Cutting down Carter

Jonathan Carter's continuing crusade to change logging practices in Maine (referendum number three coming up) has led the paper companies to make Carter, not clear-cutting, the issue in their opposition campaign

By Lance Tapley

A visit to Jonathan Carter's Forest for the Future campaign office in Augusta on a recent weekday afternoon found him working alone on the word processor. This quiet scene was not what one would normally expect at the headquarters of an important statewide referendum campaign only two months from election day.

But it fit perfectly with the image the paper companies want to present of Carter's effort to curb the excessive clear-cutting and the over-cutting of the North Woods that he accuses them of. They have long tried to portray him as an extremist loner with little support -- that it's overzealous Jonathan Carter against the whole world. And with this year's campaign they are intensifying their attempt to demonize him.

It's true that in his crusade Carter has had virtually the whole Maine political and business world against him: the governor, most of the legislators, almost all the newspapers, the huge paper industry -- the state's dominant economic force -- and much of the rest of the corporate world. Even some major environmental organizations.

And Carter's zeal is intense: he has an intensely independent character. Not averse to publicity, he has consistently been the hub around which each campaign -- this is the third in four years -- has revolved. He is averse to traditional campaign organizations -- that is, getting a lot of other people to do work. "I hate meetings," he says.

Yes, Jonathan Carter often seems way out on a limb. It appears that all he has with him are the majority of the voters of Maine.

A recent poll of 402 Mainers by an independent Portland firm, Critical Insights, had it 58 percent for his referendum proposal to regulate the forest industry and 36 percent against, the remainder undecided. Chris Potholm, the Bowdoin College professor and political consultant who is the forest industry's pollster, confirms that his surveys show roughly the same figures.

Although the industry's TV ad campaign to try to prevent people from voting yes on question 2 has yet to kick in, the popularity of regulating timber harvesting is proving -- like Carter, and probably because of him -- to be stubborn.

The timber industry is frustrated

Facing their third Carter-caused referendum on forest practices, the paper companies would like not only to defeat him this time, but for good. The Pulp and Paperworkers' Resource Council (PPRC), a national organization of forest and mill workers financed by the timber industry, has distributed literature entitled "Say NO to Jonathan Carter's NEW Forestry BAN." It urges people to "Send Carter a clear message" by defeating the latest ballot measure. A section of the brochure is very personal: "Jonathan Carter at a glance" attacks him for such a thing as not joining a union during a year he was a public-school teacher.

"So much energy has to be spent every two years" on these referendums, says Paul Hatch, a PPRC spokesman, with great frustration. "We need to try to get rid of this guy who is doing this, who's trying to put 30,000 to 40,000 of us out of work. He's like the Energizer bunny. How many times is this man going to keep coming back?"

Abby Holman, director of the Maine Forest Heritage Coalition, the forest-industry political action committee fighting the referendum, admits that her group's literature "mentions" Carter and that "in some things" their advertising to come will focus on him. But the reason is that "he has high name recognition," she maintains. So high that, she says, "people know him better than they know about the referendum," which she says the press is ignoring. "It's old news. We can't get anyone's attention."

Carter's current proposal would require that state permits be obtained for clear-cuts, which is when all the trees are stripped from a plot of land. The burden would be on landowners to prove a clear-cut is necessary. And any timber cutting could not exceed growth if landowners want tax breaks under the Tree Growth Tax Law. A commission would be appointed by the governor to develop detailed rules for putting these reforms into practice.

Holman's group claims that the proposal will have huge negative impacts on forest-related jobs in northern Maine and that in southern Maine it will promote suburban sprawl by forcing landowners to sell their property for development if they can't continue to get tree-growth property-tax abatements.

Ironically, the paper-industry's personal attacks on Carter over the years have helped create his high name recognition. Has the industry also been successful in creating high negatives for him in public opinion? "He's got a real mixed response in people," Holman admits, referring to her group's polling.

This, too, is what Carter's earliest forestry-reform campaign, the 1966 "ban clear-cutting" effort, found in a poll. Although the pollster, Janet Grenzke, bravely reported to the campaign that "Jonathan Carter's ratings are negative and are of considerable concern" and a "moderate" spokesperson was needed, the public perception of him was actually only slightly more negative than positive.

An ideal spokesperson, of course, would only have a high positive rating. In response to Grenzke, Carter enlisted other activists to speak for his group in the 1996 campaign, and he has done the same in the current one. But the press knows him well, he is available most every day in his spare Augusta office, and he is the founder, the guiding light of the crusade. Thus he remains constantly in the public eye.

