Into the woods | A conversation with Mike Wilson on the past, present and future of the Northern Forest
Change is occurring in the forested hinterland of the northeastern United States. Hundreds of communities tucked away in what’s commonly known as the Northern Forest — 30 million acres of contiguous forest that stretches from the tip of northern Maine to the shores of Lake Ontario in northwestern New York — face challenges from a changing forest products economy that has nurtured them for the past 100 years.
Thousands of jobs have been lost at paper mills across the region, affecting the families and towns that thrived on the mills. Huge tracts of forestland are being bought, sold and parceled out at an astounding rate. The magnitude of these changes has not been experienced by living generations.
Mike Wilson, a senior program director at the Northern Forest Center, a nonprofit organization with offices in Bethel and Concord, N.H., believes helping people understand the history of their communities and their relationship with the northern forest will help people face this uncertain future.
Wilson is one of the people behind Ways of the Woods, a Bethel-based mobile museum that since the summer of 2006 has traveled to roughly 50 communities throughout the four-state region, educating people on the shared heritage and shared experiences of people living in those rural communities.
“It really is an effort to understand and, when appropriate, celebrate the culture of this region,” Wilson says. “This is the birthplace of the modern paper industry. It’s the cradle of the mountaineering and skiing in America. It has been a source of retreat and renewal for artists and philosophers whose work has influenced people around the world.”
Ways of the Woods is the Northern Forest Center’s primary tool for conducting public education and outreach, and was funded by a $300,000 grant in 2002 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Mainebiz recently spoke with Wilson about Ways of the Woods, the changing landscape of the Northern Forest and the challenges facing the communities within it.
Mainebiz: What’s the reaction been from people in the communities Ways of the Woods has visited?
Mike Wilson: The reaction has been very positive. More positive than we ever even hoped it would be. I think people, particularly in rural communities across the region, respond very positively to the exhibit because they recognize it as a fair and honest reflection of their experience. People don’t perceive our presentation as driving a particular agenda, because it is not.
Ways of the Woods…is an opportunity for people to step back and remember — we’re not teaching people necessarily — but remember that this is a really special and distinct and important place. And when people start to think a little bit more about it that way it seems to be an empowering experience. It helps them feel a little bit better about the place where they live, and our hope is that as people feel better and more empowered about the places they live they’ll be more likely, and more able, to work together for the benefit of those places.
There have been lots of changes in the Northern Forest over the past few decades, from shifting land ownership to the decline of the forest products industry. What do these changes mean?
I’m not necessarily the authority on this, but it’s clear if you look at patterns over the past 15 or 20 years. It’s a 30 million-acre region — the Northern Forest — and of those 30 million acres, 20 million of them have changed hands in the past 15 years. And for the most part, if you look in Maine, where again as recently as 10 or 15 years ago the majority of the forestland in northern Maine was owned by paper companies, it is not anymore and that is a very significant change.
And some of the questions that come with that have to do with how the forests are going to be managed — how different landowners might view long-term forest management versus second-home development as economic opportunities, what the future of public recreational access to all these private lands are. Just when you simply look at landownership patterns, there are very significant questions there.
From a community economic standpoint, if you look at simply employment patterns in the forest products industry, production has not necessarily declined significantly — it may have even gone up. But employment in those industries has declined significantly. So along with that there’s the simple well-being of people and their ability to make a living, and related implications for the integrity of community and forest-based culture across the region.
What role does Ways of the Woods and the Northern Forest Center play in all of this?
Ways of the Woods is just one piece of this. It’s a way to get out and engage people. And to a large degree what we’re able to do with Ways of the Woods is help people recognize that the experience they’re having in a rural community in northern Maine… that they’re not alone. That people in northern New Hampshire, northern Vermont and northern New York are having similar experiences, and that by developing strategies cooperatively across the region we may be able to address some of the issues that are very difficult to address on the community level.
To develop those strategies, the Northern Forest Center has a whole set of other programs. For the past two years we have been managing a four-state sustainable economy initiative that was funded in part by the federal Economic Development Administration. We’ve been managing it, but it was led by a 65-member steering committee that was appointed by the governors of the four states with the intention of developing a new long-term economic blueprint for the northern forest that was based on balanced investment in the economy and communities and conservation. And we’ve just wrapped the process up and we’re working on the final report on the sustainable economy initiative, which will be released in the fall.
You said Ways of the Woods has received a good response from the public, but have there been skeptics?
There are occasionally people who approach the exhibit skeptically because they have decided before they look at it that it is pushing a particular agenda. Sometimes those people think we’re advocating a particular conservation or land protection agenda. There are other people that think we’re advocating on behalf of the paper companies or development interests. And what I generally say to people is, “Why don’t you take a look at the exhibit?” And once people have gone through and looked at the exhibit, they tend to come out of it with a much more productive and constructive attitude and we can have better conversations usually after that. Those people are very few. It’s happened six times, I think, and we’ve had about 50,000 people go through it.
What do you think the future holds for the northern forests?
That’s pretty loaded.
Well, you talk about helping people remember the past, appreciate the present and prepare for the future. If you’re preparing for the future, you’ve got to have an idea of what it might look like.
I think one thing we can hopefully bank on is the fact that the long-term well-being of the northern forests is going to be directly related to the well-being and integrity of the forest landscape and its availability as a resource for uses in lots of different ways: As a resource to support ongoing forest products manufacturing; as a resource to support continually developing recreation and heritage-based tourism sector; simply as an attractive place to live to draw creative people to the region as we enter into a time when people have the opportunity not just to live where they work, but to work where they want to live.
What you’re saying seems to imply the economy in the northern forest will rely less on forest resources and become more diverse. Is that right?
It’s likely to be based less on large employers and more on small business and entrepreneurial activity. I think when you talk about it being based on forest resources, it’s a question of how you interpret the value and use of those forest resources. We’re always going to cut trees down and make things out of them. That’s one way to use the forest resource, but we also are always, and we always have, attracted people to come here simply to experience an intact forest landscape and the wildlife, solitude, recreation you can have there. As long as we keep the forest intact we’re going to continue to do that. There’s also a way of valuing the forest resource simply as a contributor to quality of life, and that quality of life is something else that will attract people to the region to live here and contribute their talents to its long-term well-being.
Obviously, a big issue facing Maine’s forests is whether to develop or conserve that land. Is there a balance that can be found between development and conservation?
It has to be a balance. You’re not going to have one or the other.
Is finding that balance going to pose major challenges for these communities?
The balance between conservation, forest management and development has always been there. It’s always been a significant challenge particularly when you’re looking at second home development along lake shores and tops of mountains and scenic areas. Where that challenge is likely to come to more of a head in the coming few years is as we look at this new class of landowners who in some cases bring a different set of goals with their ownership of the land.
Obviously, Plum Creek is a clear example and, yeah, there will be others. It generally seems the process around the Plum Creek proposal has been a good and healthy one, and one of the keys to dealing with that challenge is making sure people are prepared to address some of these questions productively. The degree we’re able to put long-term strategies in place to guide public response to some of these proposals, and the more able we are to have a clear and shared vision and strategy around these issues, the more productively we’ll be able to respond to them as they arise.
Whit Richardson, Mainebiz staff writer, can be reached at wrichardson@mainebiz.biz.
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