Meet Mr. Vader

The announcement Tuesday that Sappi Fine Paper is selling 905,000 acres of its Maine forest lands to Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Co. was greeted by the state’s environmenmtal organizations with reactions running the gamut from alarm to hysteria.

Plum Creek responded with an olive branch. Company executives today begin a series of meetings with the environmental groups. Jim Lerner, who soon will move from Louisiana to run the Maine operation, promises to establish a continued working relationship. President and CEO Rick Holley even offered to fly Jonathan “armed resistence” Carter, generalissimo of the Forest Ecology Network, to Montana for a first-hand look at how his company manages the woods there. Provided it’s round trip.

What is significant about these gestures is that they are not required. Other than a rather perfunctory anti-trust ruling by the Federal Trade Commission, Plum Creek does not need anyone’s approval to buy this land — no DEP, no LURC, no EPA, no public hearings, no intervenors. Plum Creek could tell those who don’t want it here to go pound sawdust. It has not, and its offer to get to know Maine’s environmentalists and to work with them should, until further notice, be taken at face value.

Sadly, the Sappi/Plum Creek press release on this $180 million sale was answered by a flurry of furious faxes peppered with such inflammatory terms as “notorious” and “greedy” and “forest liquidator.” The century-old federal land grant to the Northern Pacific Railroad that formed the basis for Plum Creek’s holdings was presented as yesterday’s sweetheart deal. A decade-old quote in which a Washington congressman called Plum Creek the “Darth Vader of the timber industry” was dredged up ad nauseam, with nary a mention that the congressman retracted that statement after viewing Plum Creek’s improved forest practices first hand.

From the volume of venom, one would have thought this Western giant was wresting control of the Maine woods from some cute and cuddly mom-and-pop lumber yard, not striking a deal with South African Pulp and Paper Industries, Ltd.

There is no need for this overheated rhetoric, and not just because it’s rude. It’s because Plum Creek is unlike other large Maine timber comapnies — it does not just harvest trees, it sells, sometimes swaps, land — land for development and, as the recent sale of 10,000 acres in Montana to the Nature Conservancy demonstrates, for conservation.

And if there’s one thing Maine’s environmental groups agree upon, it’s that not enough Maine land is being conserved through public ownership. While Plum Creek promises to continue the tradition of open access for recreation, with no gates and no fees, at some point it may well determine that some tracts have a higher and better use than as a woodlot. That’s when negotiations begin and negotiations almost always go better when one side hasn’t been insulting the other at every opportunity. Even profit-driven, bottom-line business types have feelings.

But there’s a more compelling reason to tone it down — Maine’s dreadful political climate regarding the public purchase of land. Gov. King did a good job laying the groundwork for a couple of conservation easements with both Sappi and Plum Creek on small parcels of especially high public value, but it’s hard to do much when hardly any money has been set aside for that purpose.

There are federal funding sources, there is the private sector, but ultimately, the state has to lead the way, either through a bond issue or a direct appropriation. The Legislature whittled the last land-aquisition bond proposal down from an adequate amount to a pittance and it cannot be expected to do more when such rancor persists. Or when every mention of modest public acquisition raises the specter of a 2.5 million-acre national park. Or when the anti-Plum Creek barrage comes off looking like a scare tactic. Environmental activists may not want to admit it, but Maine has property rights activists, too. They’re organized, they’re articulate, they vote. And they don’t scare easily.

It is hopeless to expect anything significant to happen in Maine regarding public land acquisition under the current all-or-nothing, open warfare conditions. Those environmental groups that truly want to see the most special parts of the Sappi lands preserved can start the peace process by sitting down with Plum Creek soon and at every opportunity to make their intentions clear. With 2 million acres of Bowater land also on the market, it would be good practice. Besides, they might find out that in real life, as in the movies, Darth Vader, deep down, isn’t such a bad guy after all.