February 14, 2025
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Ban Clearcutting chief blasts compact > Carter charges King’s alternative plan would actually claim more forest land

AUGUSTA — The leader of the Ban Clearcutting initiative lashed out Tuesday at backers of the Compact for Maine’s Forest, deriding the measure as dishonest and self-serving.

Jonathan Carter, who helped the group get the clear-cutting ban on this fall’s referendum, claimed the compact would actually result in more clear-cutting rather than less.

A member of the Green Party and an ardent environmentalist, Carter will never be convinced that the proponents of the compact have the best interests of Maine’s forest at heart.

“People need to look beyond the rhetoric and the smokescreens and the distortions that are used by those who say this compact is a great solution to the crisis of clear-cutting and overcutting in the forest,” he said. “It simply isn’t.”

Gov. Angus S. King worked with paper companies, forest industry representatives and environmentalists to broker the compact as an option for the voters in November. Last week, the Maine Legislature passed a resolve necessary to put the alternative on the ballot which will also feature a third choice permitting the rejection of both measures.

Key to the compact’s provisions are a direct cap on the amount of clear-cutting a landowner may do — a restriction that is nonexistent under current law. The compact also introduces the Sustainable Forest Management Audit Program designed to provide incentives for landowners who meet conservation goals detailed under the plan.

Carter said the compact actually promotes clear-cutting by setting a limit on a single clear-cut area at 75 acres when the actual average area is 33 acres. Current law resticts individual clear-cuts to 250 acres, but landowners frequently harvest much less due to more restrictive regulations for those exceeding a cut of more than 35 acres.

“The voters need a clear picture,” Carter said. “The compact is a political solution to an ecological problem and we need an ecological solution.”

King and Charles J. Gadzik, the director of the Maine Forest Service, argued that considerable scientific study had been used to devise the compact’s provisions with the idea of providing flexibility to achieve maximum compliance. The governor said he preferred to develop “incentives for excellence” rather than accomplishing goals punitively through enforcement action.

“Jonathan wants to do everything by regulation,” he said. “We found that we can get the most environmental `bang’ through cooperation and some regulation.”

In addition to Carter, King will have to defend the goals of the compact from Senate President Jeffrey H. Butland, R-Cumberland. Failing to sway enough votes last week to defeat the measure, Butland said on a Portland radio station that he will encourage people to reject both the ban and the compact. King, who sniped sparingly at Butland Monday over the remark, clammed up about his opposition Tuesday.

“We spent last week talking intensively about the forestry compact,” he said. “I think it’s obviously good for Maine. I don’t see any reason to get in an argument. We disagree.”

During a press conference Tuesday at Ban Clearcutting headquarters, it became obvious that Carter and the Maine Forest Service define clear-cuts differently. The state maintains that about 50,000 acres a year are clear-cut in Maine, but Carter says the total amount is more like 100,000 acres. Given those numbers, he said the compact’s limit of 180,000 acres per year in unorganized townships doesn’t provide much protection.

“A hundred thousand acres a year is a million acres every 10 years or 5 Baxter State Parks that have been clear-cut,” he said.

There are 10.5 million acres of land in Maine’s unorganized townships.

Gadzik said Carter was simply wrong in his assessment of the plan.

“He’s using his own definition of clear-cutting and doing his own calculations,” he said. “I think Jonathan is comparing apples to oranges with old definitions to new definitions. That’s part of the problem and confusion in the numbers.”

Reacting to Carter’s assertion that it was dishonest to describe the compact as a tool to reduce clear-cutting when it actually provides more options, Gadzik used the opportunity to refute charges that science played no role in crafting the measure. He said biological studies revealed the need to vary the size of clear-cuts rather than encourage large numbers of 33-acre harvests.

“That’s the value of bringing science into the discussion,” he said. “It recognizes a variety of sizes are desirable and the compact takes out the incentive to create just one size of clear-cut. The goal is to have clear-cuts range in size from 5 acres to 275 acres and be designed on a landscape [from] a more biologically desirable standpoint.”


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