When the annual initiative to restrict or ban clear-cuts in Maine forests has appeared on the ballot, large landowners and paper companies have been able to count on their employees to help get out the word on why the measures were bad ideas. Chief among their arguments is that growing trees is a long-term investment: you can count on us to keep the industry healthy by keeping the woods healthy, they say.

Certainly, nearly shutting down stud mills in Costigan and Passadumkeag, as International Paper plans to do next month, is one way to reduce the amount of cutting in the woods. But the decision to essentially close operations on profitable mills, laying off 230 employees and harming hundreds more in related jobs in a region where there are few other options, is not healthy for the industry and is unhealthy for the way the rest of Maine views the industry’s treatment of its resources, particularly its human resources.

IP’s decision to close mills that were not earning as much as its other facilities can be passed off as another example of the changing values in a new economy. Its hesitation to sell the mills to someone else, thereby risking the future of a region that has served the forest industry since before Maine was a state, cannot be. It abandons the very principles of stewardship and community that the industry asserts it reveres each referendum season.

The stake for the rest of Maine’s forest-products in IP’s decision is large. If IP can strand its workers, suppliers, truckers and a local paper mill that depends on the sawdust from the two mills to make paper, what will be the industry’s argument during the next referendum?

An initiative’s outcome is a measure of public trust not only for a particular ballot issue but for the industry overall. And while IP shouldn’t keep the sawmills open or sell them simply to win the next forestry referendum, it and the rest of the industry should recognize that those votes represent Maine entrusting them with a significant part of its future. The trust comes in the form of the unions joining management on the issue, of the bumper sticker on the back of the pickup, of the vote in the small towns all over Maine. It comes additionally in the form of the tax break that everyone else must cover.

Though these aren’t good times for lumber mills, potential buyers already have contacted the Department of Economic and Community Development about the two scheduled to close, and the state has encouraged IP to either keep them open fully or sell them. A particularly promising offer on the Passadumkeag mill has come from employees through a group called Maine Wood Innovations. A lot is riding on IP’s actions in the coming weeks, for the people who depend on the mills for work and for the wood-products industry in Maine. Whatever IP does will be measured in jobs and, perhaps, at the voting booth for years to come.