In the 1996 poll, which took place before the massive advertising on that year's referendum, Carter was already familiar to nearly 60 percent of the voters. Whatever his precise name-identification percentage is today, any gubernatorial or US Senate candidate should be so fortunate. With more paper-company advertising on the way the percentage is probably about to climb higher.

But the campaign seems tiny

"If we only had people making calls . . . ," Maria Holt says wistfully of Forest for the Future's lack of fundraising activity. Because the campaign has almost no money, it not only has no ads on the air, it has no polling, no media consultant, no press secretary, no field coordinators -- all of which the other side has. It does have a few brochures, bumper stickers, and lawn signs.

"He hasn't trained people to help around him," Holt also complains about Carter in a mild, grandmotherly manner. She is a retired nurse and former Democratic legislator who serves as a part-time spokesperson. "I trained myself," she says.

Carter defends himself against charges of not organizing thoroughly. "The campaign is a decentralized citizen effort," he says. "How do you think we got 500 people to volunteer to collect signatures last November?" In one day in an off-year election volunteers collected the 42,000-plus signatures to put question 2 on the ballot.

But in the state reports revealing money being spent on the referendum, as of July 18 Carter's group had poured out the grand total of $4500 and had zero in the bank. The timber industry groups had spent $184,000 and had close to a couple hundred thousand on hand. Most of the money spent will be disclosed only at the end of the campaign season, and the timber industry has shown it easily can put millions into TV ads.

Given this imbalance in financial power, how is Carter going to raise the money to present the Forest for the Future's side of the story? "You tell me," he responds, sounding discouraged. "We'll do the best we can with what we've got."

"His style is always to say he's not going to have enough money, but he has enough for a massive TV blitz in the end" to make him competitive, says Potholm. "I'd be very suspicious."

In the last two referendums Carter came in with his last-minute TV money, totaling $1.5 million, essentially from the fat checkbook of one individual, investor-environmentalist Donald Sussman of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Deer Isle, Maine, who just happened to be stimulated by this issue. A big question hanging over both sides is whether Sussman will again finance an end game for Carter.

"We've not had a conversation about it," says Kevin Mattson, the Democratic pol who is now Sussman's representative in Maine, speaking of his talks with his boss. Although "it's a great bill" and "eminently winnable," Mattson says of the referendum proposal, his guess on whether Sussman will finally pour in the dollars is, "I don't think so . . . . We're not there right now." Mattson says that after two fights Sussman is depressed about the referendum process. But he adds coyly: "If we put in a million, we'd win it."

Why he's back again

Carter's 1996 initiative bill would have prevented clear-cuts and set strict standards for timber harvesting in the 10.3 million acres, about half the state, of the Unorganized Territory. This is the Great North Woods of Maine, owned largely by multinational paper corporations and huge land-investment companies. Many environmentalists and forestry experts who don't agree with Carter's solution nevertheless are in accord that the forest has been massively clear-cut and over-cut (more wood is cut than is growing back) during the past 20 years.

Although the ban on clear-cutting was roundly denounced by the paper industry, Gov. King, and even by the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Maine Audubon Society, groups that prefer accommodation with the paper companies, it was highly popular with the people. Polls initially showed it winning two to one.

Concern about the forests had been building for years. Mainers were finding it hard to discover places to hike, canoe, and fish without encountering clear-cuts. They were worried about paper-company spraying of toxic herbicides and pesticides. They were concerned about clear-cutting's effects on wildlife. They wondered about the state's logging and paper-mill jobs, which were already declining, if cutting continued at, what some argued, were unsustainable levels. And people found the clear-cuts just plain ugly.

It took $6 million, the most ever spent in a Maine election, to begin to turn the vote around. Their TV spots tried to frighten people about job losses and to paint Carter as an extremist.

But even that wasn't enough to win. To split the "yes" vote, the paper companies, King, and the two big environmental groups proposed a referendum alternative known as the "Compact." They said it was a set of reasonable limitations on wood harvesting that would take care of the worst excesses they confessed had been committed. Carter denounced it as a subterfuge that would do nothing to save the forest. In the end the vote was 47 percent for the Compact, 29 percent for the ban on clear-cutting, and 24 percent for none of the above, a position pushed by a right-wing, property-rights group led by Mary Adams of Garland.

