Much has been made of the problem of liquidation harvesting. One estimate is that 64,000 acres are stripped of trees and sold each year in Maine. Another estimate – probably closer to the truth – is that less than 10,000 acres a year are treated this way. Last year, lawmakers defined the practice, sometimes called “cut and run” logging, as “the purchase of timberland followed by a harvest that removes most or all commercial value in standing timber without regard for the long-term management principles and the subsequent sale or attempted resale of the harvested land within five years.” Now that they know what it is, legislators today will be presented with ways to stop it.

The proposal likely to garner the most support is from the governor’s office. It would require the commissioner of the Department of Conservation to come up with rules to “substantially eliminate” liquidation harvesting – the governor had promised to ban the practice on the campaign trial. The commissioner should consider ways to encourage landowners to undergo third-party certification that their land is well-managed, to encourage mills to buy wood from well-managed land and to improve the standards for timber harvests, among other things.

While well intentioned, this bill takes the wrong approach. First, more must be known about the problem in order to fix it. It is assumed that forested parcels are cleared and sold more frequently near already developed areas. However, there is no hard data to confirm this. It is assumed that those who practice liquidation harvesting are motivated more by the money they can make selling the land for development than by what they are paid for the wood they take from it. There have been no studies to confirm this.

Without knowing where liquidation harvesting is occurring and why it is happening, the solutions proposed by the Baldacci administration and others are premature.

From what is known, it appears that liquidation harvesting is more of a development and sprawl issue than a forestry issue. If this is true, encouraging forestry companies to become certified – in essence receiving a stamp of approval from a national organization – or improving wood procurement practices won’t solve the problem. Better local zoning ordinances, tax incentives for those who locate in already developed areas and financial incentives for those who commit to keeping their land forested would better address the clearing of trees to make way for house lots or commercial development. In addition, if the state and local residents agree that they want forested land set aside in developed areas – for recreation, aesthetics, wildlife habitat – easements might be purchased for particularly valuable parcels. The state and federal government have spent millions of dollars to protect land in northern Maine, where the development pressures are less. Similar investments could also protect land, albeit less of it, in developed areas.

Without knowing the full extent of the problem, it can’t be fixed. Rather than have the conservation commissioner to change the rules, lawmakers should ask for a thorough investigation of the practice. Knowing how widespread liquidation harvesting is and where it occurs, they will be better able to tailor legislation to tackle the real problem, which may turn out to be very different from what it is thought to be.