Plum Creek means business

From a wood lot 4-H project at age 10, to a doctoral dissertation on resolving conflicts in multiple-use woodlands management in Maine, to leading a USAID-sponsored sustainable forestry workshop in the Russian Far East, I have had a lifelong love affair with the forest and with the wonderful tradition of private forest ownership and multiple use woodland management in Maine.

Spending $100 million on purchasing 400,000 acres of land through the Land For Maine’s Future program makes tremendous sense. But we may be approaching a tipping point in rural Maine where there is an elemental loss of our rural youth, good jobs, viable communities and way of life. In this context, the opposition to Plum Creek Timber Co. is a shot across the bow of rural Mainers’ aspirations to own and use a piece of land.

Consider what Plum Creek offers Maine. It offers, for free, a taxable 400,000-acre forest with public access that is available for multiple-use forest management but with no development rights, all at no cost to the state or taxpayers of Maine. This is the same amount of land as the state has purchased for $100 million through the Land for Maine’s Future, not billed to us today but to our children as our state bonds come due. Plum Creek offers us one of the largest conservation easements in Maine’s history.

There are many reasons to second guess the way Plum Creek wants to practice multiple-use forest resource management on their lands just as there are Monday morning quarterbacks on Roxanne Quimby, Irving Timberlands, Seven Islands Land Co., the Forest Society of Maine, all individuals or corporations or non-profit landowners who want to preserve the rural economy and way of life.

Why then the venomous opposition to Plum Creek? For me it is best conveyed through a cautionary tale. Back in the 1990s a gentleman from the Greenville area stopped by my office to talk about public ownership of the Great Maine Woods. “How are you going to get rid of the private landowners? The state doesn’t have enough money to buy the land,” I asked. The following is the gist of his reply.

Those of us who want to get rid of private ownership of the Maine forest do not need to win a single referendum, bond issue or permit denial. All we need to do is create regulatory uncertainty and delay. The forest industry is very capital intensive. The one thing that will drive capital investment away is uncertainty and risk. Without capital, workers can’t produce, stumpage and land prices will fall, and when rural forestland prices fall below a certain price, the public and media will think it’s a good buy for the state to move in. If we bond for the purchase, rather than pay for it, the purchase will seem painless as the costs will only incur on future generations. So all we have to do is create delay and uncertainty with lots of free publicity from the media and we can get rid of private property in Maine’s forests.

This is very sound reasoning even if it creates an end to the rural Maine most of us know and love. This, for me, is what so much of the opposition to Plum Creek is all about.

No doubt, as in any landowner’s plans to do something, whether it’s a neighbor’s plan to put up a fence or add animals, or in Plum Creek’s case, to add a bundle of vacation homes, there is an array of opponents. That is the challenge our courts and regulators address all the time. That is the price of living in a community and a democratic society. But there seems to be a loss of personal freedoms and private property when opponents disrupt the process to their own ends.

In the case of Plum Creek, the Land Use Regulation Commission and other state and local agencies are invaluable gatekeepers and adjudicators. All Mainers want high environmental standards. Yet if the system can be made dysfunctional through uncertainty and delay, thereby driving legitimate private investments and land use decisions away, then rural Maine will lose its youth, its jobs, its way of life and its private property and will end up a neo-wilderness playground for those who support the taking of private property without just compensation. We will end up with a sign over the Maine forests that reads “soaked in formaldehyde, look but don’t touch.”

We need clear regulatory standards and an expedient and consistent regulatory process lest we be held hostage by special interests who oppose the concept of private property and a vibrant economy for rural Maine. We should start by getting off the backs of Plum Creek one way or the other and get on with revitalizing the rural Maine economy. What we do with Plum Creek will also send a message to the business world.

William Beardsley is the president of Husson College.