Cut and run How the paper industry betrayed the state BY LANCE TAPLEY

Over 20 years ago, in testimony before legislative committees and in op-ed articles in newspapers, Bill Butler, a logger and an activist in the short-lived Maine Woodsmen’s Association, warned that the state’s big paper corporations had begun to liquidate their wood supply in preparation to abandon Maine. Butler, who talked about companies moving investments to Thailand and Brazil, foresaw globalization long before it became a household word.

In part to dramatize Butler’s prophecies, in 1981 a small group of left-wing activists produced a film in which he was a character. They took it, Butler, and other leaders of the woodsmen on a tour of the state to raise awareness of the loggers’ long-range concerns and of the dangerous, poorly paid, debilitating work they endured at the hands of the companies. The documentary, directed by Richard Searls, is entitled Cut and Run.

Clearcuts "are putting us out of work," Butler laments in the movie as he walks through a scene of desolation. "This is the resource of Maine. The place is being ruined."

The state’s political leadership, both Republicans and Democrats, either ignored Butler or scoffed at him. Who could imagine Maine without an all-powerful paper industry, legendary for its thousands of well-paying mill jobs and fat political-campaign contributions? Certainly not the politicians who pocketed those contributions.

But it now looks as if Bill Butler, the film, and the title Cut and Run got it right. After a couple of decades of clearcutting, in which harvests year in and year out exceeded tree growth, most of the old-line pulp and paper companies have sold their lands and mills and left the state. Several thousand mill workers have lost their jobs in just the past couple of years, and in that period a half-dozen mills have closed or been reduced to ghosts of what they were.

It would be too strong to say that the paper industry is collapsing. But it is certainly collapsing as a big-time provider of employment in Maine.

As the Bible says, a prophet is not without honor save in his own country. Today, Bill Butler, retired at 83, sits quietly in his remote, pine-paneled Hancock County farmhouse. He reads books on ecology and mathematics — he has a degree in engineering — as he looks out a window on an impressive sweep of woods and mountains.

But he is eager to take a visitor down the road a quarter mile to an ugly clearcut so that the visitor has no misunderstanding about what has happened to this forest that he has lived in and loved for 50 years.

"This old fart was right in 1975," he says sorrowfully, adding: "It took me a long time to understand what they were doing."

Butler is not the only forest prophet whose warnings were ignored or scorned by those in power — and to a significant extent ignored by Maine’s big environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) and the Maine Audubon Society, organizations that Butler calls "patsies" for the paper corporations.

Another is Mitch Lansky of Wytopitlock, author of the books Beyond the Beauty Strip: Saving What’s Left of Our Forests (1992) and Low-Impact Forestry: Forestry As If the Future Mattered (2002).

Lansky’s following is not limited to the state’s radical fringe. His books are on some college reading lists. "I’ve always respected his opinions," says Cathy Johnson, the NRCM’s forestry-issue expert.

But with his frank and sometimes-sarcastic criticism of the forest industry, he is far from the mainstream. In his writing, Lansky says many of the same things Butler earlier publicized. In Beyond the Beauty Strip, he suggests the companies were pursuing "a deliberate acceleration of resource depletion with the intention of shutting down the least profitable mills when supplies become short."

"History will show that I got it right," Lansky says now with no tone of satisfaction. "They’re getting rid of the land and they’re getting rid of the mills, too."

Another of the prophets, biologist and activist Jonathan Carter, ran as the Green Party candidate for governor in 1994 and 2002. He also organized two unsuccessful statewide ballot-measure campaigns to reform forest practices. His activism has been bitterly opposed by the state’s political leaders — by Republicans and Democrats and by independent Governor Angus King during his two terms in office — as well as by many millions of dollars of paper-company television advertisements. Carter has suffered constant personal attack and derision, although he made sure he was not ignored.

"These are all things we predicted," Carter says of the mill shutdowns, the movement of many companies out of state, and what he sees as their great abuse of the forest and those who earn their living from it.

Of his erstwhile political opponent, Democratic Governor John Baldacci, who spends some of his time scrambling to react to one mill closing or layoff after another, Carter adds: "He’s still in that dream world that it’s all going to recover and everything will be fine some day."

