June 7, 2004
Mainebiz 10th anniversary symposium | As land ownership and land usage changes, what does the future hold for Maine's north woods?
By Michaela Cavallaro
This question and many others ˆ including the debate over forming a north woods national park ˆ were up for discussion during the Mainebiz 10th anniversary symposium, "The working woods: Industry, tourism and the evolution of Maine's natural resource-based economy.
The Maine woods are a place that most Americans, and certainly many Mainers, think of as pristine, untouched. But the reality is a little different: For centuries, those woods have been owned by first American, then global paper companies, which use them for their timber. The companies also have tended to allow recreational usage by local residents, many of whom have held leases on paper company land for generations.
In The Interrupted Forest, historian Neil Rolde recounts a plane flight over the north woods, which he describes as the least inhabited region in the lower 48 states. "Yet," Rolde says, "it sure couldn't be described as wilderness, with all those roads and signs of logging."
Back in 1971, Rolde says, the state's 16 pulp and paper mills owned 7.5 million acres, or 37% of all Maine land. But in the last several years, those dynamics have begun to change, as large parcels of forest land have been sold at amazing speeds. In the last five years alone, nearly 5.6 million acres of forestland have changed hands.
On May 25, in recognition of its 10th anniversary, Mainebiz held a symposium at the Portland Museum of Art to discuss the implications of these changes. Panelists Pat Flood, northern region operations manager for International Paper's Forest Resources and Forest Products divisions; Walter Graff, deputy director of the Appalachian Mountain Club; Roxanne Quimby, founder of Burt's Bees and a northern Maine landowner; and Jeff Rowe, outgoing executive director of the Maine Campground Owners Association and a member of the Maine Tourism Commission, spoke for nearly two hours about the future of Maine's natural resource-based economy.
Pat Flood: Our forests are currently in reasonably good shape. Yet our forest economy seems to be less robust than one would expect. So that's confusing ˆ how do you address the future? I suggest we look back at history. In manufacturing, the very good news is that paper and lumber products in production actually increased twofold from 1960 to 2000. But the bad news is that at the same time, employment decreased significantly, from 25,000 to 13,000.
Strong paper mills in Maine survived in recent years by investing in improvements, changing their product lines, making their machinery bigger and faster. Mills that could not reduce operating costs, because it was just too expensive, or couldn't change their product lines closed their doors temporarily or permanently. Our surviving traditional businesses have by necessity become very lean.
Obviously, many of the world's other paper mills are doing things less expensively than us ˆ and they are getting a bigger piece of a bigger pie. The world is growing ˆ China is exploding ˆ so the pie is growing bigger, but our piece is staying the same or growing proportionately smaller.
But every problem creates an opportunity. Here's one: My co-workers at IP continue to find cost reduction opportunities at their mill, and different ways to add value to their products and make them more attractive to their customer. But they're also building very strong partnerships with their customers. One example is the relationship that International Paper has with Time Inc. Time needs to assure magazine writers and customers that paper for the magazines comes from well-managed forests. An objective of this partnership is to certify that our pulpwood and therefore our paper comes from certified lands, certified foresters, certified producers, loggers and so forth. The more certification, the happier Time is.
So my second point about the forest resources economy is this: Partnerships will probably be a bigger and bigger part of both manufacturing and marketing.
Economist Jack Lutz tells us the average estimated return on investment for large Northeast timberland investments during 1987 to 2002 was around 11.9% and with relatively low volatility. Now, like all good economists, he tells us that past performance does not necessarily indicate future results. But a business model of sustainable forestry practice coupled with an investment closeout in 15 years is a successful Maine tradition, and one that's growing. With low interest rates and fairly dependable timber and land returns, this is one of Maine's natural resource-based growth areas. So here's my third point: Investment companies and private investors will be our leading landowners. We already see that, as indicated in our current land ownership base.
The triad of the land owner, the conservation organization and public agency funding is the growth sector for forest resources. It's not so much the question of who's done a conservation easement in
the last five years ˆ who hasn't? The sale of a conservation easement by a landowner is smart business. It converts a hidden conservation or development asset into cash ˆ often 25%, 35% of the land's full value. And in the business of forestland investment, it is of course very helpful to capture 25-35% return in the first several years of ownership, and then manage for a reasonable income stream of sustainable harvests over the longer term.