This result could be interpreted as a symbolic victory for reform, since 76 percent of the voters went for the ban or the Compact. The paper industry preferred to interpret it as a defeat for the ban. In any case, under the Maine constitution the Compact had to be sent again to the people for a straight-up-and-down vote because it hadn't achieved a majority.

In this next referendum, in 1997, Carter teamed up with Mary Adams -- he saying the Compact didn't do anything, she saying it did too much -- to defeat it 53 to 47 percent, despite, again, heavy advertising by the paper companies and support from their environmentalist friends and King.

It was a victory of sorts for Carter, but he still hadn't achieved any reform of forest practices. He next took the fight to the Legislature. But the paper companies have great influence among legislators. They contribute heavily to their campaigns. No reform passed.

Now in the year 2000 "nothing has changed except that it's worse than it was," Carter says of what he calls the on-going paper-industry liquidation of the forest. He sees the industry chopping down everything and eventually leaving Maine.

As reform, this year's proposal is about as mild as Carter thinks can be justified. But the forest corporations strenuously oppose it. King, too, is opposed, but he has suggested he will not do TV ads against it. The Natural Resources Council and Maine Audubon have not yet taken a position. The state's branch of the Sierra Club supports it.

The personality behind the personal attacks

One of the paper industry's personal thrusts against Jonathan Carter is that "he's not from Maine," as the PPRC's Hatch puts it, speaking as if this in itself were a condemnation (the people making this accusation don't seem to hold it against Gov. King). Hatch also suggests that the kinds of people Carter rallies either "don't have to make a living," or "live off of food stamps and the town coffers," or are "professionals who don't have to depend on sweat for a living."

His words express a resentment among some working-class Maine natives that frequently reflects the rich-south, poor-north divide. But it also exists statewide against immigrants who may be -- or may have been -- somewhat counter-cultural or, alternatively, may be relatively well-off, educated professionals.

Carter is partially guilty of both these charges. Born 49 years ago in exclusive New Canaan, Connecticut, into a family of the American aristocracy, he attended elite Deerfield Academy and Williams College, where an ancestor was its president. His 84-year-old father still summers on Rangeley Lake in a cottage built by Carter's great-grandparents. He says his parents were "not rich by New Canaan standards," but he was "very fortunate."

He also was a bona-fide back-to-the-lander with long-hair tendencies. After he got a master's degree in biology at the University of New Hampshire and did some secondary-school teaching, he and his wife Dottie restored an old farmhouse on 120 acres in the western mountains near North New Portland. They have a big garden, heat with wood, and sell some wood.

Although he has done doctoral work at the University of Maine and taught biology at the university campus in Farmington, he has not had, unless one counts his recent political activity, what would normally be called a career -- and he has not seemed to need one. "Life can be viewed as a journey, not a career," he observes.

Carter says he doesn't benefit from a trust fund, as the rumors have it. In any case, he doesn't have a fortune. He has had to go in debt to pay for the education of his son Jared, 19, at Connecticut College, and Michaela, 15, at Deerfield. His wife teaches kindergarten. He gets little pay from his political work. "We struggle to survive," he claims.

Despite what his detractors say about him, in many ways Carter is more the cliché Mainer than many of the native-born. He is physically rugged. He loves to fish, hike, climb, and cross-country ski. He is knowledgeable and passionate about the forest. Most important, he has in spades a quality that defines the classic Maine character: independence. He is not awed by the rich and powerful, and he is not a follower. For example, although he has been a Green Party standard-bearer, he sometimes feels estranged from the intense political correctness and impracticality of many Green activists, and he lets them know it.

Being so independent-minded, he easily falls into argument and can be overbearing, but he is saved from himself because he is an engaging extrovert -- far more of a natural politician than, say, Angus King. One can imagine Carter as a highly successful Democratic Party office-seeker.

But, true to his independent thoughts, he has consistently chosen a path that risks political marginalization. In 1990 he ran for Congress in the Second District (the northern half of the state) and in 1992 for governor as the candidate of the fledgling Green Party. He espoused all kinds of progressive reforms. He got 9 percent of the vote for Congress and 7 percent for governor.