CUT AND RUN: THE INDICTMENT

Viewers of the six o’clock news probably don’t need much convincing that something is radically troubled within Maine’s paper industry, even though the verbal responses to the shutdowns by Baldacci and other politicians seem merely regretful. Our leaders never criticize or blame the big corporations. It is as if acts of God have occurred.

In a sense, that is the case. Politically, these companies have been gods in Maine, as the Ralph Nader-produced book The Paper Plantation, written by William Osborn, documented in 1974. The industry, Osborn asserted then, had the political power to enable it to perpetuate the "standard inequities of a rapacious corporate oligopoly."

Even now — weakened, disgraced in many eyes — the industry continues to command great respect like an old Mafia don. The NRCM’s Cathy Johnson says of the companies: "They still have a huge amount of political power."

Even many of the laid-off mill workers continue to toe the company line. For example, Millinocket, which has seen thousands of workers lose their jobs, continues as a seat of opposition to the proposed Maine Woods National Park, which might present an economic alternative for the north country.

Perhaps some way out of the current debacle might be discerned if both the workers and the state’s leadership fully admitted what has happened and asked why.

Here are the particulars of what has happened:

• Closings and layoffs: In 1974, there were 16 pulp and paper mills in Maine. Now there are only 11, and three, the Great Northern (now Katahdin Paper) mill in East Millinocket, the Georgia-Pacific mill in Old Town, and the Sappi Westbrook facility, are skeletons of their former selves.

The Westbrook mill as short a time ago as 1990 employed 2300; now it employs 330 in the mill itself, plus another 300 nearby.

After Georgia-Pacific shut down its tissue-making operations in 2003 and Baldacci rushed to provide a novel form of state assistance by finding a buyer for the company’s landfill, 450 employees have managed to hold onto their jobs. (On a trade-association Web site, Georgia-Pacific still advertises that it employs 600 workers in Old Town. In the early 1990s, it had 1000.)

The biggest blow to the paper industry’s workforce occurred in January 2003. On the day Baldacci was inaugurated, Great Northern in Millinocket and East Millinocket — once the flagship company of Maine’s paper industry and which in the 1950s produced a third of the country’s newsprint — filed for bankruptcy. Eventually, in midsummer, a Canadian company restarted the East Millinocket plant. Now known as Katahdin Paper, it employs 420. In the early 1980s, Great Northern had 4500 workers.

Another recent entry in bankruptcy court is Eastern Pulp and Paper, which early this year shut down its Brewer and Lincoln plants, wiping out 750 jobs. Baldacci recently has been occupied trying to find a company to restart them. The most viable offer so far is $8.5 million from two small-time Massachusetts businessmen. The affected municipalities value the mills at $103 million. The Lincoln mill provides 31 percent of its town’s tax base.

In 1975, according to the state Department of Labor, there were about 17,000 workers in paper manufacturing. At the end of 2003, there were 10,000. Subtracting the dramatic job losses in just the beginning months of this year, the number now is around 9000, counting also continuing layoffs at the still-functioning mills.

According to one study, the entire forest-products industry now accounts for only four percent of jobs and income in the state — far from a giant.

Lloyd Irland, the most widely quoted forestry consultant in Maine, cautions that, while employment has been rapidly declining in the industry, efficiencies have allowed paper production — though it varies with the business cycle — to continue to climb to, in 2000, about four million tons. In the early 1980s, considered the heyday of industry employment, the output was around 3.25 million.

In the last year for which Irland has good numbers, 2001, however, there was a downturn to 3.7 million tons, and this phenomenon may reflect the downfall of Great Northern and other mills, he says, although he has heard production has rebounded.

Maine Pulp and Paper Association president John Williams confirms this rebound, though he would not give numbers. His group is the industry’s chief lobbyist in Augusta.

"It’s stunning to see the reduced manning levels occurring while the industry is still sustaining the tonnage," Irland comments.

He is not sanguine, however, about the industry in Maine. "It’s a grim thing to watch from my perspective," he says.

Even Williams sounds pessimistic: "There will be a reduced future from the past." He blames the Maine industry’s decline principally on a diminished demand in a slow American economy and "new facilities coming on line in Europe, Latin America, China, Korea. There’s more paper, less demand."