Walter Graff: What we're envisioning [with the Katahdin Iron Works, a 37,000-acre tract of land the Appalachian Mountain Club purchased from International Paper last year] is a mosaic of lands ˆ lands that will be partially privately owned, publicly owned, owned by nonprofits, owned by investment groups ˆ that would overall create a sense of protection. In some ways, the Katahdin Iron Works is a microcosm of what we're trying to do, in that we're going to have a wilderness area, an ecological reserve of about 10,000 acres. The remaining 20,000 acres is going to be open for forestry, for sustainable harvestry. And within that whole area we're going to build a recreational infrastructure. By doing those three things, we also feel that we undergird the [surrounding] communities themselves and the local economy.
One of the things that's important to us is to have a wilderness area on the property and for that to be non-motorized. But we also feel we want to be able to allow snowmobile routes through the property. So it's a balance.
One of the outcomes that we didn't plan but came out of [a meeting AMC held with representatives of Brownville, Greenville, Milo and other citizens around the region] was that a number of those communities hadn't been doing that much talking before this meeting. So in a sense the meeting became a catalyst for change.
I think the essence of our project is we want to protect land for the future, we want to be able to have a thriving local economy, continue to do forestry, continue to have what we believe over time will be a linked reserve system buffered by these certified, well-managed lands. It's a combination of all that is Maine. And then within that provide a recreational experience bar none ˆ a backcountry recreational experience that people will want to come to.
It's a quality of life issue. If there's opportunity there, more people will want to live in those areas, the schools will get better, businesses will come ˆ and though I'm not an economist, I believe this; I've seen it ˆ all boats will lift up.
Roxanne Quimby:When the time came for me to execute on an exit strategy from Burt's Bees that I had been planning on for many years, I felt that the best use of the funds that I realized was to make an investment in keeping Maine beautiful. I took the proceeds of the sale and created a private operating foundation last year. The corpus of our foundation is the 50,000 acres of land in northern Penobscot and Piscataquis County that we have been purchasing over the last four years. Our foundation is the entity holding the 50,000 acres that we own, and it is also doing the research and discovery process into what is on that land, what are its greatest attributes and values, and how are we going to be good stewards of it.
Business is about creating value, and a business person is tasked with unlocking the value. And I think that is what we're searching to do in northern Maine and the woods of Maine ˆ unlock the value of the landscape. There's lots of different points of view on how that can be done and should be done. I think that the value is changing quite a bit, and the value that we manage to unlock from the woods in the 21st century will be very different from what it was in the 19th and the 20th century. So I see my investment in the woods of Maine as an investment in unlocking the value that is held in there, and I think the greatest value that always has to be examined is the spiritual value, because if what we do doesn't make sense on that level, then it doesn't make sense on any level.
For me, the value of the woods is in its wilderness in terms of the spirituality, in terms of our ability to become humble in the face of something more awesome and more large than a human being. So I've taken a rather extreme point of view, it appears to some, in preserving as much of the wilderness qualities of the land I have purchased as possible.
But I do believe there is more value to be gained than just the spiritual values of the land, because I think that we live on earth, and we have to eke out our living here. For that reason, I have been a proponent of creating a national park in northern Maine because of its ability to attract economic prosperity to the region. One of the things I did at Burt's Bees was I built a brand. It's a little crude, but using that analogy for recreation and tourism in northern Maine, the national park concept is a national brand ˆ far more so than any other more limited concept for recreation that we could possibly hitch our enterprise onto.
So how do you attract national and international attention to your region? To me, you just build the biggest national brand you can with the biggest recognition. I believe that's a national park. And I believe that based on the analysis that's been done they bring prosperity to a region.
Jeff Rowe: When we talk about the Maine woods, it seems to me that we're actually talking about a lot of things. We're talking about a forest ecosystem that has a history and a future ˆ we're talking about the condition of it. We're talking about thousands of square miles of space where people want to recreate, where they want to find solace, where they want to find adventure. We're talking about the home of an industry that has been part of the landscape for four centuries and uses the Maine woods as both a staging ground and a fuel. And we're also talking about the communities and the culture that has sprung up in the Maine woods.
The problem I see is that when we get into discussions about issues around the Maine woods, we don't do a good enough job of breaking out exactly what we're talking about in any given discussion.
Generally people with my perspective are referred to as multi-use proponents of any natural resource. I think a better way to approach it is from an integrated fashion. When we begin to talk in policy terms, how can we integrate the use of our natural resources so that we are sustaining them? We're sustaining the actual resource so that it is supporting the industry that thrives on that resource, and we are producing the products that the market needs. I guess I want to have it all, and I think we can do that if we're careful about it.
