Maine Eyes Major Logging Vote
7/22/96
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Maine Eyes Major Logging Vote
By PETER JACKSON
Associated Press Writer
Monday, July 22, 1996 2:12 am EDT
c Copyright 1996 The Associated Press
WILLIMANTIC, Maine (AP) -- 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 upwards of
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 clearcutting 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
clearcutting -- 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. Clearcutting 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 clearcutting 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 clearcutting 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 clearcutting
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 environmentalist 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 half-hearted legislative efforts to limit logging have allowed
creation of a sprawling patchwork of small clearcuts 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
clearcutting 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 clearcuts, Corcoran says, adding, "The public
likes planting. But they haven't made the connection with the clearcutting
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.