But he wasn't marginalized. Among the politicos -- for example, Chris Potholm in his book An Insider's Guide to Maine Politics: 1946-1996 -- it is conceded that he probably elected Angus King, independent, as governor and Olympia Snowe, Republican, to Congress, her last race before she won the US Senate seat. To put it another way, since he mostly took votes from the Democratic candidates, Pat McGowan for Congress and former Gov. Joseph Brennan for governor, "the Democrats hold Jonathan responsible for those defeats," says Mattson, who worked on Joe Brennan's campaign and was executive director of the Maine Democratic Party in 1994-96.

In his two races for office Carter proved to be a bright, articulate, if somewhat bombastic candidate. His good looks went across well on TV. He gave the Green Party respectability. "My interest was not to win but to build the party," he says. In 1996 his much-less-well-known associate Patricia LaMarche also obtained 7 percent for governor, proving the Greens are a force to be contended with. Polls show that a third of Maine young people identify with the Greens.

Democratic statewide candidates court Carter with the hope that he won't run against them. Democratic leaders dislike, fear, and respect him. Unless they make their peace with Carter and the Greens, the Democrats risk not regaining the governor's office.

His strategy for this campaign

"We're intentionally keeping a low-key approach," Carter says about the current campaign, sounding a little like he's trying to convince himself. "Why rock the boat when you're ahead?" However, "the political reality is money," he admits, referring to TV advertising. "People are attuned to TV," Forest for the Future's Holt adds in virtual despair.

TV is not everything in politics. This year there may be an anti-corporate feeling in the citizenry that will count in the election. "The words `corporate greed' are much more up front these days," Holt says. "Look at the BIW strike. There's a corporate backlash."

Another factor may be the wording of question 2. It is hard to understand:

DO YOU FAVOR REQUIRING LANDOWNERS TO OBTAIN A PERMIT FOR ALL CLEAR-CUTS AND DEFINING CUTTING LEVELS FOR LANDS SUBJECT TO THE TREE GROWTH TAX LAW?

Probably all that will be comprehended by most voters, especially in a presidential election that turns out many people not up on the issues, is the question's first half -- "Do you favor requiring landowners to obtain a permit for all clear-cuts?" -- and this hardly seems a radical idea. The forest industry too late recognized the wording as a problem. They unsuccessfully tried to get the attorney general to legally challenge it.

And how will the effort play to make Carter the issue? Mattson, Donald Sussman's Maine representative, has scorn for this approach. "They built up the Green Party!" he says of past industry attacks. "Maybe they'll make Jonathan more popular. When they make him the issue it doesn't work. People really don't care how individuals stand on the issues."

Carter himself dismisses the personal attacks. "This is not about Jonathan Carter," he says. "This is about saving the forests. It's pretty pathetic when they try to slander the messenger rather than attack the substance."

But there remains for Carter the TV problem. In contemporary campaigns TV ads "can turn around 20 points in five to 10 days," says Ken Swope, the Massachusetts media consultant who produced spots for the ban clear-cutting and anti-Compact campaigns in 1996 and 1997.

"The organization with the most money has the opportunity to frame the debate," he says. "They find out what frightens people the most even if it is totally irrelevant to the referendum -- like taxes or crime or sprawl. There's no law against lying in political advertising."

But, unlike in larger states, all a Maine environmentalist campaign needs to "change the moveable votes," Swope says, is $1 million and the right TV spot. The whole population can be thoroughly exposed to a message with that expenditure, he says. In other words, it's possible that "one million dollars can beat five million."

And the paper industry pollster, Potholm, is concerned that the voters may not be all that moveable by his side -- and right now his side is behind. "This is an emotional issue like abortion," he says. "People have already chewed this over. It's much more difficult to move people." It will be especially difficult in a campaign season when the airways will be clogged with political advertising.

From all indications, if Carter could come up with $1 million he would have a real shot at this referendum -- and he might anyway. And if he sticks to his pursuit -- he has shown himself above all to be stubborn -- there are indications that he has a good chance to be successful sooner or later. The persistent popular support for this year's referendum after four years of public discussion of the issue may demonstrate this.

"If you keep coming back often enough, people will get tired" and one of these referendums will pass, says Hatch, the Carter opponent. "If we have to do it four, five, or six times, we'll do it," promises Holt. "Never give up," Carter says curtly.

And even without tangible success yet, even after pissing off the Establishment mightily, and even burdened with a number of disadvantages political and personal, Carter has set a good deal of the state's environmentalist agenda. He even has made himself something of a political kingmaker. In his book, his opponent Potholm, now forging ahead in the paper-industry campaign to demonize Carter, bestows upon him his highest political accolade: he is "a player."

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Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.