That sense of integration is what in many ways led to the Natural Resources Committee of the Maine Tourism Commission. About a year and a half ago, a number of us on the commission decided that we wanted to begin to take a more careful look at how tourism interacted with the range of the state's natural resources and the other industries that rely on those natural resources. And it has never really been clear what the coming conflicts or the coming opportunities are from a policy standpoint. So we created the Natural Resources Committee, which is comprised of about a half-dozen commission members, and we put everyone at the table that we could think of. We've got [state departments of] Conservation, Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, Marine Resources, State Planning, Agriculture, Transportation ˆ any of the state agencies that interact one way or another with the tourism industry. We also broadened it to include the private sector as well.
In many ways we're doing what Walter and Pat both touched on from their respective sectors ˆ we're looking at it from the statewide perspective. What are the interactions between the industry sectors, how can the state facilitate it, should the state at times stay out of the way? What are the infrastructure needs that are out there?
Michaela Cavallaro: Talk about employment in northern Maine as usage of the woods changes. I'm thinking particularly about the loss of manufacturing jobs and the shift to often lower-paying service industry and tourism jobs.
Flood: That's a tough one because it impacts everybody, and it's not a lot of fun to talk about. It's the very nature of business that you try to do more with less, and that's the cruel reality. But one thing that I've noticed is that in going around and talking to people about efficiency in business is that it doesn't just impact the forestry industry ˆ it impacts every kind of business.
So many people have gone from my industry and are now working in the conservation field. And it's very comparable, and it's very constructive. The concern I have, though, is for some of the manufacturing or logging type jobs that maybe don't lend themselves to that but those folks can also become stewards for land conservation projects. The trick is to try to find attractive jobs for those people who are in the middle-income layer.
Rowe: I think part of the struggle is that you're dealing with a transitional period. There's the myth of the dying forest products industry, and I would argue that it's not dying so much as it is duking it out on a global marketplace, but it's also transitioning. So what that means on a community level is taking communities that have traditionally been wedded to one dominant industry, in this case forest products, and saying, "what can we do with our landscape and with our community to essentially diversify our economy?"
One of the most compelling things about recreation and nature-based tourism is its role as an economic development tool. There's an argument that's out there ˆ that I think has been substantiated pretty significantly ˆ that you can use tourism and recreational opportunities to attract people to a region who then want [additional amenities] ˆ if you bring in a visitor or tourist who wants to do a high-end recreational activity, for example, they want to go to the AMC lands and they want to go to a good restaurant with a good bottle of wine. They want a good cup of coffee. They're going to look to those communities to provide those services. There are plenty of examples of how companies beyond the usual suspects have decided to locate in those regions because of the recreational opportunities and the lifestyle.
Graff: I'm in between one of the best entrepreneurs in the country and a [representative of] a Fortune 500 company, and I work for a nonprofit, so I have a lot of authority ˆ there's a lot of credence to what I'm about to say. [Laughter.] So I think that bringing together the nature-based tourism, forestry products, conservation ˆ I actually think the prospects are good. But what we need are more entrepreneurs. The north country, the northern Maine woods needs those entrepreneurs. There are many up there. But given the opportunity and the state's resources to promote that for economic development, it's not as grim as some might think.
Quimby: I think that attracting entrepreneurship to northern Maine requires a business friendly state government that fosters the entrepreneurial spirit, because we're certainly at a geographical disadvantage by being hundreds of miles away from the marketplace ˆ unless of course we're talking about tourism, when they come to us. One of the big reasons our company left Maine was the transportation costs of getting the raw materials to Guilford, Maine were absolutely insurmountable. Then adding the value and sending all those goods back out of state ˆ our closest market was Boston, but we're a national company, shipping to Los Angeles and Seattle. It was just absolutely unfeasible economically.
That's why I think the tourism industry, where they come to you, is probably going to be the best bet. And encouraging entrepreneurs in that industry makes sense.
Cavallaro: Since we're sitting here in Portland talking about an issue that's affecting people in some cases hundreds of miles away from us, talk a little bit about what implications these changes in the economy of northern Maine have for people in the southern part of the state.
