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<\/p>\nDuring the first nine decades of the 20th century, a dozen or so public corporations and private family businesses owned roughly 12 million acres of northern Maine. That\u2019s more than half of the entire state. This land was covered by a boreal forest called, not very imaginatively, the North Woods, and it was a vast industrial woodlot.<\/p>\n
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\u201cLoving the North Woods: 25 Years of Historic Conservation in Maine,\u201d By Karin Tilberg. Down East Books, 205 pages $19.95 <\/p>\n
Then, around 1990, \u201cthe unimaginable happened.\u201d In most environmental stories, \u2018the unimaginable\u2019 is something awful, but in Maine it was the opposite. The private owners began selling off their land, and over the next 25 years, from 1990 to 2015, an extraordinary four million acres of the Maine North Woods were entered into some kind of conservation or preservation status.<\/p>\n
In a variety of roles, Karin Tilberg was deeply involved in this process, and she is the ideal person to write a history of how it happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cLoving the North Woods\u201d begins with five chapters introducing the issues, participants and processes behind this transformation. The next seven chapters describe seven major conservation agreements that together protected some two and a quarter million acres of forest lands. The book finishes with chapters on forest health and a sum-it-all-up conclusion.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot of densely packed information here, interspersed with vignettes about the author\u2019s personal history and her connection to the woods. She gives quick descriptions of the people she worked with, uniformly described with terms like \u201cdedicated,\u201d \u201ctalented\u201d and \u201cpassionate.\u201d And, expectedly in a book focused on legal and bureaucratic activities, readers must wade through a forest of job titles, organization names and acronyms.<\/p>\n
For conservationists, this is a remarkable success story, and Tilberg can be justifiably proud of her role in helping it happen. But her account, told entirely from the point of view of preservation and protection groups, glosses over some important limitations to what was actually achieved.<\/p>\n
The biggest issue is that the majority of these lands are protected by conservation easements rather than fee ownership allowing \u2018forever wild\u2019 management. The easements prevent development, meaning no houses or resorts can be built there. But they allow the landowners to continue using and managing the land for wood production.<\/p>\n
The easements also allow continued access for \u2018traditional\u2019 recreation, which means ATVs, snowmobiles and existing roads and hunting\/fishing camps. Many Mainers feel strongly about such access, and allowing it to continue was a critical factor in negotiating the easements that limited other sorts of development. Still, it\u2019s important to recognize that most of the land Tilberg describes as \u201cprotected\u201d is neither in nor reverting to its natural state. It is still industrial forest.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also important to recognize that most of the seven big conservation agreements this book describes involved payments of millions of dollars each to the granting landowners. The easements were not gifts \u2014 they were sold. \u201cLoving the North Woods\u201d tells the buyers\u2019 side of the story, but it would be interesting to know what the sellers were thinking. It would take another book to explore that story but scattered through her history, Tilberg gives us enough to ponder. She notes that Reagan-era changes in the tax laws made selling highly appreciated assets like forest land less expensive than it had been before.<\/p>\n
Another factor, described in the book\u2019s chapter on forest health, is that the Maine woods went through a devastating spruce budworm infestation in the 1970s and early 1980s. The forest owners had clearcut huge areas of dead or dying trees to salvage what wood they could, and it would take 40 or 50 years for those clearcut forests to re-grow.<\/p>\n
So from the landowners\u2019 point of view, this was a perfect time to sell. Great swathes of their land wouldn\u2019t be ready to harvest for half a century. Patient buyers like university endowments and pension funds wanted long-term productive assets, and conservation groups were eager to protect the landscape from being developed. For the forest products businesses that owned the territory, selling development rights on their land wouldn\u2019t deter investment buyers, it would bring in cash, and it would ensure that the land could still be used as working forest. Selling was a no-lose proposition.<\/p>\n
Intriguingly, neither the companies nor the conservation groups seem to have imagined what the decline and fall of the newspaper business<\/a> would mean for Maine\u2019s pulp and paper industry. Newsprint was one of their biggest products, and it won\u2019t be long before that market disappears forever.<\/p>\n