The latest campaign by a Maine environmental group to ensure good forestry, coinciding this week with a legislative committee for yet another year wiping out a slate of forestry reforms, points Maine in a single direction, one in which both the state and the forest industry should be eager to go. Independent certification, based on standards from an organization respected internationally, is a reasonable approach that already has proven successful here and should be adopted and applied statewide to large landowners in commercial forestry.

The public’s interest in the condition of the forests grows out of its concern for the health of the environment. Extensive clear-cutting in the 1980s brought the issue to the public’s attention in the current debate over cutting practices, a debate that goes back to the 19th century. Maine, of course, is not the only state with this concern, and various ways to encourage or force good practices have been examined all over the country. The most promising of these has little to do with more regulation, emphasizing instead a requirement that landowners demonstrate to experts that the landowners are doing all the good things they claim to be doing, with the experts in forestry, wildlife and economics then writing up a report on what they found.

Many environmentalists like this idea, and support the world’s leading standard-setter, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), based in Mexico; industry likes the idea so much it established its own standards, under the name the Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI). Gov. King once appropriately likened certifying agencies to Underwriters Laboratories – the independent, not-for-profit product safety testing and certification organization that has placed some 16 billion UL marks on products worldwide. Just as the state does not need to test the safety of toasters in Maine homes but can rely on the broad trust the public places in UL to do the job, so too can forestry certification systems develop public trust in watching over the forests.

For the same reason that UL gained trust through its independence, FSC is the preferred certifier. It also finds support from industry members such as, in Maine, J.D. Irving Ltd. and Seven Islands Land Co., which have both had their lands certified under its standards, and by retail businesses such as Home Depot, which has announced its commitment to buy as much FSC-certified wood as it can. On a smaller scale, Maine has more than a dozen suppliers of FSC-certified wood products, from the Moose Crossing Lumber Co. in Ashland to S&S Wood Specialties in Westbrook.

The Natural Resources Council of Maine, the environmental group that has started the campaign to encourage FSC certification, pointed out Wednesday that the public summaries of certification reports can include enough information to let the public evaluate how well or poorly each major landowner is doing. These reports take the hyperbole out of the forestry debate and replace it with verifiable information. Though industry has been slow to recognize it, this is also a compromise for environmentalists because it limits their ability to lobby for different standards in the State House. And if industry adopts FSC, environmentalists can hardly call for a referendum on forest practices.

The avoidance of referendum headaches might be reason enough for landowners to willingly adopt FSC, and the state should stay out of the process if they do. However, without spontaneous interest by the large landowners, lawmakers should consider a timetable for certification. The state might not expect all landowners to earn passing marks the first time they are reviewed under the standards, but it should expect regular progress – under practices the companies themselves would choose.

Certification can work well in Maine, without the rancor of past referendums. All it takes is industry’s willingness to follow leaders like Seven Islands and Irving in testing their performance against an independent standard.