Rowe: It's a cliché at this point that we live in a global economy, but it's a fact. There is going to be change ˆ the one thing you can be sure of is that there is going to be change in the Maine woods. But I think the biggest hurdle is a psychological hurdle, to get over this notion that the Maine woods, the north country, whatever you want to call it ˆ that we're going to put a bubble over it and it's going to remain immune to the forces that we're equally subject to in Portland and Boston and New York.
Cavallaro: We are going to now take questions from the audience.
Question: What's the sustainability of the land transfer process, with the first generation of sales being the paper companies selling to investment owners who are looking for shorter returns. Who's the next buyer?
Flood: I can remember sitting down with a business man about some land a few years ago and what he told me really surprised me. He said, we owned that property back in the 20s and we sold it, and we bought it back and we sold it and we bought it back ˆ there's an awful lot of that that happens and we don't see it because frankly we don't stay on this planet long enough to see all that take place.
I expect that as we go forward, it seems like there's going to be another wave of buyer, a conservation-minded buyer who will pick up the now-encumbered land and find other unique ways to use the property.
Graff: One of the things you may find, or that we hope to find, is people out there with patient capital, who are willing to take less of a return for the land in order to protect it and still keep it in forestry. That's something that I think is a real opportunity.
Question:With regard to nature-based tourism, what is the committee doing to make sure that conservation measures keep up with increased use of the resource?
Rowe: One of the ideas that we introduced into the Blaine House recommendations, which was subsequently accepted by the conference and came out of the Blaine House in its final report, is the notion of developing an idea of the carrying capacities of the landscape. There has been no real work with economists, with the academic community to determine that. It's a very sticky issue at times, because one person's overuse is another person's good season.
Question: Why a national park instead of a national forest or a state park?
Quimby: My personal preference is a national park because I think that it has national presence, and I'd like to elevate the stature of our woods to a national presence. I think it's deserving of that and worthy of that. But I do believe that during the feasibility study stage, many people weigh in and the best compromise that's possible will be made.
I like the federal level because I hope that there is stability in the continuity of management, ownership and vision of the National Park Service. It's been in business for about 125 years now, and its vision has not dramatically altered. I just think it's a larger form of protection than at the state level.
Question: Pat, you seemed opposed to the idea of a national park. Why?
Flood: I'm so glad you asked. [Laughter.] I'm not in favor of it, really, because the people of the state of Maine have made it pretty clear that they're not in favor of it. Mainers seems to want to be doing other things. And it's up to Roxanne to try to convince people. It's her thing to do, and I respect that.
The Maine woods are a place that most Americans, and certainly many Mainers, think of as pristine, untouched. But the reality is a little different: For centuries, those woods have been owned by first American, then global paper companies, which use them for their timber. The companies also have tended to allow recreational usage by local residents, many of whom have held leases on paper company land for generations.
In The Interrupted Forest, historian Neil Rolde recounts a plane flight over the north woods, which he describes as the least inhabited region in the lower 48 states. "Yet," Rolde says, "it sure couldn't be described as wilderness, with all those roads and signs of logging."
Back in 1971, Rolde says, the state's 16 pulp and paper mills owned 7.5 million acres, or 37% of all Maine land. But in the last several years, those dynamics have begun to change, as large parcels of forest land have been sold at amazing speeds. In the last five years alone, nearly 5.6 million acres of forestland have changed hands.
On May 25, in recognition of its 10th anniversary, Mainebiz held a symposium at the Portland Museum of Art to discuss the implications of these changes. Panelists Pat Flood, northern region operations manager for International Paper's Forest Resources and Forest Products divisions; Walter Graff, deputy director of the Appalachian Mountain Club; Roxanne Quimby, founder of Burt's Bees and a northern Maine landowner; and Jeff Rowe, outgoing executive director of the Maine Campground Owners Association and a member of the Maine Tourism Commission, spoke for nearly two hours about the future of Maine's natural resource-based economy.
Pat Flood: Our forests are currently in reasonably good shape. Yet our forest economy seems to be less robust than one would expect. So that's confusing ˆ how do you address the future? I suggest we look back at history. In manufacturing, the very good news is that paper and lumber products in production actually increased twofold from 1960 to 2000. But the bad news is that at the same time, employment decreased significantly, from 25,000 to 13,000.
Strong paper mills in Maine survived in recent years by investing in improvements, changing their product lines, making their machinery bigger and faster. Mills that could not reduce operating costs, because it was just too expensive, or couldn't change their product lines closed their doors temporarily or permanently. Our surviving traditional businesses have by necessity become very lean.
