New England sees new look to logging

Lakefront homes
Most of the new owners say they plan to keep their land in timber production for a long time. But some, including Plum Creek Timber Co., of Seattle, possibly the nation’s largest landowner with 8 million acres in 20 states, also subdivide and sell lakefront property.

Plum Creek owns about 33,000 acres in northern New Hampshire and more than 1 million acres in Maine, where its plan to subdivide property around Moosehead Lake for 1,000 homes and two resorts is controversial — even though Plum Creek says 97 percent of its land would remain as forest.

Stock says concerns about development in New Hampshire’s northernmost county are overblown. Nearly half the land in Coos County is now protected by conservation easements, government ownership or nonprofit groups.

“It’s not a Wild West scenario up there, where everything’s for sale and it’s going to be snatched up and developed,” Stock says.

Higher-tech logging
The accelerating changes in land ownership have been paralleled by leaps in the speed and efficiency of logging technology. To stay ahead of the machinery, most foresters now give their loggers “prescriptions” for cutting in large stands, instead of marking individual trees to be harvested.

When Rick Gagne began logging in 1959, teams of horses dragged the timber out of the woods — and sometimes hauled out men injured by chainsaws or falling trees. Now his son, Pat, sits in the cab of a $450,000 processor, pushing buttons to instruct the machine’s arm to grab a tree, cut it, de-limb it and saw it into 8-foot logs — all in less than a minute.

Charles Niebling, policy director of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, says it’s time to consider more regulation. His group and the Timberland Owners are collaborating on a survey to figure out exactly how much timber is being cut, and where.

Niebling also says one thing is clear: What Dillon is doing is not sustainable and it’s not good forestry, and will take much of the land out of timber production over the long term.

“Trees grow back in New Hampshire,” he says. “But you’re not going to have a mature forest resource for another 40, 50, 80, 100 years.”

Talks break down
The society tried to buy land from Dillon last year. Niebling says he gave up when Dillon said he not only wanted the price he had paid, but wanted to keep logging and gravel mining rights for four years.

“What would we be buying? We’d be buying a moonscape,” Niebling says.

But Niebling also says he doesn’t fault Dillon: “I wish that he had a different ethic toward the land, but that’s his business. He bought it and we don’t have any laws that limit it.”

Whether or not more regulation is the answer, state wildlife biologist Will Staats hopes everyone involved will agree to try to preserve a healthy, working forest.

“It’s not just a cash cow. It has a long-standing impact on the traditions and values of the community,” Staats says. “We’re going to be left holding the bag. Our children are going to be left living with these forests for generations.

“We have to foster a land ethic, a stewardship ethic for these lands.”

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