Those concerned about the sustainability of Maine’s forests have every right to be confused over how to vote on Nov. 4. Question 1’s major opponents, Jonathan Carter and Mary Adams, each repeat a single but contradictory charge: respectively; the Compact for Maine’s Forests is a paper industry scam and worse than the status quo for Maines woods; or, the Compact is an outrageous infringement on private property rights. They can’t both be right; is either one?

Maine Audubon believes the Forest Compact is about progress in Maine’s woods, and we are voting yes on Question 1. As Maine Audubon’s executive director, Thomas Urquhart has pointed out, “A yes vote on Question 1 clearly moves Maine forward toward a sustainable forest; a no vote means no environmental progress and endorsers unlimited clear-cutting.”

The Compact not only outlaws unlimited clear-cutting but introduces a sustainable forestry program that will hold industry accountable, for the first time, for forest biodiversity and other non-timber values. The Compact makes the large landowners responsible for aesthetic values, fish and wildlife, soil and water quality of their woods through the ecological provisions of the sustainable forestry audit. It is actually much broader in scope than the Forest Ecology Network’s (FEN) narrow focus on timber values.

The Compact’s new permitting procedure and 1 percent limit will effectively cap clear-cutting at 70 percent ITALIC below UNITALIC the peak levels of the 1980s. FEN’s claim that the Compact will allow more than a half-million acres of clear-cutting a year is preposterous. Even assuming the worst, the figures just don’t add up. The simple fact remains that the Compact bans runaway clear-cutting in the Maine woods forever.

The indisputable fact is that the Compact reduces the size of the current maximum legal clear-cut. FEN’s assertion that the size of clear-cuts would more than double is deliberately misleading. The reason today’s average clear-cut is 33 acres is because present law gives landowners an incentive to create multiple clear-cuts of less than 35 acres separated by narrow, ineffective buffer strips of only 250 feet. These patchwork harvests have the effect of creating huge clear-cuts that fragment and eliminate valuable wildlife habitat over hundreds of acres and are particularly harmful to wildlife.

By reducing the size of clear-cuts from the legal maximum of 250 acres down to 75 acres (by 70 percent) and doubling the size of separation zones on clear-cuts less than 35 acres, the Compact removes the loopholes (and large patchwork cuts) of the current law. Layer on top of that the Sustainable Forestry Audit Program, which creates harvesting practices that take wildlife habitat, landscape values and other environmental concerns into consideration, and a whole new list of stewardship standards is added to the Compact’s regulatory changes that reduce clear-cutting. A new opportunity to create forest health emerges. By contrast, a no vote on Question 1 will leave us with forest practices that exacerbate forest fragmentation, which is the No. 1 threat to widllife in Maine’s North Woods.

To bolster its opposition to change, FEN claims that experienced environmental groups like Maine Audubon and the Natural Resources Council either sold out or were duped by the foresty industry. Nonsense. Almost simultaneous with the Compact negotiations, NRCM was opposing both the state and the paper companies to the last gasp in its attempt to get all dioxin out of hte papermaking process. And, despite the Compact, both organizations conducted a pitched environmental battle against large landwoners last spring over the proposed legislation to keep development from ruining Maine’s forested wildlands. The records of both organizations speak for themselves.

Opponents from the other side — the far right, so-called “property rights” groups — are correct in their assessment that the Compact forces landowners practicing substandard forestry to adhere to new standards dictated by the long-term health of the forest. The Compact does not interfere with landowners who are managing their lands responsibly, only those who want to strip the land and ignore watershed health and wildlife habitat.

The Compact acknowledges what is already a fact of law and of life: Property ownership is complex, not simple. Public ownership of water and wildlife resources is intimately linked with private ownership of land. It’s time property rights groups accepted their responsibilities as well as their rights. Their opposition to the Compact can only be read as support for current forest management abuses and a celebration of selfishness that has no place in a state where we must all care for our critical water, air and wildlife resources.

With the total clear-cut ban as an incentive, the paper companies and other large landwoners for the first time were willing to sit down with environmentalists and accept new restrictions they might not like but could live with. To those who have fought for better forest management for decades, the Compact, with its clear-cutting caps and size limits plus the sustainable forestry audit, represents a major breakthrough, the chance to accomplish through negotiation what our adversarialk relationship has failed for so many years to win. We urge you to vote for positive change in the Maine woods: Vote yes on 1.

Thomas M. Armstrong Jr. and Jean C. Hayes are president and vice president of the Maine Audubon Society.