Obviously, many of the world's other paper mills are doing things less expensively than us ˆ and they are getting a bigger piece of a bigger pie. The world is growing ˆ China is exploding ˆ so the pie is growing bigger, but our piece is staying the same or growing proportionately smaller.
But every problem creates an opportunity. Here's one: My co-workers at IP continue to find cost reduction opportunities at their mill, and different ways to add value to their products and make them more attractive to their customer. But they're also building very strong partnerships with their customers. One example is the relationship that International Paper has with Time Inc. Time needs to assure magazine writers and customers that paper for the magazines comes from well-managed forests. An objective of this partnership is to certify that our pulpwood and therefore our paper comes from certified lands, certified foresters, certified producers, loggers and so forth. The more certification, the happier Time is.
So my second point about the forest resources economy is this: Partnerships will probably be a bigger and bigger part of both manufacturing and marketing.
Economist Jack Lutz tells us the average estimated return on investment for large Northeast timberland investments during 1987 to 2002 was around 11.9% and with relatively low volatility. Now, like all good economists, he tells us that past performance does not necessarily indicate future results. But a business model of sustainable forestry practice coupled with an investment closeout in 15 years is a successful Maine tradition, and one that's growing. With low interest rates and fairly dependable timber and land returns, this is one of Maine's natural resource-based growth areas. So here's my third point: Investment companies and private investors will be our leading landowners. We already see that, as indicated in our current land ownership base.
The triad of the land owner, the conservation organization and public agency funding is the growth sector for forest resources. It's not so much the question of who's done a conservation easement in
the last five years ˆ who hasn't? The sale of a conservation easement by a landowner is smart business. It converts a hidden conservation or development asset into cash ˆ often 25%, 35% of the land's full value. And in the business of forestland investment, it is of course very helpful to capture 25-35% return in the first several years of ownership, and then manage for a reasonable income stream of sustainable harvests over the longer term.
Walter Graff: What we're envisioning [with the Katahdin Iron Works, a 37,000-acre tract of land the Appalachian Mountain Club purchased from International Paper last year] is a mosaic of lands ˆ lands that will be partially privately owned, publicly owned, owned by nonprofits, owned by investment groups ˆ that would overall create a sense of protection. In some ways, the Katahdin Iron Works is a microcosm of what we're trying to do, in that we're going to have a wilderness area, an ecological reserve of about 10,000 acres. The remaining 20,000 acres is going to be open for forestry, for sustainable harvestry. And within that whole area we're going to build a recreational infrastructure. By doing those three things, we also feel that we undergird the [surrounding] communities themselves and the local economy.
One of the things that's important to us is to have a wilderness area on the property and for that to be non-motorized. But we also feel we want to be able to allow snowmobile routes through the property. So it's a balance.
One of the outcomes that we didn't plan but came out of [a meeting AMC held with representatives of Brownville, Greenville, Milo and other citizens around the region] was that a number of those communities hadn't been doing that much talking before this meeting. So in a sense the meeting became a catalyst for change.
I think the essence of our project is we want to protect land for the future, we want to be able to have a thriving local economy, continue to do forestry, continue to have what we believe over time will be a linked reserve system buffered by these certified, well-managed lands. It's a combination of all that is Maine. And then within that provide a recreational experience bar none ˆ a backcountry recreational experience that people will want to come to.
It's a quality of life issue. If there's opportunity there, more people will want to live in those areas, the schools will get better, businesses will come ˆ and though I'm not an economist, I believe this; I've seen it ˆ all boats will lift up.
Roxanne Quimby:When the time came for me to execute on an exit strategy from Burt's Bees that I had been planning on for many years, I felt that the best use of the funds that I realized was to make an investment in keeping Maine beautiful. I took the proceeds of the sale and created a private operating foundation last year. The corpus of our foundation is the 50,000 acres of land in northern Penobscot and Piscataquis County that we have been purchasing over the last four years. Our foundation is the entity holding the 50,000 acres that we own, and it is also doing the research and discovery process into what is on that land, what are its greatest attributes and values, and how are we going to be good stewards of it.
Business is about creating value, and a business person is tasked with unlocking the value. And I think that is what we're searching to do in northern Maine and the woods of Maine ˆ unlock the value of the landscape. There's lots of different points of view on how that can be done and should be done. I think that the value is changing quite a bit, and the value that we manage to unlock from the woods in the 21st century will be very different from what it was in the 19th and the 20th century. So I see my investment in the woods of Maine as an investment in unlocking the value that is held in there, and I think the greatest value that always has to be examined is the spiritual value, because if what we do doesn't make sense on that level, then it doesn't make sense on any level.
