Cut and run (continued)   BY LANCE TAPLEY

• The Two Maines further divided: Long before the mill jobs started to go south in big numbers, the logging jobs began to disappear, exactly as Bill Butler feared. Clearcutting required vast mechanization — harvesters that looked like they landed from Mars in the movie War of the Worlds.

In 1979, there were 5500 Maine loggers. In 2002, there were 2500. Their wages began to vanish, too. Between 1975 and 2002, according to the state labor department, loggers got a 197-percent wage increase, on average. But inflation increased 234 percent during this period. The average wage was $27,600 in 2002.

As a result of reduced real pay for work in the woods, mill and woods-work job losses, other manufacturing layoffs, and the closing of Aroostook County’s Loring Air Force Base, Aroostook, Penobscot, Piscataquis, and Washington Counties depopulated — overall losing six percent of their combined population between 1990 and 2000. Mill town Millinocket lost 25 percent of its citizens, and logging town Allagash lost approximately the same percentage.

In northern and eastern Maine, per-capita income is low, poverty levels are high, and unemployment is high. Meanwhile, York and Cumberland Counties together prosperously grew 11 percent during the 1990s. Thus, we have that notorious, ever-widening gap between the Two Maines, a gap intimately connected to the forest-industry decline.

• The big companies leave: In the early 1970s, the seven big companies astride Maine were Great Northern Nekoosa, International Paper (IP), Scott Paper, Diamond International, St. Regis Paper, Georgia-Pacific, and Oxford Paper. As recounted in The Paper Plantation, they owed 87 percent of the industry land. The industry as a whole owned 7.7 million acres or 37 percent of the state’s territory.

Of this classic list, now only IP, with mills in Bucksport and Jay and 1.3 million acres, remains as a major player in Maine. After the giants and some successors left the state in a dizzying series of mill and timberland sales in the 1980s and 1990s, only 5.7 million acres remains in industry hands, 1.6 millions acres having been sold — much to land-investment companies — since 1995.

The sale of forestland by the industry theoretically opened up a potential for fragmented development of the North Woods. The response of the environmentalist establishment has been to work for legal easements preventing development: Pay the big landowners not to develop their land but allow them to continue their timber-harvesting practices on it. In recent years, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, over a million remote acres have been "preserved" in this fashion, along with several hundred thousand acres bought outright by environmental groups.

"The development easements are a step in the right direction toward wilderness restoration, but they must be viewed also as a form of corporate welfare, a windfall profit, and a political giveaway," says Jonathan Carter. He sees the easements as doing nothing to promote sustainable harvests while gobs of money are spent for land that is not immediately threatened with development.

"How many people want to live in T5 T6?" he asks.

"It’s a rip-off," Butler says simply.

Cathy Johnson defends the easements. "Down east, IP is selling off parcels right and left for development."

• Cutting more than growth: Carter’s Ban Clearcutting campaign in 1996 noted that the forest industry had clearcut an area the size of Delaware in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was not just aggressive activists, however, who were disturbed that the paper industry was overusing clearcuts — employing the harvesters to strip out every standing tree from vast tracts. Even the conservative environmental organizations and many average Maine folks who liked to vacation in the North Woods became alarmed.

The industry responded that it had to "salvage" trees because of damage done by the spruce budworm in the 1970s or that it was simply using modern tree-harvesting methods. But when public-opinion polling initially showed 70 percent of Maine people supporting ending the massive clearcuts through the referendum, the industry’s response was to join with the NRCM, Maine Audubon, and Governor King to propose an alternative to the clearcutting ban.

Their "Forest Compact" would have put some limits on clearcuts, though Carter ridiculed it as permitting "a million football fields a year." In the end, because of public confusion surrounding the two measures, neither was voted in, but the companies got the message: They turned away from simple clearcuts, although their newer methods still allowed them to cut heavily.

In any case, they had already cut the heart out of the historic Maine forest. There is no dispute that what remains is a vastly different Maine Woods than what existed 30 years ago. State and federal forest inventories show a huge shift from predominant softwoods, mostly spruce and fir, to hardwoods like birch and maple. And the trees growing today in the heavily cutover forest are much, much smaller.

The industry brags that it now practices "sustainable" forestry, but several studies have found that the cut continues to exceed the growth. A 2001 report by forestry professor Thomas Michael Power, relying on a number of government studies, found that the industry was cutting trees at a rate 30 percent above growth. In Piscataquis County, it was three times growth, he reported.

