Timber in Uncertain Times To control clear-cutting, regulation-shy New Hampshire considers policies similar to its neighbors’ to east and west

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Editor’s Note: Today’s article, the last in a series, looks at logging regulations in the northern New England states and possible deterrents to overcutting and development.

DUMMER, N.H. – When Rick Gagne began logging in 1959, teams of horses dragged the timber out of the woods. Now his son, Pat, sits in the cab of a $450,000 processor, pushing buttons to instruct the machine’s arm to grab a tree, cut it, de-limb it, and saw it into 8-foot logs – all in less than a minute.

Logging has made breathtaking leaps in speed and efficiency since Rick Gagne began, but New Hampshire law has changed little.

Timberland owners still may cut as many trees as they want. The only restrictions are Coos County ordinances protecting deer wintering areas, high elevation slopes in unincorporated areas and state laws protecting wetlands, buffer zones along streams and ponds and “beauty strips” beside roads.

A recent increase in commercial clear-cutting by Thomas Dillon of Madison, Maine, and homegrown loggers-turned-landowners like him have some people encouraging New Hampshire to consider laws such as those in neighboring states.

In Maine, a “liquidation harvesting” law that took effect Jan. 1 prohibits removing nearly all the valuable timber from a piece of land, then reselling the land within five years for subdivision and development. Maine also requires a forest management plan for any clear-cut of more than 20 acres and large, untouched “separation zones” between clear-cuts.

Vermont requires a state-certified forester to approve any timber harvest of more than 40 acres. Plans must include good forestry and wildlife management practices. Vermont also taxes anyone who sells timberland within eight years of buying it.

But enacting controls will be tough in regulation-shy New Hampshire, which has a “right to harvest” law that says timber cutting and trucking cannot be “unreasonably” limited by municipal planning and zoning.

“We strongly believe that you own land, you pay taxes on it, you have a right to do something with it as long as it’s legal,” says state Rep. Fred King, a Colebrook Republican and member of the Coos County Planning Board.

On the other hand, “There’s no doubt that the rate of cutting is faster than the trees are going to grow. I think everybody knows that and ultimately it will be bad news,” King says. “We may wake up someday and say, ‘Why didn’t somebody do something about it?'”

Sam Stoddard, the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension forester for Coos County, worries Maine’s new law is pushing loggers like Dillon into New Hampshire.

Dillon bought 22,500 acres in the unincorporated township of Success last year and plans to clear-cut about 3,000 acres a year for the next three years for commercial purposes.

“A way of doing business here is you buy land, you cut it and you sell it, and if that’s a timber liquidator, that’s exactly what I am,” Dillon says.

Dillon says the Maine law had nothing to do with his expansion into New Hampshire, and he still has considerable holdings in Maine, where he has learned to work under state regulation.

Dillon also predicts that Maine’s new liquidation harvesting law won’t work. He says bigger operators like him can afford to hold onto land for the required five years, and it takes that long to log a large parcel anyway.

Henry Swan is chairman of Wagner Forest Management Ltd. of Lyme and chairman of the New Hampshire chapter of The Nature Conservancy. He likes Vermont’s land-gains tax, which helped slow down a rash of second-home and condominium developments in the rural corner of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. Before the tax, companies would swoop in and buy land, cut all the big trees and subdivide it, he says.

“Even before they had the cutting finished, they had a sales plan: divide the land in 5- or 10-acre lots. If it was on water, it would be a spaghetti lot – a half-acre wide and five acres deep,” he says.

Jasen Stock, executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association, says zoning, conservation easements and tax incentives are the best way to keep land as working forest and prevent runaway development. He opposes heavy-cutting laws, agreeing with Dillon that they lead to poor forestry and costly enforcement.

“You really can’t legislate good forestry,” he says.

Mary Sloat, who is chairwoman of both the Northumberland and Coos County planning boards, says her town recently created zones where only logging, sporting camps, campgrounds and small gravel-mining operations are allowed. Landowners can subdivide up to 20 percent of a property for housing, but the rest must be kept undeveloped forever, she says.

Towns considering similar steps should act soon, she warns.

“You’d better do it, because it will be too late and you’ll never get it through once you begin to get a lot of land speculators,” she says.

State Forester Philip Bryce says the good news in the North Woods is that when the paper companies began selling their lands about a decade ago, nonprofit groups and government agencies stepped in.

The state used conservation easements and purchases to protect a vast area on the Canadian border that includes the headwaters of the Connecticut River. Most of the land is owned by Lyme Timber Co., which recently received certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, which environmentalists consider the gold standard of sustainable forestry.

Land also has been preserved by the state and federal governments around Lake Umbagog on the Maine border. And residents of Errol voted last month to buy the Thirteen-Mile Woods along the Androscoggin River as a town forest.

Nearly half of Coos County is now protected by public ownership, nonprofit groups or permanent conservation easements, Stock says.

One thing almost no one local wants is for the White Mountain National Forest to buy more land. The forest has scaled back logging in recent decades and contributes little wood to mills in the area.

Earlier this year, the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and the Timberland Association agreed to cooperate on a study of exactly what’s happening on the ground. Until they report, most people are reluctant to suggest specific remedies.

Whether or not more regulation is the answer, state wildlife biologist Will Staats hopes foresters, loggers and landowners, out-of-state investors and government officials will work together to preserve a healthy, working forest.

“It’s not just a cash cow. It has a long-standing impact on the traditions and values of the community,” Staats says. “We’re going to be left holding the bag. Our children are going to be left living with these forests for generations.

“We have to foster a land ethic, a stewardship ethic for these lands.”