For me, the value of the woods is in its wilderness in terms of the spirituality, in terms of our ability to become humble in the face of something more awesome and more large than a human being. So I've taken a rather extreme point of view, it appears to some, in preserving as much of the wilderness qualities of the land I have purchased as possible.
But I do believe there is more value to be gained than just the spiritual values of the land, because I think that we live on earth, and we have to eke out our living here. For that reason, I have been a proponent of creating a national park in northern Maine because of its ability to attract economic prosperity to the region. One of the things I did at Burt's Bees was I built a brand. It's a little crude, but using that analogy for recreation and tourism in northern Maine, the national park concept is a national brand ˆ far more so than any other more limited concept for recreation that we could possibly hitch our enterprise onto.
So how do you attract national and international attention to your region? To me, you just build the biggest national brand you can with the biggest recognition. I believe that's a national park. And I believe that based on the analysis that's been done they bring prosperity to a region.
Jeff Rowe: When we talk about the Maine woods, it seems to me that we're actually talking about a lot of things. We're talking about a forest ecosystem that has a history and a future ˆ we're talking about the condition of it. We're talking about thousands of square miles of space where people want to recreate, where they want to find solace, where they want to find adventure. We're talking about the home of an industry that has been part of the landscape for four centuries and uses the Maine woods as both a staging ground and a fuel. And we're also talking about the communities and the culture that has sprung up in the Maine woods.
The problem I see is that when we get into discussions about issues around the Maine woods, we don't do a good enough job of breaking out exactly what we're talking about in any given discussion.
Generally people with my perspective are referred to as multi-use proponents of any natural resource. I think a better way to approach it is from an integrated fashion. When we begin to talk in policy terms, how can we integrate the use of our natural resources so that we are sustaining them? We're sustaining the actual resource so that it is supporting the industry that thrives on that resource, and we are producing the products that the market needs. I guess I want to have it all, and I think we can do that if we're careful about it.
That sense of integration is what in many ways led to the Natural Resources Committee of the Maine Tourism Commission. About a year and a half ago, a number of us on the commission decided that we wanted to begin to take a more careful look at how tourism interacted with the range of the state's natural resources and the other industries that rely on those natural resources. And it has never really been clear what the coming conflicts or the coming opportunities are from a policy standpoint. So we created the Natural Resources Committee, which is comprised of about a half-dozen commission members, and we put everyone at the table that we could think of. We've got [state departments of] Conservation, Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, Marine Resources, State Planning, Agriculture, Transportation ˆ any of the state agencies that interact one way or another with the tourism industry. We also broadened it to include the private sector as well.
In many ways we're doing what Walter and Pat both touched on from their respective sectors ˆ we're looking at it from the statewide perspective. What are the interactions between the industry sectors, how can the state facilitate it, should the state at times stay out of the way? What are the infrastructure needs that are out there?
Michaela Cavallaro: Talk about employment in northern Maine as usage of the woods changes. I'm thinking particularly about the loss of manufacturing jobs and the shift to often lower-paying service industry and tourism jobs.
Flood: That's a tough one because it impacts everybody, and it's not a lot of fun to talk about. It's the very nature of business that you try to do more with less, and that's the cruel reality. But one thing that I've noticed is that in going around and talking to people about efficiency in business is that it doesn't just impact the forestry industry ˆ it impacts every kind of business.
So many people have gone from my industry and are now working in the conservation field. And it's very comparable, and it's very constructive. The concern I have, though, is for some of the manufacturing or logging type jobs that maybe don't lend themselves to that but those folks can also become stewards for land conservation projects. The trick is to try to find attractive jobs for those people who are in the middle-income layer.
Rowe: I think part of the struggle is that you're dealing with a transitional period. There's the myth of the dying forest products industry, and I would argue that it's not dying so much as it is duking it out on a global marketplace, but it's also transitioning. So what that means on a community level is taking communities that have traditionally been wedded to one dominant industry, in this case forest products, and saying, "what can we do with our landscape and with our community to essentially diversify our economy?"
