In her letter of Dec. 29, Abby Holman of the Maine Forest Products Council is confused about the amount of overharvesting that is taking place in Maine’s forests. Maine’s large landowners are cutting down the forest 37 percent faster than it is growing according to the most reliable projections that exist about what is happening in Maine’s forests today.

Here are the facts:

1. In a report dated Sept. 1998, the Maine Forest Service calculated the “Ratio of growth to harvest for Large landowners and Other landowners at the beginning of each decade, Landowner Improved Yield Run specifications.”

2. Table 10 on page 22 of that report projects that using even the most optimistic assumptions about growth rates in Maine’s forests, growth rates over the next decade will only be 73 percent of the current harvest rate of Maine’s large landowners. Using seventh-grade math to convert the growth-to-harvest rate to a harvest-to-growth ratio, that means that current harvest rates are outstripping growth rates by 37 percent (1 divided by .73 equals 1.37).

3. At the press conference referenced by Holman in her letter, the director of the Maine Forest Service was specifically asked whether these figures should be revised. Director Tom Doak correctly replied that the Maine Forest Service had no new information about growth rates and that therefore the harvest-to-growth figures in the 1998 report remain the most reliable information available.

NRCM consistently relies on the best available information in our analyses of the state of Maine’s forests. Given the recent, well-documented history of overharvesting by Maine’s largest landowners, we believe that it is too late to simply “trust” the large landowners to change their ways.

That is why we encourage all of the large landowners to get their lands independently certified as “well managed” by the Forest Stewardship Council. Through independent certification (and not through industry-controlled programs), all the large landowners could show us that they are managing sustainably. Seven Islands Land Co. and J.D. Irving have done it. We are waiting for the rest.

Judy Berk

Natural Resources Council of Maine

Augusta