In one of his papers, Lansky says harvesting went "from 3.5 million cords in 1960 to 4.8 million cords in 1980 to 6.3 million cords in 2001."

Irland, no wild-eyed radical, agrees that, historically, the cuts well exceeded the growth — though he cites as important the budworm epidemic — and that "the fiber supply is now limited" in Maine.

Lansky, Butler, and Carter insist that the present practices of leaving a small number of trees per acre are not much of an improvement over total clearcuts.

It’s a "pretty abysmal" performance, Carter says. "The abundant woody species in Maine is raspberry bushes."

Johnson says of the forest companies: "They’re not there yet" — meaning they’re not at sustainable forestry.

• Little capital investment: Although from time to time during the past 25 years paper companies installed new paper-making machines in mills at a cost sometimes of over a hundred million dollars, and such events got great fanfare in the news media, in an article in the Portland Press Herald a year ago, in response to the Great Northern bankruptcy, two University of Maine professors expressed the belief that Maine’s paper-industry woes came partially from the industry’s lack of investment in modern, efficient technology.

"To compete with the world, they’ve got to have the modern machinery. We can furnish relatively inexpensive wood fiber indefinitely, but they need the new, big, best machines," David Field, forest policy professor, was quoted as saying.

When mills shut down, the reason often given is antiquated machinery.

Cathy Johnson says she clearly sees the capital-investment lacks. The old mill machinery pollutes much more than up-to-date machinery would, she says.

Even John William, the industry spokesman, candidly agrees that the corporations have not made a lot of investments in Maine: "They put the investment money elsewhere where they could make the best profit."

• Big logs exported. Everyone agrees that the forest industry has continued to increase the export to Canada of saw logs to be milled into lumber. In 1970, 39 percent of Maine’s saw logs — that is, the bigger logs — were shipped out of state, according to the federal forest service. By 2001, 61 percent of spruce and fir, 53 percent of yellow birch, and 52 percent of hard maple were exported.

• Foreign allegiances. The Maine forest industry always has had a tight relationship with Canada. Irving, the giant New Brunswick conglomerate, is now Maine’s largest landowner after buying 1.1 million acres from Great Northern in 1998 and adding this land to the 500,000 acres it has owned for many years. The Nexfor Fraser mill in Madawaska, Brascan’s East Millinocket mill (Brascan is also part owner of Nexfor Fraser), and the Domtar Woodland mill are Canadian.

The companies’ use of Canadian workers in the woods has been the source of great controversy. American woodsmen, who are kept as independent contractors by the companies, claim that competition from foreigners takes their jobs and suppresses their earnings. In 2003, 650 Canadians officially worked in the Maine woods. (Central Americans do much of the thinning and tree planting — 1200 came here last year.)

But Canada is a small part of the story of these multinational corporations’ divided allegiances. Madison Paper Industries’ majority owner is a Finnish company. Sappi, which owns the Westbrook and Hinckley mills, is South African.

The America companies still in Maine and those that have left have increasingly made investments overseas or elsewhere in the US — in both trees and paper mills.

A few years ago, with political risk insurance provided courtesy of the US government, IP bought a paper mill in Russia employing 3200 workers. Under Russian management, it had operated at a loss, but IP made it profitable.

"One of International Paper’s biggest competitive advantages is that wood, chemicals, and energy cost little in Russia," reports the Financial Times of London. "Salaries are also low . . . Wood, the main raw material, costs about half what it would in North America."

IP has five mills in New Zealand. Bowater, which once owned Great Northern, has big holdings in Canada and South Korea. MeadWestvaco, which owns the Rumford mill, has a subsidiary in Brazil.

"Clearly, globalization is at work here," says Irland. "Each week I see new plants coming on line in China or Chile."

Perhaps the most powerful competitors to Maine’s mills and trees are in the American South. In the winter, 2004 issue of onearth, published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted environmental journalist Alex Schumatoff writes about the current "ecocide" of the great hardwood forest of the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee, where 200,000 acres have been clearcut so far and the native forest is being replaced with genetically engineered pines — which, however, are being rapidly destroyed by the southern pine beetle. The South, Schumatoff notes, produces one quarter of the world’s paper and has 103 pulp mills.

Even the American South in the long run may fall victim to corporate globalization. The yields on three acres in the Southeast US and one acre in New Zealand are about the same, an American paper-company executive told the Journal of Commerce. The Southern Hemisphere may be the industry future.