One of the most compelling things about recreation and nature-based tourism is its role as an economic development tool. There's an argument that's out there ˆ that I think has been substantiated pretty significantly ˆ that you can use tourism and recreational opportunities to attract people to a region who then want [additional amenities] ˆ if you bring in a visitor or tourist who wants to do a high-end recreational activity, for example, they want to go to the AMC lands and they want to go to a good restaurant with a good bottle of wine. They want a good cup of coffee. They're going to look to those communities to provide those services. There are plenty of examples of how companies beyond the usual suspects have decided to locate in those regions because of the recreational opportunities and the lifestyle.
Graff: I'm in between one of the best entrepreneurs in the country and a [representative of] a Fortune 500 company, and I work for a nonprofit, so I have a lot of authority ˆ there's a lot of credence to what I'm about to say. [Laughter.] So I think that bringing together the nature-based tourism, forestry products, conservation ˆ I actually think the prospects are good. But what we need are more entrepreneurs. The north country, the northern Maine woods needs those entrepreneurs. There are many up there. But given the opportunity and the state's resources to promote that for economic development, it's not as grim as some might think.
Quimby: I think that attracting entrepreneurship to northern Maine requires a business friendly state government that fosters the entrepreneurial spirit, because we're certainly at a geographical disadvantage by being hundreds of miles away from the marketplace ˆ unless of course we're talking about tourism, when they come to us. One of the big reasons our company left Maine was the transportation costs of getting the raw materials to Guilford, Maine were absolutely insurmountable. Then adding the value and sending all those goods back out of state ˆ our closest market was Boston, but we're a national company, shipping to Los Angeles and Seattle. It was just absolutely unfeasible economically.
That's why I think the tourism industry, where they come to you, is probably going to be the best bet. And encouraging entrepreneurs in that industry makes sense.
Cavallaro: Since we're sitting here in Portland talking about an issue that's affecting people in some cases hundreds of miles away from us, talk a little bit about what implications these changes in the economy of northern Maine have for people in the southern part of the state.
Rowe: It's a cliché at this point that we live in a global economy, but it's a fact. There is going to be change ˆ the one thing you can be sure of is that there is going to be change in the Maine woods. But I think the biggest hurdle is a psychological hurdle, to get over this notion that the Maine woods, the north country, whatever you want to call it ˆ that we're going to put a bubble over it and it's going to remain immune to the forces that we're equally subject to in Portland and Boston and New York.
Cavallaro: We are going to now take questions from the audience.
Question: What's the sustainability of the land transfer process, with the first generation of sales being the paper companies selling to investment owners who are looking for shorter returns. Who's the next buyer?
Flood: I can remember sitting down with a business man about some land a few years ago and what he told me really surprised me. He said, we owned that property back in the 20s and we sold it, and we bought it back and we sold it and we bought it back ˆ there's an awful lot of that that happens and we don't see it because frankly we don't stay on this planet long enough to see all that take place.
I expect that as we go forward, it seems like there's going to be another wave of buyer, a conservation-minded buyer who will pick up the now-encumbered land and find other unique ways to use the property.
Graff: One of the things you may find, or that we hope to find, is people out there with patient capital, who are willing to take less of a return for the land in order to protect it and still keep it in forestry. That's something that I think is a real opportunity.
Question:With regard to nature-based tourism, what is the committee doing to make sure that conservation measures keep up with increased use of the resource?
Rowe: One of the ideas that we introduced into the Blaine House recommendations, which was subsequently accepted by the conference and came out of the Blaine House in its final report, is the notion of developing an idea of the carrying capacities of the landscape. There has been no real work with economists, with the academic community to determine that. It's a very sticky issue at times, because one person's overuse is another person's good season.
Question: Why a national park instead of a national forest or a state park?
Quimby: My personal preference is a national park because I think that it has national presence, and I'd like to elevate the stature of our woods to a national presence. I think it's deserving of that and worthy of that. But I do believe that during the feasibility study stage, many people weigh in and the best compromise that's possible will be made.
I like the federal level because I hope that there is stability in the continuity of management, ownership and vision of the National Park Service. It's been in business for about 125 years now, and its vision has not dramatically altered. I just think it's a larger form of protection than at the state level.
Question: Pat, you seemed opposed to the idea of a national park. Why?
Flood: I'm so glad you asked. [Laughter.] I'm not in favor of it, really, because the people of the state of Maine have made it pretty clear that they're not in favor of it. Mainers seems to want to be doing other things. And it's up to Roxanne to try to convince people. It's her thing to do, and I respect that.
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments