and is so mild that some environmentalists question whether
it's worth fighting for - or against.
The other blow was the announcement last month by Champion International
Corp., one of the world's timber giants, that it is selling off $1.4
billion in nonstrategic assets to boost its bottom line. The assets
include 325,000 acres of forest in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
The North ern Forest debate ignited in 1988 with a million-acre sale by
Diamond Occidental Corp., another timber giant. Champion's will be the
sixth such sale since Diamond's. ,
Now even the environmentalists are asking: Have they achieved anything
since 1988, or have most of New England's environmental efforts during
that time been for naught? If the latter, is it time to change tactics,
get tough with the industry, and drop the don't-worry-be-happy attitude
that has characterized the advocacy?
They are also asking whether it's time to pressure the congressional
delegations, whose members say they back the Stew ardship Act but w ho.
except for Vermont Democrat Senator Patrick J. Leahv, seem reluctant to
spend any political stock on it. Republican Senators Judd Gregg of New
Hampshire and John Chafee of Rhode Is land did manage to win this year an
array of important tax breaks for the landowners -, breaks that had been
recommended in 1994 and that may help nature indirectly by making it
easier for the landowners to avert development. But, the environmentalists
ask, what about the act?
'We got hoodwinked into participating in this collegial, vin-~ in process,
and the end result is that we1ve gotten nowhere here and have wasted a
decade," said Chris Ballantyne, the Sierra Club's Northeast director and a
founding member of the Northern Forest Alliance, a coalition of
environmental groups that has labored to forge a con sensus on this issue.
On election day this month, Maine voters narrowly rejected the Compact for
Maine's Forests, a forest practices compromise miss developed last year
between the in dustry and environmentalists to preserve that state's
forests. It came about in re sponse to a referendum last November that was
also rejected. The referendum would have banned clear-cutting, the
ecologically questionable practice of completely rather than selectively
cutting tracts.
The compact was hotly debated in Maine which has endured a barrage of
media ads from both sides. Some industry and environmental groups said it
was a step toward better forestry in a state that lives or dies by it.
Others said no, but for differing reasons. More strident environmentalists
said it simply institutionalized the status quo. Property rights activists
and the Maine Republican Party said it amounted to big brother trampling
on a citizenry in need of wood.
The compact had nothing to do with the "collegial. win-in" process that
Ballantyne lambasted - a tortuous consensus effort from 1988 to 1994 by
the landowner s, environmentalists, government, and industry. Its latest
incarnation was the Northern Forest Lands Council, which Congress created
in 1990 and funded with more than $4 million. It produced the 1994
recommendations.
Although Maine is back to square. e one, it has sent a message to the
environmental ists, even those u ho believe they have made progress on the
Northern Forest: Confrontation, not consensus, may now be apro priate.
Maybe not across the board, but when it comes to the crisis that ignited
the concern in 1988 and that persists to this day - surprise sales of
millions of acres for many millions, of dollars - it may be time for
environmentalists to change their tune.
"At the start of the Northern Forest Alliance back in 1990 or so, we
decided we had a problem and had to build a consensus to solve e it " said
Bob Perschel, the alliance chairman and Northeast director of the
Wilderness Society!-. He believes the con sensus is there. Unfortunately,
so is the cri sis. And so he says that after a decade of cozeying and
coddling, "If we haven't solved the problem, then we have to reconsider
the approach."
Perschel points to some progress and efforts: by a few. states to identify
tracts worth protecting; by the industry to voluntarily cut in more
cautious ways; by communities and businesses to promote sus tainable
forestry. And the Stewardship Act would, for example, allow the Northeast
better access to dollars from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. As
environmentalist Jamie Sayen said, "I'd support the act, but I wouldn1t
mortgage the farm on it the way the alliance has."
But Sayen, who has been on the feistier end of the advocacy effort as
editor of the newspaper Northern Forest Forum, says the effort has "taken
the standard government approach to a problem: Set up a study committee,
come up with a report that sits on a shelf and gathers dust, and pursue a
process so compromised that y u eventually get compromises on top of
compromises." Thus far, he says, "No substantive progress has been made."
And so it's time for a change, Sayen says. He opposed the compact. but he
backed the referendum, and the in-your face method by which it came to be.
He believes that forestry issues in Maine from now on have an edge.
"Confrontation rather than appeasement does get you progress," Sayen said,
"It may not deliver the results you want the first time out. And if you
don't persist. it never will. But if you depend upon the tra itional,
liberal reform process, which is predicated on never asking or ansering
the tough questions' you'll never get anywhere."
Robert Braile teaches environmental writing at Dartmouth College.