Land ownership trends worry many over the future of logging

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Editor’s note: Today’s story, the second in a series of three, looks at new types of timberland owners and development pressures in the North Woods of New Hampshire and Maine.

BERLIN, N.H. – Logging trucks still outnumber cars on the roads north of Berlin, home to the last major pulp and paper mill complex in northern New Hampshire.

But many north country residents worry the trucks will be gone in a generation, along with the working forest and the mills, because of heavy logging and creeping development.

Thomas Dillon, who lives in Anson, Maine, and is commercially clearcutting part of 22,500 acres in the unincorporated township of Success, N.H., has become a lightning rod for those fears.

Yet even his opponents say Dillon’s practices are the result of economic forces bigger than any one landowner: the accelerating turnover of land ownership, new types of owners and vacation home development.

“Uncertainty of land ownership and the certainty of land turnover on an unprecedented scale have really rocked this state and this region to its roots,” says Jym St. Pierre of the environmental group RESTORE: The North Woods.

As the paper companies sell their land to timberland investment companies and the investment companies sell to other investors or loggers-turned-landowners such as Dillon, each new owner must cut more heavily to recover his costs and turn a profit. Once all the commercial timber has been logged from an area, it becomes ripe for second-home or commercial development, permanently removing it from the working forest and fragmenting wildlife habitat.

“There’s nothing wrong with that legally, but that does raise a lot of questions about where that leaves the states and communities,” St. Pierre says.

Paper companies owned much of the land in northern Maine and New Hampshire for a century. But in the past decade, timberland investment companies have bought all their New Hampshire holdings and most of their Maine lands. Most of Vermont’s timberland is held by smaller owners.

The first big buyer in New Hampshire was Hancock Timber Resource Group of Boston. Hancock promised to keep the land long-term, but ended up selling when its institutional investors pulled out.

It sold the land in Success to Dillon last year and 33,000 acres in Errol, Cambridge and Wentworth’s Location in 2003 to Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Co., possibly the nation’s largest landowner with 8 million acres in 20 states, including several thousand in Maine.

Also in 2003, paper company Meadwestvaco sold 129,000 acres – most of five towns plus smaller parcels in several other communities – to Bayroot LLC, an anonymous investor or group.

Last New Year’s Eve, International Paper sold 24,000 acres in New Hampshire and more than 1 million acres in Maine to GMO Renewable Resources, part of a Boston-based global investment company.

All the new owners say they plan to stay long-term. And all have continued the paper companies’ tradition of allowing public access to their lands for hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and snowmobiling.

But St. Pierre says all is not well.

“It doesn’t mean anything to say they have good intentions,” he said. “I have a very long list of owners who are no longer here.”

Unlike Dillon, GMO, Plum Creek and Bayroot have agreed to third-party certification of their forestry practices under the industry’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative. They also are voluntarily protecting critical wildlife habitats identified by state biologists.

Wagner Forest Management Ltd. of Lyme manages timberland for investors and groups including Bayroot. President and chief executive Tom Colgan says Wagner manages all its land based on a 50-year forestry plan, regardless of whether a particular investor wants to pay extra for sustainable forestry certification.

Wagner tells investors “they need to have a long-term focus,” Colgan says. “The returns we think are feasible doing good forestry are terms they’re willing to accept.”

As ownership changes, more timberland is being developed for vacation homes, however. Plum Creek recently announced plans for 1,000 homes and two resorts on land around Moosehead Lake in Maine.

The size of the subdivision is unprecedented, and critics say it will mar the region’s pristine character. Plum Creek says that under its 30-year plan, 97 percent of the land would remain forest and 70 percent of the shorefront would be permanently protected from development.

Though Plum Creek has no formal plan yet for its New Hampshire holdings, Northeast regional manager Jim Lehner acknowledged the company is surveying land around two ponds in Errol and could end up selling waterfront lots.

“Our goal is to own and manage forestland and grow trees for the long term,” Lehner says. “We also have another part of the business that looks at other values for the land. That points right to high-value shorefront properties that may have a higher value than growing trees.”

The North Woods also are sprouting “kingdom lots,” parcels with hundreds or thousands of acres that often are owned by people from southern New Hampshire or the Boston area. One in Dummer is becoming a private network of snowmobile and all-terrain vehicle trails, says selectman and retired forester Brad Wyman.

“We’ve already got one owner here whose private place I look at on top of the mountain out of my kitchen window every morning,” Wyman says. “He’s got 1,000 acres, and he’s posted all his land (no trespassing). He’s got his own private kingdom up there.”

Jasen Stock, executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association, says concerns about development are overblown.

“It’s not a Wild West scenario up there, where everything’s for sale and it’s going to be snatched up and developed,” he says.

Stock worries more about nonprofit groups and the state and federal governments buying timberland for conservation and recreation. If they don’t allow enough logging, the paper and lumber mills could fold, leaving other timberland owners without a market for their wood, he says.

“Where is wood for the industry – timber and fiber? We want to see a long-term, sustained flow of that from all of the region,” he says.